How the Democrats Lost Dixie, Part 4: The Circumstances That Led to Ted Kennedy's Challenge of Jimmy Carter And How That Battle Broke The Democratic Party In Ways It Is Still Recovering From

 

The most recent biography of Jimmy Carter Kai Bird's The Outlier is in many ways a brilliant retelling of Carter's administration. Yet reading I frequently got a sense of the kind of revisionist history that I more frequently associate with conservative writers who think Richard Nixon was a great man who the libs framed and that Ronald Reagan was the greatest president in history.

Bird is a writer for The Nation, one of the most leftist publications in America and throughout you can see Bird trying to frame the narrative that Carter could have been a great president but was dealing with factors beyond his control. That much is true to an extent but he by and large omits most of the flaws that Carter had as President or in some cases tries to term into virtues. This is seen particularly in foreign policy when he argues that almost all of the decisions Carter made were because he listened to much to Zbigniew Brzezinski who he considers the villain of the Carter administration because he was so much of a Cold War hawk. (Bird spends a fair amount of the book trying to downplay the threat of the Soviet Union in this book as well.) And he frequently argues that many of Carter's decisions were the wrong ones even though they were the clearly the right ones at the time as well as arguing Carter did things that he actually didn't.

The clearest example of the former comes at the end of the book when he argues that Carter's fixation on a balanced budget was clearly his biggest blunder. This is a common theme in what passes for economic theory on the left, where the argument is that the national debt is something that no President should take seriously. (We shall see how this believe played out during Clinton's administration as well.) But in the strangest revision he chooses to argue that Carter deserves more credit because he was: "the last President to argue against American exceptionalism."

This is an amazing recounting of events in regards to Carter's famous 'crisis of confidence' speech as it argues that the interpretation of Carter's speech by his rivals Ted Kennedy and Ronald Reagan – one of the major things both men used to bludgeon him with -  was in reality a virtue. And it is also is a complete denial of what the actual speech was and why it happened.

The reason for the speech came immediate after the so-called Levittown, Pennsylvania riots on June 23^rd. A group of truckers staged a protest against rising gas prices that turned violent after rough police treatment led to fires, pelting law enforcement officers with garbage and a series of arrests that led to 200 protestors and 44 officers being injured. At the time Carter was in Japan, and his absence set of alarm bells in the White House. Carter's chief adviser Stuart Eizenstat wrote the President that this was by far the most damaging thing that had happened to his administration yet. Carter had no time to rest from his flight back as he returned to DC on July 3^rd. He planned to give a speech addressing the crisis on the fifth but the day before canceled the speech. Then he disappeared from public view and had a series of meetings with his advisors on how to best address the crisis.

Eventually he ended up listening to his pollster Patrick Caddell who argued that he should give a speech addressing the nation's psychological and spiritual crisis. This was opposed by many in his administration including his vice president who would later say he considered resigning in protest.

Carter spent the next ten days meeting with a parade of public figures: members of Congress, cabinet secretaries, economists, other politicians and members of the press. Among them was the young governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton and his future adviser Vernon Jordan.

On July 15^th he gave his speech to the nation. Beginning by saying this was the third anniversary of his nomination for President he told his audience that he had promised 'to be a leader who feels your pain and who shares your dreams and who draws his strength and his wisdom from you." While talking about the energy crisis he eventually moved to his larger point:

The true problems of our nation are much deeper -deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession."

Then after reading nineteen remarks from various leader he summed up: "The problem was a fundamental threat to American democracy… a crisis of confidence."

"In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption." He pointed out two-thirds of our people do not even vote, a reality of his election. He diagnosed a real trend in American life: a sense of cynicism, an despair, loss of faith in institutions in the past and relation so many of the crises and tragedies that had undermined trust in society.

This is not a message of happiness or reassurance but it is a truth and it is a warning. The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers…We must face the truth, and then we can change our course."

