Let Bygones Be Bygones

If they ever write a book about us, you can be sure they will call it The Unmaking of the President, 1976. Rarely, if ever, has such an outstanding political commodity been so quickly and utterly obliterated. Muskie, after all, had less class than Bayh. And even he lasted through Florida.

Though it is not my purpose here to dwell upon them, there were, of course, mistakes. I personally had a hand in two of the finest. One, which turned into a minor scandal last October, involved the printing of membership applications for an organization whose caucus we planned to pack. Not precisely illegal, but not the ethical pinnacle of my career either. We got caught.

The other mistake is still too sensitive to discuss in detail. It happened much later, and sometimes I wonder if it cost my man the presidency. It had to do with a lie that I neglected to tell the press at a time when not only John Marttilla's guerillas, who were masterminding Udall's campaign, but even Ellen McCormack had figured out how to play the media for all they were worth. And that was a lot in 1976. But more about Ellen McCormack later.

The big mistakes--the really big ones involving basic strategic decisions--are a much more fuzzy matter. Not that no one claims responsibility. With a great deal of grace, our hurly-burly, unanimously beloved campaign manager Jack Walsh, has said repeatedly that it was he who made the bad moves. On election night, Walsh even claimed to friends and staff that he and he alone was responsible, a noble but untrue argument.

For it is obvious that in every campaign there are mistakes and that a major difference between the winners and the losers is that those campaigns which have the money or the time are able to recoup, regroup and alter strategy. Yet almost every decision in the Bayh campaign was dictated by money constraints and made so late that they were binding for the duration. There was no flexibility, and not even Boston's political Vince Lombardi, Mr. Walsh, can predict the future with perfection. It was lack of time, not bad decisions, that did us in.

Which, I suppose, leaves responsibility with the candidate, who entered the race only five months before he withdrew. But that may not be fair either, because the top four finishers had been running for six years, two years, 12 years, and three years, respectively. Who should have foreseen that our electoral process actually begins at some time before the previous election is held? Certainly this is not what the founding fathers envisioned when they set out to create a fluid democracy, sensitive to an everchanging electorate.

Whatever the case, the real mistake of 1976 was not made by Jack Walsh, Birch Bayh, or me. It was made by the Democratic voters and non-voters in this allegedly progressive commonwealth. That they did not vote for Birch Bayh is forgiveable; that the Democratic conservatives outpolled the liberals by close to a 60 to 40 per cent margin is not. Between them, Bayh, Harris, Udall, Shriver and Shapp received 37.9 per cent of the vote in a state in which Democrats usually favor the liberals by 20 percentage points. Fifty-eight per cent of the vote went to Messrs. Jackson, Wallace, Carter and Ms. McCormack, a relative shift of 30 to 40 per cent to the right, depending upon how you interpret the center vote. It is a figure which is frightening, unless perhaps you are Governor Dukakis. In that case, it may be heartening to know that all who voted Republican and a healthy majority of your Democratic constituents have just endorsed your policy of doing less for poor people as a solution to national stagnation.

The point was brought home forcefully to me one week and two days before the primary. Already burnt out and functioning on the campaign adrenalin which had replaced sleep and exercise sometime in early November, I left work at 10:00 on a Saturday night and drifted over to a party for the Harvard squash team in one of the River Houses. Once there, surrounded by non-politicos and unable to remember the last time I had set racquet to ball, I ran into that phenomenon so common to political people who wander outside of the fold; I had nothing to talk about.

So I stood by a wall, sipped on some punch, and feeling very alien indeed, observed my contemporaries at play. Eventually, thankfully, I was rescued by the arrival of JF, our eleventh congressional district coordinator. We quickly retreated to an empty living room and hunkered down to basics, a discussion of how we were really doing (great) and about infighting taking place at the high command (Byzantine).

After some time, three women from Wellesley College--strangers no less--crept into the room and sat on the floor listening. Perhaps they were amused by the sight--two college boys spending their Saturday night next door to a party, discussing the nuts and bolts of pulling votes in downtown Quincy.

At any rate, they were none too familiar with Birch Bayh, and one of them finally asked us why she should vote for him. I was tired but JF was not, and for ten minutes one of the best organizers in the state lectured her on the merits of Birch Bayh; his jobs proposals, his leadership in the Senate, his unequalled record on women's rights, his great American coalition, his incomparable political assets. They all listened carefully, but I could see that the one who asked the question wanted more.

Again she spoke up. "Well, that's all well and good," she said, "But what about the Brazilians? Where does he stand on them?"

The question was not really a curve. It turned out that the girl had spent a year down there, living under an oppressive American-supported dictatorship, living amidst a poverty whose lifeblood was an economic structure kept alive by the presence of powerful U.S. corporations. And she wanted to know why none of the candidates ever talked about those people.

