Almost President

by Scott Farris

  In 2004, John Kerry borrowed a rhetorical device first used by Ronald Reagan during the latter’s “State of the Union” addresses, singling out individuals for recognition to illustrate a broader point. In Kerry’s case, his concession speech cited young supporters—very young supporters—he had met during the campaign. To demonstrate his influence upon those who would govern America in future generations, Kerry singled out a six-year-old boy who had raised $680, “a quarter and a dollar at a time,” selling campaign paraphernalia, and an eleven-year-old girl who formed a group called “Kids for Kerry.” This led humorist Jon Stewart to observe, “I know why [Kerry] lost . . . you have to be eighteen to vote! Why are you going after the six-year-olds and the eleven-year-olds?”

  Recent losing presidential candidates have also paid homage to Reagan’s acknowledged mastery of political communication in the third distinct portion of the concession speech. Virtually all have adopted Reagan’s trademark conclusion to most major addresses: “God bless America.” Since 1984, from Mondale to McCain, every losing presidential candidate, except Dukakis, has ended his concession speech with “God bless America,” and only George H. W. Bush provided even a modest variation on the phrase, ending his address with “May God bless the United States of America.” Before Mondale, no losing candidate had ever concluded his concession speech with “God bless America.”

  Two scholars who analyzed major presidential addresses from 1933 to 1981—a total of 229 presidential speeches—found that the phrase “God bless America” was used only in a speech Nixon gave on the Watergate scandal in 1973. Since Reagan took office in 1981 through 2007, these scholars analyzed another 129 major presidential speeches, 49 of which concluded with “God bless America.” So routine is its usage that the scholars who analyzed the phrase concluded it was just a form of “religious . . . branding” with no more depth of meaning than an advertising slogan like Nike’s “Just Do It” or Coca-Cola’s “The Real Thing.” A speechwriter for President Carter, who seldom invoked God despite being one of the most religiously observant of modern presidents, agreed that “God bless America” has become so shorn of meaning that it is just shorthand for “the speech is over now,” and is “the political equivalent of ‘Have a nice day.’”

  Before “God bless America” took hold, the norm was not to mention God in a concession speech, though there were exceptions. Stevenson, in his 1952 concession, said, “We vote as many, but pray as one . . . we shall move forward with God’s guidance toward the time when His children shall grow in freedom and dignity in a world at peace.” Compared with Stevenson’s eloquence, simply ending a speech with “God bless America” sounds trite and theologically lazy.

  While a higher percentage of Americans regularly attend church today than at any time in our history—62 percent today compared to 45 percent one hundred years ago and just 20 percent at the time of the American Revolution—we have lost the ability to have a serious discussion about religious faith in the public square. The use of “God bless America” now seems to serve the different purpose of reinforcing the concept of American “exceptionalism”—the widely held belief throughout American history and today that America has a divine mission in the world—without making any real effort to explain why we are an exceptional people.

  While every nation likely believes that it has a special destiny, as the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Russel Nye noted, “No nation in modern history has been quite so consistently dominated as the United States by the belief that it has a particular mission in the world, and a unique contribution to make to it.” The simple expression of “God bless America” becomes a very safe way for the politician to tap into our national yearning for a sense of purpose.

  Admittedly superficial, the invocation of “God bless America” or any reference to the divine in a concession speech, when considered alongside the “deeply embedded” national belief in a divine destiny, allows the losing candidate to subtly suggest that the election was an expression of divine will, not just the popular will. The candidate and his supporters are consoled by the belief that victory was denied, not because of any fault of the candidate or error in the cause, but because defeat at that moment serves some inscrutable higher purpose.

  Given the stakes involved and the martial language used in our presidential elections, it is not surprising that some, such as the historian John R. Vile, suggest we consider the concession as a form of military surrender or even a funeral oration.

  Just as after a war, the public wants peace after a presidential campaign. They hope that politicians will emulate that most famous surrender in American history, when Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia yielded to Ulysses S. Grant and the Army of the Potomac. Despite the bitterness accumulated during four years of civil war, chivalry reigned. Lee acknowledged his defeat, Grant offered generous terms, and Lee told his soldiers to fight no more, but to go home and be “good citizens.” Voters expect no less at the conclusion of a political squabble: The loser’s dignity is left intact, both sides are praised for their valiant behavior, generous terms and words are offered, and the losers foreswear future conflict so that they may work together for the good of the nation.

  Generosity and magnanimity is easier for the winner. The loser, after all, has suffered a devastating disappointment. The exhausted losing candidate is aware of what his candidacy has meant to millions of supporters, and that he has let them down. For many losing candidates, defeat means not only the end of what may have been a lifelong quest, but also the end of a career in public service. Hubert Humphrey called losing to Nixon “the worst moment of my life,” adding that he felt “so empty . . . I could cry.” George McGovern said, “There are some things that are worse than losing an election. It’s hard to think what they are on Election Day.”

