NickFeyR: Considering that the Labour Party barely won the OTL 1964 General Election given the problems that were plaguing the ruling Conservative Party, Labour isn't in a position yet TTL to take power away from the Conservatives (who are in better shape than they were historically). As long as the economy remains good and the British flag continues to fly over Hong Kong, Rab Butler doesn't have to fear being knocked out of power by Harold Wilson. However, if things go sour for Butler over the next few years, it would help Wilson make a stronger argument that it is time for a change.
Historically, the Conservative Party held power for thirteen years (1951-1964). In this AAR they have held power for twelve years (since 1952), so they have actually been in power a year less. Having the Conservatives win in 1964 isn't too unrealistic in my view. One could argue that Labour didn't so much win that election as Conservatives lost it. Wilson himself thought the Conservatives would have won in 1964 had they chose Butler instead of Alec Douglas-Home.
Conservatives have not been in power for decades. Winston Churchill served as Prime Minister for eight years (1940-1948) before being replaced by Clement Attlee. Attlee served as Prime Minister for four years (1948-1952) before the Conservatives regained power with Anthony Eden (who had a much better Premiership TTL). Butler succeeded Eden in 1960, primarily because a reader wanted to see a Butler Premiership and explained to me how it could be done.
I can assure you that Labour is going to grab power at some point; just not right now.
El Pip: I will let McGovern answer that question: "I wanted to run for President in the worse possible way and I am sure I did."
Wow. Maybe I should put you in charge. It sounds better that LBJ's policy. "We are fighting in Vietnam because I'm Lyndon Baines Johnson and I need to prove myself to everybody at all times!"
Then there's the Democratic Party here in America, which stayed in power for twenty years (1933-1953). The Republicans kept losing elections to the point that Groucho Marx remarked that "The only way a Republican can get into the White House is to marry Margaret Truman."
Kurt_Steiner: POTUS...sounds like some kind of disease.
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The 1964 Presidential Campaign: Part Four
During the 1964 Presidential campaign, the “Washington Post” published a political cartoon by Herbert Block depicting Democratic candidate George McGovern as a railroad engineer who announced that it would be only a short amount of time before the train he was driving reached its’ destination which was the White House. He made the announcement despite the fact that his train was derailed and therefore wasn’t actually going anywhere. Block’s cartoon was a reflection of McGovern’s insistence throughout the entire campaign that he would win the election...even though he trailed in all the polls. The candidate had convinced himself that he would score a major upset victory on Election Day because he was the “peoples’ candidate” and therefore he had more support than what the polls were showing. However, not everyone on Team McGovern had, in the words of Adam Savage, rejected reality and substituted their own. When McGovern asked his campaign manager how many states he was presently leading in, his manager refused to spin the awful truth:
“George, I can answer that question with one hand.”
In the final week of the campaign, the South Dakota Senator finally stopped fooling himself and faced the grim reality. Thirteen points behind his Republican rival Malcolm Forbes with no shot of closing that wide gap, McGovern privately recognized what was plainly obvious to everyone else: he was going to lose the election. His leftist platform stood poised to be soundly rejected by the voters and he would become the first Democratic Presidential candidate in sixteen years to go down in defeat. However, just because he acknowledged it in private didn’t mean he wanted to hear it in public. When a heckler at a campaign rally in Michigan during those final days shouted
“Just quit already!”, McGovern – who was already frustrated by how poorly his campaign was going – lost his temper. Visibly agitated, the candidate abruptly broke away from his speech and snapped back at the heckler:
“You can kiss my ass!”
The off-the-cuff moment was reported in the media, portrayed as a sign that the Democratic candidate was becoming unhinged by his impending defeat.
With his commanding lead in the polls, Forbes could have coasted his way to victory. Instead he kept up the attacks, hammering McGovern in his speeches and campaign commercials as being unfit to be President at such a dangerous time. McGovern though wasn’t Forbes’ only opponent and observers noticed in mid-October a shift in targets. In the final weeks of the campaign, the Republican candidate gave an increasing number of speeches going after third party candidate George Wallace. Sitting at 20% in the Gallup Poll, Wallace was a formidable candidate whose appeal greatly worried Forbes. 20% meant that the Alabama Governor could count on millions of votes that would otherwise go to the main party candidates. While 20% might not win the election outright, Forbes feared that Wallace could siphon off enough votes that he could seriously affect who won which states on Election Day.
“We must not allow our current lead in the polls,” he warned his campaign team,
“To lull us into a false sense of security. In elections, it isn’t the millions of voters who decide the outcome. It is rather a handful of voters in the right places.”
In an election system in which states awarded their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis, the New Jersey Governor understood that as long as you came in first place, you could win a state with just a bare minimum of popular votes. That meant every vote and every state counted, which is why Forbes took Wallace so seriously.
