The Spirit of '76
Is Liz Cheney the new Gerald Ford?
Jack Hughes finds historical parallels between what Liz Cheney is enduring right now and what Gerald Ford went through in 1976. Neither of them set out for the White House, but that’s where Ford ended up and where Cheney might be going next.
by Jack Hughes
As I write this, Congresswoman Liz Cheney is in the fight of her political life. The sharks smell blood in the water and are circling; her colleagues are openly plotting to remove her as the No. 3 Republican in the Congress. The situation is worsening minute by minute, so much so that by the time you read this she might already have been forced out of her leadership position. But that’s okay because she’s got a plan.
Forty-five years ago, when she was 10, Cheney had a front row seat to the greatest intramural fight in GOP history – the epic 1976 presidential nomination donnybrook between incumbent Gerald Ford and insurgent Ronald Reagan. The Cheneys were cheering on Ford, with her father Dick leading – and winning – the fight as the White House Chief of Staff. I believe Liz Cheney is today trying to channel the Spirit of ’76.
Ford, like Cheney, served as a Republican Conference Chair whose sights were set on becoming Speaker. Ford’s climb up the congressional leadership ladder was, like Cheney, interrupted by the impeachment of a president. When Ford left Congress to become Nixon’s vice president and, later, ran for the ’76 GOP presidential nod, he did so not to satisfy a lifelong ambition but to unify the party and unite the country.
Ford, like Cheney, served as a Republican Conference Chair whose sights were set on becoming Speaker.
(Another interesting historical parallel is that Dick Cheney also once served as the Republican Conference Chair and his ambition to become House Speaker was also derailed by a political controversy. He switched over to the executive branch from the legislative one in 1989 to serve as Secretary of Defense under President George H. W. Bush after Texas Senator John Tower’s nomination for the post was rejected.)
Ford opened himself up to a leadership challenge when he pardoned President Nixon. The move has long been vindicated by history but was deeply unpopular at the time, especially among Congressional Republicans who were already facing a tough slog for re-election in the 1974 mid-terms. Their fears were soon realized. The election proved to be a bloodbath with Republicans losing 49 House seats to the Democrats.
Yet, Ford never wavered. For the rest of his life carried a folded paper in his wallet summarizing the United States Supreme Court’s 1915 decision in Burdick v. United States. The Court in Burdick held accepting a pardon was an admission of guilt – legal proof, to Ford, he’d forced Nixon to confess his sins. Ford would receive the John F. Kennedy Library’s Profile in Courage Award in 2001 for his pardon decision.
Cheney, in turn, opened herself up to a leadership challenge by voting to impeach President Donald Trump. It’s also a move that’s likely to be judged favorably in the fullness of time but, in the short-term, has proven extremely unpopular among her fellow Congressional Republicans. Cheney’s defense of her vote, much like Ford’s defense of his pardon, has only further angered those who disagree with her decision.
Ford and Cheney were willing to accept the political consequences of their actions, arguing what they did was in the best interests of the United States. Neither of them, however, considered those consequences to be irreversible. To that end, Cheney seems to be setting up a run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination much as Ford did for the nomination in 1976 – as a defender of common sense and integrity.
Ford and Cheney were willing to accept the political consequences of their actions.
Cheney, like Ford in ’76, has positioned herself as a principled conservative holding a middle ground between populist extremists on the right and progressive extremists on the left. Moreover, like Ford, she’s clearly targeting Republican and Democratic voters who are weary about the anti-establishment candidates on offer and who want to see bipartisanship restore dignity, decency, and decorum to American government.
Ford’s reputation for reaching across the aisle was critical to his being confirmed as vice president after Spiro Agnew’s resignation and was the reason both the 1968 and 1972 Democratic presidential nominees – Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern – voted for him not Jimmy Carter in 1976. (Cheney literally reached across the aisle to give Joe Biden a fist bump when he came to address the Joint Session of Congress.)
Cheney is smart to look to Ford’s two campaigns in 1976 – first against Reagan for the party then against Carter for the presidency. Ford successfully fended off a strong challenge from the far more charismatic Reagan and fought Carter almost to a draw – coming back from what was once a thirty-point gap. If Ford had just 7,000 more votes in Hawaii and 10,000 more votes in Ohio, he’d have won the electoral college.
Ford came up short, of course, making him the only person to sit in the Oval Office without having ever been elected either President or Vice President. (The other piece of Ford trivia is that he’s the only U.S. President to have been born a King – his birth name was Leslie Lynch King, Jr.) Still, there are clear lessons Cheney can learn from the Ford campaigns run by her father and a then-unknown Texan named Jim Baker.
Cheney needs to double down on her decision to put as much distance as she can between herself and Donald Trump.
First, organization is key. Cheney must develop a strong ground game in key primary states. To do so, she should rally the old order and join the Cheney dynasty’s network to those of the Republican Party’s other ‘five families’ – the Bushes, the Romneys, the McCains, and the Sununus (in New Hampshire). Where the anti-Trump vote was split during the 2016 primaries, Cheney can be its one consensus candidate in 2024.
This ties directly to the second lesson: Cheney needs to double down on her decision to put as much distance as she can between herself and Donald Trump. Dick Cheney counseled Ford to do the same with Richard Nixon, convincing him to undertake the ‘Halloween Massacre’ shortly after October 31, 1975 when he dismissed or demoted remaining Nixon Cabinet holdovers most notably Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Third, Cheney – like Ford when he faced Reagan – can’t try to create a popular (or populist) groundswell based on star power or soaring rhetoric. She’s a work horse, not a show pony; “a Ford, not a Lincoln.” She’s a steady pair of hands with sensible solutions for what’s hurting middle class Americans in states Biden won in 2020. No California or New York glitz and glamour – just Middle American grit and guts.
In the end, Cheney can lose her leadership position and her seat but still become a competitive candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in three years’ time. She just needs to take a page from the playbook Gerald Ford used – one befitting the former University of Michigan Wolverine football star – and play center. He may not always have done things the right liked, but he always did the right thing.
Jack Hughes is a communications consultant based in Canada. His previous contributions to The Experiment include “Same of Thrones,” “Tippecanoe and Agnew Anew,” “Harris / Shuri 2020,” “Bidenfeld,” “Firth and Firthiness,” “The Ballot of Bill McKay,” and “The World Wants ‘The West Wing,’” among others. His inexplicably extensive writings on Dan Quayle are “The Unusual Suspect,” “The Unusual Suspect II,” “The GOPfather” and “Porqua, CoQau?” Connect with him on LinkedIn here.
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