Running-mates running wild
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington For this week anyway, the general opinion is that Ronald Reagan has wiped out Ronald Reagan with his announcement that he had asked Pennsylvania's Senator Richard Schweiker to be his vice-presidential running-mate. The liberal politician was too much for some of Reagan's conservative supporters, but not enough for Republican liberals who are continuing to adhere to President Ford.
In the days immediately before Reagan's announcement, it was becoming evident that the old cowboy actually had nothing left in his six-shooter, and that Ford would beat him out at the Kansas City Convention; perhaps by no more than fifty votes, but beat him anyhow. For large numbers of right-wing Republicans that was satisfactory. For them, feeling righteous is more important than winning. But it was not satisfactory to the former Californian Governor, who does not view his campaign as a noble demarche, but as a serious effort to get the Republican nomination. His picking a liberal Vice-President to run with him would switch enough convention delegates if Reagan seemed flexible enough, though this is not the case with his most attached supporters, who walk around as though their vertebrae had been struck by bolts of moral lightning.
They could not believe that Reagan, their champion, had picked the notoriously prolabour Schweiker. A few defected to Ford; a lot went out, got drunk, thought it over, and decided they would stick with their compromised hero, but told everybody who would listen to them that they had lost their zeal and zest for the contest. Schweiker tried to be helpful by going off to the fatlands where Reagan's support has been strongest, to say that if it would help matters he would modify his principles and drop his prolabour stance. But that ploy made him look too ambitious for American middle-class voters.
What's debatable is whether any of this has anything to do with the real political world. During his eight years as Governor of California, while more to the right than to the left, Reagan had never been the reactionary his admirers have depicted to themselves. He fell heir to these zealots when their true hero, Spiro Agnew, was revealed to be a man who could be had at such low prices that he put bribery within the purchasing power of middle-income office clerks.
By the same token, Jerry Ford has spent nearly three decades in public life building as illiberal a record as even the most benighted members of his party have a right to expect. It would have aroused hatred, rather than the goodnatured contempt he enjoys, if he were not so distractedly without purpose. The careers of these two men are such that Reagan might as easily be playing the role of 'moderate' and Ford that of the right-winger.
The nature of the Presidency, as well as the influence of the old Nixon people around him, forced Ford to the middle and left of Reagan, the outsider, who has entertained the gallery by doing such things as swimming the length of the Panama Canal with the American flag between his teeth. It might be noted, however, that Reagan only directs his war cries against nations that do not yet possess a standing army. Unfortunately, with one of his jingo snorts, Reagan helped his opponents to lock him up with the reputation of being another Barry Goldwater. How little this has to do with policies, measures or issues is revealed by the fact that Goldwater himself is supporting Jerry Ford—but that has not allowed Reagan to escape being tagged as an ideologue.
Ideologue is the word polite Americans use when they mean fanatic, which is why the choice of Schweiker was such a shock. Reagan had broken out of his type-casting. You might have thought that this would be reassuring to the editorialists who have been warning their readers about Reagan's inflexibility, but not so. Instead people have been heaving words at him like 'unprincipled', 'expedient' and 'opportunist', the last being the most damaging thing you can say about an American politician.
It is a paradox. If you're too uncompromising they call you an ideologue; if you compromise they call you an opportunist. Yet while Reagan gets assailed by old boots and broken alarm clocks because he promised one man the vice-presidency in the hope that Schweiker could get him more votes, Ford has been promising highways, sludge treatment plants and public housing grants for delegates. The White House has been turned into a little Las Vegas pleasure dome when bucketfuls of delegates are transported for free food and gala performances of musical comedies, in order to win them over.
Reagan has been complaining about Ford's vote jobbery but has not got very far with it. This is partly because the East Coast Mass Media Peerage of New York and Washington have become wary of Reagan. It is not a regional bias against the new rich of California, or anything like that. Herbert Hoover was from California and they loved him. It is more that they don't know him, they don't know when he is sounding off or when he is serious, and most of all they cannot be sure he is reliable.
Bumpkin that he is, they trust Jerry; they can manipulate him, and they're not about to trade him in for Reagan. Still, Jerry may be able to outwit his friends and discover a way to destroy himself. This is a politician who came into office with more goodwill and popular support than any recent President, and immediately gave it away, first with the Nixon pardon and then with the appointment of Nelson Rockefeller. The pardon had much to be said for although not the way Ford tripped into it, but the Rockefeller appointment was indefensibly stupid. It made the Reagan candidacy possible. The right wing of the Republican Party is .determined to hate Nelson Rockefeller, so that when Ford made Rocky Broadjaws his Vice-President, he guaranteed himself this long nomination campaign which has destroyed such little direction as his administration had managed to develop in its first year and a half in office.
The day after Reagan's Schweiker move, when John Connally understood that there could never be a Reagan/Connally ticket, this former Governor of Texas, former Nixon Secretary of Treasury, came out for Ford, and Ford, being the slushball that he is, loved it. There is a certain kind of Republican who is hypnotised by the bluff, self-assured Texan, who looks like Lyndon Johnson in a flattering portrait. In fact the two men were closely associated in politics for many years, and Connally is so like Johnson you might call him LBJ's evil twin, He has Johnson's energy, his rapacity, his splendid lack of scruples, and much of his shrewdness, but little of his humour, nor any of the old President's personal involvement in attacking questions like race and poverty.
But Republicans are dull people for the most part. Their fascination for Connally, whom Richard Nixon brought over into their party, is like the envy of the dead for the living. It's as though the zombies were reaching out for him, not for His policies, but for his vitality. The trouble is that there are significant elements in the party who don't want him, with his vitality or withotn it. The selection of Connally gives Democrats and Independents who can't think of a good reason to vote for Jimmy Carter an excellent one for voting against Ford. Although he was tried, and acquitted of bribery in connection of the Watergate scandals, many people regard this renegade Democrat not merely as a crook, but as the blowhard personification of the wheelerdealer, influence-peddling fixer. Thus, hard
as Ford has tried to make Watergate a earnpaign issue, he has failed. For the time
being, the American public, with its vast capacity for goose pimples and moral indignation, is being entertained by the rather pale Washington sex scandals, but Connally's adoption could give the Democrats what they lack just now . . a surewinning issue.
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