As Bob Shogan of the Los Angeles Times recalled in his perceptive book, None of the Above, Kennedy ran an outsider strategy. He staked his race in the party primaries—not to accumulate an unbeatable number of Democratic convention delegates but to bypass the party bosses and to pressure them through his popular vote and media attention. In 1960, there were seventeen primaries, Kennedy entered eight and had only two real battles—in Wisconsin and West Virginia. Those were the forerunners of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary today. Their impact was magnified far beyond the actual numbers of delegates. In those states, Kennedy took on Hubert Humphrey and beat him, by months of early grass-roots work, by spending plenty of money, and by cleverly daring West Virginia Protestants to prove they were not bigots by voting for a Catholic. With a victorious verdict from the voters, Kennedy forced the party’s power brokers to recognize his popular appeal. His populist assault on the citadels of power was a lesson for the future.
In office, Kennedy also set a model with his ringing rhetoric, his witty televised sparring with reporters, the moving biblical cadences of speeches limned by Sorensen. He redeemed his promise to get the country moving with the bold, symbolic adventurism of a manned mission to the moon. The mystique of political Camelot, a noble time and a special grace and company, was his creation. And yet as a coalition builder moving the government to turn his visions in law, Kennedy fell short. He was not able to translate personal popularity into effective leverage with Congress. It took Lyndon Johnson, a master legislative craftsman, to pass Kennedy’s tax cut and other major elements of his legislative program.
The problem is that our political system has a built-in requirement for coalitions among rival power centers. Without coalitions, legislation does not move, policies bog down in governmental paralysis, presidents fail, and the public chafes for yet another new leader. But the coalitions of government and the coalitions of electoral success are vastly different. After a marathon campaign in which television and presidential primary voters have taken over the roles once played by political organizations and party leaders, the modern president has far fewer building blocks than presidents had only a few decades back.
Writing after Richard Nixon’s landslide reelection and resignation, Harvard scholar Samuel P. Huntington observed that the day after the election, the size of a president’s electoral majority is “almost irrelevant” to his ability to govern.
“What counts then is his ability to mobilize support from the leaders of the key institutions in society and government,” Huntington argued. “He has to constitute a broad government coalition of strategically located supporters who can furnish him with the information, talent, expertise, manpower, publicity, arguments, and political support which he needs to develop a program, to embody it in legislation, and to see it effectively implemented. This coalition must include key people in Congress, the Executive Branch, and the private-sector ‘Establishment.’ The governing coalition need have little relation to the electoral coalition. The fact that the President as a candidate put together a successful coalition does not insure that he will have a viable governing coalition.”3
His comments had a prophetic ring—for Jimmy Carter. Carter’s campaign strategist, Hamilton Jordan, shrewdly doped out the chessboard intricacies of the primary system. To voters sickened by the Watergate scandal, Carter sold his political innocence, his promise that “I will never lie to you.” But four years as governor of Georgia had not schooled Carter for handling an assertive Congress, even one controlled by his party. Nelson Polsby, a leading scholar of elections at the University of California at Berkeley, observed that the primary process and general election left great gaps in Carter’s political education. Having won the White House with a go-it-alone, outsider’s campaign, Carter had no links with other Democrats. He did not know how to put together congressional coalitions to pass his programs. He was missing the linkage between ends and means. Carter did pass some legislation, and he got the Panama Canal treaty ratified. But his overall record with Congress was poor.
“Nothing in Mr. Carter’s prior experience as a politician, certainly nothing in his experience of the nomination process, led him to the view that he needed to come to terms with the rest of the Democratic Party,” Nelson Polsby commented.4
Certainly, marathon campaigns test the health, endurance, resourcefulness, plausibility, tenacity, good humor, and verbal agility of candidates, as well as their fund-raising and public relations skills. All of these, except fund-raising, are necessary in the presidency. But most tests in the campaign are rhetorical. What is most egregiously missing is testing by other politicians: not rival debaters, but powerful figures who will later affect the president’s policy success or failure.
“Up until the late sixties, if you wanted to get the nomination, you had to go around and deal with the party leaders and get to know them,” recalled Austin Ranney, a political scientist at the University of California in Berkeley. “That gave you something to leverage when you got into office. Now, the politics of the campaign very much go against the politics of governing. If someone is good at both, we are very lucky. The campaign is keyed to television. The person who comes off well is the ‘good guy’ and the guy with the little ‘factlets.’ And that’s not the essence of good governing. That involves identifying good people, getting good information and advice from them, developing solutions. That involves quiet discussions, not quick adversarial exchanges but colloquy.”5
Historically, the relationship between running and ruling was much closer. In Washington and across the country were the power barons in each major party—governors, mayors, senators, the bosses of city machines, big businessmen, or union leaders—who privately took the measure of the contenders. To succeed, candidates not only had to win popular approval, but they needed to gain the confidence of political peers, a valuable asset after the election. These were political pros who had a sense of what the job required and who could assess the candidate from personal experience. Making political alliances in the campaign often required a candidate to strike deals or to modify his positions on central issues. Such bargaining with established leaders tested his knowledge of major issues and his ability to forge political coalitions—not merely with a public whose interest was fleeting, whose knowledge was superficial, and whose loyalties were fluid, but with political heavyweights whose own survival was affected.
