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Many moderate and big-city Republicans were deeply distressed, thinking Dole is too conservative. Moreover, Dole is a crony of Ford's, a fellow Midwesterner with an almost identical ideology. By picking him, Ford appeared to be looking inward instead of reaching out as the G.O.P. must do. Illinois Republican Senator Charles Percy believed that the selection of Dole compounds Ford's problem of winning in November. Said he: "If you are trying to reach voters in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New England, where a lot of the people are, the question is: What can he contribute? How do you reach independents and Democrats with a former chairman of the Republican Party?'1
The choice of Dole also signaled to many that the Republicans have written off most of the South to Jimmy Carter. If Ford meant to contest Carter on his home turf, he might more plausibly have picked Tennessee's Howard Baker or Texas' John Connally. Jimmy Carter expressed approval: "Senator Dole is an excellent choice. It would be very difficult for the Republicans to challenge me successfully in the South, and it may be that President Ford just decided not to try."
Can Carter-Mondale beat Ford-Dole? The familiar arithmetic, according to the Gallup poll, is that only 22% of U.S. adults list themselves as Republicans, v. 46% as Democrats and 32% as independents. Last week Ford's minions trumpeted a new Gallup poll showing that Carter's lead over the President had narrowed by a remarkable ten points since late July. But Carter remains ahead by an impressive margin —56% to 33%.
Among his other problems, the President is burdened by Watergate; memories of Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon will surface often in the next ten weeks. In his keynote address, Baker tried to bury the issue by contending that the Republicans had faced up to it "with honor and dignity." And he carried the battle to the Democrats: "Since then, America has learned a lot about other political abuses in prior Democratic Administrations, and even in the present Democratic Congress—abuses of personal liberties, invasions of privacy and political mischief of the most shocking type. But there is one big difference. We faced ours, and in so doing, we raised the country's expectations for honorable government. But we are still waiting for the Democrats to face theirs."
Following tradition, the campaign will formally start on Labor Day. Confident of carrying the South, Carter will spend most of his time in the West, industrial Midwest and Northeast—particularly California, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Ohio. To shore up his campaign in the urban Northeast, Carter has set up at his Atlanta headquarters an "ethnic desk" staffed by Terry Sunday, formerly a staffer at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, and Victoria Mongiardo, a nun who used to work for the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs.