An Era Of Limits

Hey everybody! I'm oakvale. You might remember I wrote a timeline called An Era of Limits many moons ago, which focused on the improbable election of Jerry Brown to the Presidency. I ended it with Brown losing re-election in 1980, and with the passage of time I've come to regret that. I enjoyed working on the timeline, and people seemed to enjoy reading it. So it's back, new, improved and, hopefully, without any of the glaring flaws the marked the original. Hope you all enjoy. Oh, and, no, I'm not necessarily saying this means Brown will win in '80...

This should be considered the final, 'official' version of the TL, with new events, new characters and more. It's also, most importantly, been entirely rewritten. The POD is the same, everything else is not.

Please note that I'll be using some fictional characters, whom you should think of as mostly obscure politicos you merely wouldn't have heard of in our version of history. Any resemblance to any person living or dead may or not be coincidental, but I'm sure you can work it out. Let's start with the relevant passage of the memoir of, er, someone you've never heard of in our timeline, as Jerry Brown decides to enter the New Hampshire primary.







“Not that long after leaving the Monitor, something transpired that would define the trajectory of my life for many years. I was twenty-six years old, ostensibly a graduate student, and, on very rare occasion, a freelance journalist, and my friends were starting to get unnerved by the fact that I was still doggedly chairing the New Hampshire chapter of the Draft Brown For President campaign. Truth be told, 'New Hampshire chapter' is redunant. We were the only chapter. There were about fifteen of us, give or take depending on who had class on what day or who had to work what hours, all volunteers, with poorly-made t-shirts that simply read “Brown!” and a youthful idealism that seems absurd in retrospect. We drank bad coffee and handed out leaflets – Five Reasons Jerry Brown Should Be The Next President! – and waited, holding out hope despite the odds that the man the press unanimously referred as the 'maverick California governor' would enter the race. Time and time again there would be an article in the paper, a sentence in a television report, that would make some vague reference to Brown considering the race, or to donors approaching him, or, on one memorable occasion, to a 'small New Hampshire-based draft movement'. Each time, we would get our hopes up, and each time, inevitably, we would be disappointed as Brown's office would refute the rumors and say that he had no intention of seeking national office.

As the dates ticked by and the filing deadline for the New Hampshire primary approached, we were starting to give up hope. Or, at least, I was. Despite tantalising reports that Jerry – we were all calling the Governor Jerry by that point, even though none of us had ever met him – was considering jumping in, the race trundled along the same as always. Some governor from Georgia no-one had ever heard of by the name of Carter was starting to generate a little buzz in Iowa, but we didn't think much of it. Udall had all the press, along with Scoop Jackson, and, as ever, George Wallace was insidiously lurking around with his powerful constituency of disaffected Southern whites. By October of 1975, I'd privately accepted that the 'movement' was a waste of time, that Jerry was, truly, going to pass, and that we'd end up with President Jackson. Or Reagan. I hadn't the heart to suggest folding to the others yet, though. They were all a little younger than me, still optimistic that Jerry would change his mind, that the official denials were just a smokescreen. For my part I'll admit that I'd already made plans to join the local Udall organisation, probably shutting the Draft movement down once the deadline had passed and our candidate was nowhere to be seen.

I remember the moment I got the big news. I was trying to quit smoking at the time, and failing by virtue of the fact that I was standing outside our 'headquarters' – an old storefront with some home-made posters in the window – in the snow, shivering and smoking a cigarette. People gave me odd looks as they walked by, curiously glancing at my too-large 'Brown!' t-shirt. A few months prior I would have been beaming, thrusting our leaflets at them, trying to articulate just why we wanted Jerry to run so badly. I was too resigned for that kind of enthusiasm now, and returned the confused looks with a strained smile while puffing on my beloved Camels. The door of the storefront flew open and Jennifer, one of our more dedicated volunteers – by this point there were six or seven on a good day – ran out, almost slipping on the ice. I raised an eyebrow.

“Jerry's in!” she said excitedly, grinning, “They just reported it on ABC. He's filing the paperwork tomorrow!”

I dropped my cigarette.”

- From The Long Game: A Political Life by David Bergen.

“BROWN RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT; FILES IN DEM. PRIMARY”

- Headline of the Concorde Monitor, 11/25/1975

“This is an era of limits, and we had all better get used to it."

