The Winning of Texas

<v Speaker>Well, I'll be very honest, I haven't seen the poll, but I understand there is some <v Speaker>movement in the south uh in the right direction uh. <v Speaker>When I went south last week, some said, well, he's only going there to show that they're <v Speaker>not writing off the South, well I- that may have been 1 reason, but the other reason was <v Speaker>that we really feel we have an opportunity in the south to win, including Texas. <v Speaker>I believe that we're going to take Texas. I don't think it's gonna be much doubt about <v Speaker>it. We we did so well in the primaries here and uh and now we've got <v Speaker>the party regulars on our side too. [laughs] [crowd shouting] <v Speaker>Texas is 1 of the biggest political prizes in the nation. <v Speaker>Only California, New York and Pennsylvania have more electoral votes than the 26 <v Speaker>of Texas. Historically, it's a 1 party Democratic state. <v Speaker>But that party may be over now. <v Speaker>Certainly it's dominating days are over. <v Speaker>A former Democratic governor, John Connally, turns Republican and conservative business <v Speaker>democrats be far behind. <v Speaker>The 3rd leg of the stool will be the Texans for Ford, which will be chaired by Wales <v Speaker>Madden. And it also will operate under the budget, an umbrella

<v Speaker>of the National Campaign Committee. <v Speaker>It was no small boost for Gerald Ford when Connally agreed to head the president's <v Speaker>campaign in Texas this year. <v Speaker>He found himself faced with a state in transition. <v Speaker>Herbert Hoover in 1928 and Dwight Eisenhower in the 50s carried Texas with the Republican <v Speaker>ticket and Richard Nixon swept it 4 years ago. <v Speaker>John Kennedy barely eked out a victory here in 1960, and the same was true of Hubert <v Speaker>Humphrey in 68. The year that George Wallace pulled a whopping 19 percent <v Speaker>of the vote, it seemed then that Texas would join the majority of western states <v Speaker>that generally vote Republican. <v Speaker>Few reckoned with the possibility of a Democratic candidate who would stir the Southern <v Speaker>soul that lies deep in the heart of Texas. <v Speaker>A Southern Baptist like Jimmy Carter can be formidable in a state that's been called the <v Speaker>buckle on the Bible Belt. John Connally stood out right away to break those psychological <v Speaker>bonds. <v Speaker>And most Baptist, as I know them, are basically conservative people, conservative phil-

<v Speaker>uh philosophically. And they certainly are gonna recognize before this campaign's over <v Speaker>that Governor Carter is not a conservative. <v Speaker>He's not a moderate. He's a liberal. He's a very he's a very pronounced liberal. <v Speaker>And in my judgment, they're not going to support him just because he's a Baptist. <v Speaker>[choir singing] <v Speaker>Gerald Ford made his bid for the Baptist vote with an appearance at W.A. <v Speaker>Cresswell's First Baptist Church in Dallas, which boasts 20000 members, <v Speaker>a budget close to $7 million. <v Speaker>And Billy Graham is 1 of its members. <v Speaker>Dr. Cresswell praised Ford and also endorsed him. <v Speaker>We asked him, Mr. President, if Playboy magazine

<v Speaker>were to ask you for an interview. <v Speaker>What would you do? <v Speaker>And the president replied, I was asked by Playboy <v Speaker>magazine for an interview and I declined <v Speaker>with an emphatic no. <v Speaker>And I like that. <v Speaker>After the service is over, the news media <v Speaker>oh really were insistent on uh whether <v Speaker>I was for [inaudible] President Ford, so I told them honestly, <v Speaker>yes, I am. <v Speaker>Am I not a citizen of the United States? <v Speaker>Do I not have a right to express an opinion <v Speaker>about a political candidate and especially 1 that has so vital <v Speaker>[inaudible] um uh assignment and the destiny

<v Speaker>of our nation? <v Speaker>So as a citizen, why I expressed my <v Speaker>opinion, an honest opinion. I am for president Ford. <v Speaker>Citizen Cresswell certainly carries a lot of weight with [inaudible]. <v Speaker>[laughs] <v Speaker>I would have had him use a different example for <v Speaker>[laughing] explaining his Christian religion. <v Speaker>But but if you read the article, it is a very good article about what the Baptist <v Speaker>religion means. <v Speaker>That Playboy interview has plagued Jimmy Carter through much of the fall campaign. <v Speaker>It seemed innocent enough proclaiming his loyalty to his wife, then stressing in language <v Speaker>not so innocent that he wouldn't impose his moral standards on others. <v Speaker>But what he said pleased practically nobody, nor did it help any when he <v Speaker>mentioned Lyndon Johnson in connection with Richard Nixon's lying and cheating. <v Speaker>Carter tried hard to smooth things over. <v Speaker>A summary brief paragraph in the magazine article was very unfortunate <v Speaker>and doesn't obviously represent the way I feel about President Johnson.