It was some of the most authentic, self-deprecating and honest works any president had spoken in public since the advent of television. In many ways it was a true State of the Union. This was not an inspiring speech to be sure and its understandable why Kennedy and Carter's Republicans rivals seized on it. But the end is forgotten in context:

"We know the strength of America. We are strong. We can regain unity. We can regain our confidence."

He wasn't saying "We can make America great again" (a slogan, I should mention that Reagan had already used on the stump and would use as a theme in 1980) but the basic idea was there. He was just saying America's in a tight spot right now but there are great things about and if we work together we can get through this tough time. He wasn't arguing against American exceptionalism just that we had to redefine it. And it was worth noting initially it was interpreting that way: 84 percent of the public response to it was favorable and Carter's approval rating jumped 11 points.

What undercut it was that two days later Carter asked for the resignation of every single member of his cabinet. This decision made Carter look chaotic and weak in the public eye. And it was that which gave the final impetus for Ted Kennedy to challenge him for the Democratic nomination.

 

In a different series of articles I wrote how much of the so-called Kennedy legacy has more do with rhetoric and imagery that is incredibly out of context with their actual accomplishments. The tragedies that followed the family have done much to provide cover for this for an entire generation but it is the only explanation why so many otherwise intelligent people were seizing on the idea of Ted Kennedy's actions during his announcement of his run for the Democratic nomination.

As Theodore White accurately accounting in his final book the idea of challenging an incumbent president for the nomination was absurd in every way. A successful one would mean that one had to tear the political establishment that was behind the occupant of the Oval Office down in order to get the nomination and then use that same organization to bind it together to defeat the opposition in a few months' time. Harry Truman may have been a bit too blunt when he described it as tantamount to treason but it was a blow to the democratic process.

The fact that during the last three election cycles it had been almost commonplace did not change a greater reality: Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy's primary campaigns had helped Richard Nixon win the Presidency in 1968 and Reagan's challenge of Ford in 1976 had to have been a factor in Carter's victory in 1976. (As we shall see it played a factor in Bill Clinton's election in 1992.) It can only be explained by the fact that Congressional Democrats, most of whom were still overwhelmingly liberal, had never truly embraced the centrist Carter, and the feeling was too often mutual. But Carter was aware of how the country was moving to the right and those liberals were basically ignoring those headwinds. No doubt they saw this as a chance for the liberal wing of the party to regain control.

But they couldn't have picked a worse choice for their standard-bearer than Ted Kennedy.  One assumes that the last name alone and the tragedy that had befallen his brothers had blinded them to his larger issues. And to be clear they were the kind of things that should have disqualified anyone else from running.

The most famous was Chappaquiddick and how the family had circled the wagons to keep a suspicious death from affecting one of their own's hopes for the White House. These had surfaced both in 1972 and 1976 and they were going to come back with the force of a thunderbolt from the start of his campaign.

This should have been enough of a disqualifier. But Kennedy's marriage to his wife Joan had never been stable and by the leadup to the 1980 campaign was essentially in name only. She had her own issues with drinking and by this point was doing everything in her power to attend AA meetings anonymously. Kennedy was openly having affairs with aides by this point and many people on the Republican side knew this was an issue.

And by this point in his career Kennedy's reputation in the Senate was not nearly as strong at it would later become. Chappaquiddick had cost him his leadership post in the Senate in 1971 and his efforts to make him try to be a more national candidate sounded like hypocrisy coming from a man with such a horrid personal life. These concerns made many question his fitness for office: in his memo to Carter Hamilton Jordan had written that Kennedy had a lack of trustworthiness and integrity with many key voters.

None of these issues had gone away by September of 1979 and they would come back to haunt Kennedy down the road. And its worth noting White had the right idea when it came to the primary challenge: the real reason they wanted him gone was not because of a national crisis but 'a charge of incompetence'. Then again considering that September Carter's approval ratings were at 19 percent, Democrats had reason to fear of what would happen in they didn't challenge Carter.

The signs of trouble for Kennedy came well before he officially declared his candidacy and even before the hostage crisis in Iran. In October of 1979 there was a straw poll in Florida in which Kennedy made its first real challenge of Carter.

