Column: For Reagan campaign manager, this election is tough to watch

You got a bad back, you go see a chiropractor.

You got a toothache, you go see a dentist.

You got the election year blues, you go see Stu Spencer.

So I drove to Palm Desert, pulled up to Keedy’s Fountain Grill, and had lunch with the man.

Spencer ran four of Ronald Reagan’s campaigns — two for governor, two for president. He is admired by people on the right and the left and misses the days when common ground between the major political parties was something you worked for rather than against.

Last time we met at Keedy’s I thought Spencer was choking on his food. Turned out he was gagging at the mention of Fox News and MSNBC.

Spencer had no patience back then for gas-bag punditry on the non-issues of the day. He wanted reason and not rants, substance and not smirks. I’d throw out the name of a radio or TV personality and he’d lean in and say, “He’s an ass.”

I’m happy to report that Spencer, now 89, is as salty as ever, and held nothing back in talking about how we’ve ended up with two of the most unpopular presidential candidates in history. Spencer, by the way, doesn’t care for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.

At all.

He’s on medication because of it.

“Five milligrams,” he said, giving me the name of the pill he pops. “My wife said, ‘You’re depressed.’ I said, ‘No, I’m pissed.’ I go to the doctor, he asks me a bunch of questions. He says, ‘You’re depressed.’”

Last year, he and another Reagan man, Ken Khachigian, penned a blistering response to Trump’s claim that Reagan was “somebody I that I actually knew and liked. And he liked me. And I worked with him and helped him.”

That was news to Spencer and Khachigian, whose op-ed closed with this:

“We knew Ronald Reagan. We served alongside President Reagan. Ronald Reagan was our friend. And, Mr. Trump, you’re no Ronald Reagan.”

One thing that makes Spencer want to spit is that for years, he’s been telling GOP leaders they need to recruit rather than repulse Latino and other minority voters or the party is as doomed nationally as it has become in California. But Trump’s candidacy has done just the opposite.

Spencer, who noted that Reagan signed a bill that amnestied millions of illegal immigrants, said he gets hate mail every time he talks about Latinos. Spencer grew up with Latinos in San Gabriel, and as he tells it, he learned to say “Kiss my…” in Spanish at an early age. Those words have been on the tip of his tongue throughout this election cycle.

At Keedy’s, Spencer ordered a cheeseburger, then pulled out a list of liabilities and missteps by each candidate.

Trump, he wrote, has flip-flopped more than any candidate in his lifetime, and Spencer scrawled 15 examples, from mass deportation and abortion to whether he supported the Iraq war.

Clinton, he wrote, is an “ethical disaster” who “equals Trump in lies.”

But his Clinton list didn’t have as many examples as his Trump list. Despite her negatives, I think Clinton will get strong support from women who respect her focus on women and families and didn’t appreciate Trump’s uncouth comments about Carly Fiorina and Megyn Kelly.

Spencer was aghast during the primary, when Trump launched personal attacks on Fiorina and other GOP opponents. Reagan, said Spencer, “would have been dumbfounded at the lack of class Trump’s got. He’d attack you on your policies but he’d never attack the person.”

When I asked Spencer to elaborate on his issues with Clinton, he said “she’s got a ton of baggage” and “has a tin ear for politics.”

How so the tin ear?

“When you get pneumonia,” as Hillary did, “you don’t try to cover it up. Every family has had someone with pneumonia. You take antibiotics and you’re back on your feet…that’s how you handle it.”

In the old days, Spencer said, candidates as flawed as Trump and Clinton wouldn’t have gotten this far because party leaders held great power and wouldn’t have allowed it. But now there’s a new king maker.

“It’s about who’s got the dough,” Spencer said, either to self-finance a campaign or capitalize on independent expenditures by outsiders.

Parties have splintered and lost their core purposes, Spencer went on. Democrats are in a fix, he said, with the rise of young voters attracted to Bernie Sanders’ brand of socialism. And his beloved GOP has moved too far from its small government/lower taxes mantra and taken on too many social issues.

Every year, he said, he and President Reagan would drive out to see the Rev. Jerry Falwell, and every year, Falwell would implore Reagan — who was an abortion foe but had signed an abortion bill as governor — to take up abortion and repeal Roe vs. Wade. Reagan would listen politely but commit to nothing.

On one trip back to the White house, Spencer turned to Reagan and said:

“’Mr. President, are you giving serious thought to trying to repeal Roe v. Wade?’ He turned to me and said, ‘Stu, do I look insane to you?’ I said, ‘No sir, you look wonderful.’”

Another negative force in American politics, as Spencer sees it, was the advent of political news coverage as a 24-hour ratings game, with too little focus on what really matters. And social media, despite its benefits, gives a platform to “every idiot who can get on there and blah, blah, blah.”

It’s easier to demagogue now as a candidate, Spencer said, and get by on simple answers to complicated problems regardless of whether those answers “are logical or correct or ethical.”

In this climate, he said, whoever becomes the next president will have “a terrible job” for the next four or eight years, a period in which gargantuan foreign and domestic issues will persist.

I asked Spencer what advice he’d give to the two camps in the remaining seven weeks of the campaign.

He didn’t want the job, but I managed to drag a few thoughts out of him.

He’d advise Trump to soften a bit “and be nice and kind to the woman. To be tough on issues but treat her as a person.”

He’d advise Clinton to “focus on his weaknesses” and how they impact her base supporters, including minorities.

Each candidate has the advantage, Spencer said, of running against the other.

Get more of Steve Lopez’s work and follow him on Twitter @LATstevelopez.

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