<v Speaker>Charles Carbo, an Atlanta lawyer and close adviser of Carter's came to Texas to <v Speaker>set the record straight. <v Speaker>The only criticism I ever heard that Jimmy [inaudible] Lyndon Johnson <v Speaker>was uh not the uh [representative]. <v Speaker>But he said that he thought <v Speaker>Johnson would have fared better if he had told kept <v Speaker>the public informed about the Vietnam War. <v Speaker>Even so, it was [inaudible]. <v Speaker>And Ford made the most of it. <v Speaker>You never heard a Texan proclaim that America <v Speaker>is not respected anymore. <v Speaker>You never heard a Texan allege that American the <v Speaker>American people have lost their pride in America's strength <v Speaker>and its moral integrity. <v Speaker>But the Playboy interview wasn't Carter's fundamental problem in Texas.

<v Speaker>Above all else this is a business state where conservative economics usually carry <v Speaker>elections. Many in the business community feared Carter and refused to follow Governor <v Speaker>Dolph Briscoe into the Carter camp. <v Speaker>Campaign manager Hamilton Jordan, and national Democratic chairman, Bob Strauss, held a <v Speaker>strategy meeting in Dallas. <v Speaker>Soon afterwards, Charles Carbo was here to spread words of reassurance at a petroleum <v Speaker>club dinner. First, he spoke with the press. <v Speaker>We haven't done a good job. <v Speaker>And uh developing the [real] Jimmy Carter with respect to business <v Speaker>Johnson-. <v Speaker>Then he turned to where this particular trouble began. <v Speaker>I don't know, I never did know Mondale until I went to interview him and I- [people <v Speaker>speaking] I think he's a clean man. I think he's a really <v Speaker>good man. <v Speaker>I think that uh, if he's elected. <v Speaker>[inaudible] I think it uh the business people

<v Speaker>will be well satisfied. <v Speaker>Much more so than they would, though. <v Speaker>[singing] The [Doles] came to Texas early in the campaign, and generally the senator and <v Speaker>his wife of less than a year, Elizabeth Hanford Dole, the federal trade commissioner, did <v Speaker>double duty. <v Speaker>We were also asked uh, what about a conflict of interest? <v Speaker>Because I'm serving on the Federal Trade Commission, of course, he's he's in the Senate. <v Speaker>And uh so my response to that was there's a lot of of interest in this <v Speaker>marriage and very little conflict so far. <v Speaker>And also, that we are both uh lawyers. <v Speaker>And I said that uh I think we may be the only 2 lawyers in the country who really trust <v Speaker>each other. [laughing] <v Speaker>And I'm not going to trot around this country talking about pardons or amnesty, I wanna <v Speaker>talk about the M.I.A. and the P.O.W.s [applause]. <v Speaker>Oh, I don't think he's blown it any more than Carter had blown his chances a few weeks

<v Speaker>before with his interview in Playboy. <v Speaker>Jimmy Carter had his Playboy interview and Gerald Ford had his debate on Eastern Europe <v Speaker>when he astonished his audience by saying that those countries are not under the <v Speaker>domination of the Soviet Union. <v Speaker>It was Ronald Reagan who came to Texas to set this record straight. <v Speaker>And his explanation was that what he was trying to speak of, what <v Speaker>is the spirit of the people having visited them and seen them, that they uh in their <v Speaker>spirit, they were Poles, they believed in their country and so forth and their <v Speaker>own culture and all this. <v Speaker>Uh he admits himself that um [what he said], he didn't say <v Speaker>it right. It was taken wrong. <v Speaker>They're behind the Iron Curtain because of Democrat administrations following World War <v Speaker>2 that sold them down the river at Yalta and Potsdam and [inaudible]. <v Speaker>There weren't any Republicans there. <v Speaker>We're not going to see the opening of offices, the installation of phones. <v Speaker>The placards, the yard signs, the billboards, the bumper stickers and so <v Speaker>forth. We're gonna see a different type of campaign, in my judgment, this year.

<v Speaker>And it's going to be a a campaign of uh personal involvement <v Speaker>uh of people. <v Speaker>Campaign funds have been severely limited this year by federal law. <v Speaker>But that doesn't change the basic equation of politics. <v Speaker>This election, like most elections, will be won finally by the candidate who most <v Speaker>successfully identifies, registers and gets out his voters. <v Speaker>We uh have been making a major effort uh through the month of September <v Speaker>and will continue through the month of October to identify every favorable voter uh <v Speaker>that we can find in Dallas County for for uh President Ford now and stay on the <v Speaker>Republican ticket. <v Speaker>We've been working primarily uh uh uh uh canvassing <v Speaker>the survey and the president and Alan [still] running well ahead of <v Speaker>of uh their opponents. And so we've been doing a door to door, canvassing the dormitories <v Speaker>uh, registering voters, and it has a new [inaudible]. <v Speaker>We have phone banks uh established around the county that uh have been calling <v Speaker>since Labor Day or the day after Labor Day, uh identifying, we're calling every

