My life

The last few weeks of the campaign were dominated by a new phenomenon in Arkansas politics: completely negative television ads. There was a tough one on the car tags. But White’s most effective campaign ad showed rioting Cubans, with a strong voice-over telling viewers that the governors of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin cared about their people and they got rid of the Cubans, but I cared more about Jimmy Carter than the people of Arkansas, “and now we’ve got them all.” When Hillary and I first saw it, we thought it was so outrageous that no one would believe it. A poll taken right before the ad started running had shown that 60 percent of the people thought I’d done a good job at Fort Chaffee, while 3 percent thought I’d been too tough and 20 percent, the hard-core right, too weak. I could have satisfied them only by shooting every refugee that left the fort.

We were wrong about the ads. They were working. In Fort Smith, local officials, including Sheriff Bill Cauthron and Prosecuting Attorney Ron Fields, strongly defended me, saying I had done a good job and had taken risks to protect the people around the fort. As we all know now, a press conference will not counter the effect of a powerful negative ad. I was sinking in the quicksand of Cubans and car tags. Several days before the election, Hillary called Dick Morris, whom I had replaced with Peter Hart because my people hated dealing with Dick’s abrasive personality. She asked him to do a poll to see if there was anything we could do to pull it out. To his credit, Dick did the poll, and with characteristic bluntness said that I would probably lose. He made a couple of suggestions for ads, which we followed, but as he predicted, it was too little, too late.

On election day, November 4, Jimmy Carter and I got 48 percent of Arkansas’ vote, down from his 65

percent in 1976 and my 63 percent in 1978. However, we lost in very different ways. The President carried fifty of the seventy-five counties, holding on to the Democratic strongholds where the Cuban issue cut into but didn’t eliminate his margin of victory, and getting annihilated in the more conservative Republican areas in western Arkansas, where there was a high turnout, fueled by voters’ anger over his broken pledge on the Cubans, and by Reagan’s alliance with Christian fundamentalists and their opposition to abortion and the Panama Canal treaties. Arkansas still hadn’t gone over to the Republicans. Carter’s 48 percent was seven points better than his national percentage. If it hadn’t been for the broken pledge, he would have carried the state.

By contrast, I carried only twenty-four counties, including those with heavy black populations and a few where there was more support for or less opposition to the highway program. I lost all eleven counties in Democratic northeast Arkansas, almost all the rural counties in the Third District, and several in south Arkansas. I had been killed by the car tags. The main effect of the Cuban ad was to take away voters who had been supporting me despite their reservations. Public approval of my performance on the Cuban issue kept my poll ratings higher than they would have been in the face of the car tags, the interest groups’ opposition, and the dour economic situation. What happened to me in 1980 was strikingly similar to what happened to President George H. W. Bush in 1992. The Gulf War kept his poll numbers high, but underneath there was a lot of discontent. When people decided they weren’t going to vote for him on the war issue, I moved ahead. Frank White used the Cuban ad to do the same thing to me.

In 1980, I ran better than President Carter in the Republican areas in western Arkansas, where there was more direct knowledge of how I had handled the Cuban situation. In Fort Smith and Sebastian County, I actually led the Democratic ticket, because of Fort Chaffee. Carter got 28 percent. Senator Bumpers, who had practiced law there for more than twenty years but who had committed the unpardonable sin of voting to “give away” the Panama Canal, got 30 percent. I got 33 percent. That’s how bad it was. On election night I was in such bad shape I didn’t think I could bear to face the press. Hillary went down to the headquarters, thanked the workers, and invited them to the Governor’s Mansion the next day. After a fitful night’s sleep, Hillary, Chelsea, and I met with a couple hundred of our die-hard supporters on the back lawn of the mansion. I gave them the best speech I could, thanking them for all they’d done, telling them to be proud of all we’d accomplished, and offering my cooperation to Frank White. It was a pretty upbeat talk considering the circumstances. Inside, I was full of self-pity and anger, mostly at myself. And I was filled with regret that I would no longer be able to do the work I loved so much. I expressed the regret but kept the whining and anger to myself.