Wallace’s appeal stemmed from his opposition to civil rights gains, which struck a chord not just in the South but in the North as well. As African-Americans in the 1960s got better jobs, moved into better neighborhoods, and went to better schools, it created competition with white and ethnic Americans who had previously taken those things for granted. These Americans greatly resented the competition, believing that it threatened the way of life they were accustomed to. Therefore they were quite receptive of Wallace, who campaigned on getting rid of the competition and returning life to the way it had been before the Civil Rights Movement upset everything. Since he was representing their point of view, it wasn’t at all difficult for Wallace to get a full crowd at his campaign rallies. When the third party candidate was excluded from the October 5th Presidential Debate (neither the Republican nor Democratic candidates wanted to share the stage with him), he responded by holding a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden at the same time the debate was going on. An overflow crowd of 20,000 people showed up at MSG to hear Wallace mercilessly tear into the two men who were presently debating without him.
“It is not my voice they do not want to hear,” he proclaimed before a raucous packed house,
“It is yours! Mr. Forbes and Mr. McGovern do not want to hear your voices in that television studio a few blocks from here, but we are going to make them hear your voices!”
A reporter who was attending the MSG rally wrote afterwards that it was
“the largest political rally held in New York City since Franklin Roosevelt had denounced the forces of ‘organized money’ from the same stage in 1936.”
To chip away at Wallace’s support, Forbes began to seriously go after him. He attacked Wallace as being a one-issue candidate who was running against civil rights but wasn’t running for much of anything else. That his campaign was all bun and little beef (to borrow from the famous Wendy’s 1984 television commercial):
“Governor Wallace has not said what he would do about Social Security. He has not said what he would do about health insurance for the elderly. He has not even said what he would do about the war in Vietnam. All Governor Wallace has said so far is that you should be afraid of your fellow Americans because of the color of their skin. Ladies and gentlemen, fear of others is not a platform for running this country. With the problems that are before us, this campaign is about how we are going to deal with them. Fear of others is not a solution to those problems.”
While Forbes was attacking Wallace as a racial fear-monger who lacked specifics, the Dixiecrat candidate faced attacks from McGovern over labor. In an effort to peel away the blue-collar vote which was running strongly third party, the McGovern campaign highlighted the fact that union workers in the North were losing jobs because companies were moving their jobs south to Alabama. Why Alabama? Because it was a right-to-work state (meaning workers didn’t have to join a union or pay any money to a union but could still receive the same benefits as union members). The Democratic candidate painted Wallace as someone who was taking away union jobs for the benefit of his own non-unionized state (even though Wallace publicly opposed right-to-work laws). These attacks prompted voters to have second thoughts about giving their support to Wallace. When the final Gallup Poll of the 1964 campaign was released on Monday, November 2nd, the Alabama Governor saw his numbers drop five points to 15%. After looking at the final poll, Forbes became cautiously hopeful that Wallace’s hemorrhaging of support would negate his impact on the electoral map.
Forbes, whom the final Gallup Poll showed as winning the election handily, ended his campaign with an Election Eve rally in the city where he had been nominated: San Francisco, California. Several hundred thousand people filled the streets to cheer Forbes and his running mate Everett Dirksen as they were driven back to the Cow Palace. Several prominent California Republican officeholders attended the Election Eve rally, including Governor William F. Knowland and Senators Frederick F. Houser and Richard Nixon. Also in attendance was a recent Republican convert named Ronald Reagan. Until 1962, Reagan had been a conservative Democrat serving in the Jackson Administration as Secretary of Labor. Jackson, wanting his cabinet to be full of people who were experienced in their respective fields and who represented a broad political spectrum, chose Reagan for the Labor post because of his politics and his experience being on both sides of the labor-management table. Then in 1962 came the nationwide steel strike, which brought steel production to a grinding halt. Worried about the impact the steel strike would have on national defense, the President made the decision to nationalize the steel industry and bring it under government control. The Secretary of Labor staunchly opposed the move on the grounds that it was socialistic and urged him not to do it. When Scoop went ahead and did it anyway, Reagan – along with Secretary of Commerce Philip Willkie – resigned from the Administration in protest. Wanting a fresh start following his resignation, Reagan switched political parties and became a conservative Republican.
(Ronald Reagan during his tenure as Secretary of Labor)
In the two years since, Reagan had been touring the country, making speeches which gave his conservative point-of-view. While he wasn’t the only one doing that, there was a major difference which set him apart from the others. During his days as a Hollywood actor and spokesman for General Electric, Reagan developed an understanding that how you said something was just as important as what you said. While other speakers focused squarely on substance, Reagan put emphasis on style. He crafted his delivery so he could show off his natural charisma, his sense of humor, and his radiant optimism. The public response to his style was positive; people liked how he spoke and were won over by his speeches. In the fall of 1964, Reagan’s star was on the rise as he steadily built a national following. Given his growing popularity as a speaker and his conservatism, it should perhaps come as no surprise that Forbes asked him if he would speak at his Election Eve rally. Always mindful of party unity, Forbes wanted to show that he had the backing of conservatives just hours before the polls opened.
