Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell : The Team Who Brought Carter the Presidency Explains How Democrats Can Again Take the White House

Hamilton Jordan (pronounced Jer’-den), now 47, and Jody Powell, 48, were the “gold-dust twins” at the heart of the last Democratic campaign that captured the White House. In the past 25 years, only their Southern strategy guided the Democrats to victory. And, like Bill Clinton--the governor of Arkansas the press had seemed to be electing before any votes has been cast--their candidate was a Southern centrist governor who came out of nowhere. Jimmy Carter, whisper many Democrats, showed us that it takes a Southern moderate to win.

Jordan recognized Carter’s political potential long before the country had heard of him. As a young 28-year-old, Jordan wrote up a perceptive, 70-page game plan that he presented to Carter in 1972, mapping out a strategy for winning the Democratic nomination four years later. The document was a carefully maintained secret until Carter had nearly wrapped up the prize in the spring of 1976. Carter had a strong lead over President Gerald R. Ford coming out of the conventions that summer, but stumbled badly in the weeks that followed before winning by a small margin.

Powell was the other member of that 1976 campaign team who enjoyed almost a father-son relationship with Carter. After serving as the governor’s press secretary in Georgia, he accompanied Carter on early campaign swings across the country, passing out leaflets to voters and rich morsels of information to reporters. Powell won respect not only for his hard-headed sense of politics but his humor--when former Georgia Gov. Lester G. Maddox attacked his boss, Powell retorted, “Being called a liar by Lester Maddox is like being called ugly by a frog.”

Since leaving the White House after a losing campaign in 1980, Jordan taught for a while at Emory University, then was felled by a lymphatic cancer that many of his friends thought would kill him. But he fought back and the disease has been in remission for more than five years. After a stint running the American Tennis Players Assn., he is now president of Whittle Books and lives in Knoxville, Tenn. In his post-White House days, Powell made a mark as a newspaper columnist and political analyst for ABC News. In 1987, he became an executive in a public-relations firm and today he is chairman and chief executive officer of Powell Tate, a communications firm whose other chief partner, Sheila Tate, was Nancy Reagan’s press secretary.

Assessing the 1992 campaign, both Jordan and Powell believe that the Democrats will win in November only if they bring some of the South back into the fold. The GOP has had a hammerlock there for 20 years, broken only by Carter. Clinton’s natural appeal to Southerners is one big reason he attracted early interest among Democratic pros. But any Democratic candidate must convince the country that, if elected, he won’t be another Carter--and that, too, will require special campaign planning.

Gergen: In the past six elections, the Democrats have captured the White House only once, when they nominated Jimmy Carter, a Southern governor. Do you think the best chance the Democrats have to recapture the White House is to again nominate a Southerner?

Jordan: I think I would approach it a little different. I think the party has to nominate somebody who has the potential to attract the kind of centrist Democratic and independent voters that have not supported the Democratic nominee in recent elections. I think the South has disproportionately more of those types of voters--which is why I think the South is critical for the party in the general election. So I think it’s not just being a Southerner, it’s having the ability to appeal to mainstream voters . . . .

Powell: . . . . Nominating a Southerner has almost become a shorthand for exactly what Hamilton said. . . . If you go all the way back, eons and eons, to 1976, and look at that general election, yes--carrying most of the Southern states was essential to that election. But it was also essential that we carried some of those traditional swing states outside the South.

. . . . If you look at that vote, what you saw is that the way Jimmy Carter won was by maintaining the traditional Democratic voting patterns and traditional Democratic constituencies. As I recall, he got about the same thing that Vice President Humphrey got in ’68 in the urban areas. But he was able to significantly increase the Democratic vote in suburban and rural areas. That goes to the same point of broadening the appeal.

Gergen: Do you both think it would help the Democrats if they wrap this up early? Is there any risk, for example, of peaking too soon? One thing we’ve seen is the Democratic nominee comes out of the two conventions ahead--then they’ve had trouble keeping the lead.