Carter narrowly won because of a few hundred votes at the Miami caucus. But in a way both men lost. It was a hollow victory for Carter that demonstrated how vulnerable his southern base was to a primary challenge. But just as critical, it exposed Kennedy's organizational weakness and how so many people had not forgotten Chappaquiddick even eleven years later. A poll conducted by four Florida papers showed the two men tied in the state but that Kennedy's character was a concern for many.

Two weeks later within the space of 24 hours Kennedy's campaign was damaged by events both abroad and domestic. The former was the Iranian hostage crisis which was initially expected to end in forty-eight hours and ended up being the defining issue of Carter's presidency. The latter was Roger Mudd's infamous interview of Kennedy.

It's most remember that Kennedy couldn't come up with an answer to the question "Why do you want to be President?" What's forgotten is by the time he fumbled it the damage had already been done. Even the friendly questions by Mudd, arguing that the best thing for the country would be to not run to save the nation from another national tragedy he couldn't answer efficiently and he couldn't answer questions about the state of his marriage or Chappaquiddick. Even Mudd was astonished when Kennedy couldn't come up with an answer. As he later thought: "Oh my God. He doesn't know. He doesn't know why he's running."

The interview was a shock to the political class who assumed that Kennedy was going to be a great candidate. As Bob Dole himself running for President acerbically put it: "Seventy-five percent of the country watched Jaws, twenty-five percent watched Roger Mudd, and half of them couldn't tell the difference."  In one day Kennedy was first put on the defensive and as the hostage crisis deepened, then put out of sight simultaneously. And it's worth noting that when Kennedy did make the announcement he was running three days later he said that he was 'compelled by events and by my commitment to public life."

This spoke to the largest problem about Kennedy's entire campaign. As was noted in his campaign in Iowa in particular one could tell that he really didn't want to do it. As one Boston Globe reporter put it:

"I see a man running for President dutifully, fatalistically, unhappily. I see a complicated man with a lot to win by losing. Privacy, peace, family, personal freedom. If Ted runs and loses, he exorcises the past. He's done and he doesn't have to do it again. If he runs and loses he exorcises the fear. He is, in a very real sense, a free man."

As another reporter wrote for the Washington Monthly that December Kennedy's womanizing was talked about openly as well as a larger question as to why so many people had wanted him to run in the first place:

"…we have kept alive the possibility that the great aborted promise of John and Robert Kennedy will some day be realized fully. It is as though, despite all our scrutiny of Edward Kennedy on one level, on another we've averted our eyes, saving our hope, putting off the moment of judgment, saying to ourselves: when he runs for president, then we'll see, then we'll really take a closer look. Well, now he is actually running for President…As the abstract haze of hope begins to thin in the atmosphere of a concrete candidacy, we find ourselves squinting at the particular human being inside that haze. Who is he?

All of those questions should have been faced, openly and honestly, at least a few years before, certainly by the campaign itself. But they had been buoyed by early polls saying that Kennedy would win in a walk before the hostage crisis began.

Yet despite that Patrick Caddell walked into the Oval Office with polling results that were striking. After a ninety minute focus groups Iowa voters initially favored Carter by a margin of three-to-one over Kennedy but when they were asked to imagine him as president, they favored Kennedy. The dream was still visible. The larger problem was the organizational skills of the campaign were horrible compared to Carter's, which four years after his superb showing in the first caucus were still strong. And events continued to work against Kennedy: on the eve of the caucus the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and the week before the caucus another two articles were published about Chappaquiddick. In the end Carter beat Kennedy nearly two to one in Iowa.

Things actually got worse from that point on. All of the best people in the Kennedy organization had been in Iowa, leaving practically nothing for Maine and New Hampshire the next two states. There was almost no money left and the donors weren't coming through. There was talk of rumors of Kennedy getting out of the campaign even before the New Hampshire primary but Kennedy kept going.

