REACHING ACROSS THE AISLE
By the time you read this it will have been fifty years since Republican Speaker of the House Gerald R. Ford was inaugurated on the tails of President Richard Nixon’s resignation. He is famously quoted as saying that the nation’s ‘long nightmare was over.’ To many Americans that meant that the age of conservatism would begin and America, which had suffered more than a decade of assassinations, civil unrest, the Vietnam War and the humiliation of Watergate when he was elevated to the highest office in the World.
Immediately, he began trying to bring the nation together. Within a month he had pardoned Nixon, a move that probably cost him a second term but one that he felt would keep the scab of scandal from from tearing open and festering into the election. He wasn't even sure then if he even would run for a second term but that became a moot point. But the former House Whip knew how to cross the aisle and get legislation passed.
In those days, ‘crossing the aisle’ literally meant taking a few steps across a real aisle to talk to Democrats actually on the floor. He counted Democratic Party Leader Tip O’Neill as one of his closest friends and, often, the outcome of a vote was not left v. right but different coalitions within the parties and different caucuses that would communicate across the aisle to form simple majorities. As the House Majority Whip, Ford formed majorities often from the adjacent ends of both parties.
As Speaker, he worked with his friend, Democrat Tip O’Neil, to work where agreement could be found. So, it was as President, not strange that he would know the mood of the Congress after Nixon resigned and a growing coalition to extend the ‘long nightmare’ by impeaching the resigned Nixon, now, ostensibly, a private citizen.
He knew that many Democrats and few Republicans had a stomach for that but a long protracted House fight would have to include a Supreme Court ruling and there were probably enough votes in the House to try the disgraced former president. All of this prompted Ford, after much consultation with the FBI, SCOTUS and leading Democrats to conclude that there were not enough votes to convict Nixon, if it was even legal to do it, but testing the theory and going through the process would take over a year to process. Maybe two…
Not to mention what the ensuing investigations by the Special Prosecutor, the House and FBI would unveil. All on television, in living color, Live hearings being a new tool in the toolbox of political warfare and broadcast daily, echoed again at nightly news and then parsed by Pundits on the Weekend Talking Head shows. Watergate had lasted two years and was threatening to last another two years.
A month after he took office, he controversially pardoned Nixon to end the long national nightmare once and for all, despite the party warnings that he may have irretrievably hurt his chances at re-election despite being a popular figure now and an incumbent. It turned out to be true. But he didn’t regret doing it
…
HOW DO I KNOW ALL OF THIS…
When I was in college I became very politically involved and, eventually, became president of both, the college’s Student Congress and Programming Board. That gave me a seat on the College Foundation, and another seat on its popular Great American Talk Fest Board which would feature Gerald Ford that year and from that, I got a seat on the Ford Foundation board which was fundraising and building his museum in my town. Because of that, I became friends with the retired Ford and, often when his schedule permitted and when his business took him to our hometown, he would invite me to lunch or breakfast at his favorite ‘club’ downtown.
Despite knowing that I was an avowed Agro Labor Democrat, he enjoyed talking to me and was really not interested in converting me to his party as much as he was hoping that I would convert to his beloved UofM after my pre-law studies. It was at this time that he shared all of this but also his concerns about Reaganism and the relentless polarization and pull to the Right. The party choosing Reagan over Nelson Rockefeller was writing on the wall to him and the forces that puppeteered the populist Reagan were not really conservatives as much as they were Oligarch Opportunists.
Reagan had promised ‘no-new taxes’ and many other things that proved to be not true but the media and party ignored what he had to do to stay in power and, instead, created a mythology around Reagan that lives on to this day.
Ford, who had read and studied the secret and fabled ‘Atwater Memo’ had seen all of this unfolding in a methodical step by step process to subvert the party and government in general from the smallest ‘drain commisioner’ to the presidency itself. And the country. He was not the only one who saw and feared this.
