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<text> <title> (80 Elect) Madison Square Garden of Briars </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1980 Election </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> August 25, 1980 NATION Madison Square Garden of Briars </hdr> <body> The Democrats' Show of Unity Left Something to be Desired By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Douglas Brew and Walter Isaacson/New York. THE HAPPENING. Long on tradition but short on memory, every convention takes on a life all its own as it distills the passions and personalities that animate a national political party. Caught in television's klieg lights, these happenings at their best--and worst--illuminate the mood of America. The green-bannered forces of Jimmy Carter flexed more muscle and organized brilliantly to prevail in New York City's Madison Square Garden. But the blue standards of Edward Kennedy waved in defiance, then blazed across the floor in bittersweet celebration of the vanquished Senator's finest hour--an impassioned call to the Democratic Party not to abandon its compassionate past. The masterly address set even some Carter delegates to weeping. In a convention devoid of suspense but filled with personal drama, the President won renomination yet lost much of the glory to the man he so handily defeated. Carter's quick knockout of his foe and Kennedy's retributive triumph came out on the convention's first two days. By winning 24 primaries to Kennedy's ten, Carter had sent 1,982 delegates to New York, 316 more than required for the nomination. Not only were they unlikely to defect, but they would have been prohibited from doing so if the convention adopted a rule, proposed by the party's National Committee in 1978, requiring all delegates to cast their first roll call votes for the candidate to whom they had been committed. If he was to keep on pursuing the nomination, Kennedy had little choice but to try to block the adoption of this rule. Try he did, and Carter set out to stop him by deploying the kind of forceful, efficient head counters and persuaders that he has never been able to muster while lobbying in Congress. Clad in green-and-white vests, fashioned from tablecloths, 128 Carter floor whips watched for any delegates who looked wobbly on the rule. In a three-hour rehearsal they had discovered that they could send orders to all the Carter delegates on the jammed floor within seven minutes. They had memorized the quickest routes through the nearly always clogged aisles to the alternate delegates seated in tiers above the floor. They had run through an imaginary roll call. They were in instant communication with the command trailers just off the convention floor. They were ready. "Now is the hour," intoned Convention Chairman Tip O'Neill as the appointed time for the debate on the rule arrived on Monday night and the convention roared to life. With each speaker the blue and green signs waved wildly. Cheers, boos and catcalls accompanied arguments over what the Kennedy forces cleverly termed a demand to "open" the convention and the Carter supporters called the "faithful delegate" rule. As the Carter and Kennedy whips worked for every vote, Illinois became a battleground. Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne had flown to New York expecting to switch some 30 of her state's 163 Carter delegates (the largest Carter contingent on the floor) to the Kennedy position on the rule. Her aides applied heavy pressure, for example offering Donna Matteo, 25, a city job if she switched. "But I worked for Carter. I was elected by people who voted for Carter, and I'm going to vote for Carter," she replied. Secretary of Transportation Neil Goldschmidt, White House Chief of Staff Jack Watson and Eugene Eidenberg, who heads the Administration's relations with cities and states, all went to work on the Illinois delegates and doused what one of them called a "brush-fire" of potential defection. In the Louisiana delegation, Inez Fourcard, a black Carter delegate, told a reporter: "I'm for Carter, all right. But I've decided I'm against that rule. I don't want someone hanging over my head telling me what to do." A Carter whip overheard her remark. Suddenly, Chip Carter, the President's son, appeared at her seat and kindly offered to autograph her green Carter-Mondale poster. He wrote: "Thank you for your help on behalf of my father. With love, Chip Carter." Fourcard, a young teacher, hugged the sign but made no promise to support Carter on the rule. Then Bernard Lee, a black floor leader for Carter, took a seat next to her and said, "If you're with us, we need you on the rule." Eventually she agreed: "I guess since I'm a Carter delegate, I'm going to vote with the Administration." But then Bobby Kennedy Jr. rushed over to cajole Fourcard. "It took courage in the '60s to stand up for what you believe," he pleaded. "And it will take courage again today." Said the startled Fourcard as TV correspondents also zeroed in on the scene: "I don't understand. Why do people think my vote is so important?" Replied Bobby: "We need you. Vote your conscience." Bobby left, but Carter's man, Lee, stayed right next to her. FInally she reconfirmed her shaky decision: "I'm going the Carter way, I guess." She did. When the roll call was taken, it was obvious that the Carter full-court press had been effective. Only one uncertainty remained. Some of the