Oh fuck yeah (okay probably not but let’s run with it). Now let’s be clear: dude had Parkinson’s and was openly diagnosed. On the other hand it’s 1979 and we know that it is a disease aimed at the body not the mind and like not tons else.
Kennedy doesn’t run without Carter. Hugh Carey is lovely on paper and weaker in reality. Askew is a perfect VP and could never translate beyond Governor. Carter might be back. Jerry Brown is forever and ever the wildcard, all the way or nowhere. Bayh is running for Senate, so is McGovern: the Watergate Babies like Hart are going for re-election. Mondale of course, but ouch after Carter. Nah. The Western Jack Morman who brings the idea of FDR, who loves Kennedy and has close ties, Westerner against Westerner. It has to be Udall, in a scenario where Carter fails and Kennedy sensibly doesn’t get in.
So obviously Udall plays FDR and Reagan (who also wants to be FDR) given his age backs Udall to the hilt if asked. Udall sticks with “I shall serve my country in a wheelchair on a battleship as Franklin Delano Roosevelt did with my mind clear and my legs failing, no man or woman stricken by circumstance is less than those of fortune—thousands of veterans have served witness to the fate that will fall me. Here I was thinking winding up with one eye was god’s way of punishment for me.”
Morris K. Udall deploys what we now call dad jokes, his evident good humour, his call for universal healthcare to save people before afflicted like himself (the personal is political…) and perhaps most of all he spared with Ronald Reagan at the debates as a fellow human being instead of some Goldwater sequel. Udall throws Carter “a good man…” under the bus so hard that trucks are dodging the debris six ways to Sunday.
All of this simply means that as the sun dawns on November 4th, 1980, Represenative Mo Udall faces a coin flip of an election…