"After all," she pointed out, "All these folks who are worried about inflation, even the ones who collect unemployment and want jobs, they live like kings compared to the poor people in Sao Paolo."

It was not a bad question at all. In reply, I tried to give her a short lesson on practical politics.

"Only people like us," I began, "students, politicos, suburban liberals who aren't caught up in busing, abortion, Israel and imagined economic catastrophe, have the mental energy to worry about your South American friends. Most people have all they can do to think about next week's paycheck. They don't want to hear from Brazil," I said. "And the Brazilians don't vote in America."

I assured her that Birch Bayh cared for the Brazilians. It's just that he had to keep it a secret. "For a politician to espouse their cause would actually hurt them," I concluded. "It would lose votes."

Somehow, the answer did not satisfy. And well it should not have. For the Wellesley College woman had struck upon a telling, perhaps the telling point of 1976. The liberals could not afford to be so liberal this year. No candidate could afford to talk about the forgotten masses in Brazil. The voters wouldn't stand for it.

In 1972, at least some were able to see beyond the immediate, and George McGovern ran on a commitment to stop an American outrage taking place against yellow and brown-skinned nonvoters 6000 miles away. But that effort failed 49-1, and four years of inflation, unemployment, Watergate and otherwise uninspired leadership have made us a less generous nation. It was not the fault of the candidates if even the people of that one lonely state had turned inward and seemed to be voting solely for themselves. Whether it was the anti-busing Wallaceites who carried Boston, the pro-Israel Jacksonites who delivered Brookline, or the union mobilizers for Jackson in Fitchburg, there appeared to be an ugly, unifying theme throughout: "Me, Me, Me."

No Democrat in his or her right political mind could afford to speak out continually for the truly forgotten people. Nelson Rockefeller was vilified for not paying taxes like the rest of us, but not even Fred Harris talked about conditions at Attica. Only Birch Bayh and Sargent Shriver talked straightforwardly and consistently about helping black people, and between them they garnered 12.9 per cent of the vote.

So it was the advocates of lunchpail politics, no more busin' and Georgian efficiency who had a picnic. And in the Massachusetts Democratic presidential primary of 1976, the disadvantaged had somehow slipped past the minds of the electorate.

Although I promised myself at the start of this piece that I would not eulogize my candidate, let me just say that on the night that Birch Bayh lost, he showed himself to be the classiest candidate in the field. His cool public concession in which he urged his supporters to pursue those goals upon which he had based his candidacy won him many votes after the fact. And privately, in the upstairs suite at the Copley Plaza Hotel, surrounded by staff-people, volunteers, and the usual campaign flotsam, he exhibited unusual strength. Moving from worker to worker, especially seeking out those who were weeping, he smiled, hugged and asked them to smile back. An 11:00 p.m. bulletin showed him at 4 per cent, with Ellen McCormack hot on his tail.

"She's giving us a fight," grinned the man who had been picketed by right-to-lifers for the past five months. Not a visible trace of bitterness.

Throughout the ordeal he expressed to Jack Walsh and others a deep concern for his workers, especially those who, like his son, had taken time off from school. For an extremely ambitious man who had never yet known defeat, it was not a bad performance.

For most of us in the campaign there had always been the knowledge that Birch Bayh was, politically speaking, the best all around liberal Democratic candidate since Bobby Kennedy. For myself, and perhaps for others, there had been a naive and ongoing belief in his invincibility, in the inevitability of eventual victory. Massachusetts would keep him alive, and New York would put him over the top.

So sure was his victory in my mind that I had set up a new scale for measuring political performance; not victory per se, but whether, once victory was achieved, the politician would be able to maintain his humility and compassion, or whether he would succumb to the sycophants and executive trappings--whether he would succumb to the arrogance of power that has destroyed some of our best intentioned presidents. During the campaign, I sometimes wondered if President Bayh would have the strength to remember where he came from, but after viewing Bayh the loser, I know that he could have done it.

I was in the counting room at 8:20 p.m., on a phone to the Copley Plaza, when the first precinct out of 2000 came in. It was all over. Bayh was running neck and neck with Ellen McCormack and Milton Shapp in a torrid battle for the cellar. Udall was far ahead, and well on his way to earning the progressive mantle.

Yet Udall's 18 per cent "was hardly a crashing mandate," in the words of one major liberal Democratic activist, particularly in view of the poor competition he received from his single-digit liberal rivals. His next primaries are not until April 6, and while he may win in Wisconsin, he has a long way to go in New York. Henry Jackson is superbly organized there.

March 2 was not just a loss, out a massive, mindblowing defeat for Birch Bayh, for Massachusetts liberals, for the voters who did not know better, for the nonvoters who forsook their chance, and for the poor people of Brazil. Especially for the poor people of Brazil and for all of their American counterparts in Massachusetts and across the nation.

Robert Gordon '76 coordinated the field staff for Bayh's Massachusetts primary campaign.