What’s more, once a candidate had won the support of regional party leaders, it usually continued after the election. A president could look to regional power barons to help deliver votes from their congressional delegations. So the system of brokering for electoral support had the advantages of testing the mettle of a leader among experienced politicians he would have to lead, and of providing building blocks for a governing coalition.
Surely, the process of back-room deals had its seamy side, for like the current system, the old paths to power influenced what types of politicians made it to the top. Since the Civil War, we have had three different systems of presidential selection, each with its own type of victor, according to Samuel Kernell, a political scientist at Brookings Institution. As recently as William McKinley, it was regarded as bad taste to seek the nomination aggressively. From 1876 through 1932, Kernell explained, the party barons were looking for someone safe who would abide by the tacit rules of the game: spreading patronage, the spoils of victory, and distributing federal largesse to the states. The party power barons were not looking for greatness. Grover Cleveland was typical of the era, though the system also produced Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
By Kernell’s scheme, the second stage came in 1932 when the party barons shifted to picking national coalition builders. Nominations were still brokered at party conventions, not settled by primary voters, but the power barons gravitated toward nominees who could stitch together the disparate elements of the party and appeal to the nation. Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower were quintessential examples. Power brokers were wary of Tennessee’s
Senator Estes Kefauver, with his televised hearings on organized crime or on drug abuse. Kefauver’s populist style made the party barons uneasy; they preferred an establishment figure such as Adlai Stevenson.
But trends began to change with Jack Kennedy in 1960. By 1972, with the Democratic party’s internal reforms, power was taken from the bosses and given to the masses. The barons were formally overthrown, the conventions virtually stripped of power, and the nominees chosen by direct primaries. The new campaign game favored image makers, not coalition builders: political individualists such as Jack Kennedy and Barry Goldwater and outsiders such as Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.6
The 1988 race showed similar characteristics. Senator Gary Hart, an outsider in style and temperament, rose and fell in the media. The shower of media attention after Hart’s modest but unexpected second-place finish in the 1984 Iowa caucuses made him a sudden contender, and he came close to the nomination. In 1986, rather than seeking a third Senate term, Hart left Washington for full-time presidential campaigning. His candidacy was initially killed by the media hunt after his tryst with actress Donna Rice fired controversy over his extramarital relations. And his chances, after his surprise reentry into the race in December 1987, depended heavily on using media coverage to reach the electorate. Three more outsiders, Bruce Babbitt, twice elected governor of Arizona; Pierre S. du Pont IV, two-term governor of Delaware; and Michael Dukakis, a third-term governor of Massachusetts, followed Jimmy Carter’s route, hoping a strong early showing would vault them into the White House without Washington experience. Television evangelist Pat Robertson built his race around his mass following, despite his lack of government experience. Robertson’s television appeal was enough to make him a contender, or at least an influence on Republican fortunes.
Of course, the 1988 field includes experienced Washington politicians—Republicans George Bush, Robert Dole, and Jack Kemp, and Democrats Richard Gephardt, Albert Gore, and Paul Simon. More than the others, Dole and Gephardt have proven their skill at the inside power game, garnering votes and leading coalitions.
But if mastery of the art of government were of prime importance to voters, it is questionable that Howard Baker would have quit the competition to become White House chief of staff. Nor is it clear that experienced, popular, big-state governors such as Mario Cuomo of New York and James Thompson of Illinois would have hesitated to enter the race. Similarly, in the Washington power game, senators Bill Bradley of New Jersey and Sam Nunn of Georgia are known for intellectual leadership, legislative skill, and integrity. Both have tackled tough issues—taxes and financial policy in Bradley’s case, military and arms policy in Nunn’s case. They are influential with their political peers because they are knowledgeable, fair minded, and skilled at turning their ideas into policies and laws. But the political book on both Bradley and Nunn is that they lack the charisma for presidential-level video politics—a likely factor in keeping them out of the 1988 competition.
Image over Issues
Governmental competence has not scored high with the voters in the past three presidential elections. After Watergate, Washington experience and connections were a definite handicap, and that helped produce the victory of Jimmy Carter—as an outsider. Part of Ronald Reagan’s public relations genius has been somehow to distance himself from Washington, from the very government that he heads, and to treat the bureaucrats under his command as if he had no connection with them.
In the 1984 campaign, Peter Hart, pollster for Walter Mondale, warned Mondale not to expect much public credit for his three terms as a senator and four years as vice president. In July 1983, Hart had done a poll among prospective New Hampshire voters about the qualities they valued most in a president. The number one quality they picked was: “A leader—can take charge and get results.” Number two was: “Compassionate—cares about people.” Number three was: “Has a plan for jobs and economic growth.” Way down on Hart’s list, tied for tenth (out of eighteen), was political competence: “Capable, knows the ins and outs of government.”
