Almost President

by Scott Farris

  Gore, who won the popular vote but lost the presidency to Bush in 2000, traded in the role of politician for prophet. Like William Jennings Bryan nearly a century ago, Gore has used his prestige to promote a cause in which politics intersects with science. The difference between the two is that Bryan staked his legacy on persuading the public to be wary of scientific consensus around the theory of evolution, while Gore’s struggle is to persuade the public simply to accept scientific consensus around the issue of global climate change and do something about it.

  In 2007, for his work in sounding the alarm to the danger of global climate change, Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize—an unprecedented honor for a losing presidential candidate. Indeed, only four presidents have ever won the Nobel Prize: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama. But Gore also won prizes that no president has ever won: a Grammy for the spoken word version of his book, An Inconvenient Truth, and an Emmy for his global television network, Current TV, an “interactive television service” that gives viewers the power to create and influence content. Gore was also the subject of the Academy Award–winning documentary on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, and he has authored several best-selling books.

  Defeated by Bush in 2004, Kerry defied expectations by returning to the Senate in the unusually prominent and influential role of chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Some suggested that Kerry, because of his exceptionally proactive efforts to promote free and fair elections in the Muslim world, had become a “de facto” secretary of state. As Jimmy Carter once earned the reputation of being the most active ex-president in recent American history, admirers said Kerry was determined to become the “best ex-presidential nominee.”

  Kerry’s role during President Barack Obama’s administration parallels Adlai Stevenson’s relationship with President John F. Kennedy—though Obama seemed more receptive to Kerry’s mentoring than Kennedy was to Stevenson’s. Both Stevenson and Kerry had hoped to be appointed secretary of state but were passed over by the young presidents they wished to serve. So they assumed different influential roles regarding foreign policy, though again, Kerry seemed to have the better arrangement as chair of Senate Foreign Relations, while Stevenson held the less effective post of ambassador to the United Nations.

  McCain, who lost to Obama in 2008, spurred considerable comment when he broke with recent tradition and became an immediate, prominent, and harsh critic of Obama and many of his policies. McCain’s decision to attack Obama’s policies within weeks of Obama assuming office led the New York Times to comment in a front-page article in March 2009 that McCain was “rewriting the part of presidential loser.” McCain responded, “I’m the, as I said, loyal opposition. And both words, I think, are operative.”

  During the second half of the twentieth century, losing candidates generally afforded the winning candidate at least a short grace period during which they withheld criticism. But McCain was not “rewriting” the part of presidential loser as much as he—like Kerry and Gore—was returning to an older script. In attacking Obama for “leading an extreme, left wing crusade to bankrupt America,” McCain evoked memories of Henry Clay’s denunciations of Andrew Jackson’s supposed pretensions to monarchy or Al Smith’s excoriating Herbert Hoover for the ills of the nation’s Great Depression. There was a time when a losing candidate stayed in the fray, and McCain’s attacks only seemed shocking when compared with the way our more recent losing presidential candidates quietly absented themselves from the public arena.

  Bob Dole resigned from the Senate during his 1996 presidential campaign and was only modestly involved in politics after his loss to Clinton. Michael Dukakis finished out his final term as governor of Massachusetts but then devoted most of his time following his 1988 defeat to teaching at colleges in Massachusetts and California. Walter Mondale was urged to run for the Senate again after his defeat in 1984, but he declined. He had noted the cool reception George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey had received from their peers when they returned to the Senate following their defeats. “It’s never the same when they come back,” Mondale said. Mondale served as U.S. ambassador to Japan under Clinton and was finally drafted back into the senatorial election arena in 2002 as a last-minute replacement when Senator Paul Wellstone died, but he lost.

  McGovern, who returned to the Senate after losing to Richard Nixon in 1972, and Humphrey, who returned to the Senate two years after losing to Nixon in 1968, had hoped to be acknowledged leaders and spokesmen for their party. They had plenty to say, but few were interested in their opinions. After Humphrey’s loss to Nixon in 1968, he was not invited to speak at any Democratic Party function for almost a year. He was even rejected by his colleagues in his bid to become Senate majority leader, despite his previous prominence as a senator and vice president. His peers felt so guilty about the rebuff that they created a new honorary post, deputy president pro tempore, just for Humphrey.

  McGovern famously gave a speech at Oxford University on the day of Nixon’s second inauguration in which he claimed “the United States is closer to one-man rule than at any time in our history.” McGovern was chastised for what he was told was “unsportsmanlike conduct toward my victorious rival,” and New York Times columnist Joseph Kraft added that McGovern should have had “the grace to keep quiet for a while.”

  But this notion that the presidential loser should keep quiet is relatively new. Clay was merciless in his attacks on Jackson whom he believed to be, as McCain was said to believe of Obama, unqualified for the presidency. Bryan led the campaign against President William McKinley’s “imperialist” ambitions in the Philippines. Thomas Dewey, after first excoriating the conservative wing of his own party for wanting to “turn back the clock” to the “good old days of the nineteenth century,” turned his fire on the Democrats by charging in the summer of 1949 that Truman seemed determined to “throw China into the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.”