  Psychologists tell us that it is important for those who experience loss to be able to articulate their emotions in order to place the loss in perspective. Yet, this is the opposite of what we expect our losing candidates to do. So the emotions are masked, sometimes by nothing more than civility, other times with humor. Adlai Stevenson, after losing to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, used an anecdote so well received that McGovern repeated it twenty years later. Losing a presidential election, Stevenson explained, reminded him of a story told by his fellow Illinoisan, Abraham Lincoln, about “the little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark. He said he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.”

  Humor is for public consumption; privately, candidates are more likely to be hurt and angry. When Henry Clay lost to his archenemy Andrew Jackson in 1832, he confided to a friend, “Whether we shall ever see light, and law and liberty again, is very questionable.” Walter Mondale, who lost to Ronald Reagan in 1984, reportedly asked McGovern, who had lost a dozen years before, when losing stops hurting. “I’ll tell you when it does,” McGovern replied.

  Losing candidates do not brace themselves for the possibility of defeat. “I never conceded to myself . . . or anybody else that that election couldn’t be won,” said McGovern, even though he was crushed in his landslide loss to Richard Nixon. “At two o’clock in the morning on election day, I was still campaigning.” No matter what the polls have said, the candidates maintain the hope that they will surprise the pundits and pull off an upset, as President Harry Truman did in 1948. In 1992, President George H. W. Bush received only 38 percent of the popular vote, but “when you are in the bubble,” one of his aides said, “you feel the momentum and the crowds are lively and you know in the outside world you’re behind, but in the inside world you’re thinking, ‘This is going to be 1948 all over again.’”

  It is not surprising then that the concession speech can resemble the five-step process psychologists have identified for those coping with grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Some have even feigned relief that they have avoided the burden of the presidency. They are, of course, lying. Bryan insisted to
reporters, who marveled at his equanimity, that, despite his loss to William McKinley in 1896, he “went to bed happy” on election night. But a friend who observed him that evening instead saw a man summoning all his strength to conceal his emotions, and later wrote, “It is a terrible thing to look upon a strong man in the pride of youth and see him gather up in his hands the ashes of a great ambition.”

  This sense of finality (which Bryan avoided by running for president twice more) can make the end of an unsuccessful campaign seem a type of death. In a traditional funeral, it is usually obligatory to display the body, although in the case of a concession speech it is the corpse who gives the eulogy (and who, like Bryan, prays for a possible political resurrection).

  Dewey noted the similarity between the end of a campaign and a funeral, with his own role as that of the corpse, in 1948, shortly after losing to Truman. In a speech to the Gridiron Club a few days after the election, Dewey, who had also lost the presidency in 1944, said he felt like the drunk who had passed out during a wake. “If I am alive,” he said to himself, “what am I doing in this coffin? If I am dead, why do I have to go to the bathroom?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  HENRY CLAY

  1824, 1832, 1844

  Sir, I had rather be right than be president.

  One irony of contemporary politics is that the annual celebration of the Democratic Party is still known as “Jefferson-Jackson Day” when it is Andrew Jackson’s arch-nemesis, Henry Clay, who helped lay the foundation of modern liberalism. If alive today, small government advocate Jackson (and probably Thomas Jefferson, too) would more likely be considered a conservative Republican, while Clay and his political disciple, Abraham Lincoln, would be Democrats in their shared belief in the necessity of an assertive national government to act positively for the economic, social, and moral well-being of the nation.

  But Clay, the greatest legislator in American history, has no national political dinners named for him, nor is his face chiseled on Mount Rushmore. His is the greatest example of how failing to become president obscures a candidate’s place in history. At his death, Clay was eulogized by the New York Times as “too great to be president,” and given the several mediocrities who have occupied the White House, this may be a fair comment. Clay himself despised our national fixation with the presidency to the exclusion of the other branches of government, though, Lord knows, he sought the office often enough himself.

  Three times Clay was nominated for the presidency and came within a whisker of election. On two other occasions he actively sought nomination. This exceptional man known to his admirers as “Prince Hal” and the “Western Star” failed again and again through an extraordinary combination of poor judgment, rotten timing, and bad luck. Yet, these losses did not prevent Clay—Kentucky senator, Speaker of the House, secretary of state—from shaping American history far more profoundly than most presidents.

  Clay once said, perhaps a bit disingenuously, “Sir, I had rather be right than be president.” He was never president, but he was often right. To a degree far beyond his contemporaries, Clay had an accurate vision of the nation the United States was to become. Where Jackson was stuck in the Jeffersonian fantasy of a country populated only by yeoman farmers, Clay foresaw the industrial potential of America and understood its destiny as a great world power.

  A Southerner by birth, Clay was a Westerner by choice. Part of his genius was in developing a political program and strategy designed to bind the nation together and reduce the concept of sectionalism, by entwining the interests of each section with those of the others. In arguing in favor of his Compromise of 1850, Clay famously proclaimed, “I know no South, no North, no East, no West, to which I owe my allegiance.” His political program, which he called the “American System,” was carefully balanced to meet the needs and aspirations of every section of the country. It included protective tariffs to bolster American manufacturing, primarily in the North, which would in turn create stable, domestic markets for the raw goods produced in the South and West. Revenue from the tariffs would then be used for public works (then called “internal improvements”), such as roads, canals, and later, railways, which would help farmers and planters in the West and South move their goods to market.

