The Jim Wright 1980 General Election

This race was very unusual.

It was among the very first out-of-state races I would handle on my own, meaning unconnected to my old friend, Matt Reese, of West Virginia and Washington. It had been delivered to me by Congressman Gillis Long of central Louisiana ... a very smart guy whose early-70s campaign for Governor of Louisiana I had helped as a Moon Landrieu aide-on-leave - as the Boss had several friends in that particular hunt. Gillis had run third behind Edwin Edwards and Bennett Johnston, but he was the good guy and everybody knew it. 
Gillis, and I (temporary leave from City Hall) both leaned hard for Edwin against Johnston in the runoff, and when our side prevailed I went back to Moon's shop and Speaker O'Neill, of Boston College and Middlesex County, Massachusetts, made Gillis a House Whip. Got us both out of a ditch! 
Tip's boy, Tommy - as Lt Gov. Of Massachusetts - and I became good friends a few years later. When I saw Tip later in DC when the subject of Jim Wright and Gillis Long both came up. The speaker spoke very fondly of Gillis Long, but expressed admiration for Jim Wright.

Also, 1980 was bringing into sight a completely new political agenda. Moon Landrieu was Carter's HUD Secretary, and Wright's 12th District was not just Texas, but north central Texas... Ft Worth and the west-of-Dallas suburbs... Eddie Chiles, and that other nutty family with all the money. 
I walked off a jet at DFW in spring of '80 into a world I thought I was about to learn as a boy, then go off and teach to others across the country - because I would be seen as somebody who had learned to "whip up" on these right-wingers ....!

Wrong. I was lucky. Wright had, as i believed at the start, a strong base of strength and good will. But I, nor anyone else active at the time, had ever experienced what was about to take place.

The race was part of the watershed struggle emerging as the post-war Democratic era headed for an abrupt end. Kennedy had died, Johnson succeeded him in '63 then won what remains the strongest landslide ever handed a sitting President. 
Guns and butter ... Vietnam and a huge domestic agenda.

Nixon had replaced a bitter Johnson, whose past had caught up with him. Then Nixon had left Washington in disgrace - following Watergate.

Then Carter, the nice guy from Plains, who carried his bags and slept in the spare rooms of his supporters as he campaigned in the '75 Democratic Primaries.

Newt Gingrich was now heaving grenades in Congress. Reagan - in Sacramento- was re-creating himself as a soft-spoken bombshell, while Goldwater was beginning to drift away ... Becoming reasonable, thoughtful.

As Dylan had been wailing, the times were changin'!

The Republicans saw our race as a major opportunity, where President Carter's perceived weaknesses could be attached to the House Democratic leader at a time when he was virtually isolated on the ballot. No President, no U.S. Senator, no other statewide Texas offices at contest. The Republicans had drawn a bead on the Texas 12th
and pulled the trigger.

Wright was in the position to raise all the money necessary.
I had prepared a pretty aggressive campaign budget - an incumbent's campaign that I felt would surely do the trick, but I just didn't know Jim Wright. Man could not utter the word "No" to anybody. As the old saw goes, if he had been a woman Jim would have been knocked up all the time! 
By September - I had arrived in late spring - we were 30% over our spending plan. Things were going well, but the signs were troubling. I ordered up an early tracking survey, just in case. Looked pretty good. Bill Hamilton from DC, a great polling pro and savvy, was cautious but optimistic when he flopped the results before us. Said he felt good, but wanted to talk about our plans for the last 90-days, and we sorted it through, tinkered a bit but kept the structure of the race pretty much as it was. Wright felt he needed a solid win to be able to convert his role as Majority Leader to Speaker when and if O'Neill chose to hang it up. The two of them had no deal as far as I knew, but they were close. In the bitter, earlier battle for 
Majority Leader, Wright had won a surprisingly strong victory over San Francisco liberal Phillip Burton - with a wink and a nudge from the Speaker. Wright wasn't too easy to like, but compared to Burton ... all Tip wanted to do was not get caught!
So, we upped the budget a bit that fall, added mail, increased street-operations among African American and Hispanic voters in the east and north sides, where Patti Everitt and Robert Jara of our campaign staff knew exactly what had to be done. And the Wright phone banks were ratcheted up to buzz-saw levels. When Jim and I had first talked in the spring of 1980, I had asked what kind of outcome would serve his future adequately. He suggested the mid-50s. Our tracking was demonstrating an acceptable lead for Wright, but Democratic values were falling badly as summer turned to fall ... voters liked Jim Wright just fine, but Carter was beginning to fold like a bad suit. I hadn't planned a lot of TV ... huge, sprawling market divided between Ft Worth and Dallas, and a ton of suburbs and exurbs mixed in between. Got my attention. I called a good media guy out of Austin. Roy Spence road into town on a Harley - no shit. I'd talked with him without Wright's okay, since I hadn't planned much television - given the market. We went over the polls. I explained my reluctance to authorize a negative approach on television and he agreed. 
He went away, came back quickly with some divine scripts and proposed to create a couple - not negative - designed to head off those among Wright's backers who would bash Jim Bradshaw, our unknown opponent. Bradshaw wasn't the issue, it was the Eddie Chiles' of the world with huge check books ... with voters beginning to get more and more angry at President Jimmy Carter. Spence shipped in a terrific production crew over a weekend in early October who turned his scripts into magic.

Little Sarah, 8, quivering voice ... "Mr Wright, why can't we pray in school?" Jim - really cheesy-grin (everybody reading this who knew him even a little knows this grin!). "Of course you should pray in school ... every morning, before Congress dies anything for anybody ... a priest, or a minister, or a Rabbi comes before us and leads all Members in a prayer to the almighty."
Sarah smiles ... like a sweet child.

Cut.

Three weeks before the election, Wright upped the budget by about 20% to air Sarah's spot.

And just before election weekend, President Carter, a great guy who was about as popular as a Yankee in Dixie at the moment, called from Anchorage offering to swing through Ft Worth on the way back to the White House to "give you a hand". Wright put his hand over the phone, wrinkled those bushy eyebrows into a twist and stared at me ...

I whispered, "Leader, Sunday or Monday before the election .... but suggest to the President that we keep it quiet, try to make it a huge surprise!"

Election Night -60%.

Jim Wright was one of the really good guys.