AEI’s Steven Hayward has a piece today on NRO about Reagan and the Philadelphia, Mississippi campaign kickoff in 1980. The article goes a long way toward defending Reagan from charges of racism, but still doesn’t address why he chose Philadelphia to launch his general election campaign. So I asked him.

My email:

Mr. Hayward,

Enjoyed your NRO piece this morning.

But the Philadelphia, MS campaign kickoff has always troubled me.

Why would Reagan (or his handlers) choose a small town in Mississippi that’s known for nothing else other than that it was the site of the murder of three civil rights workers?

It has all the appearances of southern strategy message-sending.

In general, I hold Reagan in high regard. So if there’s a benign explanation, I’d love to hear it.

Cordially,

Radley Balko

And Hayward’s response:

I tend to agree with you that the Mississippi launch for Reagan was problematic, to say the least. In my book I talk about how Reagan’s campaign got off to a terrible start in several ways after the convention, this being just one of them. I do think there is a benign explanation, though, part of which I made in my piece, but to which I would add: Reagan was not in any way a racist, which I can talk about at great length, which is not to say that he could have done a better job of thinking about and talking about race issues. (He supported Humphrey’s civil rights bill way back in 1948, and opposed the 1964 act on the principled grounds that it would lead to exactly the kind of problems we have now with quotas.) More to the point, Reagan was unafraid of being politically incorrect, even in cases such as “states’ rights,” where he thought a traditionally sound idea had been perverted. However, I agree with you (I think) that he’d have been better off not using the phrase there, and I rather wish he hadn’t. He didn’t need to, either. (It wasn’t his only such doubtful statement on that swing.)

I think they chose to start campaigning in the south for a strategic reason. It was Carter’s base and strongest area and Carter was still polling well in the south, but Reagan was also popular there. Reagan’s strategists thought that if they could take the South away from Carter, they had the election won even without any northeastern or midwest states, because Reagan had the west locked up. Early campaigning in the south would also tie up Carter there later so that Reagan would have more freedom to campaign elsewhere. I am sure this calculation looked very compelling at the time; remmeber that polls from Labor Day through the election showed it very very close.

That explains why Reagan would campaign in the south, and it provides some needed context for his “states’ rights” comments. But why Philadelphia, specifically? Why not Atlanta? Or Nashville? Or Charlotte? I think this is a serious blight on President Reagan’s record. I can’t see any reason at all to start a campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi other than to appeal to the basest of prejudices.

Philadelphia as of 1998 had a population of 7,700. It’s 80 miles form the nearest “big city” — Jackson. Not exactly an electoral jackpot, this Philadelphia. Seems to me that there would have been a certain kind of voter in the south who’d have known the significance of a campaign kickoff in Philadelphia, Mississippi. And it seems to me that Reagan and his aides probably knew how to appeal to that certain kind of voter.

I agree with Hayward. From what I’ve read, Reagan didn’t have a bigoted bone in his body. This I guess was just a really, really bad decision.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 20th, 2002 at 7:45 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.