FORTY YEARS AGO, in October 1972, I was driving around the
state of Arkansas in the Climermobile, a large motor home whose use had been
donated to the “Jerry Climer for Secretary of State” campaign by one of his
supporters. Jerry had hired me to work
for his campaign against incumbent Kelly Bryant. Jerry lost, but the campaign was an adventure.
The 1972 Election in
Arkansas
The 1972 election was the first in the post-Rockefeller era
for state Republicans. Before 1964, the party had offered only hapless, futile
opposition to the dominant Democratic Party. However, by 1964, Winthrop
Rockefeller and his supporters had taken control of the party, and that year WR
ran for governor against Orval Faubus, the long-time incumbent. Losing to Orval Faubus in 1964, WR ran again
in 1966, beating Jim Johnson to become the first Republican governor since
Reconstruction. He was re-elected in 1968, then lost to Dale Bumpers in 1970.
In all of these campaigns, WR and other Republican candidates for state-wide office
had plenty of resources to be competitive.
Following the 1970 election, the Republican Party had
ignored Rockefeller’s recommendation to elect William T. Kelly to be chairman
of the Party, voting for Charles Bernard, the unsuccessful Republican Senate
candidate in 1968, instead. WR, who supported Kelly and apparently was not too
fond of Bernard, was not pleased.
Without WR on the ballot and lacking the funding of the
previous four elections, the 1972 election was a test of the strength of the
state’s two-party system. The Republican Party recruited four credible
candidates for state office: Len Blaylock (governor), Ken Coon (lt. governor),
Ed Bethune (attorney general), and Jerry Climer (secretary of state). Also,
Wayne Babbitt was selected as the Party’s candidate for the Senate. In
addition, of course, that year Richard Nixon was the Republican candidate for
president.
WR (who had pancreatic cancer that would kill him in February 1973) limited his contributions for the 1972 campaigns to a
fixed amount given to the Republican Party, and the Party and its candidates
were expected to raise additional funds to have enough to be competitive. The
lavish campaign spending of the previous eight years had ended.
Going to work for
Jerry Climer
I had not been following state politics too closely since
the 1970 election when Bumpers had crushed Rockefeller. I had been finished up
my studies, then spent a miserable six weeks at an ROTC training camp. Following that, I went to Vienna for a year.
Arriving back in Arkansas in June 1972, I had six months to
occupy before reporting to a training camp for artillery officers. I was happy
to read that Jerry Climer was running for secretary of state. Apparently, he
had made a good impression as Pulaski County Clerk after being appointed by WR
to that position in late 1970 to fill a vacancy. I had known Jerry at the
University of Arkansas and thought highly of him, viewing him as a serious guy, very intelligent and
ambitious.
Visiting Little Rock, I gave him a call and found out that
he was looking for a campaign assistant.
I quickly signed on. The adventure began.
I viewed the job as much more than a way to occupy a few
months and get a paycheck: I believed
strongly that Jerry would make an excellent secretary of state and would be far
superior to the incumbent. As required when working in any serious political
campaign, I threw myself into the job and spent four months absorbed in the
task of getting my candidate elected to office.
The Climer Campaign
The chair of Climer’s campaign was Phyllis McGinley (if I
remember correctly), a nice middle-aged woman who was dedicated to Jerry’s
candidacy. She worked with him to create
his schedule, managed the budget, directed volunteers, and operated the
campaign headquarters on Capitol Avenue in Little Rock. She initially viewed me
with some suspicion, probably because I had longish hair and mutton chops. She
was not sure it was wise to have hippy- looking guy traveling with the
candidate. Fortunately, we got along and she warmed to my involvement in the
campaign.
My job was to travel with the candidate in the Climermobile,
help write press releases and other campaign material, assist with
correspondence, and help out with ideas to advance the campaign. Most of the
travel was done in the large motor home which enabled us to avoid spending
money on hotels and provided us with a moving bill board. We put about 14,000
miles on it during the months of driving around the state.
The actual days spent campaigning are a bit of a blur. A typical day included driving, shaking
hands, speaking, writing, calling, and schmoozing. We did our best to generate
stories for both newspapers and radio. We were keen to see what was being
published in newspapers about Climer and Bryant, and to hear what was broadcast
on radio. So we monitored both closely. The Republican Party had hired a clipping
service that passed clippings about the race to us each week. When driving, we
kept tuned to local stations to hear what they were saying.