“What I said to Mondale is that experience is like a pair of twos in a game of poker,” Peter Hart told me. “It’s the lowest hand you can form. It’s the best there is until something better comes along, but it’s pretty easy for something better to come along.” Looking back over the past three presidential elections, Hart sized up the qualities that were valued most by voters. “In 1976, political virginity and purity counted much more than competence,” he said. “In 1980, it was toughness that counted—can-do, stand-up type of leadership. The 1984 election was defined by Reagan, so toughness still counted.”7
With the Iran-contra scandal, the Wall Street indictments for insider trading and the scandal over television preacher Jim Bakker’s adultery and lavish profits, the climate changed. Peter Hart and other pollsters found signs that voters were placing greater value on political leaders who play by the rules of the game and who showed integrity and a sense of community. Several presidential candidates stressed their competence and substantive knowledge. If those assets prove decisive in 1988, that could overturn the conventional wisdom of the past ten to fifteen years that image matters more than issues. As one of President Ford’s campaign strategists put it in an internal memo in June 1976: “The polls continue to show that issues are not a decisive campaign factor. The voters continue to react to personality traits and themes.”8
That echoed Richard Nixon’s view that he lost to Kennedy in 1960 because “I spent too much time … on substance and too little time on appearance: I paid too much attention to what I was going to say and too little to how I would look.”9 By 1968, as Joe McGinniss documented in The Selling of the President 1968, Nixon was paying more attention to his shave and his image.
In fact, concern with measuring and manipulating image has become such an obsession of campaign strategists that they have devised Buck Rogers gadgetry (borrowed from commercial advertising) to get instant feedback. For example, when seven Democratic contenders held a televised debate in Houston in July 1987, Democratic pollsters Harrison Hickman and Paul Maslin assembled eighty-five Iowa Democrats at the Holiday Inn in West Des Moines to record their instant reactions to the debaters. The Iowans were each given a cigarette-sized gadget with a knob for dialing scores from one to seven. If they liked what was happening on the TV screen, the viewers dialed a seven; if their reaction was negative, they dialed a one. Their gadgets were wired to a nearby computer which compiled a running composite score. Actually, it computed more than an average; it showed whether some candidate was polarizing the audience, producing both sevens and ones, or just a lot of mushy, neutral fours. Media managers used that data to coach their candidates on how to remodel their images.
Dick Wirthlin, Reagan’s pollster, showed me how he has used a similar system, not only for Reagan’s campaign debates but for Reagan’s presidential addresses. Wirthlin was trying to find “power phrases” and hot moments that scored well with the audience—to be sure that Reagan repeated them in future speeches.10 Wirthlin and others chart audience reaction and then impose their graphs—like the sawtooth lines of stock-market averages—on videotapes of the candidates speaking. These reaction graphs suggest that people are often responding as much to the speaker’s facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language as to content. To people who complain this technique has overtones of Big Brother, Wirthlin and others answer that reaction graphs are useful tools generated by political competition. Insuring the right emotional impression of a candidate on television may be the heart of a winning strategy, but it hardly matches the far more complex task of coalition building in government.
Like Nixon recalling the 1960 campaign, Walter Mondale acknowledged that he had been hurt in the 1984 campaign by his stiff television image. “I think you know I’ve never really warmed up to television, and in fairness to television, it’s never really warmed up to me,” Mondale told reporters. Not that Mondale was proposing to do away with television. “Modern politics requires
television,” he said. “I don’t believe it’s possible any more to run for president without the capacity to build confidence and communications every night.” But from years in government, Mondale, like Nixon, was worried about the implications of image campaigning: “The thing that scares me about that, the thing that has held me back, is that I think, more than we should, American politics is losing substance. It is losing debate on merit. It’s losing the depth that tough problems require to be discussed, and more and more it is that twenty-second snippet—you know, the angle, the shtick, whatever it is.”11
Presidential campaigns are superficial because the contenders want to reach so many people so quickly. Mass rhetoric is light on substance and quick on slogans, because the public neither understands the intricacies of issues nor is willing to focus on much explanation. The frenetic pace of campaigning during the peak of the primary season makes thoughtful discussion of issues a rarity. Even with televised debates, the press often compounds these problems in the intense season of early primaries, by pouncing on the daily gaffes and stumbles of front-runners or lionizing some sudden challenger; by focusing on the narrative drama of who’s ahead, behind, limping or gaining in the horse race; by its fascination with the inside baseball of campaign tactics, rather than the issue or long-term record of candidates. Actually, the past records of Carter and Reagan were better indicators than most campaign rhetoric of what was to come in the White House. In Georgia, Carter had been a loner, an individualistic moralizer; and in California, there had been two Reagans: one, a dogmatic ideologue with charm, and the other, an occasionally pragmatic compromiser.
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