Jimmy Carter wins in 1980

Robert

Banned
For Jimmy Carter to win re-election several things would have had to happen.

One, the economy would have to be better.

Two, no hostage crisis.

Three, the Soviet Union not be on the move.

and last but not least, Ronald Reagan would not be running against him.
 
If Carter won that way. Reagan would run and win in 84 easily. He would be like Old Hickory in 1824, the campaign starts right after the HR vote.

In this situation, how loudly would the Republicans scream for the abolition of the Electoral College?
 
That's if it happened at all.

October 21, 1980

Reagan Campaign Manager Netted by French Police

(AP) Paris – The French National Police have confirmed that they have detained since yesterday for questioning a William Joseph Casey, an American citizen from New York City. Casey is the national campaign director for the Reagan-Bush Presidential campaign. Casey, along with several other individuals, was first taken into custody at Paris’ Ritz Hotel as a result of what French police officials are describing as a “narcotics investigation.”

“Our Narcotics Bureau received information from a source that a transaction involving the sale of heroin was taking place in a certain suite at the Ritz,” Commissaire de Police Nicholas Pitou, a senior Police official, confirmed in a statement to the press. “Upon entering the suite with the appropriate warrants we detained for questioning several individuals, mostly foreigners, some of whom are American, while others are of Middle Eastern origin.”

The men of “Middle Eastern origin” have been identified as Iranian citizens, although their names have not been released to the press. One of them is alleged to be Mehdi Karroubi, a senior Iranian cleric said to be closely associated with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini, who resided in Paris until early 1979, was the spiritual leader of the revolution which overthrew the Shah of Iran last year. Iran and the United States are currently involved in a tense stand-off over fifty-two U.S. diplomats who are being held hostage by pro-revolutionary radicals in Iran.

In addition to William Casey, at least two other people were identified as American citizens. One is apparently a CIA officer travelling under a false passport. Another was at first identified as Republican Vice Presidential candidate George Bush, however this report was quickly corrected when the alleged “Bush” was identified as American actor Richard Lawson. According to confidential sources associated with the National Police the actor, who bears a physical resemblance to the Vice Presidential candidate, had been hired to impersonate Bush, although the reason for this remains uncertain. The real George Bush is a former Director of the CIA and Chairman of the Republican National Committee.

“No narcotics were discovered,” Commissaire Pitou confirmed, “however several documents were recovered which require further inquiry.” Pitou would not elaborate on that, however other sources within the National Police have confirmed on background that the documents found pertained to weapons systems and may have included price lists for certain weapons.

Consular officials from the U.S. Embassy have been allowed to speak with Casey, Lawson and the third American, but have declined to comment to the press, citing the privacy rights of the people involved.

In Washington, the Reagan-Bush national campaign headquarters expressed surprise at the detention of Casey in Paris.

“We have no knowledge of what he was doing in Paris, or who he was meeting with,” campaign spokesperson James Baker said. “I’m sure there has been some mistake and it will all be sorted out soon. Bill Casey remains involved in some private business ventures, and I’m sure he was mistakenly caught-up in an error by the Paris police.”

Neither Ronald Reagan nor George Bush would comment officially on the arrest.

“This is some kind of a low, sleazy attempt at a smear,” Bush said to reporters at a campaign stop in Connecticut. He was pulled away by his handlers before he could elaborate.

The Carter Administration had no comment on the matter.

“We will coordinate with the French authorities, and find out what has happened. We will reserve any comment until we have all the facts,” White House Spokesperson Jody Powell told reporters at his morning press briefing.

Casey and the others have not been charged with a specific crime. French law allows the police to hold “persons of concern or interest” for seventy-two hours for questioning before charges must be brought, or they must be released.

By contrast, the Iranians were quickly released, and they have left the country. Sources indicate that the French were anxious to release them before any reprisals for their detention could be taken against the French Embassy in Iran’s capital of Tehran, which is still staffed by French diplomats. The Iranian Embassy in Paris claimed no knowledge of the affair, and even denied that the “Middle Eastern men” were Iranians. An Iranian Embassy spokesman suggested that they were “probably Israelis” and that the meeting may have been a “joint Israeli-CIA conspirators’ cabal.”

William Casey is a New York City attorney and business man. He served as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and an Under Secretary of State in the Nixon Administration from 1971 – 1974. During the Second World War he was a member of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the current CIA. His wife Sophia, who resides at their home in Manhattan, declined to speak with reporters.
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Drew said:
That's if it really happened at all.

