TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/election/80elect/80elect.005

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                                                                                August 25, 1980

COVER STORY

Carter:  Running Tough


Overcoming Kennedy, the President starts his hot pursuit of
Reagan


     IT BEGINS. Every four years, America's two major political
parties materialize in tandem conventions that form the
proscenium for the presidential campaign to come. Some argue
that these outbursts of ritual and oratory are anachronisms as
doomed as dinosaurs. But as this and the following stories show,
New York was a vital festival for the Democrats last week. Myths
were made and unmade, plinths erected, men and women tested,
principles examined and policies established -- all essential
ingredients to getting the show on the road.

     The spotlights picked him out first, a slim figure
proceeding to the dais through a darkened Madison Square Garden.
Jimmy Carter was about to give a speech crucial to his hopes
for staying in the WHite House. Not since Harry Truman had a
President received such a grudging, unenthusiastic nomination
from a Democratic Convention -- and Carter was starting from an
even lower rating in the polls than Truman had carried into
that campaign of 1948. The President had to set both a tone and
a theme for his own uphill race, and he had to do it
immediately.

     The tone he was able to attain, by adopting Truman's
give-'em-hell style. Perspiration pouring from his face, his
voice hoarse, his eyes coldly angry, Carter gave a shouting
stump speech unlike almost any he has delivered before, in
content as well as manner. It was a headlong assault on his
rival, Ronald Reagan, depicting him as a dweller in "a world of
tinsel and make-believe" who would "launch an all-out nuclear
arms race" and start "an attack on everything that we've done in
the achievement of social justice and decency in the last 50
years."  The nation, Carter cried, faces "a choice between two
futures":  a Democratic future of "security and justice and
peace" and a Reaganite future of "despair...surrender...risk."

     With that blast began the final phase of the 1980
campaign: eleven weeks that seem sure to be long, bitter, angry.
The denunciations of Reagan will be echoed endlessly by Carter
and other Democratic orators throughout the fall. Carried too
far, the personal attacks might backfire and make Reagan a
sympathetic figure. The G.O.P., meanwhile will be characterizing
the President's tenure in the White House as 3 1/2 years of
blundering incompetence. Says one Carter aide: "This campaign
is going to be very messy, horribly bruising."

     Especially so, perhaps, because Carter's acceptance speech
Thursday night succeeded, to the extent it did, primarily as a
get-them-scared-of-Ronnie exercise. It failed, painfully, to
achieve what the President's own staff had said would be its
equally essential aim: communicating to all of America a vision
of his goals that would lead and inspire the nation. While
painting, in broad strokes rich with hyperbole, a gloomy
picture of a Reaganite America, Carter described the Democratic
promised land only in vague -- or at times excessively technical
-- platitudes. Not even the delegates who had nominated him the
night before, or the Carter supporters who packed the hall,
appeared really moved. Their cheers on occasion seemed merely
dutiful -- a not unpleasant ritual diligently performed. At
other times, it was his fighting spirit that seemed to rouse
them, not his words.

     For Democrats, the evening was not a happy opening to the
campaign: their nominee did not match Reagan's forceful yet
restrained address at the close of the Republican Convention
four weeks ago. An even more painful contrast for the Carterites
was their candidate's failure to come anywhere near equaling the
remarkable performance two evenings earlier of the man he had
beaten for the nomination:  Ted Kennedy. His strong, mellifluous
voice ringing through the Garden, Kennedy had summoned the party
to keep faith with its liberal past and the disadvantaged for
whom it has traditionally spoken. Stirring memories of the New
Deal and New Frontier glory days, he set off a 43-minute,
dancing-in-the-aisles demonstration that far exceeded in noise
and enthusiasm anything the Carterites could stage. It was a
purely emotional, if not mindless phenomenon. To the assembled
delegates, it made little difference that many of the big
spending programs he advocated seemed more responsive to the
problems of the '60s, or even the '30s, than of the '80s. On
this one night he was their man, and they cheered his every
word.

     The practical effect of the speech was nil:  Kennedy had
withdrawn his name from nomination the night before, after
losing a rules fight that ended his last chance of prying loose a
sufficient number of the 1,892 delegates Carter had won in
primaries and caucuses. But the fervor of Kennedy's supporters
demonstrated a severe problem, not only for Carter but for all
Democrats. The party is searching for, and has not found a new
role and a new voice. While its primary votes went to Carter,
whose conservative economic policies caused Kennedy to jeer at
him as "a clone of Ronald Reagan," the hearts of many of its
activists still belong to the old-fashioned liberalism. After
the Kennedy demonstration, delegates whooped through by voice
vote several of the Senator's economic planks that seem out of
touch with the realities of inflation and the mood of the
country, including a call for a $12 billion jobs program that
Carter had warned he could not accept. The Senator himself won
1,146.5 votes on the final roll call, to Carter's 2,129, and
unheard-of performance for a man whose name was never formally
placed in nomination, and who officially released his delegates
to vote as they pleased before the ballot.

