The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Karen Tumulty (motivational novels .TXT) 📖

The internal numbers of his pollster Richard Wirthlin showed a sharp decline in support among the blue-collar voters who had been so crucial to Ronnie’s 1980 victory. In May 1983 a Washington Post headline declared: “Go Ahead, Sucker—Bet on Reagan’s Reelection.”

Meanwhile, a potentially formidable Democratic field was shaping up, with Walter Mondale, who had been Jimmy Carter’s vice president, leading the pack. The night of Ronnie’s announcement that he would run again, Nancy wrote in her diary: “I think it’s going to be a tough, personal, close campaign. Mondale is supposed to be an infighter.… Ronnie is so popular that they might be desperate. I’ll be glad when the next nine months are over.”

The construction of Ronnie’s own campaign apparatus was well under way. Stu Spencer would continue to be both Reagans’ most trusted strategist, but he declined the role of campaign manager. That went to Ed Rollins, who had become White House political director when Lyn Nofziger left in November 1981. Rollins moved into a campaign headquarters on Capitol Hill and was given a $21 million budget for the 1984 primary season. To quiet any concern about the age issue, the Reagan team arranged for Parade magazine to run a December 1983 story on the president’s workout program, with a cover image of Ronnie, in a white T-shirt, pumping iron.

Even while she was trying to talk her husband out of running, Nancy had been sizing up his potential adversaries. As she had noted in her diary, Mondale seemed most likely to win the Democratic nomination. By the fall of 1983, she had correctly discounted the assumption of many in Washington that Ohio senator and former astronaut John Glenn, an American hero, had the potential to “ride the rocket ship” to the White House. She started to worry more about youthful Colorado senator Gary Hart, the insurgent in the race. When Hart dealt Mondale a stunning upset in the February 1984 New Hampshire primary, Nancy called Rollins and demanded: “What do we have on Hart?” The campaign manager assured her that while Hart had some appeal, he probably wouldn’t be able to go the distance against Mondale and the Democratic establishment. Nancy replied, “Well, you better look into this. I’m getting calls from my friends that we better take him seriously.” Rollins had not had much by way of direct dealings with Nancy previously. She was suddenly on the phone to him constantly, telling him what intelligence she was picking up and demanding to know what the campaign was doing about potential trouble spots that popped up on her radar.

It drove him nearly crazy. Nancy and her network did not share Rollins’s confidence that the campaign was going their way. One of her chief worries was that Ronnie might lose their home state of California, and no amount of argument from Rollins could convince her otherwise. She had heard that the campaign had only a light footprint in the state and demanded to know why it hadn’t set up an office in Beverly Hills. Why weren’t her friends there seeing campaign signs for Ronnie? Once, when Rollins couldn’t tell her where one of them could send a contribution, she said: “Shouldn’t you know the address in California where people can send checks? You’re the campaign manager. This is embarrassing.” After one particularly brutal campaign strategy session with the first lady, Spencer told him: “She could smell fear all over you, Rollins. You’re doomed.”

But as months went by, Rollins told me, “I sort of moved from being scared to death of her to having great, great respect for her.” Nancy may not have had his deep knowledge of the intricacies of making a campaign work, but she was unsurpassed when it came to knowing what it took to make her husband appear and perform at his best. Nor was she going to shrink back into the traditionally ornamental role to which the political handlers preferred to consign a candidate’s wife. As he came to accept those realities, Rollins finally developed a workable relationship with Nancy. He knew he had passed his biggest test with her when she told him: “I know you love my husband. You’re a protector of my husband.” In other words, she saw them as comrades, united in a common cause.

With the economy on the rebound, the 1984 reelection strategy was to go long on feel-good themes and short on policy specifics, because many of Ronnie’s remained controversial. One of Nancy’s chief concerns was the advertising. She had been dissatisfied with the quality of the spots their campaign team had put on the air in 1980 and pressed for something more creative and interesting this time around. Rollins argued that television did not make much difference. He wanted to invest more money into voter registration, ground organization, and other fundamentals that he felt were being neglected. Lyn Nofziger, who was advising the reelection effort, warned the campaign manager: “Don’t forget who your clients are. They’re movie stars. To them, all this stuff that you’re talking about—voter registration, what have you—that doesn’t mean jack shit to them. What’s important to them are pictures. Their friends are going to see the commercials.”

Rather than hiring an existing advertising agency, Mike Deaver put together a high-priced all-star group from around the country. They were dubbed the Tuesday Team. These were people who came not from the political world but from the corporate one, where they had produced ads for notable brands such as Pepsi, General Electric, and Pan American World Airways. The work they did from their headquarters in Rockefeller Center had a polished, cinematic quality.

One sixty-second commercial in particular stands as a modern political classic. It had a dreamlike quality that was inspired by The Natural—a popular movie that year about a middle-aged baseball phenom, played by Robert Redford, who seems to materialize from nowhere—and reflected Deaver’s belief in using visual images as powerful storytelling tools. As orchestral music played, the campaign spot opened with a montage of softly lit scenes