Hot on the Campaign Trail

(10 of 10)
pitting two forceful and persuasive politicians against each other. Neither of them is an ideologue, but they offer a clear difference in philosophy. "For years I've thought we'd run against each other," he says. "I didn't know when or why, but I've just thought it would happen."

In the morality campaign of 1976, a Connally candidacy would have been almost unthinkable. But the pendulum of American political preferences seems always swinging, moving from a fear of an imperial leader to a fear of a weak one, from a desire for a moral President to a desire for a shrewd horse trader. So, as Johnson and Nixon begat Carter, now Carter could just conceivably beget John Connaly, if the horse-trading rancher can satisfy skeptical Americans that his steed is white and he will never come home with a spavined and one-eyed nag. -