     By convention's end, Carter seemed to be fretting nervously
over the degree of support he would get from Kennedy. In his
acceptance speech, he appeared almost to plead for his rival's
backing. Kennedy responded with what seemed a notable lack of
charity. Though he refrained from criticizing the President, his
formal endorsement was brief ("I will support and work for the
re-election of President Carter"), his ritual appearance with
Carter on the rostrum after the acceptance speech Thursday night
was perfunctory -- even strained -- and his expression on that
traditionally happy occasion was reserved and aloof.

     Will Kennedy and his admirers be similarly aloof during
the campaign? That was the key question the convention did not
answer. It was not a rancorous gathering, certainly not by the
standards of such Democratic donnybrooks as those of 1948 and
1968. Indeed, it mildly disappointed some Reagan aides who had
been hoping for an angry and divisive brawl. Only during the
opening-night rules debate did Carter and Kennedy partisans
exchange catcalls. The seemingly endless platform arguments that
followed were conducted with a fair show of civility by speakers
who rarely stirred passion, or even attention.

     Nonetheless, many Kennedy delegates went home resigned to
voting for Carter but unsure themselves of whether they could
work for him with any degree of enthusiasm. That will probably
be determined by how successful the President is in portraying
Reagan as a specter. One major reason for the anti-Reagan
strategy that will be the heart of the Democratic campaign is to
impose on a party that could achieve unity:  denunciations of
Reagan are one thing, and perhaps the only thing, that nearly
all democrats can agree on.

     The approach just might work. Even Reagan's own strategists
do not expect his big lead in the public opinion polls -- 28
points just after the Republican Convention -- to last for long.
Indeed, they would not be surprised to see it cut in half by
Labor Day. Pat Caddell, Carter's pollster, told TIME editors at
lunch last week that "we may come out of this convention less
than ten points behind, and I would prefer to come out ten to
15 points down -- far enough down where we are clearly the
underdog and Reagan is clearly on top."  In that case, he
thinks, voters will focus on Reagan rather than Carter and will
not like what they see:  "On an ideological scale of one to
seven, from very liberal to very conservative, the distance
between where the voters place themselves and where they put
Reagan is very great. He is quite to the extreme right. Carter
is much closer to the average voter. One of the things that I
am much surprised by is the enormous doubt that exists about
Ronald Reagan."  As the oratory thunders toward November climax,
Democratic planners have high hopes that millions of traditional
party voters, frightened by visions of Reagan, the ideologue,
and viewing a vote for Independent Candidate John Anderson as
a ballot thrown away, will return, however grudgingly, to the
fold. One politician unimpressed by the likelihood of any such
Democratic unity is Ronald Reagan. Said he last weekend:  "I
shall forever remember the final scene that night when the
Senator from Massachusetts joined the President on the platform.
If that's the best they can do in unity, they have a long way
to go."

     But as Carter tries to pull a Truman against a formidable
opponent with a well-defined appeal, his problem is not simply
that he projects and image of faltering leadership:  the party
he is trying to lead is itself in trouble. In Congress, the days
of comfortable Democratic majorities may be past. A July poll
showed the public favoring Republican congressional candidates
over Democrats for the first time since 1952, 47% to 43%. The
Democratic majority of 116 in the House could easily be reduced
by 30 to 50 seats, and some Democratic leaders are afraid that
a landslide Reagan victory might even cost them control of the
House they have held since 1954. Democratic control of the
Senate is also threatened; a shift of nine seats would hand over
power to the Republicans for the first time since '54. Enough
Democratic seats are in real danger to make that a distinct
possibility.

     Closer to the grass roots, Democrats now hold 67 of the
nation's 98 partisan state legislative chambers. But their
margins in many are so thin that this fall they could lose
control of the majority of the chambers for the first time since
the new Deal. This is an especially ominous prospect for the
Democrats, since legislators elected Nov.4 will draw new lines
for their own and congressional districts based on results of
the 1980 census -- and Republicans are as skilled as Democrats
in gerrymandering districts to ensure the maximum number of
future seats for their party.

     These immediate threats at the polls reflect long-range
and fundamental problems for the party. After dominating
AMerican politics for most of the past half-century, the
Democrats are in substantial disarray. In one mid-1979 poll,
only 38% of the people questioned thought of themselves as
Democrats, down from 51% as recently as November 1976 (24%
thought of themselves as Republicans). The party's long-dominant
ideology of Government social activism is rejected as passe or
even dangerous by many; 42% of voters polled by Yankelovich,
Skelly & White Inc. in May called themselves conservatives,
while only 15% were self-proclaimed liberals.

     Amid these changing patterns the party's leaders have been
unable to define a new faith. The political swing to the right
in the country has caught the Democrats off guard and off base.
After studying recent data on the party's voters, Presidential
Pollster Caddell was startled to discover that "if you look at
Democrats on issued today compared to 1976, you will find that
they looked like sort of moderate Republicans back in 1976."

     Other factors have been at work. Since 1972, a series of
reforms diffusing power in the Democratic Party has hurt its
effectiveness. Says Nelson Polsby, a professor of political
science at the University of California, Berkeley:  "The
fundamental thing that has happened with this revolution of
reforms is organizational:  the party does not exist as an
organizational force. It is not a question of the building being
infested with termites, the termites are the building."
Special-interest groups fight for their own causes, but not
necessarily the full spectrum of the party platform. In such a
situation, Democrats are having more and more difficulty
holding the national party together. Says V. Lance Tarrance, a
Houston-based Republican pollster:  "The Democrats have trouble
with supply lines. They can't reach out and win a Colorado or
Texas with ease any more."  Says George Christian, former press
secretary to Lyndon Johnson and now a political consultant in
Austin:  "The sagebrush rebellion is for real."

     Though the Democratic Party traces its ancestry to Thomas
Jefferson, its modern shape was sculpted by Franklin D.
Roosevelt, who transformed what had become a largely Southern
party into a national coalition of all those who looked to
Government to improve their lot in life:  industrial workers,
especially union members; big-city dwellers; the poor; blacks,
Jews and other minorities; and liberal activists of every
background. Oddly assorted though this grouping was (it included
both the descendants of Southern slaveowners and the
grandchildren of their slaves, the alliance held together for
almost two generations. The nation struggled through the
Depression, fought World War II and then embarked on a boom
that tried with marked success to deliver, as promised,
something for everybody.

     The coalition reached its zenith in 1964, when the
ultraconservatism of Barry Goldwater drove blocs of Democratic
votes back to Lyndon Johnson in numbers that Roosevelt himself
might have envied. L.B.J. took 94% of the black vote, 90% of the
Jewish vote, 80% of the union vote -- and 61.4% of the total
vote. This coalition remains the core of Democratic voting
strength today. As Hamilton Jordan, deputy campaign chairman,
told TIME editors last week, "It's impossible for Democrats to
win without a strong turnout from minorities. It's impossible
for a Democrat to win a general election without labor support.
It's impossible for a Democrat to win without the vote of Jewish
Americans, and so forth."

     That is precisely the trouble, since the coalition is no
longer what it was. Inflation, recession and the pervasive
uncertainties of the '70s have weakened the loyalty of many of
its members. The South has been drifting away for decades: even
Georgia-born Carter could take only 45% of its white votes in
1976; he won the region because a massive majority of the blacks
supported his cause. But now a large number of blacks, dismayed
that the civil rights crusade of the '60s and Carter's
Administration have not done more to speed their economic and
social progress are threatening to stay away from the polls.
While most union leaders swung into line last week behind
Carter, blue-collar workers packed Serb Hall in Milwaukee last
March to greet Candidate Reagan and cheer his attacks on Big
Government with shouts of "Give 'em hell, Ronnie!"

     Jews are afraid that Carter is trying too hard to work out
an accommodation with the Arabs at the expense of Israel. To
counter these fears, both Carter and Mondale pledged outspoken
and undeviating support of Israel during their acceptance
speeches, and the band played Hava Nagila, the traditional
Jewish song of rejoicing. Yet, in these complicated times, there
is the hazard that such pro-Israel demonstrations will further
anger Arab nations that the U.S. needs as friends -- and thus
give Carter more troubles.

     Even if the Democratic coalition can be tugged back
together, many of the party's basic elements are dwindling in
numbers and clout. Union membership is declining, down from
about a third of all nonfarm workers in the mid-'50s to less
than a fourth today. Blue-collar workers are a shrinking
minority of the work force (33%); white-collar workers have
become an outright majority (51%). Fourteen of the 20 biggest
U.S. cities, traditional Democratic strongholds, lost population
during the 1970s, some drastically, as residents moved to the
largely Republican suburbs. The cities that did gain in
population tended to be in the Republican-dominated Sunbelt --
Houston, Phoenix and San Jose, for example.

     Jack Walsh, a Boston political consultant who was briefly
a Carter campaign director last year, sums up:  "If the
coalition voted Democratic by the same percentage today that it
did in F.D.R.'s era, it would amount to about 35% of the vote."

     Nor has the party been able to find new loyalists to
replace the defectors. In part, the Democrats have been the
victims of their own success. They have enacted much of the
classic liberal agenda --  generous welfare plans, unemployment
compensation, Social Security, Medicare, civil rights
legislation. Some of the beneficiaries of these programs no
longer consider themselves to be Democrats. Says Sol Chaikin,
president of the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union:
"You have a group that has moved out of the proletariat into the
broad middle class."

