Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked Read Online Free

aide of many years, gently pointed out that he might be overdoing it. “Some people seem to think you might have gone tooheavy on Reagan,” he pointed out. “I think they like it,” Carter replied mildly. “It turns them on.”
    From Akron we flew to Granite City, then to East St. Louis and Springfield, Missouri. After this we doubled back to Detroit. It had become clear that the only places where Carter was drawing an emotional reaction were African-American communities. I’ll in fact never forget a previous appearance at a black church in northern New Jersey and the singing of “Amazing Grace.” But now, at each stop, Carter simply did what every candidate before him had done when facing Reagan: he attacked him for being too far right, too in over his head for the big time, too extreme to be trusted with nuclear weapons. What else was there to do, even though we had been warned by Reagan’s last electoral victim that these particular charges wouldn’t work?
    To our dismay, at least one network news program, CBS’s, led that night with the one-year anniversary of the hostage-taking, not the next day’s crucial election. Carter, receiving an update on the campaign coverage when he returned to the plane from the Detroit stop, was chiefly concerned not with the network accounts Rick replayed to him but with a piece of news his pollster had just given him. Out there in America, many voters were not even aware, despite all the drama of the weekend, that the hostages might soon be freed.
    As we flew from Detroit to Portland, across those vast stretches of seemingly unending plains and then abruptly over the Rockies, someone asked why we weren’t stopping to campaign. “Because there’s not a single state we’re flying over that we have a chance of carrying,” said domestic policy advisor David Rubenstein, voicing the awful truth.
    When we got to Seattle, our last stop, Carter delivered his best speech of the campaign by far. I think it helped that we were in anairport hangar, which echoed his every word. With ten thousand people screaming, their voices resounding through the rafters, he was on fire. He had the rhythm; he had the audience.“How many of you believe we’re going to whip the Republicans tomorrow?” Huge applause. “You don’t know what it does to a man who’s been campaigning since early this morning—I got up at five o’clock Washington time. When I asked Jody Powell, ‘Where do we spend the night?’ he said, ‘Governor, this evening there ain’t no tonight tonight.’ ”
    Back on Air Force One, Carter joined us for drinks, a rare occurrence. He even invited the press up from the back of the cabin to join in. I couldn’t help noticing that the back of his hand showed a mass of cuts made by the many rings and watches of the men and women in all those receiving lines. But it was all about to end. The next stop was to be Plains, Georgia, where Jimmy Carter would cast his own vote.
    Then the news—dire and definite—came. While I sat with the press, worried that a few reporters were busily taking notes under the table during what was supposed to be an off-the-record chat with Carter, Jody and Rick went up to the front of the plane, to the president’s cabin. The time was now 4 a.m. back in Washington. Three of his top advisors—Caddell, Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan, and Jerry Rafshoon—were at the White House and had just minutes before received the latest poll results.
    President Carter, Caddell told Jody, was going down by a landslide. All the neck-and-neck status, so recently reported, had been undone by the obstructionism of the factions in Tehran. After teasing us with the possibility of a settlement, the Iranians’ demands seemed unchanged to the voters. We’d been taken for a ride again, one more time.
    Carter was about to get the news. Returning to his cabin, he grinned when he first saw Jody and Rick. Still in an exuberant mood,still high from his thunderous Seattle