TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/80/80capcam.2

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                Äíúc4hj                                              á««COVER STORY

Carter:  Running Tough

Overcoming Kennedy, the President starts his hot pursuit of Reagan

August 25, 1980

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