- Governor Jerry Brown (D-CA) at his announcement speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, 11/30/1975

“The year of 1976 was also the first time I remember becoming even slightly interested in political matters, as the Presidential election rolled around. After the national trials of Watergate and Nixon's pardon, all of which I was vaguely aware of as background noise, the country was looking for a fresh face to wash away the sins of those dark years. Like many people of their generation, my grandparents, staunch Democrats who nonetheless admitted to having voted for Nixon in '72 out of fear of the supposedly radical George McGovernor, liked Jimmy Carter, then an unknown Georgia Governor making his first try at the Presidency. My mother supported Jerry Brown's campaign, but I was fourteen, and didn't much care about the issues.

I instinctively liked Brown, though. He was young, and, to use a word often abused, dynamic. To my young mind he compared favourably against old dinosaurs like President Ford. Or any of the crusty Democrats who'd occasionally appear on TV asking for votes. My support, of sorts, for Brown, was, inevitably given my age, based on superficialities. He had charisma, and energy, and seemed like he represented some kind of intangible progress. And, most of all, youth. I didn't pay much attention to that election, but one afternoon I bought a Jerry Brown badge for a couple of dollars and it remained pinned to my jacket for the rest of the year. That was my first involvement with politics.”

- From Photographs Of Dad: A Memoir by Supreme Court Chief Justice Barack Obama.

037771 said:

Have been looking forward to this for a while now

Great beginning too; really liked this image-



Did that particular draft movement exist in OTL?

Anyway, looking forward to the campaign!

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First of all, thanks, because your quote allowed me to notice a couple of typos that had went undetected.

I'm not aware of the draft movement existing in OTL, but there's usually minor draft movements for all kinds of candidates, so I could be wrong. Wouldn't be the first time!

Oh my goodness, I'm in a Brown induced ecstasy!

Really enjoyed the original TL. This is going to be awesome.

Subscribed, oakvale!

Subscribed

Two new chapters up this weekend, as the New Hampshire primary rapidly approaches and the campaign begins in earnest.

...or not, since I've been without internet access since Thursday evening. Gah.

Hopefully normal service will be restored as soon as the horrendously incompetent phone company fix whatever's wrong on Monday. Apologies for the delay, not much I can do.

Also, browsing internet forums on a phone like I'm doing now is an awful experience.

“By the time Jimmy Carter stormed to victory in the Iowa caucues in January, the Brown For America campaign was running at full steam. We were based out of New Hampshire – even if our national office was nominally in Sacramento – with some staff and offices in a handful other primary states, and were performing decently in fundraising – Gray Davis, Brown's businesslike campaign manager, was responsible for gently dissuading the Governor from some of his more eccentric ideas, like refusing large donations. As noble as the principle might have been, we needed the money to make a dent in the early primaries.

Gray, a somewhat austere, coolly professional man who'd been Brown's Chief of Staff back in California, had met with me not long after Brown entered the race. Casting an eye over the 'Draft Brown' storefront's array of posters and crudely-designed t-shirts, he was either mildly impressed, or felt sorry for me, and hired me as his assistant the next week. With abysmal pay and nightmarish hours, I'd follow Gray around, taking notes, trying to make sense of an increasingly illogical schedule, and placing phone calls to the dozens and dozens of supposedly influential New Hampshire hacks who could give us the edge we needed in the nation's first primary. It was a sign of things to come.

One of the most memorable events in those frenetic months happened when I walked into my tiny office in our Manchester headquarters and found a skinny, almost gaunt, dishevelled man with greying hair and a beard sitting at my desk, smoking the cigarettes I still hadn't given up. He nodded at me - “I heard the Gov's banging Linda Ronstandt. Don't spread that around, though,” he said, and put his feet up on my desk. That's how I met Marc Madrigal.

I'd vaguely heard of Madrigal before this. A minor legend in New England politics, he gained some national attention when he'd worked on George McGovern's doomed campaign in 1972, quitting after the Thomas Eagleton fiasco. He had no respect for personal boundaries, cared little for the conventional wisdom, and had a propensity for big, novel, and occasionally unworkable ideas. Needless to say, Brown liked him immediately, and Madrigal was hired, over the protestations of Gray Davis, in January of '76, as a 'strategy advisor'.