New York Times Obituary – May 7, 1987

WILLIAM CASEY, CONTRAVERSIAL REPUBLICAN CAMPAIGN MANAGER, DEAD AT 74; TAKES MANY MYSTERIES TO THE GRAVE WITH HIM.

By Bella Fizzbin

William J. Casey, the former Campaign Manager of the 1980 Reagan-Bush Republican Presidential campaign, died of pneumonia yesterday in Glen Cove Community Hospital on Long Island. He was 74 years old.

Mr. Casey caused a sensation in October 1980 when he was detained by French authorities while allegedly meeting with several representatives of the Iranian revolutionary government in what was alleged to have been an arms deal. Whether or not this involved a trade for the fifty-two American diplomats then being held hostage by Iranian militants remains a subject of controversy to this day. Mr. Casey declined to speak to the French and American authorities and refused all opportunities to speak to the press. A Presidential Commission of inquiry headed by former Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton and former Michigan Governor and Michigan Supreme Court Justice Mennen Williams concluded that Mr. Casey had most likely engaged in illegal contact with representatives of a foreign power in violation of the Logan Act, but could not confirm if either the sale of weapons or a trade for the American hostages was conducted at that meeting.

Mr. Casey’s detention at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, along with actor Richard Lawson, who had been employed to impersonate then Republican Vice Presidential candidate George Bush, caused a considerable controversy in the closing days of the 1980 Presidential election. A third, unidentified American man, since alleged to have been a serving CIA officer travelling under a false identity, was briefly detained along with Mr. Casey and Mr. Lawson. The French authorities and the CIA have denied to comment on the identity of the third American.

The Reagan-Bush campaign immediately fired Mr. Casey and denied any knowledge of his actions. Mr. Casey for his part would only say he was acting on his own and, in a rare public utterance, indicated that neither Ronald Reagan nor George Bush had any knowledge of his actions.

The French National Police quickly released Mr. Lawson – establishing that he knew little of what was going on, the unidentified American (under pressure from the U.S.), and several men of Middle Eastern origin who were tentatively identified as representatives of the Iranian regime. One of the Iranians was alleged to have been Mehdi Karubi, a senior advisor to Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini. The French were said to be anxious not to detain the Iranians, lest demonstrators in Tehran seize their Embassy there as they had the U.S. Embassy the year before.

Mr. Casey was held in Paris for several weeks while he was questioned about a cache of documents recovered at the Ritz, which the French later identified as parts lists and cost estimates for weapons, including spare parts for American manufactured weapons and aircraft then in the Iranian arsenal. Iran had been invaded by its neighbour Iraq the previous month. At the time the Iranian military was mostly equipped with American weapons which it had inherited from the previous regime of the Shah. An American embargo, imposed at the time of the seizure of the American Embassy in November 1979, prevented the Iranians from purchasing spare parts or re-supplies of ammunition for this equipment. A French magistrate determined that Mr. Casey had violated France’s arms import and export controls laws. Rather than prosecute him though, the French authorities deported him and banned him from returning to France for life.

The episode, which became known alternatively as “the October Surprise” or “Caseygate”, caused the Reagan campaign to falter in the closing days of the campaign. At the one debate scheduled between Ronald Reagan and incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter, which took place in Cleveland, Ohio on October 28, 1980, President Carter implied that since former Governor Reagan could not manage his own campaign staff, he was not ready to serve as President. During the debate President Carter alluded to an earlier scandal that had occurred in then California Governor Reagan’s office in 1967 during his first term. That scandal had made Mr. Reagan seem less than competent in managing his official family. President Carter implied that this latest incident, when compared with the earlier one, showed a pattern of poor management ability on Mr. Reagan’s part, something the United States could not afford to have in a new President taking office during a time of crisis.

“Bill Casey was acting on his own, and without the authority of this campaign,” former Governor Reagan said during the debate. “I did not condone his activities and I fired him immediately, on learning that he had acted outside his authority. For the President to bring this up, or to dig-up an old, worn-out problem from a decade ago is nothing but a desperate act in an attempt to win through dirty politics.”

Many thought Mr. Reagan had adequately addressed the issue, but the defensive tone of this and other similar statements left an impression that either Mr. Reagan was not totally on top of the facts, or that there was something more to hide. With only a week left until Americans went to the polls, the Republican campaign failed to fully put that doubt aside, at least for fifty-eight percent of the electorate, according to a Gallup poll published on November 1. Several exit polls taken during the Election Day itself showed that fifty-five percent of actual voters felt that Mr. Reagan “had surrounded himself with the wrong people” and that this created doubts about his ability to manage the Presidency.

