by Dick Morris
But because of Kennedy’s unique example, political leaders have never quite understood the importance of being a father figure. John Kennedy’s obvious youth, vigor, and charisma, coupled with his bold inaugural assertion that the “torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans,” led to a sense that people want youth in the White House. But even if there is another politician with Kennedy’s charm and attractiveness, it is unlikely that we will see a press sufficiently willing to leave the image untouched.
Ronald Reagan’s paternal friendliness epitomized the style, which resonated deeply with the American people. Reliability, trustworthiness, steadiness, and unflappability became attributes Americans wanted in a president. Even in the Democratic primaries of 1984, Walter Mondale defeated Gary Hart by using an ad featuring a ringing red telephone, presumably the hot line with Moscow. The announcer asked if the voters wouldn’t prefer an experienced hand like Mondale’s to answer the ringing summons rather than the young, untried Gary Hart.
With Clinton, the World War II generation relinquished its thirty-two-year control of the White House. Skipping entirely the generation born between the mid-1920s and early 1940s, the baby boomers took the presidency.
In his Arkansas years, Clinton ran for governor as the electorate’s son. Editorial cartoonists drew the boy governor in a baby carriage. When he succeeded in regaining office after his 1980 defeat, the carriage acquired the treads and turret of a tank, but a carriage it remained. As a candidate for president, Clinton campaigned as Everyman’s friend. Happy to dine at McDonald’s and Burger King, jogging in tattered shorts, fighting to control his waistline, Bill Clinton was Bubba, the regular guy running for office.
But Clinton the regular guy came across as a bumbler in the opening years of his presidency. His inability to appoint an attorney general who could be confirmed by the Senate, his gaffe in opening his administration by urging that gays be allowed in the military, and his stumbling over the economic-stimulus package left him with a look of inexperience and incompetence. The need for a greater dignity and stature became obvious. But could a young man be the nation’s father? Even as his hair whitened, his suits darkened, and his ties reddened, it was unclear he could pull it off.
It is one of his most interesting achievements that even as his perpetual adolescence became glaringly obvious with each scorned woman, Clinton was able to become America’s father. He did it by conscious manipulation. He featured issues involving children and was so often seen with adoring youngsters that the father image began to sink in. His platforms were always dignified; he moved his jogging indoors. He stopped his self-conscious explanations of past failures and frank confessions, which used to dot his speeches. Fathers don’t explain. They don’t apologize. They don’t show vulnerability. Only when forced to the wall by the Lewinsky scandal did he permit a breach in his wall of dignity.
Dignity, often called presidentiality, is an essential element of a successful presidency. Jimmy Carter earned himself no credit by walking in his own inaugural parade. America, lacking a reigning monarch, looks to Hollywood for glitz and to the White House for grandeur.
A president must seem to be above it all. When he gets involved in the nitty-gritty of lobbying or seems to be his own congressional floor leader, he becomes a prime minister and loses his grip on the presidency. He must always be unrattled, calm, possessed, and sure of himself.
Ceremonial occasions are crucial for an effective chief executive. These rituals of democracy serve to elevate the president and put him above politics. The problem is to get the media to cover the events, since they are predictable, repetitive, and scripted. By combining policy with pomp, the presidential event, ceremonial or not, can make it into the nightly news.
In 1996, while greeting the largely female American winners of medals in the Atlanta Olympics, President Clinton spoke out about the need for gender equality in funding programs for female athletes in public schools. While receiving the winners of the Boys’ Club public-service awards, he called for mandatory community-service requirements for high school graduation. The ceremonial and the political had been merged so the ceremonial would get covered.
At the start of his presidency, Clinton would often speak of rites he had to perform “because I’m president,” as if the stature of the position were rented, like a tuxedo for a friend’s wedding. After the dignity of the office became second nature to him, he internalized it and developed a presence that increasingly looked presidential.
The obvious partisanship of the Republicans in Congress enhanced Clinton’s stature by comparison. The more Congress wallowed in scandal investigations and political attacks, the more Clinton appeared larger, more positive, and less political. In a classic example of jujitsu, the fury of the GOP attack made the country yearn for a president who could cast a disdaining, confident, fatherly glance at the furor in Congress. As politics sank to an all-time low of sleaze, Clinton seemed to rise in stature, even though he was, in large part, responsible for the sleaze. It was not until his direct involvement in the Lewinsky affair undermined his image of dignity that his personal popularity began to fade, even though his job approval rating remained strong.
In our democratic society, where familiarity and folksiness is at a premium, few politicians truly grasp the importance of the father image. Ronald Reagan mastered the role of president-as-father long before he entered the office. Like an experienced actor playing a role, dignity came easily to him. George Bush’s success in exuding fatherliness, particularly during the Gulf War, likely came from his study at the master’s knee while he served as vice president. Jimmy Carter never tried to be the nation’s father. Richard Nixon couldn’t pull it off. And Lyndon Johnson just looked phony.