Madrigal ultimately proposed a strategy that focused on a strong performance in early primaries in an effort to knock out most of our competition early. He theorised, to Gray's grumbling concurrence, that Udall would be a paper tiger, that his inevitable Iowa win would prove irrelevant, and the race would eventually come down to an establishment candidate – the consensus was that it would be Scoop Jackson, with his tough talk on the Soviet Union – a relative newcomer, and George Wallace potentially proving a spoiler, if unlikely to win the nomination. We banked on being the relative newcomer, getting those parts of the Democratic base, and there were a lot, tired of establishment politicians to rally around our fresh-faced candidate, and go on to comfortably win the nomination after gutting Jackson over his cronyism. In many ways, it was a testament to Madrigal's work on the McGovern campaign – the plan ultimately resembled 1972, with the establishment's Hubert Humphrey being narrowly defeated by the insurgent McGovern candidacy. Obviously, we hoped for and expected a different result come November.

Part of Madrigal's plan involved a risky tactic of attempting to present Brown as a likely, even inevitable nominee. Our ads attacked President Ford far more than any of the other Democratic candidates, blasting the administration for economic incompetence, a bumbling foreign policy, and the like. We used words like 'dynamic', 'vigorous', 'energetic', and ' leadership' so often that they started to feel like the clichés they were before the primary was even over. The idea was based on the fact that our polling had shown that a sizable chunk of the electorate were hesitant about Brown as a potential President. They liked what he had to say, liked the image, but weren't yet used to the idea of him in the White House. By touting his popular tenure as Governor, his fiscal rectitude, his clean ethical slate, we were trying to get across a simple message – Jerry Brown could be President, and, with your vote, he would be.

When Carter's Iowa win splashed over America's newspapers, we were polling a strong third or fourth nationally, with about ten percent, and had been slowly but surely gathering momentum in New Hampshire. We were as surprised as anyone – we'd been operating under the assumption that the fundamentally week Mo Udall would win the caucus, and that we could then undercut him in New Hampshire. But Carter posed a serious threat to us. A soft-spoken Baptist, Carter was an obscure Governor whom no-one could seriously call 'establishment'. If he followed his Iowa triumph with a win in New Hampshire – a strong possibility, considering that the 'liberal' vote, which was lukewarm towards Carter, was split between several other candidates, not least of all Jerry Brown – he'd be the clear challenger to Scoop Jackson, and quite arguably the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.

And so, in the month between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, we panicked en masse. Carter proved a problematic opponent – focus groups showed again and again that he had the highest favorability ratings of any candidate, and attacks could run a risk of backfiring. The strategy we settled on proved to be a smart one – we blasted Udall, Frank Church, the liberal darling from Idaho, and Oklahoma Senator Frank Harris. All three were considered liberal candidates, and as such it was important to divert their voters to us if we were to edge out the proudly moderate Carter. All this time, too, we continued running our 'general election' ads, incessantly attacking Ford. An amusing side effect of this was that the President's poll numbers began falling in the state, as Ronald Reagan – who appeared as a boogyman in some of our fundraising letters – extended his lead. I don't know if we were responsible, but one of Ford's strategists complained about us in the local press, which provided some gloating from Madrigal and the ad people.

There was an unspoken agreement that winning New Hampshire was vital to our chances. If we came up short in the Granite State, it was as good as over. Without the good publicity we'd get from a win, no matter how slight, it was unlikely we'd take Massachusetts or Vermont, let alone Florida, where we were struggling in the polls. If Carter swept all four, which was a distinct possibility, the race was finished. We worked hard, getting by on four hours of sleep (on a good day) and endless cups of coffee – the quality of which, unfortunately, hadn't improved despite the absorption of our draft movement into a professional, national campaign. On some occasions Gray would dismiss me and I'd leaflet a town in the freezing cold, usually with Todd Delaney, one of the more persistent volunteers from the Draft days, or Jennifer Gallen, the one who'd broken the news of Brown's entry to me just months ago. In a helpful coincidence, Jennifer actually had uncle, Hugh, who was a state representative and would, a few years later, become Governor. He helped us out a little, putting the occasional phone call to one of the people who supposedly essential for winning whichever township we were canvassing. It was a hard month, but it seemed to pay off. The day before the primary, polls showed us neck and neck with Carter, who'd been catapulted to frontrunner status, as Udall and the others faded.

The night of the New Hampshire primary was one of the longest of my life. Watching the early returns in the sterile headquarters with most of the staff after a day of last-minute campaigning and driving people to the polls in my beloved if unimpressive Ford Maverick , I was a nervous wreck. I clutched a cold cup of coffee which I didn't touch all night. When the results started to show Carter with a lead, my heart sank. Madrigal, who held a grudge against Carter for the latter's role in the 'anyone but McGovern' movement four years ago, started drinking from a flask. Gray Davis, as ever, remained taciturn, pacing grimly. But, as the votes continued to pour in, we began closing the gap. Udall was doing much worse than expected, and we seemed to have been the beneficiary. Late that night, Brown overtook Carter for the first time in the tallies, and an almighty cheer went up. Gray actually smiled. Madrigal kept drinking, but now it was in celebration rather than despair. Reagan seemed to be beating Ford, although by a narrower margin than polling had showed.

