Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (51 page)

He was far more conservative than Bush and had known Reagan for years, but thought, like most, that Reagan was too old to run. The nascent Bush operation wasn't happy with the speeches being written by David Gergen and others, so Gold was introduced to Bush. He met with Bush over drinks at the Alibi Club in Washington, and during a later trip to Houston they bonded by jogging together. He was introduced to Jim Baker and was talked into traveling with Bush as a speechwriter—but Gold would be more than that. He was Bush's peer, and the adult confidant that every candidate needs to talk frankly and confidentially to and with. Gold assumed that Bush's effort would be respectable but would come up short. He hadn't counted on the failings of the Reagan campaign in the early going or the tenacity of Bush.
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Bush hung in there like a terrier and Gold with him. But by the eve of the Pennsylvania primary, Gold had suffered one insult too many and furiously quit the campaign. The final straw had come when Bush aide Jennifer Fitzgerald showed one of Gold's speeches to Gergen and Gergen made a few minor edits. When Gold found out, he hit the ceiling.
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As soon as Bush was without Gold, he began to make glaring mistakes on the road and was taking the wrong advice. By this time, with Reagan strongly in the lead, Jim Baker was looking to make a soft landing of the Bush campaign. Baker's notion was to get Bush out of the race gracefully, not offend Reagan and Nancy any more than the campaign already had, and angle to get his candidate the second
slot leading up to Detroit. That meant that Bush could no longer insult Reagan on the campaign trail.

Gold acutely understood this, but Pete Teeley, Bush's liberal press secretary and Reagan skeptic, did not. For months, Bush had been bedeviled by the political advantage Reagan had gained with his proposal for massive tax cuts. Bush was an old-fashioned balance-the-budget Republican. Bush's advisers convinced him to propose his own modest tax-cut plan, which he reluctantly did, even though it was focused more on cuts for business than for individuals.

It was in Pennsylvania, at the prodding of Teeley and Bush researcher Stef Halper, where Bush unveiled a line that, while sounding good at the time, would become a source of enormous tension between him and Reagan for a long time.
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He called Reagan's 30 percent tax-cut plan “voodoo economics.”
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“I went off the campaign trail for a while and voodoo economics comes up and Teeley writes the goddamn speech,” Gold later recalled.
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It was a good line. Too good. The media immediately picked up on it. As soon as Baker and Keene heard about it, they knew Bush's chances for going on the ticket were headed into the toilet. If Bush was making fun of Reagan's plan, he might as well be making fun of Reagan. And while Reagan could laugh at himself, Nancy flipped out when anybody made fun of her Ronnie.

Bush dropped the voodoo-economics bomb during a speech before students at Carnegie Mellon University. In it he accused Reagan of “phony promises” and “economic madness.”
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Bush wanted to know where the corresponding cuts in spending would come from to pay for huge tax cuts. He did not believe in the supply-side theory that the tax cuts would generate more revenues for the federal treasury than they would cost. Bush previously had danced around the policy differences between the two men, but this speech went full-bore against the Gipper. Bush was as dismissive of Reagan's ideas as he was of someone not using the correct fork at dinner.

Baker and Keene knew they needed to get Gold back out on the road with Bush, if only to protect the candidate from himself. They delicately suggested to Ambassador Bush that he call Gold at his home and ask him to come back. Bush balked. He didn't understand why he had to apologize. Finally he acceded. Bush called Baker and Keene at the campaign office, not knowing that he was on a speakerphone. “So how did it go?” Keene asked. Bush snapped back, “Well, I did what you asked me to do.” Keene replied, “Yeah, so everything's fine?” “He told me to go fuck myself and hung up.” As Keene and Baker rolled on the floor laughing, Keene choked out, “Well, it usually works!”
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Baker and Keene did not immediately respond to Bush's lamenting. They were still too busy laughing hysterically.