Free media was important because the campaign budget was
quite limited, with only a small amount of funds for paid television and
newspaper advertising. Climer’s biggest challenge was to increase his name
recognition outside of Pulaski County, and without a substantial media budget,
that was almost impossible.
Climer gave it his best, and I was impressed with his
campaign skills and his dedication to the task. Though I am moderately cynical
by nature, Climer was not. He seemed driven by the conviction that he could do
a much better job as secretary of state than the man he was running against.
Though the odds were against him winning the election, Climer spent time near
the end the campaign discussing with me what steps he should take immediately
after taking office to improve its operations.
I am not sure how much of an asset I was to Climer. He was understandably
reluctant to have me too visible when he was out shaking hands. In 1972,
longish hair apparently put off small town voters. In Harrison, the chairman of
the county party organization pointedly invited me to stay in the Climermobile
when Jerry went to meet with Party supporters to make a brief speech.
What I did well, I think, was write press releases and
position papers that were used to get campaign coverage by newspapers and other
media. The journalism courses that I
took at the University of Arkansas paid off when I was doing this work.
The Lost Election and
Its Aftermath
Of course, Climer lost, as did all of the other Republican
candidates for state-wide office in 1972. While he received only 40.6 percent
of the total vote, he got 62.4 percent of the vote in Pulaski County. Also,
polls showed that he received a majority of the votes of voters with
post-graduate degrees. His name
recognition never reached 50 percent.
Probably unwisely, I wrote an article the following year about
the Climer campaign for a local alternative newspaper in Little Rock, the Arkansas Advocate, in which I said
nasty things about Kelly Bryant, his wife, Nixon’s campaign in Arkansas, the Arkansas Gazette, the AFL-CIO, state
radio stations, state newspapers, and voters in general. The article was a bit sophomoric and ill-advised, but still provides a perspective of what it was like to campaign in Arkansas in 1972. It can be found here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/110446291/The-Climer-Campaign-The-Crusade-Nobody-Noticed
I mentioned in this article my disappointment
that the Arkansas Gazette did not
publish a series of investigative articles on the malfeasance of the Secretary
of State's office until after the election. The reporter who wrote those
articles called to yell at me and suggest he was going to sue me. A few weeks later,
when I got an entry level job at the Arkansas Department of Planning, he tried
to sabotage me by writing a Gazette story
about me getting a state job. The
article prompted a call from the governor’s office to Charles Crow, the
director of the department. Fortunately, he apparently convinced the caller
that my academic credentials were sufficient to justify hiring me for this
$9,000 a year entry level position.
Jerry Climer never again ran for office, but had a stellar career
in Republican-related jobs. After completing his term as Pulaski County Clerk,
he worked as the chief legislative assistant to Congressman Tom Coleman (R-MO), and then was executive
assistant to Ed Bethune for six years after he was elected to the House of
Representatives in 1978. From 1985 to
1990, Climer was on the leadership staff of Congressman Guy Vander Jagt (R-MI). (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Climer)
Climer helped set up and lead two non-profit organizations
that worked with Republicans in Congress. The first, the Congressional
Institute, has sponsored travel and retreats for Republican Representatives and
Senators, but its website (http://conginst.org/)
indicates that it has a broader bipartisan mission:
 |
| From the Congressional Institute Web Page |
Founded in 1987, the Congressional
Institute is a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to helping Members of
Congress better serve their constituents and helping their constituents better
understand the operations of the national legislature. The Institute sponsors
major conferences for the benefit of Members of the U.S. Congress as well as a
number of smaller gatherings, all devoted to an examination of important policy
issues and strategic planning. The Institute also conducts important research
projects consistent with its mission, develops resources such as a House Floor
Procedures Manual and sponsors Oxford-style bipartisan Congressional debates.
The Public Governance Institute is a policy training and
research organization. According to its website (http://www.publicgov.org/): "The Public
Governance Institute is a research, education and training group. Founded in
2001, the Institute assists public leaders and institutions in their effort to
lead public-sector change." This institute, at this point, does not
appear to be actively involved in projects -- or at least its website does not show much activity.
Climer
retired in 2007 and lives in Edenton, North Carolina. He was co-author of a
book, Surviving Inside Congress that
was published in 2009, with a second edition in 2011. It is available both as a regular book and in
a kindle edition (http://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Inside-Congress-ebook/dp/B005E0UTUC).
I saw Jerry only a couple of times in passing after the 1972
campaign.
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