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Today has been proclaimed a national day of mourning in honor of former President Gerald R. Ford, who died Dec. 26 at age 93 as America's longest-living former president. To put that age in some kind of perspective, he was four years older than John F. Kennedy, who died 43 years ago. The decade of the 1910s produced four presidents -- Ronald Reagan, born in 1911; Ford and Richard M. Nixon, 1913; and Kennedy, 1917.
Somewhere in one of those cluttered dresser drawers
where guys toss things when they have nowhere else to put
them, things like old belt buckles and a postcard from Bill
Owens mailed from Moscow in 1989, I have a campaign button
that says Betty Ford's Husband for President.
I wore
it back in 1976, for I gladly voted for Ford that year, the
first and last time I voted for a Republican for that
office.
His 1974 pardon of Richard M. Nixon hadn't sat well with me and millions of other people, but over time, it made sense. America needed to address the present and future, not haggle over the past, and putting Nixon in jail wasn't going to fix anything. Ford also got us out of Vietnam.
He seriously bungled a 1976 debate question about Soviet domination of eastern Europe, but his acceptance of the Helsinki Accords in 1975 paved the way for the collapse of the Soviet Union.
As a part-time Vail resident, he was as close as Colorado ever came to having one of its own in the White House. He was the only president I ever met in the flesh, although that came after he was out of office, when he appeared at the 1978 state Republican convention.
It's interesting to speculate how differently things might have turned out if Ford had won the 1976 presidential election. He had to work for his own party's nomination -- Ronald Reagan mounted a serious challenge. To placate that wing of the party, Ford dumped his vice-president, Nelson Rockefeller, and replaced him with Kansas Sen. Bob Dole. One might note that ever since then, for the past eight presidential elections, the Republican ticket has had someone named Dole or Bush.
Ford started out well behind former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter in the polls, something like 30 points, but the more people saw of Carter, the better Ford did; he lost by only 1.7 million votes out of 80 million cast.
Carter's victory had several pernicious effects. Previously it was enough for a presidential candidate to have been born once, and since then, most must be born again, and many feel compelled to affect a drawl. Carter also gained the White House without carrying a single state in the West, not even along the Pacific Coast.
At the time, the West was somewhat competitive. Even Utah and Idaho had Democratic governors.
And how did Carter treat them? In 1977, he announced a
hit list
of water projects that he opposed funding.
To be sure, most of them were money-wasting pork-barrel
environmental disasters, but he never consulted with the
governors, didn't even give them a heads-up. They were in
shock. As our Democratic Gov. Dick Lamm put it then,
They look for our coal, they look for our oil shale,
they look for our uranium -- they look to Colorado for
their energy. But their opening card is to sock us in the
face.
Meanwhile Carter tried to eliminate the mountain snowpack measurements conducted by the federal Soil Conservation Service. The idea was to turn it over to the states, but is there any reason on earth that a downstream state would trust Colorado's measurements? There are some things the feds have to do.
Carter pretty much made the Mountain West a one-party zone for the better part of a generation.
If Ford had won, there might never have been a
Sagebrush Rebellion.
By 1980, after six years of a
Ford administration, the Reaganistas might have turned a
mere flash in the pan, rather than a growing and potent
faction.
The Republican Party might have stayed true to its sensible Midwestern origins, sparing us its takeover by the Old Confederacy and its long-held affection for cheap labor, free trade and jingo militarism.
Alas, Ford lost in 1976. But he did pretty well for a
man who never wanted to be president. As Thomas Jefferson
once observed, Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on
offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.
Ford escaped most of that by serving as America's only non-elected president, and that may be why so many of us will mourn his passing.
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