Can’t resist going once more into the Living Room Campaign.  This time to the Ford / Carter campaign in 1976. What’s most interesting is that you can see Ford struggling to bring together key elements of what would become the Reagan coalition.  Carter was clearly not the type of candidate they expected to be running against. He wasn’t very liberal. He was from the deep south, and he made his evangelical Baptist faith a cornerstone of his campaign.

So, the Ford campaign seized on Carter’s famous interview with Playboy in which he said that he had experienced lust in his heart.  And produced this strange ad featuring A. S Criswell, who was head of the Southern Baptists.

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1976/criswell

The 1976 race was only four years after Nixon had unveiled his Southern Strategy, to use Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation as the means to move the solid Democratic south to the Republican Party. But, Carter was from Georgia, and 1976 was to be the last hurrah for the Solid South.  Carter carried all the southern states, including Texas! California back then was a reliably Republican state, and Ford carried it.

The Ford campaign eschewed subtly in appealing to white southerners. They rolled out this spot, featuring Strom Thurmond directly addressing racist voters. He accuses Jimmy Carter, in the service of big union bosses, of being willing to eliminate “our States Rights away clause.”  I have no idea what he’s actually talking about there, but everyone watching sure knew what Strom meant when he was talking about States Rights. This one does belong in a museum. “See, kids, that was what a segregationist looked and sounded like.”

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1976/strom-thurmond

Finally, this anthemic spot for Ford doesn’t need much set up. It’s like watching a team of high school students try to make a presidential spot. The song was surely rejected by R.C. Cola as being too vapid to represent their fine product.  For some reason Ford has a ship’s wheel leaning against the wall of the Oval Office. No one bothered to mount it. He wasn’t going to be there that long, why put holes in the wall?

Clearly everyone on the campaign team was using cocaine.  Ford himself looks stoned as he leans back in his chair, gestures in the air and pretends to work for the camera.

They are making all kinds of efforts to be diverse, though.  Which makes the Reagan Morning in America spot all the more striking for its broad-shouldered, car-pooling, hard-working whiteness.  Here’s the link.  Be careful, the song is catchy:

“We’re living here in peace again

“We’re going back to work again”

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1976/peace