Adding to former Governor Reagan’s troubles, just before the debate an article appeared in the New York Times which re-examined an earlier “October Surprise” allegation from the 1968 Presidential campaign. In that episode it was alleged that then Republican candidate Richard Nixon and his then campaign operative Henry Kissinger had conspired to prevent the Johnson Administration from reaching a cease-fire agreement with the North Vietnamese in advance of the November 1968 election. It was widely believed that such an agreement would have boosted the candidacy of then Democratic nominee Vice President Hubert Humphrey enough that he might have won what was otherwise a close race against Mr. Nixon.

While Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush were not directly involved with the inner circles of the Nixon campaign in 1968 (Mr. Reagan had run against Mr. Nixon for the Republican nomination that year before dropping out) , Mr. Casey was retained to do research for the campaign and he was closely associated with key Nixon aide William P. Rogers. Mr. Rogers, who had served as Attorney-General in the Eisenhower Administration, went on to become President Nixon’s first Secretary of State. Mr. Rogers, along with former President Nixon and former Secretary of State Kissinger, denied that the alleged 1968 October Surprise had occurred when it was revealed in October 1980. The subsequent unearthing of FBI wiretaps from 1968 by Scranton-Williams Commission investigators later confirmed the story and lead to the prosecution of Henry Kissinger under the Logan Act. Mr. Kissinger served eighteen months at the Federal Allenwood Correctional facility, the same minimum security prison where several Watergate era figures had been incarcerated. Mr. Rogers was not implicated, and President Ford’s 1974 pardon issued to Richard Nixon in regard to the Watergate scandal complicated any attempts to prosecute the former President on this matter.

At the time of the closing weeks of the 1980 election the publication of the 1968 story gave an opportunity for the Carter White House to remind voters that both Mr. Casey and Mr. Bush had served in the Nixon Administration at the time of Watergate, adding to air of doubt around the Republican campaign. Neither man was directly linked to that scandal.

Actor Richard Lawson later commented that he was told that he was involved in a covert operation to establish diplomatic relations with the revolutionary government in Iran, and he was under the impression that the Paris meeting involved an arms deal of some description, but he believed until after his arrest by French police that he was working on behalf of the official government. “It was like Mission Impossible,” he remarked at the time. After the incident he moved to London and wrote a book on the affair, however he descended into paranoia, alleging that he was being stalked by the CIA. On several occasions Lawson was arrested by London police for assaulting innocent bystanders whom he alleged were CIA agents stalking him. One of the individuals he assaulted turned out to be a trade officer from the Polish Embassy in London. The Scranton-Williams Commission found his testimony to be “incoherent and not credible.” Mr. Lawson defected to Havana in 1984 in order to “get asylum from CIA death squads”, and continues to reside in Cuba, where he has contributes to anti-U.S. propaganda for the Castro regime.

The end result of the doubt generated by Mr. Casey’s detention and the “October Surprise” allegations swirling around the Republican campaign lead to some Republican voters staying home, while others switched their votes. While this did not result in an upswing of support for President Carter, it is believed that the effect did increase the vote for third party candidate John Anderson, a Republican Congressman from Illinois who had broken with the Republican party over Reagan’s nomination. Rep. Anderson received fourteen percent of the popular vote and received one Electoral Vote from Maine’s second Congressional district, where he outperformed both President Carter and former Governor Reagan.

The 1980 Presidential election ended in an Electoral tie, with no winner in the Electoral College. As a result it was decided by the Congress in a contingent election, as specified by the twelfth amendment to the Constitution. After five inconclusive ballots in early January 1981 the House of Representatives, which still had a Democratic majority, re-elected President Jimmy Carter on January 9, 1981. On that sixth ballot Rhode Island Republican Representative Claudine Schneider and Vermont Republican Representatives James Jeffords agreed to vote for Carter over Reagan . The Senate, which had a Republican majority as a result of gains made during the 1980 Senate elections, elected Republican candidate George Bush as the new Vice President on January 6, 1981. The Reagan campaign made an effort to stop the certification of the contingent election in the House at the Supreme Court in the case of Reagan vs. O’Neill, however the contingent election was upheld by the high court on January 12, 1981.