R
EAGAN'S
P
ENNSYLVANIA COORDINATOR
, F
RANK
Donatelli, was a native of the state and knew the political landscape. Equally adept was another key member of the Reagan operation in Pennsylvania, the widely respected Drew Lewis, whom John Sears had recruited. Lewis was one of the most influential GOP leaders in the state, and when working for Ford in 1976 he had held the line against any defections engineered by Reagan's running mate, Pennsylvania senator Richard Schweiker. Lewis and Schweiker had been boyhood friends, but 1976 caused a temporary rift in their friendship. Schweiker's aides called Lewis a “Judas” for supporting Ford.
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Lewis earned the undying respect of many in the GOP because he was a terrific fundraiser and because he was a man of his word, loyal to a fault.
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Lewis even won the support of the tough-minded Billy Meehan, the old boss of the Philadelphia GOP, who delivered his thirteen delegates after Reagan agreed to appear at a fundraiser for him.
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Lewis once told Al Hunt of the
Wall Street Journal
that “most of my business and political friends had little nice to say about Reagan; the only people I enjoyed talking to about Reagan were the gas station attendant and the guy at the parking garage.”
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Reaganites dominated the heavily Republican counties of Bucks, Montgomery, Delaware, and Chester, while Bush's support would come from the blue-blooded “Main Line” of Philadelphia's western suburbs. Two of Lewis's notable conservative recruits were Faith Whittlesey and Congressman Bud Schuster.
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On the other hand, John Eisenhower, son of the former president, was vehemently opposed to Reagan.
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Bush's newest strategy was to declare he was going to tell the truth, Harry Truman–style. He repeatedly said, “I'm going to resist the popular appeal.” He claimed that Reagan was proposing ideas that sounded good but would not work.
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Bush was often angry on the stump and it showed, as he frequently balled up his fist for effect. His attempts at humor rarely came off well.

Washington insiders familiar with Bush said that for all his obvious talents, the man was just tone-deaf when it came to politics. The reputation had deepened when, in the black depths of Watergate, Bush, as head of the national Republican Party, did not speak out against President Nixon and his cronies. The party was falling apart, and yet Bush chose to be loyal to Nixon instead of the GOP. Many in the media and the Republican Party became deeply disappointed over Bush's timidity. At the very time when he should have shown caution and gone easier on Reagan, he did just the opposite and endangered the slim chance he had to go on the ticket with Reagan in Detroit.

It was time for Vic Gold to get back on the plane. Gold called Keene at 2 o'clock one morning and barked, “Where is he? It's time to save the son of a bitch from himself.”
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His pride salved, the high-maintenance Gold did eventually return to the road with the low-maintenance Bush.

Gold's return to the Bush entourage was evident immediately. Bush adopted a softer approach and David Broder of the
Washington Post
took note: “Only in the past month … has Bush begun to recover. He has finally begun to distinguish his own ‘reasonable’ conservatism from Reagan's more free-swinging variety. Republicans have begun to notice that Bush is making sense and scoring points in his criticisms of President Carter's foreign and domestic policies.”
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Reagan addressed 1,200 rabid fans in Philadelphia. The Gipper was introduced by Governor Thornburgh, who was booed by the crowd for not doing more for their city, and because he was taking a neutral stance in his state's presidential primary (though he did call Bush's campaign “hopeless”). Reagan walloped Carter, charging him with costing the city 2,000 defense-related jobs at the recently closed Frankford Arsenal because of cuts in Pentagon spending. Reagan said America's military might should be so great that “no nation on this earth will dare to lift a hand against us.”
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Earlier in the day, Reagan had plunged into an excited, mostly Democratic crowd at the South Philadelphia Italian Market, accompanied by Senator Dick Schweiker and an overcaffeinated supporter, Paul Giordano, owner of a locally well-known grocery store. Giordano took note of the makeup of the crowd and told a reporter that Carter might do well there because the president was “a babbling idiot.”
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A street band played the theme to
Rocky
… again … though Mr. and Mrs. Balboa were not spotted.