But a president needs to play the part until he becomes it. He must act with the dignity his office demands long before he really feels like a president. Dignity is a political weapon every president needs.
Chapter 29
The Domestic Uses of Foreign Policy
MOST CONVENTIONAL THINKERS say that foreign policy doesn’t matter in American domestic elections. Unless there is a war or a threat from abroad, the pundits maintain that Americans don’t care about what happens past the ocean’s edge. But this wisdom ignores the key role foreign policy plays in telling us about the personality of our leaders. It is on the foreign stage that we see most clearly the strengths and shortcomings of our presidents and other elected high officials.
Obviously, the use of force in foreign affairs can erase an image of weakness and vacillation, leaving an impression of resolution and toughness in its place. President George Bush, for example, never heard himself described as a wimp once he had bested Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War of 1991. President Kennedy came to be seen as callow and inexperienced after he botched the Bay of Pigs attack and the Vienna summit meeting with Khrushchev in the inauspicious first year of his tenure. But when JFK faced down the Soviets in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, he entered history as a firm leader who wouldn’t flinch in the face of danger.
But toughness is only one possible quality of leadership that foreign-policy actions can demonstrate. President Clinton has been particularly successful in establishing a reputation for patience, empathy, reliability, resourcefulness, idealism, and subtle diplomacy in his repeated and usually successful interventions in global trouble spots. His ability to bring the warring parties together in Northern Ireland and in the occupied West Bank showed Americans how their president’s ability to charm and cajole could help preserve world peace.
Indeed, the very defects which characterize Clinton’s image are transformed, as if through alchemy, into assets when played out on a foreign stage. His ideological flexibility, desire to please everybody, and constant wish to have it both ways madden his domestic critics, but these shortcomings have become the crucial tools of his foreign policy. Able to make everyone feel he knows their pain, empathizes with their position, and secretly wants to do all he can to help them, President Clin
ton has been able to win the trust of such obvious antagonists as Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Similarly, President Jimmy Carter’s preoccupation with detail may have led to an unduly myopic presidency, but it was this very capacity to discuss patiently each square kilometer of sand in the Sinai which made the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel possible. A Ronald Reagan might have found the minutiae maddening and remained aloof, but Jimmy Carter seemed to seek it out and used each deal over each detail to build a basis of trust between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin.
But if foreign policy is misplayed, it can hurt an incumbent’s image faster than can domestic errors. Pocketbook issues may mean more to voters, but foreign wars, replete with atrocities, suffering, starvation, rape, and violence make much better television. The appalling images that emerge from places like Bosnia, Lebanon, Rwanda, and Somalia can rapidly galvanize public sentiment for decisive action. A president who ignores popular emotion does so at his own peril.
Failing to act in the face of such vivid scenes of disaster quickly gives a president a reputation for weakness, ineffectuality, and dithering. As graphic pictures of suffering in Bosnia filled TV screens, President Clinton complained in 1995 that “the TV reporters are doing their damnedest to get me to enter a war.”
But support for foreign intervention is paper-thin in the United States. Polling indicates that about 35 percent of the electorate—about twenty points from the right and fifteen points from the left—want no foreign involvement. Isolationism was never defeated at the polls. For the left, it was discredited when Hitler attacked Russia, and for the right, it fell when our battleships sank at Pearl Harbor. But it remains a potent force in both political parties.
With only about two-thirds of voters willing to tolerate any foreign action at all, for any reason, a president doesn’t have much margin for error before he loses his political support in the face of foreign reversals.
The best way to sell foreign involvement to Americans is not through appeals to nationalism or economic self-interest but to look instead at human rights and values to generate support. The career officials of the State Department and the National Security Council don’t get it. They believe in the maxim that war is “diplomacy by other means.” To them, issues like the stability of the Western alliance or the need for global harmony are paramount concerns. They are willing to stoop to citing economic interests like trade or jobs to sell their policies. But they regard appeals to human values as mushy, unreliable, and dangerous because they might require more action than we bargained for.
But it is only through a focus on the abuse of people—particularly children—that the American people are willing to rise above their essentially isolationist prejudices. They could care less about diplomacy or alliances, and appeals to economic self-interest ring hollow in times of economic boom.
For all the focus on questions of character and scandal that have become chapter and verse of our politics these days, it is not in the bedroom but in the situation room that Americans learn the most about the personalities and character of their leaders. The tests of foreign policy—of toughness, compassion, courage, and resourcefulness—are the real ways that character count in evaluating a president.
For the Truman presidency, the defining moments that told us what kind of man we had as president were the Truman Doctrine to save Greece and Turkey, the Marshall Plan to save Europe, and the decision to act in the face of aggression in Korea.
For Eisenhower, it was his willingness to stay patient and restrained in the face of Khrushchev’s insults during the 1960 Paris summit. For Kennedy, it was the Cuban missile crisis. For Johnson, it was his bungling of the war in Vietnam. For Nixon, it was his deftness in opening a relationship with China. For Carter, it was Camp David on the positive side and the hostage crisis in Iran on the negative. For Reagan, it was his bombing of Libya and his outreach to Gorbachev that were pluses, and the Iran-Contra scandal that was a negative. For Bush, it was the Gulf War that defined his foreign policy.
