Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked Read Free

man in the White House—which is standard operating procedure for any opposition candidate—but there was something about his reach that struck me as truly audacious. What he seemed to be implying was that everything wrong in the world was now the fault of Jimmy Carter. His taking such an approach forced his rival, for hispart, to defend absolutely everything voters didn’t like— absolutely everything —beginning, not ending, with the humiliation of having our flag trampled on every night by scruffy, hateful Iranians.
    Reagan had a mischievous way of sticking Carter with this burden of all things bad. “Can anyone look at the record of this administration and say, ‘Well done’? Can anyone compare the state of our economy when the Carter administration took office with where we are today and say, ‘Keep up the good work’? Can anyone look at our reduced standing in the world today and say, ‘Let’s have four more years of this’?” He was forcing voters to imagine themselves as cheerleaders for a gridiron squad that again and again kept fumbling the pigskin.
    Throughout the summer, the polls remained too close to draw any conclusions. Then, on Labor Day, came the first sign of real trouble. My wife, Kathleen—we’d gotten married that June—and I were spending that holiday Monday enjoying Georgetown. Toward evening we stopped by a Wisconsin Avenue college bar to check the news. I’d written Carter’s big campaign kickoff speech, which he’d given earlier that day at a picnic he was attending down in Alabama. After he’d read my draft, he told me right there in the office—talk about an unusual occurrence!—how much he liked it, making me eager to see how it played on the networks. Suddenly on the TV screen above the bar appeared a tanned Ronald Reagan looking happy and relaxed, in his shirtsleeves. Standing, attractively windswept by the harbor breezes, the Statue of Liberty to his back, he spoke about our country and the hopes it stood for. His punch line was that the Democrats had betrayed those hopes.
    “I’m here because it is the home of Democrats,” he said in explaining his presence in Liberty State Park. “In this country,” he went on confidently, “there are millions of Democrats who are just as unhappy with the way things are as all the rest of us.” He was celebratingthose millions of immigrants that New York’s harbor has welcomed over so many decades. “They didn’t ask what this country could do for them, but what they could do to make this refuge the greatest home of freedom in history. . . . Today a president of the United States would have us believe that dream is over, or at least in need of change.”
    Ronald Reagan grasped the deep-running need shared by Americans to feel positive about their country and themselves. He himself believed completely in the brighter, shinier world of which he spoke, and his conviction was infectious. Jimmy Carter, a decent and honest man, had notoriously gone on national television the year before, offering a somber speech that faced the present and the future squarely but was barren of the blue skies Reagan now reminded Americans they had coming as their birthright.
    Carter was never to live down the fallout from that speech, and with a reelection campaign looming on the horizon such a downbeat address had been far from strategic. Carter certainly had ample cause to share his concerns—about energy consumption, and each citizen’s personal role in energy conservation—with his constituents. Yet he broached these subjects without suspecting how unpopular they would eventually make him, convinced that telling difficult truths would itself rouse the country to its time and its historic tasks. During that broadcast, now known as the “malaise speech,” Jimmy Carter hadn’t actually even used the word malaise, yet in speaking to the press, his pollster-advisor Patrick Caddell had framed the speech’s themes that way, thus tarring Carter