Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America Read Online Free PDF

wedges and a raspberry desert,” and conversation. 14 Conspicuously absent from the meeting was the controversial John Sears, which was just fine with several of the attendees, especially Nofziger. They were still angry at Sears's missteps over the past year, which they believed had cost Reagan opportunities to overtake Ford. 15 Many blamed Sears at least in part for the “$90 billion” gaffe in late 1975. At Sears's direction Reagan had given a speech in which he made specific proposals for shifting responsibilities to the states without proposing how to fund them. The flap contributed to Reagan's losing the New Hampshire primary. (Some years later Sears did take responsibility for the “$90 billion” mayhem.) 16

    No one at the meeting talked about a 1980 Reagan campaign. It was just blue sky over the horizon. Still, Reagan was looking ahead. He decided to create a permanent political operation designed to assist candidates and campaign staffers of the Right in building for the future, spreading the word about Reagan's small-government approach to policy and politics, and keeping Reagan in front of the American people. The new organization would not be announced until after the election, however. Jimmy Carter was well ahead of Ford in the polls and few at the meeting thought the president would win; some Reaganites, in fact, were pulling for Ford to lose. But Reagan did not want to appear to be presumptuously dancing on the grave of Ford's presidency before Ford actually lost the election.

    Although Reagan still felt wounded by the derision and ridicule that the Ford team and the GOP establishment had directed at him, he did agree to campaign for President Ford and his running mate, Senator Robert J. Dole of Kansas. Reagan also made a thirty-minute television appeal for the GOP, taping the entire speech in one take. It aired on Sunday, September 19, at 10:30 P.M. eastern time on NBC. The focus of the speech was not on Ford but on the differences between the Republican and Democratic platforms—an important issue for Reagan, since the GOP platform had his fingerprints all over it. 17 Later in the campaign, he made four commercials in Hollywood, promoting the platform and, finally, Ford. But as the New York Times noted, “It was duty more than heartfelt enthusiasm that produced the Reagan ads for the Ford campaign.” 18

    Ford was lagging far behind Carter and needed desperately to shore up his base, but the president waited almost a month after the convention before actually calling Reagan and asking him to campaign. Even then, the Ford team did not make good use of the popular Reagan. Hannaford later recounted that “the Ford campaign had made few specific requests until near the end of the campaign, when they wanted [Reagan] in a place he could not get to one day without scrubbing several other long-promised appearances.” 19

    In late October, by which point the polls had tightened, a leak from Ford aides to the New York Times said, “Former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California has refused a request by President Ford's top election strategists to campaign on the President's behalf in three key states in the final days of the Presidential race.” The story made it appear as if Reagan wanted Ford to lose the election, when in fact Reagan was campaigning heavily for Ford and the GOP in California, which Ford needed if he was to have any chance of winning the election. 20 Reagan also campaigned in North Carolina, Texas, Louisiana, and the Midwest. 21 All told, he appeared in twenty-five states for the Republicans in the closing months of the 1976 campaign. Reagan was also asked to become the honorary chairman of the Ford campaign, but he took a pass.

    Despite his campaigning for the Ford-Dole ticket, Reagan made it unmistakably clear at a joint appearance in Los Angeles that he wanted to be anywhere other than with Gerald Ford. “It was the worst I'd ever seen him,” remembered Lou Cannon, who was covering the