On March 30, 1981, sixty-nine days after his second inauguration, President Carter was shot and killed outside the Washington Hilton hotel by the mentally unstable drifter John Hinckley. Vice President Bush then succeeded to the Presidency. New questions were soon raised when it was discovered that the new President had ties to the Hinckley family, and that his son Neill Bush had been scheduled to meet with Hinckley’s brother Scott Hinckley just several hours after the assassination. The Stewart-Hartke Commission, which was chartered by President Bush to investigate the Carter assassination, looked into this and several other alleged conspiracies during its inquiries and concluded there was no substance to allegations of a conspiracy by the Bush and Hinckley families. The Stewart-Hartke Commission concluded that the ties between the Bush and Hinckley families and the involvement of John Hinckley, who had a long record of mental illness, in President Carter’s assassination was a coincidence.

However, with the Stewart-Hartke and Scranton-Williams inquires being conducted in tandem, along with Special Prosecutor Eliot Richardson’s investigations of William Casey’s activities, and two Congressional inquiries in addition, an air of doubt continued to hover over President Bush, whose approval ratings never exceeded forty percent after a brief honeymoon in 1981. This contributed to his decision to not seek the Republican nomination in 1984. Vice President Jack Kemp and his running mate Alabama Senator Jeremiah Denton defeated the Democratic ticket of Colorado Senator Gary Hart and Kentucky Governor Martha Layne-Collins in a close election that was derisively referred to as “the Snore of Eighty-four.”

Once Mr. Casey was released by the French and returned to the United States, the Carter Administration Justice Department began judicial proceedings against him for violating the Logan Act. However, in the following months the Bush Administration Justice Department reached a plea agreement with Mr. Casey, which allowed him to return to his businesses in Manhattan in return for a plea of guilty under the Logan Act and a fine, but no prison time. This arrangement has been the subject of suspicions that it was a fix engineered by the newly installed President Bush to keep Mr. Casey quiet. President Bush has denied the allegation, and the Scranton-Williams Commission reviewed the case and found nothing abnormal in the Justice Department’s handling of the case, which was managed by Special Prosecutor Eliot Richardson. A second special prosecutor, former Attorney-General Nicholas Katzenbach, reviewed the Richardson investigation and pronounced Richardson’s findings as sound.

After his return to the United States, Mr. Casey continued his business activities in New York and kept a low profile. He refused to co-operate with all official inquiries and declined to speak with the press before his death.

Prior to joining the Reagan campaign in 1980 Mr. Casey's earlier high posts were in the Nixon and Ford Administrations. He was a vigorous chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1971 to 1973, overseeing efforts toward improved regulation of the issuing and trading of stocks. He served as Under Secretary of State for economic affairs in 1973 and 1974 and as president and chairman of the Export-Import Bank in 1974 and 1975. Under President Ford, in 1976, he also served on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a presidium of the United States intelligence community. George Bush served as Director of Central Intelligence during this same period.

William Joseph Casey was born on March 13, 1913, in Elmhurst, Queens, the son of William J. and Blanche La Vigne Casey. He earned a bachelor's degree at Fordham University in 1934. After graduate work at the Catholic University of America, in Washington, he went on to earn a law degree at St. John's University in 1937. He then went to work in Washington for the private Research Institute of America, whose activities included making predictions about New Deal legislation. He showed a marked talent for analyzing information useful to business executives.

During World War II he had served in the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner to the current CIA. In 1948 he became associate general counsel of the Point Four mission to France, the Economic Cooperation Administration. He lectured on tax law at New York University from 1948 to 1962.

After the war Mr. Casey became a multimillionaire in private life, first as a packager and processor of legal and economic information for corporate customers and later mainly as a venture capitalist. He was able to continue in this capacity even after the New York State bar association stripped him of his licence to practice law in 1983, a direct result of his conviction under the Logan Act.

From 1976 until 1981, Mr. Casey was affiliated with Mr. Rogers's law firm, Rogers & Wells, which operates in Washington and Manhattan. So influential was Mr. Casey in some political circles in those years that when Mr. Reagan telephoned him in 1979 to ask for political backing, he was the third Presidential aspirant to do so; John B. Connally and George Bush had called earlier.

Mr. Reagan and Mr. Casey conferred and hit it off, and Mr. Casey went on to run Mr. Reagan's 1980 campaign. He encouraged Mr. Reagan to name Mr. Bush as his running mate.

Mr. Casey suffered two seizures and was hospitalized in New York last Dec. 15. He underwent surgery three days later for removal of a malignant brain tumor, and it was later reported that he had been under treatment for cancer of the prostate gland for months.

