Hamilton Jordan: Looking Back

A. Well, from the beginning I saw two kinds of hurdles. One was ours and one was Reagan's. I saw us either getting into the ball game or not getting into the ball game. I never said that around, obviously, but there was a question in my mind whether we were going to get in striking distance. We seemed to have gotten over that hurdle two or three weeks [away from the election]. The other hurdle was whether Reagan would, as Pat Caddell said, begin to look plausible as a president and my judgment was he had not.

And then the debate happened, which helped him a lot, although I can't say that was a decisive factor, and then this thing that Pat told us the day of the election and it sounded like just a good excuse that we were concocting for ourselves, but the hostage thing hurt us a lot. It symbolized all of the feeling of helplessness, that we'd lost control of our destiny, of our lives. Everything wrapped into one symbolic incident.

Q. What did you guys, what did the president do wrong?

A. I cannot point to any one thing that cost us the election. It was almost like it was bigger than us.

Q. You don't think that making the attacks on Reagan boomeranged because he didn't look to be the kind of person that the president seemed to be attacking? And it got vicious. . .

A. That wasn't vicious. That was a bogus issue. Carter mean? Show me examples in his government when so-called meaness has affected his policy decision. He said some things on the stump that maybe he regretted and Reagan said some things I'm sure that he regretted. But that really was a bogus issue.

We were trying to make Reagan the issue. If the American people had voted on the differences, Carter would have won. I don't think they voted on the differences and, if they did, it's not conservatism; it's just that we've tried this Democratic stuff for a while, let's try something else.

Q. When did you know how bad it was going to be?

A. Well, we had a feeling after the debate over the weekend that we were in trouble, although the polls showed us still close. But then the Iranian thing just all broke against us.

Q. Do you have a feeling that the election system -- the length of the campaign and the costs and the financing, etc. -- is a mess and that needs to be changed?

A. There are a lot of changes that need to be made, but I don't see a practical way to make those changes.

There is this idea of a disposable president -- every four years we've got to get a new president. A lot of the problems that we face need eight years of continuity in focus to be successfully grappled with. But the election starts so early. And the federal election law is kind of a farce. I think.

This is one thing I was going to try to stay involved in. I wanted to see if we could -- as a second-term president -- change things.