At that point Kennedy no doubt became the kind of candidates liberals had hoped he would be, arguing for an anti-inflation freeze on wages, the price f goods, dividends, interest rates and rent and government control. This revitalized the campaign in the eyes of many but he couldn’t escape the reality that he was a once-confident candidate…now flinging charges in a desperate, post-Iowa attempt to catch up. He had squandered most of 1979 organizationally and now he was paying the price. And it didn't help that the majority of the leaders of the campaign were following the rules of previous Kennedy runs in the 1960s which no longer applied, no clear people in charge and not enough money.

Carter spent most of the campaign using all the advantages of incumbency that he had accused Ford of using against him just four years earlier. But he also had the advantage of a southern firewall so big that by the time of the Illinois primary Carter had to big a lead for him to overcome. Increasingly, however, Kennedy seemed more determined to win the nomination and after a humiliating defeat in the Illinois primary hinted that, even if Carter had a majority of delegates at the convention he would try change the rules binding delegates to the results of primaries.

But then after winning the New York and Connecticut primaries on March 25^th, things began to change. There had been signs that Carter's popularity was waning because of both inflation and the hostage crisis before the vote. After that Kennedy began to gain ground in primaries. Carter still had enough delegates to lock things up but on April 24^th an attempt to rescue the hostages failed so badly that it would end up doing grave damage to his campaign

On the last day of the primaries Carter still had more than enough delegates to clinch the nomination even though Kennedy had won five of the last eight primaries, including California and New Jersey. Kennedy has lost and yet chose to behave in a way that would be the worst example of election denialism until Donald Trump came along.

At this point Kennedy had a kamikaze like state of mind that was driving him to fight as long as possible. In what was the kind of fatalism that goes against revisionist orthodoxy, many wanted to see Reagan win. Certainly the party itself was giving no sign of being on his side. In the weeks after Carter clinched the nomination both houses of Congresses chose to rebuke him by overwhelmingly overriding his veto of the oil import fee.

More to the point the party was in denial of the idea of Kennedy's old-guard liberalism still being popular. As Thomas and Mary Edsall would write in their book Chain Reaction where as white working and middle class voters had once seen Democrats from protecting them from powerful business interests they now saw them as trying to raise their taxes in order to give government benefits to blacks and other minorities, even as jobs were disappearing in the rust belt. The Republicans, by developing a populist stance around race and taxes were succeeding persuading working and lower middle-class voters to join and alliance with business interests and the affluent.

They also pointed out his liberal ideas were not swaying blue collar voters and moderates, saying it was similar to McGovern's in that it was 'ideologically pure but unpersuasive'. That might explain why so many liberals wanted to go off a cliff with Kennedy.

What they didn't want was to go over one with Carter at all. On the eve of the convention itself, the Maine delegation tried to draft Edmund Muskie, Carter's new Secretary of State. There were also movements to draft Henry Jackson and Robert Byrd leading up to the convention. Only through the immense will of Carter at the delegation did rules hold and Kennedy finally dropped out.

Then Kennedy's group insisted on embarrassing Carter on the second night of the convention, giving one of the most memorable speeches in 20^th century history that led to a demonstration that lasted thirty minutes and took all the wind out of Carter's sails. And he gave the final giant middle finger when Kennedy wasn't on stage to speak and then purposely snubbed his opponent after he gave his speech. And then in a moment that went down in history Kennedy refused to obey the age old traditional of refusing to be photographed with the man who defeated him. The Kennedy camp wanted to humiliate the sitting President of the United States. And they did so, out of pure spite.

The irony is that even had it not been for every element of Kennedy's primary run, everything he had done to humiliate the sitting President after he won the primaries, even after he lost at the convention but still looked like bigger man, even after the humiliated moments, it almost certainly wouldn't have made much of a difference. Carter had been marked for defeat even before the primary challenge and he was even deader after. The reason no one seemed to acknowledge it was because of his opponent in the general.

In the next article I will deal with how both Carter and the Democratic Party's underestimation of Ronald Reagan lays bare in the strongest terms the problems they have had with the electorate to this day.