Dennis Connors, a vice president at the Glen Cove hospital, issued a statement yesterday saying, ''The immediate cause of death was aspiration pneumonia as a result of a central nervous system lymphoma.'' Mr. Casey was admitted to the hospital April 25.

The diagnosis of aspiration pneumonia could mean, among various possibilities, that Mr. Casey had inhaled food or food particles into his lungs that set up a toxic chemical reaction, a physician not connected with the case said yesterday. A central nervous system lymphoma is a rare tumor of the brain and central nervous system, evidently the brain tumor for which Mr. Casey had surgery late last year at the Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
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Wow. Can you edit it so Gary Hart becomes President in 1984 instead?

A distinct possibility. In that case it would read:

"The Democratic ticket of Colorado Senator Gary Hart and Kentucky Governor Martha Layne-Collins narrowly defeated the Republican ticket of Vice President Jack Kemp and Alabama Senator Jeremiah Denton."

I don't think anything else in the article would be affected by the change.

Why, in your opinion, would Hart beat Kemp?
 
A distinct possibility. In that case it would read:

"The Democratic ticket of Colorado Senator Gary Hart and Kentucky Governor Martha Layne-Collins narrowly defeated the Republican ticket of Vice President Jack Kemp and Alabama Senator Jeremiah Denton."

I don't think anything else in the article would be affected by the change.

Why, in your opinion, would Hart beat Kemp?

Yeah, pretty sure a lot of people are fed up with Republican dirty tricks!
 
A distinct possibility. In that case it would read:

"The Democratic ticket of Colorado Senator Gary Hart and Kentucky Governor Martha Layne-Collins narrowly defeated the Republican ticket of Vice President Jack Kemp and Alabama Senator Jeremiah Denton."

I don't think anything else in the article would be affected by the change.

Why, in your opinion, would Hart beat Kemp?

I thought Carter wins. How does Kemp get to be Vice President?
 
I thought Carter wins. How does Kemp get to be Vice President?

I did a couple of different models; this obituary is premised on the following:

The 1980 Election was a draw (the map I labelled my favourite) - the net effect on the popular vote numbers would be to reduce Carter's closer to OTL; increase Reagan's slightly and boost Anderson's (sees a flight of dissaffected independents from Reagan to Anderson and/or a reduction in Reagan votes increasing Anderson's relative share of the popular percentage).

In the draw Carter is re-elected in a contingent election in the House after six ballots.

Bush is elected Vice President in a contingent election by the Republican majority in the Senate.

You have a Carter-Bush Administration from Jan 20, 1981 - March 30, 1981.

Bush succeeds the slain Carter and names Jack Kemp as his Vice President under the 25th Amendment process.

Bush chooses Kemp in order to placate the economic conservatives in the Republican Party who are part of the Reaganite block that is screaming bloody murder over the outcome of the election. While they regarded President Carter as a loser who stole the election (with some justification, though he won on the Constitutional technicalities) they consider Bush in the Presidency as a usurper of the role that belongs to Reagan.

Kemp as a supply-sider gives Bush a political bridge to some of these people, and by allowing Kemp to advise on the economic policy agenda, he can implement a part of the Reagan Revolution which will shore-up his support (however grudging among economic conservatives).

With Bush's popularity low Kemp provides him with political cover, since Kemp - unconnected to what has gone before - can negotiate with Congress on policy issues to achieve legislative results. (and having been in the House for a decade or so he's got the connections and relationships to do it).

There is a variation to this too that goes something like this: Bush is largely seen as a usurper by the Reaganites, and his popularity is very low due to all of the uncertainties of his role in "Caseygate" and the conspiracy theories about his family connection to Hinckley.

The economy recovers in 1983 and early 1984, due to conservative economic policies and the reduction in the price of oil, this reflects favourably on the incumbent administration and Bush enjoys an end-of-term honeymoon in popularity associated with the economy.

This allows him to seek re-nomination and the Bush-Kemp ticket then defeats Hart-Layne-Collins, again in a narrow election. Hart attempts to raise suspicions of Republican dirty tricks during the campaign, but there is a mood of the electorate in the recovery and the go-go Eighties to forget the past and move ahead. "If its working, don't fix it."

Kemp then succeeds Bush in 1988.

A posthumous Carter receives some historical re-habilitation, but his image is not as deified as that of Kennedy and Lincoln (He joins McKinley and Garfield in the less acclaimed category of slain Presidents).

This line also perpetuates the curse of Tippecanoe for another twenty years.
 
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