Democrats Didn’t ‘Play Fair’: Reagan : President Says House Majority Gave Indiana Seat to ‘Own Man’

EVANSVILLE, Ind. — President Reagan set out today on his last and longest campaign trip of the season, flying west to states where his personal popularity is high but his fellow Republicans are in trouble.

On the first leg of a weeklong, seven-state journey that will keep him out of Washington until Election Day, Reagan flew to Evansville to focus attention on a House race Republicans contend that the Democrats in Congress stole from them two years ago.

“One of the principles the Democrats have abandoned most dramatically is the principle of fair play,” Reagan said in his speech for Richard McIntyre, the Republican challenging Democratic Rep. Frank McCloskey in a tight rematch for Indiana’s 8th District seat.

In 1984, McIntyre and McCloskey split the vote. GOP state officials in Indiana certified McIntyre the winner by a 34-vote margin, but the House, controlled by a Democratic majority, seated McCloskey after its own recount, supervised by the General Accounting Office, showed him winning by four votes.

GOP Members Walked Out

Republican House members accused the Democrats of stealing the election and walked out of the chamber in protest.

Rep. Leon E. Panetta (D-Monterey), chairman of a House task force that recommended that McCloskey be seated, said at the time, “There is no rule here that says when you win by four votes you have a playoff.”

If the Republican McIntyre had won by a similarly small margin, “there’s no question we would have seated Mr. McIntyre,” Panetta said.

Reagan, however, speaking to a McIntyre rally at the municipal stadium, said, “They threw your votes out the window and, in a naked display of power politics, they simply handed your district to their own man.”

Support for Abdnor

From Evansville, the President was flying to Rapid City, S.D., to boost the candidacy of Sen. James Abdnor, a member of Reagan’s “cleanup crew” sent to Washington in 1980, the year Reagan scored his first national landslide victory.

In his effort to reelect the Republicans who ended the Democratic majority in the Senate, the President has stumped for those in close races, paying tribute to them for helping institute the tax cuts, budget reductions and military buildup that were the hallmarks of his first term.

Reagan has dubbed them the “cleanup crew for the worst economic mess since the Great Depression,” always ignoring the deep recession that followed his own election and citing instead the four years of economic growth since then.