![]() “How long do you expect this convention to be shut down?” Kennedy asked. “Well, senator, you know they didn’t comply with this rule,” Ickes responded, explaining the technicality he had used to stop the proceedings. What’s going on down there?’“ Kennedy asked Ickes. Several Kennedy advisers were also on the phone. It was Kennedy, calling for Ickes from his room at the Waldorf Astoria. For a few moments, the two men were on the verge of blows. I’m shutting this convention down, Tom,” he said. Ickes, then 40, sneered at the younger political operative. His outrage caused his already ruddy complexion to glow red. “What the f- are you doing? You can’t do this!” Donilon yelled at Ickes. Donilon threw down his headset and stormed toward the stage, where he found a Carter lawyer named Tim Smith grappling with Ickes as they came down the stairs from the stage. The convention had been stopped, for no apparent reason, on the second day, by Kennedy forces. The Carter aide was responsible for seeing that the 1980 Democratic Convention went off without any major hitches, and he had just been blindsided. It was, ‘F- ’em.’ You know? To be blunt about it.” We weren’t even thinking about the general election. “I mean, we weren’t thinking about the country. “We just said, ‘F- ’em.’ This had turned into a real grudge match,” Ickes said in an interview. ![]() It was a gesture done purely out of spite. ![]() It was nonprime-time programming, but Ickes’ delay would muck up that evening’s televised schedule. Harold Ickes, who was running the floor operation for Kennedy, used an obscure procedural rule to call a halt to the afternoon floor proceedings. “We neglected to take into account one of the most obvious facets of Kennedy’s character, an almost childlike self-centeredness,” he wrote with great bitterness after the election in his score-settling book, The Other Side of the Story.īefore the platform speech, tensions were so high that high-ranking members of the dueling factions almost got into a fistfight. that you don’t cut each other’s throats.” But Jody Powell, Carter’s press secretary, thought he knew. “If you have any wisdom and judgment at all, you know you don’t get carried away by personalities and pettiness in a political fight,” he told The New Yorker. Robert Strauss, Carter’s campaign chairman, could not understand why Kennedy insisted on continuing to fight. The delegates had had to say no over and over to Kennedy whips asking them to vote to open the convention the day before, and they were exhausted. ![]() The Carter forces knew that the senator’s speech would create an atmosphere highly favorable for Kennedy's platform proposals to pass and that many of their delegates were already leaning toward voting for them. The vote on the platform would come right after Kennedy was slotted to speak at the convention. Kennedy’s camp was pushing to include planks that were a rebuke to the president: a call for a $12 billion stimulus spending program, a measure to fight unemployment and an endorsement of wage and price controls-proposals far to the left of Carter’s. Yet Kennedy’s team was intent on embarrassing Carter on the convention’s second night, when the delegates would vote for a party platform. That win ensured Carter the nomination, and Kennedy conceded. The Carter forces were able to hold their coalition of delegates together on the convention’s first night to beat back a movement to vote in favor of an open convention. The story of the 1980 convention-told here with new details about a near-fistfight on the floor and relying on long forgotten TV footage-is a reminder of what happens when intraparty rivalry becomes so personal that the combatants lose sight of the greater cause of winning the general election. Democrats must figure out whether the country is more open to a liberal president than it was in 1980. Much of the 2020 debate boils down to a similar split in the party, between bold progressives like Senators Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren and swing-state centrists like former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. The argument facing Democrats now has echoes of 1980. But if they tear themselves to pieces like they did in 1980, they could squander their shot at defeating President Donald Trump. And it is a cautionary tale for Democrats as they head into the 2020 election cycle. It was the peak of a brutal fight inside the Democratic Party, one so bruising that the party has been careful to avoid a similar experience ever since. ![]()
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