Jordan: I think, collectively, we’ve all seen that in our experience in politics. The new guy looks fresh and he wins the nomination. Then people start, particularly with an incumbent President--begin to look very seriously at that person.

What happened in our case . . . I felt like we got overexposed in the primaries. We went from “Who is this guy” to “He’s on television every Tuesday morning claiming victory in some other state.” The new face of January-February, about April or May, had become an old face. People were tired of it, were tired of the campaign, and yet we had to continue fighting because of the Jerry Brown active candidacy and the kind of “anybody but Carter” coalition . . . .

When we got through, we were exhausted. I always felt like, while we had spent four years preparing for the primary, that we never figured out over the summer our posture for the general election. That’s the reason we almost lost. We lost a 35-point lead . . . .

We were torn. There were people telling us you’ve got to put together the Democratic coalition, you’ve got to embrace the party and the constituencies. . . . Then there was another group saying, “No, you guys. Jimmy Carter was something different, something special in the primaries, and you compromise that if you look like just another traditional Democratic candidate.” We flip-flopped between those two things.

So consolidating and winning early is a blessing--if you take the time that you gain to get ready for the general election. But whatever those numbers are, they’re going to shrink . . . .

Powell: . . . . Ideally, you would use the time, you would have some time before the convention to concentrate on putting the party back together, building a general election team, that sort of thing. But if you’re pushing and shoving and fighting right down to the convention within the party, you don’t really have a chance to start bringing people who have been in other campaigns in--to find out sort of who can do the most for you, either at the national level or the state level.

. . . . The one other thing I would say, though, is that it’s my strong impression that substantially more resources are being devoted now by the party and by other Democratic groups toward preparing for the fall campaign than was the case back when we were involved . . . .

Gergen: Let’s turn to the general election. What does a Democratic candidate have to do to break open the South, to win states that haven’t been won since you ran the campaign in ‘76?

Jordan: It’s going to be very tough . . . . From a Democrat’s perspective, you see this disturbing trend of people who elect Democratic mayors, governors, U.S. senators or congressmen having left the party in increasing numbers over the past 12 years. We . . . lost a lot of those people there--disproportionately, they were white, moderate, conservative voters. So the challenge is to have a message and an agenda that allows them to come back home. But I’m not sure they consider it home any more . . . .

Gergen: Is the South the critical test for a Democratic nominee? What sort of electoral strategy should be pursued to win in the general?

Jordan: There was a period of time when the South looked so hopeless for Democrats that people started talking . . . . (that) the South’s not important. If you just look back at history . . . the Southern states, as you know, blindly--with the exception of Al Smith--gave their support to Democratic candidates. In fact, the Southern electoral vote for many years was 50% or 60% of the total Democratic electoral vote.

It’s difficult to see how you do it without being competitive broadly in the South . . . . Notwithstanding some demographic changes, you’ve got to focus on the South, key states in the Midwest and the Northeast as your electoral base. . . .

Powell: And lock that up early. The problem is if you write off those 11, 12, 13 states--

Jordan: You’ve got to win two-thirds of everything left.

Powell: And you clearly are not, because there are a certain number of those states that you’re not going to be competitive in. What you do is put the Republicans in the position--I think President Nixon first used this word in the political sense . . .--you’ll put the Republicans in a position of picking one or two or three of those other states that are absolutely essential to you and just carpet-bombing you in terms of money and resources that you’re not going to be able to match.

Gergen: You’ve seen these stories about womanizing come and go for various candidates. How would you advise Bill Clinton to deal with this?

Jordan: Have a good press secretary like Jody Powell who can get the story killed before it reaches print. I don’t know what the standard is. The standard changes every four years . . . .

Powell: I think part of the problem is . . . I don’t think there is a standard yet. If there ever is going to be one again. The old rules are gone and the new ones haven’t been written, and it may be even too much of an exaggeration to say they’re in the process of being written.

