Doug Bailey Remembers Gerald Ford
Hotline founder Doug Bailey was part of Gerald Ford's campaign inner-circle in the '76 general election campaign that saw Ford make a near-miraculous comeback from 31 points down. We've asked Bailey to pen his remembrances of Ford.
John Deardourff and I prepared the general election advertising for President Ford in 1976. It was the easiest job we ever had.
Imagine the luxury of a political consultant whose client (1) is President of the United States but had never run for anything bigger than a congressional district in Grand Rapids – and (2) is an honest, candid, simple, straight-forward, believable guy.
America had a president it didn’t know, so our job was to introduce the people to their president, his wife, their children – who they were, where they came from, what they were like. And to do so in a compelling way, all we really had to do was part the curtains and let Jerry Ford be Jerry Ford. He would never have allowed us to make him be anyone else anyway. He was who he was.
Some found him less than a scintillating intellect, even though he knew more about how government works (and the budget, for example) than any president before or since.
But all found him authentic. You watched him and listened to him and you felt you knew the man. He was the anti-Nixon. He inspired the confidence that you knew him. And I can assure you he was exactly the same man with the camera on or off. For good or bad, what you saw was what you got. And after Nixon, that was a treat.
With all the media talk about how the pardon may have cost him the election (it probably did, but it was the right thing to do, and he did it because it was the right thing to do), it’s worth remembering all in the minds of voters in 1976.
That election came after eleven years of downward spiral for the American spirit: the assassinations of JFK, Bobby, and Martin Luther King; the civil rights riots that followed; Vietnam (with 59,000 Americans dead); the resignation in disgrace of a Vice-President; Watergate; and the resignation in disgrace of a President.
And yet by the end of the campaign much of the country was singing “I’m feeling good about America.” The reason was this wonderfully simple and calm and decent and honest man, who gave us reason to hope again.
Maybe it’s time we go looking again for another president who doesn’t crave the job! [DOUG BAILEY]