  Key to Clay’s program, and the plank that led to his bitterest battle with Jackson, was a national bank to ensure the nation had sound currency, a safe place to deposit funds, and access to domestic credit in order to facilitate trade and commerce. Clay later tweaked his program to add such far-sighted ideas as using the sale of public lands to finance public universities and establishing an international copyright law to protect American writers and artists. Much of the American System would become law when Lincoln, who called Clay his “beau ideal of a statesman,” became president. Lincoln, according to his relatives, idolized Clay, and a study of Lincoln’s writings and speeches clearly shows that much of his political philosophy was directly inherited from Clay.

  If Clay was the quintessential American in his ardent nationalism, the services he rendered to the nation were also essential to its survival. Three times our greatest legislator forged compromises that reduced the likelihood of civil war: in 1820, 1832, and 1850. Had war come in any of those years, it goes without saying that American history would be very different. In those years, the North did not enjoy the advantages in population and industry that virtually assured victory when the war did come. Furthermore, while Jackson, a determined foe of secession, was president in 1832, the presidents in 1820 and 1850, James Monroe and Zachary Taylor respectively, would not have provided the caliber of leadership and the determination to save the Union that Lincoln would demonstrate.

  But Clay did more than prevent war through legislative compromise and sterling oratory. He helped create our enduring two-party system that features two broad-based, “big tent” national parties. Particularly embittered by his 1832 loss to the hated Jackson, Clay was the leader in then creating the Whig Party, which for a generation was the alternative to Jackson’s Democratic Party and which became the foundation of the new Republican Party. Clay’s American System concept created a national party, when an alternative history might have led to the creation of multiple narrowly focused or sectional opposition parties and a less stable American democracy.

  The split between Clay and Jackson and their dueling Democratic and Whig Parties was a continuation of the historical debate that began between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, and reminds us anew that personalities as much as policies create political unions. Jackson favored Jefferson’s view that the best government is the least government, especially for a rural and agricultural nation of yeoman farmers. Clay adopted Hamilton’s more prophetic vision of America developing into a powerful industrial and commercial state.

  The Founding Fathers had hoped the United States might avoid having political parties, which they called “factions,” but those rallying to Hamilton soon became known as Federalists, while Jefferson’s disciples were known as Republicans. Scholars differ as to whether the Federalists and Republicans were true political parties as we understand the term today, for there were no party organizations as such, no nominating conventions, or other similar partisan paraphernalia. In any event, this partisan division did not last. The Federalists disappeared as a viable political faction from a combination of factors, including John Adams’s disastrous presidency, the death of George Washington, and the murder of Hamilton in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr.

  The last remnants of the Federalists were discredited when some New England Federalists openly discussed secession during the unpopular War of 1812. For nearly a generation after that, there was only one political faction in the United States and the vast majority of Americans considered themselves part of it: Jeffersonian Republicans. When James Monroe was re-elected president in 1820 without opposition, a distinction shared only with Washington, a newspaper m
islabeled this period of nonpartisanship the “Era of Good Feelings.” It was hardly that.

  Because they were the only game in town, the Jeffersonian Republicans had to accommodate a wide range of views, not to mention competing personal ambitions. The election of 1824, therefore, was a watershed event in American political history. It reflected a generational change in leadership, as Monroe was the last of his Revolutionary War peers to serve as president.

  Five men stepped forward to offer themselves as Monroe’s successor, though John C. Calhoun withdrew to run for vice president when the two executive offices were still elected separately. That left William Crawford of Georgia, who had served in the Senate and as both secretary of war and treasury, but who was now debilitated by a stroke; John Quincy Adams, son of the second president and America’s foremost diplomat; Andrew Jackson; and Henry Clay.

  Clay had begun his political career believing himself a Jeffersonian, but when the War of 1812 exposed America’s many weaknesses, he became a fierce and tenacious advocate of an active, vital national government. He called his love of the Union “the key to my heart.” Jackson was devoted to the Union, too, but was Jeffersonian in his belief that the national government should be remote from the daily lives of Americans (except, it must be said, when federal power was needed to clear away aboriginal populations to open up new settlement areas for white Americans).

  Given that Clay and Jackson were the first two statesmen of national renown to emerge from the frontier West, their rivalry seems inevitable—though Clay, particularly, did his best to exacerbate their mutual animosity. Their early lives had many parallels. Both were born in the Southeast: Clay in Virginia in 1777 and Jackson in South Carolina in 1767. Both lost their fathers at a young age, had childhood memories of abuse at the hands of British soldiers during the Revolutionary War, and later moved west—Clay to Kentucky and Jackson to Tennessee—to seek their fortunes as young attorneys.