  Stevenson, too, had no qualms about challenging the policies of Eisenhower and the Republicans weeks after Ike took office. On February 11, 1953, Stevenson gave a highly regarded speech in New York City, which he concluded with an attack on Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy and his supporters for laying “rough hands” on the Bill of Rights. Traveling on to Washington, D.C., the next day, Stevenson was greeted by hundreds of cheering Democratic congressmen and their aides—a different welcome from what McGovern or Humphrey received.

  In making public attacks so soon after an election, Clay, Bryan, Dewey, and Stevenson were acting in the unofficial capacity as the titular leader of their party, a post that seems to have disappeared in recent decades, though it seemed McCain was trying to resurrect the title. Being the titular leader of a political party is unique to the American form of democracy. Unlike a parliamentary democracy, there is no official leader of the opposition party in American politics who can speak on behalf of the party. That duty is often split among the opposition party leaders in Congress, the party chair, and those most likely to obtain the party nomination the next election cycle.

  But there was a time when the most recent presidential loser was automatically considered the de facto spokesperson for the party out of power until the party nominated someone else. But the last person generally acknowledged as the titular leader of a nonpresidential party was Stevenson, who held that title from 1952 until the Democrats nominated Kennedy in 1960. Richard Nixon had disqualified himself for the role by his behavior following his loss in the California governor’s race in 1962, and the dimensions of Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 sent Republicans immediately searching for a new standard-bearer.

  Observers debated whether McCain attempted to resurrect the title following his 2008 loss to Obama. The news media seemed intent on bestowing it upon him. In the first two years after his loss to Obama, McCain appeared on the prestigious Sunday morning news interview shows more than two dozen times—far more appeara
nces than any other official, Republican or Democrat, during the same time period. Also, in contrast to McGovern’s and Humphrey’s return to relative anonymity, McCain returned as the ranking Republican on the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, which made him a particularly sought-after spokesman for the Republican Party on foreign and military affairs.

  Because the concept of a titular head of a party had disappeared for a half-century, McCain’s behavior was carefully scrutinized. Commentators debated whether McCain was speaking out on principle or whether he was simply bitter and envious of Obama’s victory.

  While the McCain-Obama race was not particularly vitriolic by the standards of past presidential campaigns, Obama’s status as the first African-American presidential nominee added a new tension to the contest, as did the economic crisis that engulfed the globe during the final months of the campaign. As noted in chapter one, there was genuine concern during the campaign that the ill will would not abate following the election, but McCain then gave his exceptionally gracious concession speech and tempers seemed to cool almost at once. Then there were some commentators who went too far the other way and suggested that McCain and Obama might develop a partnership similar to that enjoyed between Franklin Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie.

  That alliance did not happen in the first few years after the campaign in part because McCain had developed a negative opinion of Obama well before their campaign began. While both were in the Senate, McCain accused Obama of reneging on a deal for the two of them to work together on Senate ethics reform. He questioned whether Obama had the courage to stand up to the special interests in his party as McCain had proudly dissented from Republican positions on so many occasions. But there were also those who thought that McCain was simply jealous of the news media’s infatuation with Obama. Obama, meanwhile, sensed McCain’s disrespect and returned it in kind.

  Obama had been in the Oval Office less than a month when McCain began complaining that the administration was not reaching out in the spirit of bipartisanship, and friends said McCain was miffed that Obama did not reach out to him as the leader of the opposition party to help craft legislation. McCain became an especially harsh critic of Obama’s proposals to reform the nation’s health insurance system, a measure that received virtually no Republican support. When Obama convened a summit with Republican and Democratic members of Congress to discuss how to forge a bipartisan compromise, McCain attended and chided Obama for failing to live up to his campaign promises. Obama interrupted, saying “the election’s over,” to which McCain testily responded, “I’m reminded of that every day.”

  McCain was known for having a sharp temper. Further, friends have said that McCain’s survival through more than five horrific years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam left him with the conviction that he had a destiny to fulfill. Having also lost to Bush in the 2000 Republican presidential primaries, McCain was twice denied the presidency by men he deemed less deserving than himself.

  Following the 2000 election, McCain had been a thorn in the side of Bush’s presidency, too, and seemed to relish thumbing his nose at Republican orthodoxy. He pushed his McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation into law over Republican objections, he broke from the GOP position to support a patient’s “bill of rights” in the regulation of health management organizations, supported more stringent background checks for certain gun purchases, and initially opposed significant elements of Bush’s proposed tax cuts. McCain’s unorthodox positions even led Kerry to send feelers out to determine if McCain would consider being his running mate in 2004 on a type of “national unity” ticket—an idea McCain quickly dismissed as unfeasible.

  Realizing that his “maverick” status, if unabated, could alienate the Republican base and cost him his last chance at the Republican presidential nomination, McCain began altering a number of his positions during the 2008 campaign. The McCain who had once advocated reform that included a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants now focused almost exclusively on border security. The McCain who had initially voted against the Bush tax cuts now favored extending them. The McCain who had once opposed repeal of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision on abortion now said repeal “wouldn’t bother me any”—and he claimed to no longer even favor rape and incest as exceptions where abortion might be appropriate.