largest states, including those where Kennedy was strongest, had passed on the roll call. The Carter strategists assumed Kennedy was trying to confuse matters, seeking some kind of psychological edge. Yet there was no Kennedy ploy. Watching three TV sets in a room at the Waldorf, a subdued Kennedy and his sisters were also puzzled as the states passed. They telephoned the Kennedy trailer at the Garden to inquire and were told: "They are just having trouble counting their people." Kennedy realized he was losing, but sounded relaxed. "I guess I had better get something to eat," he said and stepped across the hall for some roast lamb sent up by room service. Pennsylvania's vote sealed Kennedy's fate. Its 83 votes against his position provided the winning majority. On the previous weekend, Carter Campaign Manager Robert Strauss had been worried enough about Pennsylvania to instruct a Carter whip working the delegation: "Tell them we'll yank them off if they don't want to vote with us. Whip, whip, whip them into shape!" The final tally was 1,936.4 to 1,390.6 in favor of Carter's position on the rule--an unexpectedly comfortable margin of 545.8 votes. At the Waldorf, Kennedy faced up to the end of his nearly ten-month quest for the presidential nomination. His top aides had considered what to do in case of a defeat on the rules fight. Kennedy had said for being right and winning too." Kennedy had every reason to be dispirited. But he had long contended that his sole reason for continuing the futile challenge to the President was to check what he saw as his party's drift toward conservative economic policies and away from its liberal social values. The Senator wanted one last fight over the economic planks in the party platform--and one last word in the debate about them. In the speech he prepared for that Tuesday-night debate, Kennedy had included a paragraph of praise for Carter. But then he picked up a newspaper and read a comment by Hamilton Jordan, the President's deputy campaign chairman. "We could do it without him," Jordan had said of the campaign, "but it will be easier with him. He doesn't matter so much himself, but his people do." With that, Kennedy toned down his speech to only one mention of Carter, and the result was hardly an endorsement at all. After running through the speech for parts of two days with a TelePrompter in his hotel suite, Kennedy went to the Garden on Tuesday night and waited for 45 minutes in a holding room beneath the podium while other speakers talked to a bored hall of delegates. Fretted Kennedy: "No one is paying any attention." Counseled a friend: "Don't worry. They'll start paying attention when you come out." That they did. Now the hall was Kennedy blue again as the Senator's supporters displayed their feelings for him, and Carter delegates generously let their foes have one last hurrah. After the ovation died away, Kennedy took command. Nearly each of the text's 150 well-paced sentences drew shouts, laughter or applause. Time and again came the chants: "We want Ted! We want Teddy!" He cut them off by rolling on into his text. "I have come here tonight not to argue as a candidate but to affirm a cause...I speak out of a deep sense of urgency about the anguish and anxiety I have seen across America...We cannot let the great purposes of the Democratic Party become the bygone passages of history." Kennedy's specific appeals were for programs both unrealistic and increasingly unpopular with many Americans. But on this night this audience, out of conviction or nostalgia, or a little of both, cheered his plea for national health insurance, environmental protection and his $12 billion federal jobs program ("We cannot solve problems by throwing money at them, but we dare not throw out our national problems onto a scrap heap of inattention and indifference"). In a lyrical sequence of scorn, Kennedy accurately quoted past statements of Ronald Reagan to support the charge that the Republican candidate is "no friend" of labor ("Unemployment insurance is a prepaid vacation plan for freeloaders"), the cities ("I have included in my morning and evening prayers every day the prayer that the Federal Government not bail out New York"), the elderly (Social Security "should be made voluntary"), and the environment ("Eighty percent of air pollution comes from plants and trees"). Calling for sacrifice, Kennedy put a twist on one of his brother Jack's most famous lines, shouting: "I am convinced that we as a people are ready to give something back to our country in return for all it has given to us." And he evoked tears as he turned more personal, recalling his campaign and "my golden friends across this land." He concluded: "For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die." For a few seconds the Garden was silent. Then the convention's most tumultuous demonstration erupted, ignoring Chairman O'Neill's attempt to order a roll call on the Kennedy economic planks. The Senator's adherents danced, sang and chanted, "We want Teddy!" O'Neill wisely gave up, signaled the convention band to join in the fun with medleys of For He's a Jolly Good Fellow, MacNamara's Band and Happy Days Are Here Again. On the floor, delegates spoke of how the speech had moved them. Gary Brandt, a 6-ft. 2-in., 230-lb. welder from Ohio, wiped his eyes and said of Kennedy: "He could have turned the damned country around. If he'd talked like that during the campaign this would