With his usual gift for seeing historical patterns and similarities, Michael Barone writes, in the National Review, that the 2008 presidential campaign most resembles the one from 1976 between President Gerald Ford and former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter.
In 1976, writes Barone:
- "The Republicans were the incumbent presidential party ... as they are now, but the Democrats had a big advantage in party identification ... far more than today."
- "The Republican president who had been elected and re-elected in the last two campaigns ... had dismal favorability ratings, far lower than George W. Bush's."
(One of my vivid memories from the '76 campaign is of a cartoon by the Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Herb Block — better known as "Herblock." It showed Carter being asked by the press what he thought was the biggest obstacle facing his opponent. Carter's reply was a characteristically Southern response: "Pardon?" — which served as a not-so-subtle reminder of Ford's 1974 pardon of Richard Nixon.) - "The Democratic nominee was a little-known outsider, with an appeal that was based on the idea that he could transcend the nation's racial divisions."
Carter cultivated that image by winning decisive victories over George Wallace in Southern primaries. Florida was an early battleground victory that fueled the image of Carter as representative of the "New South" that was emerging and reinforced the message that politicians like Wallace represented the "Old South" that was disappearing.
I have always believed, though, that the demise of Wallace's national political ambitions in 1976 was due more to the fact that the 1972 assassination attempt had left him wheelchair-bound and gave him the appearance of disability than it was to the phenomenon of his views falling out of favor with the voters.
Such a phenomenon, I believe, never really occurred.
To be sure, while Wallace's political influence was confined to his home state of Alabama for the last 20 years of his life, many elements of his political philosophy were absorbed into the Republican Party that has dominated the South for nearly four decades. Wallace remained a Democrat, but many of his supporters — and his own son — long ago shifted their allegiance to the Republicans.
The sustained support for Republicans in the South seems to confirm Lyndon Johnson's prediction in the mid-1960s that the passage of the civil rights legislation would hand the South to the Republicans for a generation or more.
Carter nearly swept the Southern states in 1976 — no other Democrat, including fellow Southerner Bill Clinton, has done that since — but it was close in many of them. (And the South has been reliably Republican ever since. In fact, only three Southern states — Louisiana, Clinton's home state of Arkansas and Al Gore's home state of Tennessee — voted for the Clinton-Gore ticket in both 1992 and 1996.)
"An early summer Gallup poll showed him trailing Carter by 62% to 29%," Barone writes. "He had barely limped through the primary contests against Ronald Reagan, who continued his campaign up through the mid-August national convention."
(The Republicans managed to put on a happy face for the TV viewers, as you can see in the above picture.)
Yet Ford managed to close the gap and, by November, nearly pulled off the most remarkable upset in American political history. As Barone points out, a shift of less than 10,000 votes (out of a national total of 81 million) in the states of Ohio and Hawaii would have put Ford back in the White House.
(I remember hearing this argument from Republicans in 1976, and, while the math is accurate, I, for one, have always thought the logic was faulty. Ohio has a political history that would support the conclusion, but Hawaii, with its diverse population, has been a reliable state for Democrats since it joined the Union nearly 50 years ago. It was also one of only a half-dozen states that voted for Carter against Reagan in 1980. Because its population is so small, its vote margins seldom look large.)
It's anyone's guess what would have happened if Ford had won the 1976 election. He would have been ineligible to seek another term in 1980 (having served more than half of Nixon's second term), but voters may have grown weary of Republican presidents by that time — and, thus, Reagan might not have been elected president in 1980.
A Ford victory might have meant the end of Reagan's political career. As a result, the ascendance of Reagan's vice president, George H.W. Bush, or Bush's son, George W. Bush, might never have happened.
Bob Dole, as Ford's vice president, would have been the heir apparent for the GOP nomination in 1980. No doubt he would have been a more vigorous nominee at the age of 57 (his age during the 1980 campaign) than he was at the age of 73 (in 1996, when he actually was the nominee).
(In fact, Reagan and Dole did run against each other in the early Republican primaries in 1980 — but the race rapidly narrowed to Reagan and Bush, and Dole quickly dropped out along with the others in the GOP field like John Connally and Howard Baker. If Ford had been elected in 1976, Dole could have run in 1980 with the advantages of incumbency.)
In short, if those votes in Ohio and Hawaii had swung to Ford, the history of the last 32 years may have been altered in ways we can't imagine.
How did Ford nearly pull off a miraculous, Trumanesque comeback? The Ford campaign turned things around by using advertising to "fill in the blanks" in voters' minds about both candidates.
Ford, of course, was the president, but he had not been elected president or vice president (the first — and, so far, only — person to become president without being elected to either position first) and so voters had not had the normal opportunity to get to know him. And, as an outsider who had little name recognition prior to 1976, there were plenty of gaps in the public's knowledge about Carter.
Ford's advertising team focused on filling in those gaps — and nearly made American political history.
Barone thinks a similar strategy could benefit McCain this year.
"There's an assumption this year that voters know John McCain pretty well," says Barone. "But my sense is that there is still a lot of filling in the blanks that the McCain campaign can do."
As for Carter, Barone writes, "Most voters wanted to support a Democrat, and one who had smoothed over the nation's racial divisions — as they do today. The press up through early summer was giving him mostly adulatory coverage. But voters didn't know much about Carter. He made, as most candidates do, and as Obama seems to be doing now — some mistakes along the way."
Filling in such gaps — and exploiting weaknesses that are exposed by the opposition's mistakes — can only carry a candidate so far. Voters need reasons to vote for a candidate rather than against another one.
(I remember another of Herblock's cartoons, which dealt with the many faux pas committed by both candidates that autumn. In his book about the 1976 campaign, "Marathon," Jules Witcover wrote, "It had not been what one could call an uplifting campaign" and did a fine job of describing Herblock's cartoon:
("Herblock ... summed up the mess by depicting the two presidential candidates as boxers punching themselves in the jaw as the ringside announcer reported: 'Ford is rocked by a left to the jaw — Carter takes a hard right to the mouth — both men are hurting ...'")
Barone observes that the Ford campaign used its incumbency to its advantage. "Voters then, as now, thought the nation was off on the wrong track. The Ford campaign, with a catchy song, 'I'm Feeling Good About America,' and upbeat ads starting off with shots of Air Force One, argued that their candidate was leading the nation around the corner, making Americans feel proud again."
That one may be trickier for McCain. He's not an incumbent. And Air Force One is not his prop to use.
Barone acknowledges the problem. "The McCain campaign needs to do something similar" to what the Ford campaign did in 1976, he writes.
"Exactly how they can do this I'm not sure."
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