As the Kansas City convention approached, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan were neck and neck; it was the closest nomination contest in many years and the closest a sitting President had come for a hundred years to being unseated by a challenger of his own party. This show was not intended to be purely a pitch for Ronald Reagan: Mr. Ford's campaign, Mr. Buckley tells us, "has had two weeks to designate a representative but has not succeeded in doing so." Mr. Sears, a moderate Republican, would wind up managing Mr. Reagan's next campaign for the Presidency, too, until his spectacular dismissal in the snows of New Hampshire. Here, he does well at focusing on the details: e.g., on how difficult it will be for Gerald Ford, if he wins the nomination, to put together a general election campaign: "Mr. Ford has no personal constituency in the South ... the only way he could have won there would have been if the Democrats had nominated a liberal Democrat who was not from the South. They did not do that ... that forces [Ford] up into the Northeast and Middle West ... And yet the positions he's taken in order to try to fend off Mr. Reagan's candidacy are not ones that he could drop that quickly to go run the other way. So I really don't know what he would do."