It was in this climate that a curious friendship had begun between former president Ford and his counterpart Jimmy Carter who also had been betrayed by his own party. The left wing Ted Kennedy liberals had sabotaged his chances at a second term in much the same way that the Right had damned Ford with faint praise and little populist persuasion or politicking. I myself reminded him of Carter. Carter, who was a moderate in office, would be increasingly characterized as a liberal as the country veered hard Right after Reagan.
THE AISLE BECOMES A CHASM
By now, the notion of reaching across the aisle had entirely vanished and the cameraderie and ersatz truce that had pervaded the fifties and sixties since Eisenhower were now completely gone, replaced by an adversarial relationship between the parties. In the midst of this Ford and Carter forged a fast friendship that recognized that the Center bridge was vanishing and polarization was inevitable.
The fabled ‘Atwater Memo’ knew that white males would be in the minority by 1998 and that the 2000 election would be critical as well as the resultant reconfiguration, gerrymandering and redistricting of the census. He also theorized that even that would not hold much and that the growth of Black, Latino and other populations would eventually join women who were increasingly leaving the party and even voting against the men. He thought that the balance would tip unless something happened. Trump happened.
I BET YOU’RE WONDERING WHAT MY POINT IS HERE…
I subtitled this, ‘Who Would Ford Vote For?’ By now, you’ve probably guessed as if you probably didn’t already know. The Republican Party of Gerald Ford and Bob Dole had long since passed and he now had more in common with Centrist Moderate Carter and even the Lefty Socialist Democrat that I had become. Ford believed in strong government and our dependence on the metaphor and reality of what he called ‘The Heartland’ that Carter also represented. It is not a wonder that Ford picked Dole from Kansas.
But it is also not a wonder that two of the last Vice Presidents to balance the ticket alongside LBJ and Carter came from Minnesota and it is, then, also not a wonder that Kamala Harris picked Minnesoata Governor Tim Walz to balance her ticket as VP. Despite him being a ‘liberal’ DFL Democrat, his heartland down to earth demeanor, enthusiasm and likeability seems authentic and genuine to people and one other thing… Like Dole. Like Ford himself.
In many ways, he is closer to Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter than any and many of the presidents of the last fifty years. And while Kamala represents the future of this country, Tim Walz represents a heartland version that Republicans had exploited for generations that the Democrats generally ignored and/or conceded to them. Republicans Coolidge and Nixon called them the ‘Silent Majority’ a non political, non vocal and often mostly rural middle that Ford and Carter saw as going underground and supporting whoever would recognize their needs, beliefs and, most of all, pander to fanning their fears. The politics of the last sixty years also has a silent racism attached and, I believe, that the positive liberalism of heartlandia Tim Walz dispels that in a real and palpable way.
Jimmy Carter who will soon be a hundred years old recently told his son, Jason, that he wants to live long enough to vote for Kamala Harris in November. Gerald Ford, who would have been a hundred and eleven in July, I believe would have joined him, not to reach across the aisle but because there really isn’t an aisle and the vast majority of Americans have more in common than they do not and that Trumpianism does not hold those same common values, realities and beliefs. Beliefs that these two shared in the closest friendship of any two former presidents.
THERE IS NO AISLE
In his eulogy for Gerald Ford Jimmy Carter closed his heartfelt and warm words for the late president and his family by saying these words, ‘I still don't know any better way to express it than the words I used almost exactly 30 years ago. For myself and for our nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he did to heal our land.’
Those wounds have been reopened as well as wounds that tore apart this land long before even Lincoln tried to heal the Union. Perhaps even before that. There have been many long nightmares along the way and Carter and Ford would probably agree that we can avoid the existential threat of an even worse nightmare than the ones that these two friends helped heal together.
Thank you for this. I still feel sometimes doing the right thing is not going to be easy. But is seems to go back to not trying and imprisoning the Civil War seditionists. These people kept pushing and pushing and here we are.