<v Speaker>registered voter. <v Speaker>[people speaking] Finding out what their voter preference is and if they're on our side, <v Speaker>then we'll call them on Election Day and make sure they go to the polls. <v Speaker>Today, we're doing [Town East] and we're in a number of grocery stores and discount <v Speaker>stores, Kmart, uh [Scags] Albertson, <v Speaker>[people talking] let's see and then we're going door to door in some of the minority <v Speaker>precincts, some in Pleasant Grove and some in the East Dallas area, we're still working <v Speaker>in the areas with the predominantly lowest registration. <v Speaker>In other words, where there are transients and where people have moved and, where <v Speaker>um we feel like we need to up the registration in that area. <v Speaker>The black vote is critical to Carter's campaign in Texas, and he hopes for help from the <v Speaker>Baptist church. <v Speaker>Well Reverend Cresswell is a very big uh Baptist preacher in this country, but they have <v Speaker>many, many more ministers of the Baptist faith who are supporting Jimmy Carter. <v Speaker>I think that uh Mr. [Ford's] association with him is his longtime <v Speaker>uh relationship. So I was not surprised, and I'm sure many other Southern

<v Speaker>Baptists were not surprised at that endorsement. <v Speaker>But you were saying that there will be other Baptist ministers endorsing Carter. <v Speaker>Will they be working for Carter in the black congregations, do you think? <v Speaker>Oh, of course. Not only uh black congregations, but we have <v Speaker>uh uh clergical leadership all over this country. <v Speaker>I think he would be getting out to vote for Jimmy Carter. <v Speaker>He- during his lifetime, he did more Milton the voter registration <v Speaker>and uh get out the vote efforts than in any other single activity. <v Speaker>I think that there are 2 major [thrusts] of any campaign. <v Speaker>1 is the basic character of the of the person seeking office, <v Speaker>and the other 1 is the ability of that person to either serve, <v Speaker>or to demonstrate an ability to serve in the future. <v Speaker>And I think that we had a pretty good blend of that in- in the last night's debate. <v Speaker>Realistically, Carter will be strongest, probably in the southern part of the state uh in <v Speaker>some of the more rural areas.

<v Speaker>The more urban an area the the basically the stronger the president will do. <v Speaker>I think Carter has a reasonable chance of carrying Tarrant, but the margin wouldn't be <v Speaker>too large. Dallas County is a Republican county, as we all know. <v Speaker>Oh I think 1 of the real key areas, though, is, is the small town <v Speaker>vote in Texas. And that's where where more and more people are seeing President Ford <v Speaker>as being a um, their friend. <v Speaker>It could probably be strong in the valley and in San Antonio and El Paso <v Speaker>and then s- in some areas in east Texas. <v Speaker>I'm talking specifically about the Wallace Road in east Texas, for instance. <v Speaker>It is that only the eyes of Texas that are upon us. <v Speaker>The eyes of the whole world are on the United States of America <v Speaker>this year, not just for the 4th of July when we celebrated <v Speaker>a glorious 200th anniversary, but also <v Speaker>on November 2nd. We're on display as much as all the entries <v Speaker>in this great Texas state fair. <v Speaker>He's a very logical leader of the Republican Party being chosen by Mr Nixon because he

<v Speaker>was loyal. <v Speaker>There's been a mere mention of Watergate. Virtually every time Jimmy Carter opened his <v Speaker>mouth, uh he's not gonna let anyone forget about it. <v Speaker>So, John [inaudible] might as well join the parade. <v Speaker>I d- I don't think they've established any facts. <v Speaker>Uh there've been several of these efforts recently. <v Speaker>We're not relying on any votes going to to Eugene McCarthy to carry the state. <v Speaker>I do think that any votes uh uh that that McCarthy does <v Speaker>garner on Election Day will will be to our advantage. <v Speaker>The Republicans adopted their 1932 platform, <v Speaker>which is about we're expected to stop. <v Speaker>I had projected the Democrats would go back to 48 <v Speaker>and I was wrong. They actually stopped at 52, <v Speaker>but not with the Democratic platform. They picked up the Republican platform at 52. <v Speaker>So there is a difference between the 2. <v Speaker>I think anybody can be for whoever they wanna be for. <v Speaker>[choir singing]

<v Speaker>I think if Handel looks down from heaven, he would be <v Speaker>proud of this choir and this orchestra. <v Speaker>And Mr. President that's why the White House oughtta <v Speaker>be in Dallas, Texas, and not in Washington. <v Speaker>The battle for the White House has been intense in Texas, and some say it may turn out to

<v Speaker>be the swing state for Gerald Ford or for Jimmy Carter. <v Speaker>Since 1928, Texas has voted with the winner every time, but <v Speaker>once. [no footage for remaining 15 minutes]