Thursday, May 6, 2010 - I began by blasting President Fords pardon of...
I began by blasting President Fords pardon of former President NixonOne of my better lines was: If President Ford wants to pardon anybody, he ought to pardon the administrations economic advisors
Over the years, I changed my mind about the Nixon pardonI came to see that the country needed to move on, and I believe President Ford did the right, though unpopular, thing, and I said so when we were together in 2000 to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the White HouseBut I havent changed my mind about Republican economic policiesI still believe FDR was right when he said, We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad moralsWe now know that it is bad economicsThat has even greater application today than it did in 1974
We left Hot Springs on a rollWith seven weeks to go we had a chance, but a lot of work to doOur headquarters operation was getting better and betterMy best young volunteers were getting to be experienced pros
They got some very good suggestions from the person the Democratic Party sent down to help usHis name was Jody Powell, and his boss, Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia, had assumed a leading role in helping Democrats win in 1974A couple of years black balenciaga bag later, when Jimmy Carter ran for President, a lot of us remembered and were gratefulWhen Hillary came down, she helped, too, as did her father and her younger brother, Tony, who put up signs all over north Arkansas and told the Republican retirees from the Midwest that the Rodhams were Midwest Republicans but that I was all right
Several of my law students proved to be dependable driversWhen I needed them during my congressional campaign, there were a couple of airplanes I could borrow to fly around inOne of my pilots, sixty-seven-year-old Jay Smith, wore a patch over one eye and wasnt instrument- rated, but he had been flying in the Ozarks for forty yearsOften when we hit bad weather, he swooped down below the clouds to follow a river valley through the mountains, all the while telling me stories or bragging on Senator Fulbright for knowing Vietnam was a mistake before anyone else did
Steve Smith did a brilliant job of research on issues and Hammerschmidts voting recordHe came up with a series of ingenious pamphlets comparing my positions on issues to his votes on them, and we put out one a week for the last six weeks of the campaignThey got good coverage in the local papers, and tiffany bracelet Steve turned them into effective newspaper adsFor example, the Arkansas River valley from Clarksville to the Oklahoma border south of Fort Smith was full of coal miners who had worked for decades in the open pit mines that scarred the landscape until federal laws forced the land to be restoredMany of the miners had debilitating black-lung disease from all the years of breathing the coal dust and were entitled to benefits from the federal governmentThe congressmans casework operation helped them get the benefits, but when the Nixon administration wanted to cut back the program, he voted for the cutbacksFolks in the river valley didnt know that until Steve Smith and I told them
I also had a number of positive proposals, some of which I advocated for twenty years, including a fairer tax system, a national health-insurance program, public funding of presidential elections, a lean and more effective federal bureaucracy, more federal education funding and creation of a federal Department of Education (it was then still an office in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare), and incentives to promote energy conservation and solar power
Thanks largely to financial support from the imitation louis vuitton wallets national labor unions, which my friend and regional AFL-CIO leader Dan Powell pushed hard for, we got enough money to do some television adsOld Dan Powell was talking about me becoming President when I was still twenty-five points behind for CongressAll I did was stand in front of a camera and talkIt forced me to think in twenty-eight-second segmentsAfter a while, I didnt need a stopwatch to tell me whether I was a second or two long or shortProduction costs were low for the ads
The TV ads may have been rudimentary, but our radio ads were greatOne memorable ad, produced in Nashville, featured a country singer who sounded just like Arkansas-born Johnny CashIt opened, If youre tired of eating beans and greens and forgotten what pork and beefsteak means, theres a man you ought to be listening toIt went on to slam the Nixon administration for financing huge grain sales to the Soviet Union, which drove up the price of food and animal feed, hurting poultry and cattle operationsThe song said, Its time to push Earl Butz [Nixons agriculture secretary] away from the troughIn between verses came this refrain: Bill Clintons ready, hes fed up tooHes a lot like me, hes a lot like youBill Clintons chanel lookalike bags cheap gonna get things done, and were gonna send him to WashingtonDon Tyson, whose costs of poultry production had soared with the grain sales and whose brother, Randal, was working hard for me, made sure I had enough money to run the song to death on rural radio
As we moved closer to election day, the support got stronger and so did the oppositionI got the endorsement of the Arkansas Gazette, the states largest newspaper, plus several papers in the districtI began to campaign hard in Fort Smith, where there was strong support from the black community, especially after I joined the local chapter of the NAACPI found good support all over heavily Republican Benton CountyAcross the river from Fort Smith, four or five people practically worked themselves to death trying to turn Crawford County for meI got a great reception in Scott County, south of Fort Smith, at the annual fox and wolf hunters field trialIt was an all-night event out in the country, at which men who loved their dogs as much as their kids (and took just as good care of them) showed the dogs and then cut them loose to chase foxes and bay at the moon while the women kept mountains of food out on picnic tables all through the gucci ladies watches ni
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