Jordan: The closer anybody gets to the White House, or to being the nominee of the party, the more likely, I think, that some element of the press will use anything they can that they have on them. . . . I don’t know if there are any standards that will keep somebody using whatever they have against any candidate that they think is on the way to being President.

Gergen: That’s an interesting point. Until about three or four weeks ago, the standards seemed to be--unlike last time--that if Clinton had a problem and it stopped before he started to campaign, he was going to be OK.

Jordan: The other thing that you guys know more about than I do, with your own (press) backgrounds, is this kind of disgusting phenomena where some rag will publish something, and then the New York Times or the Washington Post says, kind of holding their nose, “We don’t like having to do this, but since it’s in the public arena now, we have to address it as well.”

Powell: That’s happened already in this one. Isn’t that right Dave?

Gergen: It happened with the publication, the Star. They came out with this thing about Clinton early last week, and it hit the front of the New York Post with a front page headline on Wild Bill. I got jangled out of bed really early one morning by the BBC. The thing was playing all over Europe, I couldn’t believe it--from the Star.

Jordan: But they went through the Gary Hart stuff. If we don’t know what our own stand is, they certainly don’t know over there. (Laughter)

I think, to the extent we’re talking about Clinton here, I think the fact that, from everything I can tell, he has a stable marriage and a wife right there who’s campaigning with him and so forth . . . that has to count for something.

Gergen: You guys went through this in ‘76, you went through being in the White House and everything all the way up to ‘80, ’81. How has the country changed from the time that you were in the public arena in these political campaigns? How are our politics different?

Powell: I think they’re nastier, in the sense of meaner. I think people are significantly more skeptical, if not cynical. And when I say that, you have to remember that we’re talking about the first campaign after Watergate--so it wasn’t exactly a time when people were all warm and fuzzy even then. But compared to now, it’s a much more serious problem, I think--forgetting who wins or who loses this election.

Jordan: I think that’s right. I think we would probably have not won in ’76 if we had not been (in) the kind of Watergate, anti-Washington kind of environment.

But today, I think the public attitude is every bit as cynical, except its cynicism is kind of a broad dissatisfaction with the political process. The thing in ’76 was disillusionment with a President . . . and our institutions don’t work very well. I think the cynicism today is just more of a feeling that none of this works very well any more at any level. Just kind of a real, broad, angry dissatisfaction with people in public office generally, who at every level now are basically managers of debt. . . .

Gergen: So whoever wins is going to have a tougher time governing?

Jordan: I’m afraid so.

Powell: I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. . . . As Hamilton said, people were upset and angry and that sort of thing (in ‘76), but there wasn’t a sense that something might be fundamentally wrong with the whole shooting match. People were inclined to say, as Hamilton said, that was one specific set of individuals and so forth, not that it was, not even the whole Republican Party, much less the whole political process.

I think you have to also tie into it this sort of perception of where we stand in the world, too. When you’ve got a Japanese official standing up and saying well, the Americans have become our subcontractors. My guess is what you get out there is not so much a reaction of anger, but people sort of nodding their heads and saying, “Yeah. I hate to say it, but the SOB’s right.”

Gergen: And a pessimism about any capacity to change it.

Powell: Yeah. And I think that’s true about a lot of other things that people worry about a good deal in our society.

In fact, my former boss said something, back when we were talking about his project in Atlanta--to deal with a lot of the social problems there--and I was giving him a bit of a hard time about how you went about it and so forth. He said, “Well, you know, what we have here are two problems of hopelessness. One is hopelessness on the part of the people who have those problems--who are caught in those neighborhoods and don’t see any reason to think they’ll ever have a way up and out. The other is hopelessness on the part of people who generally want to help and try to do something about it. But they don’t know of anything they think will make a difference.” I think that analysis, which really struck home to me, was something that maybe goes even broader here.