The conventional wisdom may marginalize the impact of foreign policy, but history suggests that it is in this arena more than any other that presidents are made or broken.
Part 3
Getting Elected
Obviously, our new political era changes the way candidates must run when they seek elective office. The changing levels of voter sophistication have so altered our electoral landscape that the vast bulk of what now constitutes the conventional wisdom about elections is obsolete. Starting with the first step, sizing up a race, and proceeding to the end, we must reevaluate what candidates do, how to run, and how to win.
Chapter 30
Should I Run?
WHEN IS IT SAFE to go into the electoral waters? When should a man or a woman run?
If running means taking on an incumbent, check out the calendar. Successful insurgencies are typically concentrated in certain years. In figuring out whether or not to take on an incumbent, it is most important to decide whether the times are ripe for change.
Some election years are partisan debacles for the left or the right. In the 1958 recession, the 1964 Goldwater disaster, the 1974 Watergate elections, and the 1986 midterm races, Republicans lost dramatically. The 1972 Nixon landslide, the 1980 Reagan housecleaning, and the 1994 anti-Clinton outpouring were equally dismal for the Democrats.
The strange thing about partisan sweeps is that we rarely see them coming far in advance. It is only in hindsight, or in the few weeks before election day, that its dimensions become apparent. Pundits will always hedge their predictions near the 50-yard line, generally seeing only moderate gains or losses. That way, they avoid being wrong at the top of their lungs. But each potential challenger needs to make his or her own independent assessment of the times. In recent history, about one election in three is marked by a radical turnover in power. The most important question for any potential candidate is, “Is this my year?”
In bad economic times or in an era ripped by scandal, insurgents find the wind at their backs. But public boredom can just as surely enhance a challenger’s chances. When political cycles have run their course, the old actors must often leave the stage—voluntarily or by defeat. In the 1986 congressional elections, two years after Ronald Reagan was overwhelmingly reelected, his Republican Senate majority collapsed. The events that constituted the Iran-Contra scandal had not yet been made public. The economy was doing fine. Reagan’s job approval ratings were very high. Yet, the president’s men were mowed down by insurgent Democrats. The public understood that it was time to change faces. The voters realized that the Senate soldiers of the Reagan revolution had done their bit and had no more to contribute. It was time for them to go.
Whether through public anger or through boredom, voters usually have to be in the mood for change for challengers to win. Yet, weak incumbents can be defeated even in relatively stable years, and hardy ones can survive even the worst epidemics of public anger. Polls designed to measure the vulnerability of an incumbent usually miss the key point. Pollsters and their clients too often focus on the popularity or job rating of an incumbent in deciding if he can be defeated. This is a bit like seeing if a tree can be chopped down by measuring its height.
The issue is not whether the incumbent is popular but whether people really know what he or she is all about. A senator with a reputation in his home state as a moderate, but with a voting record that is really far left or far right, may be very vulnerable despite a 70 percent approval rating. On the other hand, Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) regularly scores negatively in popularity polls but constantly wins because voters know who he is, know the good and the bad, and want him anyway.
Frequently, senators score higher in public ratings than do governors or mayors, yet are more vulnerable to defeat. By the time a president, a governor, or a mayor runs for reelection, voters know all about them. The incessant media coverage of chief executives usually shows all an incumbent’s warts long
before election day. This gives the office-holder time to repair the damage or to offset it with positive achievements. By election day, voters are frequently deaf to the insurgent’s negatives against the incumbent because it is all old news. Thus, Reagan or Clinton will be said to be coated with Teflon—charges don’t stick—because voters know so much about them that new information, positive or negative, has little impact.
On the other hand, people rarely read about the daily doings of a United States senator. When an opponent attacks the incumbent senator’s record, it’s likely to be news to the voter. We meet our senators only every six years when they run, while we see our executive-branch officials every day in print. The daily drubbing presidents, mayors, and governors get in the media may lower their poll numbers, but may confer a kind of immunity to attack that legislative officials do not enjoy.
Congressmen are a breed apart. They almost never lose. They are protected by the xenophobia (fear of strangers) of the American public. Daily, we face the grim knowledge that our government can destroy any of us. The danger that close scrutiny of our tax returns might pose, the possibility of an unwelcome visit from a government regulator, or our dependence on Treasury checks all brings us a sense of personal vulnerability. We try not to think about it too much but when we do, it is terrifying. We can be ruined by an overzealous tax auditor or public prosecutor, or even by careless clerk making a typographical error on our file.
Facing an alien government, we see our congressman as the friendly intermediary. His familiar face assuages our panic toward the cold institutions of government that face us. Strident campaigns against incumbent congressmen usually backfire, since they throw ice on the cozy relationship we tend to feel with our local representative. Senators are too distant to benefit from this intimacy, but congressmen, who run every two years, are very close indeed.