  McCain seemed to have abandoned even his signature issue, campaign finance reform, and dropped his support for a cap and trade system to combat climate change and instead strongly supported more domestic drilling for oil. Most disconcerting of all to many of his admirers, given the moral authority on which he, as a former POW, could talk about torture, he brokered a “compromise” with the Bush administration on how it could treat detainees accused of terrorist activities. Critics said the policy allowed the administration to ignore the Geneva Convention if it chose to do so.

  After Obama’s election, McCain continued to tack to the right. He had previously said he would favor allowing gay men and women to serve openly in the military once the joint chiefs of staff endorsed the idea, yet when the joint chiefs did so in 2010, McCain maintained his opposition. McCain even denied that he had ever considered himself a political “maverick,” when that had been a key theme of his presidential campaigns. Some credited this shift to the political right to McCain’s having a strong Senate primary challenge in 2010 from someone even more conservative than he. Friends also say the 2008 campaign changed McCain. A former chief of staff, Grant Woods, acknowledged that McCain’s views on immigration, for example, changed in part because he felt betrayed by Hispanic voters, who overwhelmingly supported Obama despite McCain’s years of championing immigration reform. “When you carry that fight at great sacrifice year after year and then you are abandoned during the biggest fight of your life, it has to have some sort of effect on you,” he said.

  Others insist it was all a manifestation of McCain’s ornery temperament. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank said it was McCain’s “antipathy toward President George W. Bush [that] led him to seek common cause with Democrats to thwart a Republican president. Now his antipathy toward President Obama has made him a leading Republican hardliner.” McCain allies countered that a liberal news media had been quick to applaud McCain’s differences with a Republican president as “courageous” but now expressed disapproval when he did not offer uniform support to a Democratic one. Some observers believe he took certain positions just to earn media coverage, and others simply believe he enjoyed “being a pain in the ass.” There was “an element of truth in each charge,” McCain said.

  It may also be true that a news media awed by McCain’s Vietnam experience simply misjudged McCain’s fundamental political philosophy, that while he cast some votes counter to Republican orthodoxy he was, as one friend said, “fundamentally . . . very conservative.” Perhaps, but the record indicates McCain became far more conservative after Obama’s election. A National Journal analysis of one hundred key votes found McCain tied with four other senators as the most conservative member of the Senate in 2010. More typically in his career, the National Journal said, McCain had ranked as “near the 45th” most conservative member of the Senate, which meant that he had previously been one of the least conservative Republican members of the Senate.

  If McCain’s visibility was due to a sense of obligation to lead opposition to the Democratic agenda because he was the most recent Republican standard bearer, then he was simply returning to a tradition only recently abandoned. But even though McCain, seventy-two years old when he ran in 2008, is unlikely to seek the presidency again, aides said McCain intended to stay politically relevant. One aide told Vanity Fair in 2010 that service in the Senate is “McCain’s whole life, his reason for being,” and another said there is no chance McCain will one day “go off and set up a global education foundation.”

  No losing presidential nominee has been named secretary of state since Charles Evans Hughes in 1921. Kerry had hoped to become
Obama’s first secretary of state, a post that went instead to Hillary Clinton. Descended from the prominent Winthrop and Forbes families, Kerry’s father was a career Foreign Service officer, giving young Kerry an interest in foreign affairs almost from birth. His family moved around the world, including time spent in divided Berlin, where an adolescent Kerry once snuck into the Communist half of the city. In part to keep young John out of such trouble, Kerry was sent to boarding school in Switzerland.

  While this background enhanced Kerry’s deep interest in foreign affairs, it also left him without a sense of place, of being from somewhere.33 Back in the States, Kerry continued to struggle to fit in at the exclusive St. Paul’s preparatory school in New Hampshire, where his relative lack of wealth, his Catholic faith, and his Democratic politics stood out among the preppie WASP student body. Kerry would later bond with Obama, friends said, as a “fellow outsider.”

  Their shared politics, faith, and initials led Kerry to adopt John F. Kennedy as his political hero. Kerry even once had the opportunity while still a schoolboy to go sailing with Kennedy, and he had briefly dated Jackie Kennedy’s half-sister. Kerry joined the Navy after a Kennedy aide came to Yale following Kennedy’s assassination and told the students that serving in Vietnam would help fulfill Kennedy’s legacy. Kerry even became skipper of patrolling gunboats known as “Swift boats,” similar to the PT boats Kennedy had commanded during World War II.

  Kerry’s war record would be a matter of some dispute during his presidential campaign, but official records label him an aggressive commander who earned three Purple Hearts, the Silver Star, and a Bronze Star. Disenchanted with the war, after his discharge he became active in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Well spoken and well groomed, Kerry, the former champion debater, was viewed by the Nixon administration as perhaps the most dangerous anti-war protester in the country.