‘You know, some funny things happen to you on the campaign trail,’ Reagan mused into the mike. ‘Not so long back a little boy came up to me — he must have been, why, no more than eleven or twelve years of age. He looked up at me and he said, “Mister, you’re pretty old.” (Forgiving laughter as Reagan cleverly defuses the age issue.) “What was it like when you were a boy?” (Long, wry pause.) And I said… “Well, son. When I was a little boy, America was the strongest country in the world. (Applause and cheers.) When I was a little boy, every working American could expect to buy his own home. (Applause.) When I was a little boy, gasoline was twenty-eight cents a gallon.” (Cheers.) … The little boy looked up at me and he said, “Hey, mister. You ain’t so old. Things were like that when I was a little boy too.'” (Laughter, applause, cheers and whoops.)
Ronald Reagan is quite right. Some funny things do happen to you on the campaign trail.
Lined up with forty swearing pressmen over the chaotic trench of a hotel reception desk in Fort Worth, Texas, I noticed that the two-faced illuminated sign in the courtyard said, on one side, holiday inn – welcome cov mrs reagan, and, on the other, STEAK AND SHRIMP SPECIAL $6.95.
In the Chattanooga Room of the Opryland Hotel (z8oo Opryland Drive, Nashville, Tennessee), Governor and Mrs Reagan hosted a $25o-a-plate fund-raising dinner. Ronnie, Nancy and half-a-dozen local dignitaries sat on a raised dais in front of metallic blue drapes. Over cocktails, the entire company swore allegiance to the flag, then listened with heads bowed to the pre-prandial prayer: ‘Help us, God, to resolve our economic difficulties’, and so on.
In the foyer restroom of the Holiday Inn, Midland, Texas, the muzak was playing ‘My Way’. As I came out into the hall, where Reagan would soon delight an expectant crowd, the Robert E. Lee High School Brass Band was playing ‘Hot Stuff”. When the applause died after Reagan’s speech, the band played ‘I Wish I Was in Dixie’.
As the campaign Braniff jet took off from El Paso, Nancy Reagan rolled an orange down the aisle from the first-class section (where, I imagined, Ronnie was either asleep or completing a course of vitamin injections) to the back of the plane, where the news-cameramen shouted and laughed. Their laughter, like so much American laughter, did not express high spirits or amusement but a willed raucousness. As the plane landed in Dallas, the news-cameramen rolled the orange back to Nancy in the nose. It was a ritual. Half-way through the flight, Nancy1 came by with some chocolates, including one for your reporter. She still looked moist and trusting, even though a violent lightning storm coruscated the evening sky, and Ronnie was at least thirty feet from her side.
Reagan’s stump speech is by now as pat and unvarying as his story about the twelve-year-old boy — an intro which alternates with the tale of how Ronald and Nancy were once mistaken for Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. Both anecdotes serve to mellow the audience for the honest sagacities to come.
Make America strong again. We don’t want our soldiers on food stamps. ‘Carter wants to preserve the status quo — that’s Latin for the mess we’re in.’ Tackle inflation by 30 per cent tax cuts over three years (an idea which, incidentally, alarms even the most reactionary economists). Cut federal spending. Less government! We are not energy-profligate: we are an energy-rich nation. Scrap the Department of Energy. Nukes are good. Abortion-on-demand is bad (reagan is pro-life, say several hand-held posters). ‘Just because you can’t keep guns from criminals, why keep them from honest people?’ Able-bodied people on welfare should be put to work on ‘useful’ community projects. He did it in California — he can do it here. No more Taiwans! No more Vietnams! Carter is afraid that nobody will like us. Reagan doesn’t care whether people will like us. He just wants people to respect us!
It is all delivered with mechanical verve, and with only a few stumbles and slips of the tongue — ‘welfare’, for instance, has a habit of getting mixed up with ‘windfall’. You watch and listen to Ronald Reagan much as you do to Jimmy Carter, marvelling at their spectacular uneasiness in the realm of ideas, language and conviction. As front-runners, all they have to do is avoid, or minimise, the horrendous gaffes that seem ever ready to spring from their mouths. It is as if they can only just stop themselves from yelling out — ‘I hate blacks!’ or ‘Who is Anwar Sadat?’ Reagan is justly famous for his howlers, blind spots, mangled statistics and wishful inaccuracies. Each time he goes up to speak, you sense that the pollsters are reaching for their telephones, the aides for their aspirins.