Alternate Ford Running Mates in '76?

[SlideAway]

The choice for Ford came down to Dole or William Ruckelshaus, the former Deputy AG under Nixon who had resigned rather than carry out the "Saturday Night Massacre." Ford and his team initially decided on Ruckelshaus, but the next morning Ford changed his mind, fearing that Reagan supporters might find Ruckelshaus too moderate.

Nevertheless, the pick would have distanced Ford more from Watergate, and might have been a boon with swing voters. The other leading alternatives were, according to the Steve Kornacki piece (the latter link) Howard Baker (who didn't poll as well as expected) and Anne Armstrong, a GOP donor / Nixon-Ford advisor and then-ambassador to the UK.

 

[GeographyDude]

But . . .

Gerald Ford almost won the 1976 election, in spite of

(1) early October, his delay in asking for the resignation of his Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, when it became known which member of his administration had told an obscene joke which was derogatory of black people, and in the presence of either reporters and/or singer Pat Boone. Even though Ford had loyalty to Butz, and even though it was complicated, for Butz may have prefaced the joke with "“Things have come a long way since the days when a ward politician could say . . . ”
http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a100476butzresign

(2) his blunder of "there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration" on the October 6 debate. Actually, I've read that Ford was overprepared and this referred to an intra-administration squabble and philosophic debate whether to accept the Soviet domination as a given and a fact of life. So, the political lesson is: Don't overprepare for a debate. Spend the last couple of days giving easy speeches and/or talking with just average citizens about their concerns. Plus, due to Ford's stubbornness, it was about a week before he cleared the matter up, and lost a week of momentum when he had been gaining on Carter. (I may have gotten the part about loss of momentum from the book by his Press Secretary Ron Nessen.)

And President Ford still almost won the election!



* yes, singer Pat Boone. Sometimes actually history is stranger and wonky-er than an alternate timeline which kind of needs to follow a narrative which makes sense.