     The Democrats have also been undetermined by success in a
more insidious way. Their decades of running Congress, most
states and the White House have made them "the party of the
Government," in the words of Texas Democratic Pollster George
Shipley. So long as Government was presiding over a
noninflationary boom that brought benefits to nearly everyone,
that identification helped. But in an era of slow growth, energy
shortages, persistent inflation, high taxes, unemployment and
recurrent recession, the Democrats have been angrily attacked
by members of the old coalition whose competing claims can no
longer be reconciled. Says Convention Keynoter Morris Udall, who
is now involved in a hot fight to hold on to his Arizona House
seat:  "I used to go home every election year and tell the
senior citizens, 'We're going to increase Social Security
benefits. Hurray for Udall and the Democratic Congress!'  Now
if we increase Social Security, the young people trying to raise
a family say, 'What the hell is going on here? There's more
money coming out of my paycheck. I can't stand it.'"

     For many voters, Government now appears to be not an ally
but an enemy whose tax-and-spend policies foster wilder and
wilder roller-coaster rides of inflation and recession. With
the nation turning against Big Government, the Democrats have
run out of acceptable new ideas -- their stock in trade for so
long -- because the ideas have always involved creation of an
ever larger bureaucracy. Ironically, it is Ronald Reagan, with
his nostalgic vision of a day when the individual was great and
the Government small, who now appears as the innovator,
proposing risky but exciting new courses -- to cut taxes by 30%
over the next three years, for example.

     It will not be easy for the party to accommodate itself to
these new trends. For many democratic loyalists, any rightward
shift looks like a betrayal of the party's commitment to the
poor, to minorities, to all the disadvantaged. Nonetheless, the
party is changing. After its emotional outburst for Kennedy,
the convention nominated a President who has proposed limits on
social spending and increases in defense outlays, appointed a
Federal Reserve chairman who pushed interest rates to
unheard-of levels, all but openly engineered a recession in
order to slow inflation, and intends to campaign as an advocate
of a balanced budget.

     But what new positions can the Democrats develop for
themselves? The convention gave no answer. There was constant,
worried talk that the Democrats were "a party in transition"
(New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley), "a party in an identity
crisis" ) Connecticut Representative Toby Moffett), "a party
that is struggling to finds its soul" (Massachusetts Lieutenant
Governor Thomas P. O'Neill III). Says Eric Goldman, a former
adviser to Lyndon Johnson:  "The Democratic Party may have
outlived its usefulness."  Says Ramsey Clark, L.B.J.'s Attorney
General: "The Democratic Party is a party in name only, not in
shared belief."

     Somehow the party must balance the new awareness of fiscal
reality that even Kennedy delegates feel with the traditional
commitment shared by Carterites that all Americans should have a
fair change to achieve the good life. If the party cannot yet
communicate to the people a detailed program for achieving its
vision, it at least must offer a firm sense that it knows where
it wants to go. That was lacking last week.

     The party obviously lacks the ideal leader to help it
through this difficult period of transition. Jimmy Carter won
the presidency by campaigning deliberately as an outsider -- and
he has remained one. Even if he wins a second term, he has no
solid base in the party that would enable him to unify it behind
his ideals. Looking to the future, Louis Koenig, a political
scientist at New York University, says:  "The hope for the
Democratic Party is to become a party of issues -- social,
economic, foreign policy, inflation, energy, the dollar, health
costs. But party leaders have not emphasized issues --  they
have stressed personalities."

     A party unsure of its mission, rallying around its
President unenthusiastically and telling the nation to vote for
him primarily out of fear of his opponent, is hardly apt to
inspire the electorate this fall. But whatever happens in
November, it would be a gross mistake to count out the
Democrats:  witness all those obituaries of the Republican Party
written at regular intervals from 1964 to as recently as 1976.
The Democrats are still the majority party, a party open to
bewilderingly diverse groups who somehow pull themselves
together for one more election, and then another and another.
Said Vice President Mondale last week:  "This Democratic
Convention is a mirror of all America -- all of it, black and
white, Asian and Hispanic, native and immigrant, male and
female, young and old, urban and rural, rich and poor."

     The Democrats' ability to stitch together an effective
coalition, however, may not be limitless. Says Massachusetts
Senator Paul Tsongas, a Kennedy supporter who nonetheless
questions the traditional liberal philosophy:  "I think there
comes a swell of realities and eventually someone takes
advantage of it. One of our parties is going to deal with those
realities in very effective terms. And that party is going to be
in power for a very long time."

     -- By George J. Church. Reported by Neil NacNeil and
Christopher Ogden/New York.