“Sure,” Reagan replied when he received the request,
“If you think it would help.”
“I want to thank Governor Forbes,” Reagan began as he stood behind a podium facing a packed house,
“For granting me this opportunity to discuss my own ideas regarding the choice that we face tomorrow.”
It became known as the “Another Course” Speech. In it Reagan said that Forbes was doing as well as he did because he was offering the voters a real different domestic path forward, not a me-too version of the status quo which McGovern represented. He attacked the Democrats for producing
“a tax burden that reaches one-third of our national income. Today in our country the tax collector’s share is thirty-seven cents of every dollar earned; but yet they insist on spending more than the government takes in. They haven’t balanced our budget in the last eleven years, and now our national debt is one-and-a-half times bigger than all the combined debts of all the nations of the world. Now I have an uncomfortable feeling that we cannot base our hopes for prosperity in the future on Senator McGovern.”
Only with Forbes in the White House
“can we have prosperity, for he knows through his firsthand experience that prosperity cannot be produced by more government spending but by less. He has called for reforming our tax policy so we can at least make a start towards restoring for our children the American dream that wealth is denied to no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him.”
As a proponent of a free-market economy, Forbes would offer a much-needed break from the proponents of a planned economy
“who cannot see a fat man standing besides a thin one without automatically coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.”
Reagan ridiculed Democrats for believing
“they can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves”, noting for instance their agricultural policies. Under their policies,
“one-fourth of farming has seen a steady decline in the per capita consumption of everything it produces. That one-fourth is regulated and subsidized by government. In contrast, the three-fourths of farming unregulated and unsubsidized have seen a twenty-one percent increase in the per capita consumption of all its produce. Farm income remains unchanged since 1955, and we have seen a decline of five million in the farm population. We have also seen an increase in the number of Department of Agriculture employees. There is now one such employee for every thirty farms in the United States, and we recently learned that much of the payments that were supposed to go directly to the farmers went to them instead.”
“Governor Forbes, like many of us, accepts responsibility for those who are less fortunate. But he does not believe that spending more on social welfare will, through some magic, end poverty. Federal welfare spending is today ten times greater than it was in the dark depths of the Depression. Federal, state, and local welfare combined spend forty-five billion dollars a year. For three decades we have tried to help the less fortunate by government planning, without success. The more the social welfare plans fail, the more the planners plan. But any time we question their schemes, we are denounced as being opposed to their humanitarian goals. That we are always against, never for anything. Well, it isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”
On foreign policy, Reagan contrasted Forbes who
“knows what’s at stake...in mankind’s long climb from the swamp to the stars” with McGovern whom he blasted as being part of the leftist appeaser crowd
“who tell us that by avoiding a direct confrontation with the enemy he will learn to love us and give up his evil ways. Those who oppose their idea are blanket indicted as war-mongers. Well, let us set one thing straight: there is only one argument with regards to peace and war. Do we want appeasement or courage? The policy of accommodation which Senator McGovern and other well-meaning liberals advocate is appeasement, and we have seen too many times appeasement leading to surrender and the enslavement of our fellow human beings. They are wrong. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right, and this policy of accommodation asks us to accept the greatest possible immorality.”
The election tomorrow was more than just a decision about who should occupy the White House for the next four years, Reagan argued as he closed his speech.
“It is a rendezvous with destiny. We have the opportunity tomorrow to preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth. If we pass up this opportunity, we will sentence them to a thousand years of darkness. We must not let our children and our children’s children say of us that we did not do all that could be done. Let history not record that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent it from happening.”
Reagan’s speech electrified the audience. They applauded throughout and gave him a standing ovation at the end, which he acknowledged with a smile and a wave before departing the podium. Although Reagan wasn’t the only person who spoke at the Election Eve rally, his “Another Course” Speech became the one everyone who was at the Cow Palace remembered. Knowland gushed that Reagan had given
“one hell of a speech.”
Forbes himself was pleased with the speech, glad that he had asked him to speak. While flying across the country overnight so he could be back home in New Jersey to vote in the morning, Forbes jotted down a thank-you note to be hand-delivered to Reagan. He then nodded off. At 7:00 AM EST on Tuesday, November 3rd, polls all across the Eastern United States opened. Election Day had finally arrived.
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This is it. The next update will cover Election Night 1964. It has taken me long enough to get there.