In the early hours of the morning, we got the news. The anchor cleared his throat - “With over ninety percent of ballots counted, we're now calling the Democratic New Hampshire primary for California Governor Jerry Brown...”

The room burst into applause, and some people cried. Gray and Madrigal awkwardly hugged, which remains the only time I've ever seen that happen. As we hurried to the town hall where the victorious Governor was to give his victory speech, I realised that we were really, truly in with a chance to win the nomination. It all felt a bit surreal.

We followed up our sensational New Hampshire victory by taking Massachusetts, narrowly beating Scoop Jackson, who was going on the attack against both Brown and Carter, but Carter hit back by easily winning Vermont the same day.

Madrigal echoed the opinion of the campaign upper echelon by declaring that it would Florida, where we were surging, that would determine whether it would be Brown or Carter who would ultimately be the nominee. Both he and Gray seemed convinced that whichever one of the two 'anti-establishment' candidates lost Florida would effectively have to withdraw, as the winner would duly be anointed frontrunner and go on to defeat Scoop Jackson in the next run of primaries. Boarding a flight to Orlando weeks before the crucial primary, I felt simultaneously exhausted and invigorated. I hadn't had a proper night's sleep in months, but, just maybe, it could all be over very soon. If Brown won, he would be effectively the presumptive nominee. If Carter won, we would quickly run out of steam as attention shifted to the Georgia Governor. Either way, Florida looked likely to decide who would garner the most publicity, and, thus, quite possibly the nomination.”

- From The Long Game: A Political Life by David Bergen.

“It's exceedingly clear, according to every reputable poll and pundit, that either Governor Carter or Governor Brown will win Florida. This will probably decide which one the anti-establishment vote coalesces around, and perhaps even who will ultimately be the party's nominee.”

- Editorial in the Orlando Sentinel, 3/08/1976

“WALLACE TAKES FLORIDA; REAGAN BEATS FORD” [1]

- Headline of the New York Times, 3/10/1976




[1] It's obviously worth pointing out that Wallace was, certainly, in his own way very much an anti-establishment candidate, if of a markedly different ilk, and with a different vote, than either Brown or Carter.

With my internet access finally restored, I'll have the second of these two latest chapters up shortly.

Please don't kill off Reagan .

I'm liking this new one as much, if not more than the old one. Very nice, oakvale. Looking forward to Jerry Brown's further adventures in politics!

Side note though, I noticed that you repeatedly referred to Mo Udall as a "weak candidate". Why was that?

Just bumping this because I think it needs more attention, and also because you might have forgotten about it.

Fear not guys, I certainly haven't forgotten you. It's just that my tonsils are currently in the painful process of rotting out of my throat (I might be exaggerating, but ugh).

Rest assured that updates will be resuming ASAP.

Good news everyone! I'll have the new update (or two) up before the heat death of the universe. This weekend, to be exact. Friday, maybe, but Saturday's more likely.

Sorry for the incessant delays, I've been spending my time fighting off minor throat infections and researching Jonestown, which will play a rather prominent part in this story.

oakvale said:

Good news everyone! I'll have the new update (or two) up before the heat death of the universe. This weekend, to be exact. Friday, maybe, but Saturday's more likely.

Sorry for the incessant delays, I've been spending my time fighting off minor throat infections and researching Jonestown, which will play a rather prominent part in this story.

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Get better, oakvale!

So yeah, when I made that promise I, y'know, couldn't keep I kind of forgot that this week is what Americans refer to as "finals week", and thus I've been studying (or attempting to) for most of the time I'm awake.

The good side of that is that once my exams are over I hope to get few chapters in before Christmas. If all goes to plan (a big if, as people who've read my timelines know ) I hope to be covering the general election before the year's out. The primaries drag on for a bit in exhausting fashion, but that's politics for you.

This is not an era of limits. Unlimited updatage is demanded.

V-J said:

This is not an era of limits. Unlimited updatage is demanded.

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You're right! My exams are done and I'm now over my massive hangover from the ensuing celebrations, so I'm actually working on an update right now. With my fingers typing on the keys and stuff.

Soon Jerry will be
Preeeeeehhhh
siiiiii
dent.