Thursday, February 4, 2010 - National conventions are noisy and chaoticThe...
National conventions are noisy and chaoticThe delegates normally listen only to the keynote address and the presidential and vice-presidential acceptance speechesIf youre not giving one of those three, your only chance of being heard over the constant din of floor talk is to be compelling and quickI tried to explain the painful, profoundly different economic situation we were experiencing, and to argue that the Democratic Party had to change to meet the challengeEver since World War II, Democrats had taken Americas prosperity for granted; their priorities were extending its benefits to more and more people and fighting for social justiceNow we had to deal with inflation and unemployment, big government deficits, and the loss of our competitive edgeOur failure to do so had driven more people to support Republicans or to join the growing cadre of alienated nonvotersIt was a good speech that took less than the allotted five minutes, but nobody paid much attention to it
President Carter left the convention with all the problems he had when it started, and without the boost a genuinely enthusiastic, united party usually gives its nomineeI returned to Arkansas determined to try to salvage my own campaignIt kept pleated miu miu handbag getting worse
On September 19, I was home in Hot Springs after a long day of politics when the commander of the Strategic Air Command called me to say that there had been an explosion in a Titan II missile silo near Damascus, Arkansas, about forty miles northwest of Little RockThe story was unbelievableAn air force mechanic was repairing the missile when he dropped his three-pound wrenchIt fell seventy feet to the bottom of the silo, bounced up, and punctured the tank full of rocket fuelWhen the highly toxic fuel mixed with the air, it caused a fire, then a huge explosion that blew the 740-ton concrete top off the silo, killed the mechanic, and injured twenty other air force personnel who were near the openingThe explosion also destroyed the missile and catapulted its nuclear warhead into the cow pasture where the silo was locatedI was assured that the warhead wouldnt detonate, that no radioactive material would be released, and that the military would remove it safelyAt least my state wasnt going to be incinerated by Arkansas latest brush with bad luckI was beginning to feel snakebit, but tried to make the best of the situationI instructed my new director of public safety, Sam Tatom, to work out an emergency knock off chanel wholesale purse evacuation plan with federal officials in case something went wrong with one of the seventeen remaining Titan II missiles
After all the other things wed been through, now Arkansas had the worlds only cow pasture with its very own nuclear warheadA few days after the incident, Vice President Mondale came to our state Democratic convention in Hot SpringsWhen I asked him to make sure the military cooperated with us on a new emergency plan for the missiles, he picked up the phone and called Harold Brown, the secretary of defenseHis first words were Damn it, Harold, I know I asked you to do something to get the Cuban problem off Arkansas mind, but this is a little extremeContrary to his restrained public demeanor, Mondale had a great sense of humorHe knew we were both tanking, and he still made it funny
The last few weeks of the campaign were dominated by a new phenomenon in Arkansas politics: completely negative television adsThere was a tough one on the car tagsBut Whites most effective campaign ad showed rioting Cubans, with a strong voice-over telling viewers that the governors of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin cared about their people and they got rid of the Cubans, but I cared more about Jimmy Carter than the chanel shopping bag people of Arkansas, and now weve got them allWhen Hillary and I first saw it, we thought it was so outrageous that no one would believe itA poll taken right before the ad started running had shown that 60 percent of the people thought Id done a good job at Fort Chaffee, while 3 percent thought Id been too tough and 20 percent, the hard-core right, too weakI could have satisfied them only by shooting every refugee that left the fort
We were wrong about the adsIn Fort Smith, local officials, including Sheriff Bill Cauthron and Prosecuting Attorney Ron Fields, strongly defended me, saying I had done a good job and had taken risks to protect the people around the fortAs we all know now, a press conference will not counter the effect of a powerful negative adI was sinking in the quicksand of Cubans and car tags
Several days before the election, Hillary called Dick Morris, whom I had replaced with Peter Hart because my people hated dealing with Dicks abrasive personalityShe asked him to do a poll to see if there was anything we could do to pull it outTo his credit, Dick did the poll, and with characteristic bluntness said that I would probably loseHe made a couple of suggestions for ads, which we followed, but as he louis vuitton replica handbags predicted, it was too little, too late
On election day, November 4, Jimmy Carter and I got 48 percent of Arkansas vote, down from his 65 percent in 1976 and my 63 percent in 1978However, we lost in very different waysThe President carried fifty of the seventy-five counties, holding on to the Democratic strongholds where the Cuban issue cut into but didnt eliminate his margin of victory, and getting annihilated in the more conservative Republican areas in western Arkansas, where there was a high turnout, fueled by voters anger over his broken pledge on the Cubans, and by Reagans alliance with Christian fundamentalists and their opposition to abortion and the Panama Canal treatiesArkansas still hadnt gone over to the RepublicansCarters 48 percent was seven points better than his national percentageIf it hadnt been for the broken pledge, he would have carried the state
By contrast, I carried only twenty-four counties, including those with heavy black populations and a few where there was more support for or less opposition to the highway programI lost all eleven counties in Democratic northeast Arkansas, almost all the rural counties in the Third District, and several in south ArkansasI had been killed by the car tiffany style necklace
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