Gerald Ford and the Long String of Bad Luck
Former Gov. Jim Martin, who represented North Carolina's 9th Congressional District from 1973 to 1985, had some things to say in today's article on the late President Ford that I didn't have room to lay out in the depth they really deserved.
Martin (full disclosure: a longtime friend of my late father's) pointed out that Ford faced some serious handicaps in trying to win a presidential term of his own after succeeding Richard Nixon in the summer of '74.
For one thing, one of the factors that had made him a confirmable successor to Spiro Agnew -- the fact that he had never run a national or even a Senate campaign -- also meant that he had no real following outside his own congressional district and the House Republican leadership. He was going to have to build one from scratch during his campaign after an abbreviated term tainted by the corruption of his predecessor.
For another, he assumed the presidency as a Republican when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and had for about a generation.
That fact alone meant that the number of confirmable candidates from whom he could pick someone to nominate for vice president was almost nil. He picked Nelson Rockefeller, a moderate and therefore someone at least some Democrats could be persuaded to vote to confirm. But in so doing, he angered some of his own party's conservatives, thus inadvertently laying the seeds for former California Gov. Ronald Reagan's insurgency during the 1976 primary season.
That insurgency failed as Ford finally clinched the nomination, but he was so weakened by the effort (as Jimmy Carter would be, four years later, by Edward Kennedy's insurgency) that he entered the fall campaign behind.
And, of course, there was the pardon of Nixon. Of all of these factors, it was the only one that was, so far as we know, completely within Ford's control.
And yet despite all these obstacles, in a horrendous year for Republicans, Ford and his campaign managers almost closed the gap between him and Jimmmy Carter by Election Day -- the 297-to-241 Electoral College margin was smaller than many had expected.
It's interesting to speculate on what would have happened had Ford won a full term. Would Ronald Reagan still have won in 1980? Or would the country have decided that 12 years of Republicans in the White House was enough?
Hard to say.
