Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked Read Online Free Page A

reception, he had no way of suspecting the devastating news he was about to hear. “Is that Pat? Let me talk to him,” he said. Then, with the phone at his ear, his face collapsed. I’ve often wondered if he knew in those closing days and hours that this was coming. Now it had.
    Jody, seeing his boss of so many years in pain, now moved quickly and surely. He understood exactly what needed to be done and instructed Rick accordingly. “The presidency is gone,” he told him somberly. “We want to try to keep from losing too much of the Senate and House.” The mission now entrusted to Rick and me was to write a speech for Carter to use in Plains that would cool the country down, ease the hate, and attempt to limit Democratic losses. “Jody’s a soldier,” Rick said of the young Georgian who’d been with Carter from the start and now was guarding him to the end.
    The memory of what transpired over the next several hours, as the plane headed southeast to Georgia, is indelible for me. There we were, a small band of defeated warriors huddled together in a snug, small room high above the American landscape, working resolutely to produce the words and phrases that would help make the best of a terrible situation.
    • • •
    Late that morning, back in Washington finally, I went out to cast my own vote. As I got to my polling station I remember there was a guy racing angrily into it. In my mind, whether it was true or not—maybe he was just having a bad morning—I saw him as one of the millions of irate citizens piling on, joining the massacre. His image burned itself into my mind’s eye and became a sort of collector’s item, a bit of unwanted memorabilia, from those last weeks of the campaign. Here was a voter, it seemed to me, so mad at Carter he intended to vote straight Republican with the intention of flushing the thirty-ninth president out of politics and out of his life once and for all.
    That evening, I watched Carter show up ahead of time, well before he was expected, at the Sheraton Washington ballroom to concede defeat. It was the earliest concession speech by any American presidential candidate since 1904 and it would wind up costing several West Coast Democrats their seats. Stories would grow of people leaving the voting lines on word that the president had given up the fight. Nevertheless, I always assumed his hurry wasn’t so much selfish on Carter’s part as it was self-protective. He was exhausted. If he’d gotten any more exhausted, he wouldn’t have been able to control his emotions, his very self .
    The next morning, Kathleen and I woke up, had breakfast, got into our car, and began driving north toward Pennsylvania, with no particular destination in mind. What I didn’t know then, as we hit the highway just to get away, was that the fierce battle I’d just witnessed, played out across the entire American landscape, was just a prelude.

Those two years with the Peace Corps in Swaziland changed my life. They got me off the academic track and into politics.

CHAPTER TWO
STARTING OUT
    “Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion from a fixed point.”
    —H ENRY A DAMS , T HE E DUCATION OF H ENRY A DAMS
    When you visit Capitol Hill as a tourist, the men and women working in the offices appear to have always belonged there. They make you think of soldiers manning a citadel: they’re friendly but continually on guard. You’re the outsider; they’re the presiding officialdom; and the dividing line is clear. That’s certainly how it struck me on long-ago high school trips to Washington.
    It’s different, though, once you become an insider. When you’ve passed through the gate and find yourself admitted to the inner sanctums, as I was in my mid-twenties, you never again refer to it as “the government.” You realize all too quickly the distinct separateness of each congressional office, the jealousy with which each andevery Senate staffer guards his or her