This Country by Chris Matthews

Author:Chris Matthews [Matthews, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE SCRAMBLE

History offers two types of American election years. One is when the country likes what it has. The other is when it’s ready to place its bet elsewhere. Nineteen eighty stands high in the latter category. Any competent Republican could have given President Carter a race. All that Ronald Reagan needed to do in their single debate was pass the competence test.

When it was over, Carter knew that Reagan had met that threshold. Alone with his diary that night, the president ridiculed his rival’s “Aw, shucks” performance but saw that it had succeeded. “He apparently made a better impression on the TV audience than I did.”

This left only one hope for Carter. He needed to change the topic. He needed to shift the country’s focus from a desire to replace him, Jimmy Carter, to a fear of putting Ronald Reagan in his place.

The next morning, Carter set out to do what he’d failed to do the night before: nail his rival as someone not to be trusted with nuclear weapons. In Pittsburgh’s Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, he produced the evidence. It was a New York Times article from February that quoted Reagan as saying that a foreign country’s decision to develop nuclear weapons wasn’t “any of our business.” But it was too late. The verdict on the debate was already a fait accompli. Reagan had won.

The spirit on Air Force One in the final week of the campaign had a way, however, of denying the outside world. Walking aboard, I would hear Phil Wise, a Georgian good ol’ boy, singing the current Willie Nelson favorite “On the Road Again.” On takeoff, Phil had another ritual: he would crouch on a serving tray and surf down the aisle as the air force pilot took the aircraft steeply into the sky.

Sitting in the staff section with Rick, I was struck by the contrast between the harsh politics outside and the remarkable comforts within. The staff tables always had our name card, a restock of M&M’s, and, of course, our packs of cigarettes.

President Carter, holed up in his forward compartment, meanwhile, endured the turbulence from the postdebate outlook from his pollster Pat Caddell. The poll numbers “don’t look good for us” he wrote in his diary. “Reagan apparently improved more than I did.” But then, hopefully: “Nobody knows.”

I’d been taken with the loneliness of Carter’s journey. At every stop, he had to meet with local politicians he may have met only once or twice before. To prepare himself for the critical encounters, he now worked his way through the photos of the local personages that would be awaiting him in the next receiving line. Is this what it takes to lead the United States?

The crushing blow awaited us at a campaign stop in Chicago. It began with a rush of optimism. At four in the morning on Sunday, November 2, the White House received what looked like good news from Tehran. The Iranian parliament had met and agreed on terms that teased hope for the hostages’ release.

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