by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After The Contenders
PBS showed a truly weird documentary about the 1976 Presidential election
called Feeling Good About America
— which seemed odd because I don’t remember the late 1970’s as a particularly
feel-good time and the filmmakers, whoever they are (neither the PBS Web site
nor imdb.com has a listing for this film), try to shoehorn it into one by
saying that the number one singer in the U.S. in 1976 was John Denver (PBS
seems to have an exaggerated view of Denver’s popularity; when they did one of
their pledge-break specials about him and the announcer began with, “John
Denver was the most popular singer-songwriter of the 1970’s,” I yelled back at
the TV, “Huh? Does the name
‘Elton John’ mean anything to you?”) — this must have been before the double
rise of disco and punk, which pretty much put an end to the ability of soft,
sensitive singers like Denver and David Gates to rule the charts. Their
argument was that the 1976 Presidential campaign was a necessary corrective to
the Watergate scandals, and they assert that Ford’s controversial pardon of
Richard Nixon was a good thing because the country was able to put Watergate
behind it and not have to deal with the spectacle of a former President being
tried and possibly jailed for depressingly ordinary crimes.
Their case was that
both Ford and Carter were decent, honest people who were well qualified to be
President, and they were both politically moderate (though I didn’t support
either of them: I signed on to the insurgent campaign of Eugene McCarthy,
partly because I thought Carter was too conservative and partly because a very
close friend of mine asked me to), and this interregnum of peaceful and dully
competent leadership was just what the country needed to heal its wounds. The
film’s title comes from a banal campaign song cooked up by the Ford people —
significantly it was backed by a brass band while Carter’s song was a plaintive
country-folk piece done with just voice and guitar — and it also makes the
point that the election was razor-close and it wasn’t apparent until hours
before the polls close that Carter had won. Given what a disaster the Carter
Presidency turned out to be — with renewed energy crises, the Iran hostage
situation and Carter himself accused of declaring a state of “malaise” in the
country (based on a speech in which he never actually used that word) — it’s
easy to forget that at the time he announced he was considered a real breath of
fresh air, an “outsider” (even though he’d served a term as governor of
Georgia), a peanut farmer and not part of the Washington establishment. The
film also makes the point that Carter brought evangelical Christians into
politics for the first time, though it does not mention that as much as Carter proclaimed his
devotion to traditional Biblical values on the stump, in office he governed as
a typically Democratic social liberal, and the evangelicals (most of them,
anyway) were so incensed that when he ran for re-election they threw their support
to Ronald Reagan and have remained bulwarks of the Republican Right ever since.
It’s not surprising that in the footage from 1976 shown here Reagan comes off
as a more strongly defined and charismatic figure than either Carter or Ford, seeing crystal clarity in issues on
which both Carter and Ford were nuanced.
The film also hails 1976 as the year
in which Presidential debates resumed after a 16-year hiatus (they attribute
that to the refusal of either Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon to debate, but it
had more to do with the “equal time” provision of federal communications law
and the obligation it imposed to networks and broadcasters to put on all the candidates for a particular office, including
the minor-party ones; it’s indicative of the way American politics has become
structured deliberately to exclude all alternatives to the Republican and
Democratic parties that this was actually considered a problem, set aside in
1976 when the FCC declared a one-time exception to the equal-time rule and subsequently
through the establishment of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which I’ve
described as “the Commission on Making Sure Voters Don’t Hear from Anyone Other
than Republicans and Democrats in Presidential Debates”) and Ford made his
famous and bizarre gaffe that “there is no Soviet influence in Eastern Europe,
and there never will be in a Ford Administration.” My understanding was that
Ford had misunderstood something his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had
tried to explain to him — that the Soviets claimed a right to intervene in
Eastern European affairs because it was part of their “sphere of influence,”
and the U.S. didn’t accept that claim (ironic since as early as the Monroe
Doctrine the U.S. had made a similar claim of a “sphere of influence” in Latin
America that supposedly gave us the right to intervene in their affairs any time we wanted to) — though that doesn’t
explain the doggedness with which Ford clung to his position, not only during
the debate itself (he got a follow-up question that would have given him an
opportunity to walk back from it, and he didn’t take it) but for a week
afterwards. The most interesting point this film makes about the 1976 election
was that not only was it close, but it was the last election in U.S. history
that wasn’t polarized: the women’s vote broke 50 percent for Carter to 48
percent for Ford, just as the men’s vote did, and Carter got the votes of 30
percent of self-proclaimed “conservatives” just as Ford got 26 percent of the
votes of self-proclaimed “liberals.” Of course the polarization since then that
we’ve all grown to hate — as well as the “gender gap” that allows Democrats
like Barack Obama to win on the women’s vote even while they decisively lose
among men — were the products of Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, and the way
he governed!