have been his convention." Now Carter's strategists had no choice. They would have to concede more to the Senator on the platform than they had hoped. In the Ohio delegation, a Carter whip shouted into his green telephone: "We got major, major defections in the big industrial states. We're going to lose them." The Pennsylvania whip frantically signaled the trailer: "We're lost. All 185 are going." On Kennedy's most insistent plank, his call for a $12 billion jobs program, Campaign Boss Strauss figured his troops would lose by some 400 votes. In a wide-open meeting on the podium, O'Neill and Carter's and Kennedy's men--who were in touch by telephone with nearby command posts--completed the deal. A roll call vote, embarrassing for the President, would be abandoned. O'Neill would call the ayes and nays on a voice vote and would divine the agreed-upon result: victories for Kennedy on the jobs program and a plank giving priority to fighting unemployment. In return, Kennedy would give up on his call for wage and price controls, a plank on which he did not have majority support anyway. Carter later said he could endorse the "aims" of the jobs plank, if not its $12 billion price, and announced that he was pleased to run on the reshaped platform. Kennedy promptly delivered his much delayed endorsement. His message, read to the cheering convention by O'Neill, declared: "I congratulate President Carter on his renomination...I will support and work for the re-election of President Carter. It is imperative that we defeat Ronald Reagan in 1980. I urge all Democrats to join in that effort." The President's renomination on Wednesday night was anticlimactic. The old problem of disunity remained at the center of the convention's and the party's problems. Despite their candidate's withdrawal, only some 100 delegates shifted from Kennedy to vote for the President, even though Kennedy had not been placed in nomination. Carter won, 2,129 to 1,146.5. When the Minnesota delegation made the customary move to declare the nomination unanimous, shouts of "No! No! No!" roared from the Kennedy diehards. Only after a hurried call to Kennedy and an announcement on the floor that the Senator had urged a unanimous voice vote did his delegates quit. At last the blue placards yielded, and the Garden turned to a sea of green for the convention's final night. In his acceptance speech, Vice President Walter Mondale, as Carter later did himself, stressed the need to fight unemployment. But his speech will be remembered for its litany of past Reagan positions. Ending each citation with the question, "Who on earth would say something like that? Ronald Reagan did!" Mondale quoted Reagan as calling the weak and the disadvantaged "a faceless mass waiting for handouts"; saying programs that help blacks and Hispanics were "demeaning" and insulting"; and declaring that "the minimum wage has caused more misery and unemployment than anything since the Great Depression." Mondale set the audience to chorusing with him the punch line "Ronald Reagan!" Then it was time for Carter's acceptance speech and an opportunity to take some of the bitterness out of the convention. His aides had said that Carter would try to sketch an inspiring vision of America's future in a calm presidential style, but he fell far short of that. Once again, the Kennedy presence loomed. The President faced the matter head-on in his speech. "Ted," he said, "your party needs--and I need you. And I need your idealism and your dedication working for us. We'll make great partners this fall in whipping the Republicans." A commendable effort at healing the convention wounds, perhaps, but a shade too pleading to come from a President. Carter was also embarrassed by the boos that greeted his mention of draft registration, an outcry that was quickly drowned out by his supporters. (Later, when other White House officials were introduced, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was also booed.) Kennedy did not help matters much when he finally appeared with Carter on the podium. He walked stiffly onto the crowded stage and tentatively shook the hand of the President, who patted his back. For a moment, Kennedy was hugged by O'Neill, while Carter shot him quick, anxious glances. After another fleeting handshake, Kennedy patted the President and moved offstage. he was called back by aides to pose for pictures beside the President. Then he was gone. There was no warmth, no clasped hands held high. Privately, Carter's aides charged that Kennedy had broken an agreement to wait behind the podium, then step out dramatically to be introduced as soon as the President's speech had ended. "Where's Ted?" asked Carter as the demonstration proceeded. But Kennedy's aides insist he did precisely what the President's men wanted, staying in his hotel until Carter had finished speaking, thus not attracting TV coverage away from the speech. The bitterness lingers. Said a Carter aide about Kennedy's appearance: "He wanted to put that last wound into us. He hurt us and he hurt himself. We all lost." On that sour note ended the Democratic Convention that President Carter had hoped would give him a flying start in his attempt to come from behind to catch Ronald Reagan. The four days in Madison Square Garden hardly did that. For Jimmy Carter, as the green and blue banners were finally put away last week, the race to Nov. 4 looked longer than ever. </body> </article> </text>