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12 The Anti-Gore Campaign of 1970 With Michael S. Martin I At the end of 1968 Albert Gore knew he was in trouble. His opposition to the Vietnam War, his moderation on civil rights, his support of Great Society liberalism, and his advocacy of tax reform had alienated many in Tennessee. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August had starkly illustrated his estrangement from major elements of the state Democratic Party. The Tennessee delegation was handpicked by Governor Buford Ellington. When Gore made an impassioned speech for a peace plank in the party platform, he received rousing cheers from other delegations. Tennessee delegates responded with studied indifference, sitting on their hands, ostentatiously reading their newspapers or talking and walking around. Gore cast a lonely vote for George McGovern. The rest of the delegation followed Ellington’s lead. The governor had been a favorite-son candidate in part in anticipation of a draft LBJ move, in part in the hope of wringing concessions from Hubert Humphrey. In the end, Ellington and the delegation voted for Humphrey.1 There was no love lost between Ellington and Gore. Gore had campaigned strongly for Ellington in the general election in 1958 after the segregationist won a hotly contested and divided Democratic primary. But, according to John Seigenthaler, Gore regarded the governor as a “dolt.” While Ellington was Lyndon Johnson’s point man in Tennessee, Gore and LBJ were too similar and too ambitious to get along. Gore mistrusted Johnson’s ties to moneyed interests, Johnson was exasperated by what he and 202 his friends regarded as the insufferably self-righteous Gore. As Adrian Fisher, who worked for LBJ and was an admirer of Gore, recalled, Gore was a “hard man to put pressure on” and Johnson wanted to put pressure on everybody. The result was that even before the split over Vietnam, “each was smacking against the other again,” no matter how often they tried to mend their fences. Ellington, who left the White House with Johnson’s blessing to run for governor in 1966, simply believed that Gore was jealous of Johnson, “Gore for some reason felt he had been the bridesmaid too long, not the bride. He had seen himself pushed aside by Johnson, which can build up in any man.” The consequence of the Gore-Ellington split, the bitterness between the Ellington camp and supporters of his 1966 opponent John J. Hooker, and the disinterest in Democratic Party organization by President Johnson meant that the state party organization was in a shambles. That absence of an effective state party would be particularly important for Gore, who had never built up a political organization of his own, but had relied on goodwill, on the Kefauver organization or on the state party.2 Gore also knew that the Republican party in Tennessee had been transformed . When he was first elected to the Senate in 1952 he garnered 74 percent of the general election vote. In 1958 he pushed that up to 79 percent. But in 1964 Goldwater supporter and Memphis public relations man Dan Kuykendall had polled 46.4 percent against him. Two years later Howard Baker Jr. had won the other Senate seat against Frank Clement comfortably and was on his way to building up the strongest political base of any of the first generation of southern Republican senators. In 1968 the Democratic presidential candidate Humphrey only polled 28 percent of the vote. Middle and western Tennessee white Democrats had switched to George Wallace. His 34 percent enabled Nixon to carry the state. Gore knew that the Republicans would mount a strong challenge in 1970. If Gore was in any doubts about the extent of anti-Democratic backlash, he had only to look at the defeat of his closest Washington friend, Oklahoma senator Mike Monroney in October 1968.3 Gore also knew that he was perceived as having lost touch with the state. One pollster reported that “he is frequently criticized on the basis of being out of touch with the state, a “politician” who appears on the scene a few months before election time to take popular stands on controversial issues— and once elected is seldom seen or heard from by his constituents.” Said one voter, “He’s a politician. Until six months before the election we never hear from him, then you start getting mail, films, and so on.” Gore might vigorously refute the charge—he was in Tennessee at some point in forty-three weeks in both...

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