T
ED
K
ENNEDY RETURNED TO
Pennsylvania in mid-April and got some unexpected good news. Arizona Democrats had held their state convention, and he'd surprisingly won there over Carter.
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He was hoping the trend would move northeast to a state where his brother the president had been greeted like a god. The other reason for the spring in Kennedy's step was that a poll taken by the Carter-Mondale campaign leaked and had Kennedy ahead of the president in Pennsylvania, 43–40 percent.
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Kennedy was running tough television ads against Carter. One showed the president at bat in a softball game. A pitch slowly went by Carter and the bat never came off his shoulder. The heavy metaphors were impossible to miss about Carter's manhood, as he missed the “softball” pitch, a fat strike over the plate. Kennedy had another ad featuring Carroll O'Connor, television's “Archie Bunker,”
telling audiences, “Jimmy's Depression is going to be worse than Herbert's,” a reference to Hoover and to a line from the
All in the Family
theme song. Carter responded with peel-your-skin-off ads eviscerating Kennedy over character and family.
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I
N THE JUST COMPLETED
North Dakota convention, Reagan took twelve of the seventeen delegates chosen. Bush took only one. The other four were technically “uncommitted,” but if you scratched any of them, underneath you found yet another hard-core Reaganite.
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In Arkansas, John Connally's “$11 million delegate,” Ada Mills, did not follow Big John's lead to endorse Reagan. Instead, she chose Bush.
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In better news for Reagan, he took all seventeen delegates in the Nevada state convention.
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Even more promising, Reagan hit the sweet spot in New Jersey, as a preliminary report said he would win sixty of sixty-six delegates there in June. Four years earlier, Reagan had taken only a few of the state GOP's sixty-seven delegates.
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Ray Donovan, a contractor with a superb political reputation, was running things in the Garden State for the Gipper. Donovan had raised $650,000 for Reagan, more than had been raised in any other state except Reagan's California. He was being assisted by an original Reaganite, Thomas Bruinooge from Bergen County, who had been one of the few courageous New Jersey delegates to support Reagan over Ford in 1976.
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Reagan was also getting the reluctant support of much of the state GOP, which had snubbed him four years earlier. New Jersey politicians knew when they were licked.

Speaking at his alma mater in Ann Arbor, Gerald Ford was asked whether he would consider going on the ticket with Reagan. He shot it down, saying the notion was “totally impractical.”
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Just three days before the Pennsylvania primary, John Anderson dropped any remaining pretense and announced that he would run for president as an independent.
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Absolutely no one was surprised.

W
ITH THE
P
ENNSYLVANIA PRIMARY
now just days away, Bush complained about the polls, which showed him losing the state to Reagan: “I don't believe all these damned polls. They've been wrong, wrong, wrong.”
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For the Sunday before the April 22 primary, Bush had bought a full-page ad in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, taking on not Ronald Reagan but Jimmy Carter. The tagline, “He's the one man Jimmy Carter hopes he'll never have to run against,” was clunky, but it did the trick.
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For the first time since the Iowa caucuses, George Bush was giving a clear reason why Republicans should choose him to lead the GOP in 1980.

Bush was back on message, spending a boatload of money and all his time in the state. Reagan's support was dropping; Pennsylvania Republicans thought he was snubbing them, because he had spent only a couple of days campaigning there. The Reagan campaign was repeating the mistake of Iowa.

Panicked, Reagan returned to Pennsylvania for a final two-day swing.
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Team Reagan now feared that Bush might just win the state. Bush picked up some additional momentum on the eve of Pennsylvania by seizing seventeen of Maine's twenty-one delegates in its final selection round.
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The Sunday before the primary, Senator Howard Baker startled everyone when he swung his support to Reagan. Baker got out of a sickbed and abruptly appeared in Pennsylvania, where he warmly endorsed and then embraced a very pleased Gipper. Baker minced no words about Bush, the animosity still evident: “Reagan would make a much better GOP nominee and a better president.”
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Jim Dickenson of the
Washington Star
had the best take on the Baker endorsement: “An increasingly confident and assertive Reagan put Baker on display much as ancient Roman generals paraded defeated chieftains who then swore fealty to the conqueror.”
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