Bob Graham -- nowhere man in 2004
orlandosentinel.com
Virtually every four years some thoughtful, well-respected senator indulges himself into thinking his Capitol Hill reputation is useful currency in a White House campaign. Then he falls flat on his face.
Five dollars will get you 10 that, in 2004, his name will be Bob Graham.
Graham, a well-regarded three-term senator and former governor, is revered in Florida politics. But he is a much longer shot than most presidential wannabes with a similar profile.
Three times in the past 16 years, Democratic presidential candidates have considered and rejected Graham as their running mate. Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton and Al Gore each knew what he was doing.
Graham is the 2004 version of Richard Lugar of Indiana and Orrin Hatch of Utah, who in 1996 and 2000 somehow thought their decades in the Senate and position as Republicans' congressional expert on foreign affairs and the judiciary, respectively, would impress primary voters.
Boy, were they wrong.
Lugar got 5 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary in 1996, and Hatch won less than 1 percent in 2000. Both crawled back to the Senate to nurse their wounds.
Forget media blathering about how Graham's problem is lack of charisma, although he certainly is a zero in that department. There are more fundamental reasons why his candidacy has little potential to be anything but primary road kill:
He mistakenly believes that running for president is a bigger version of running statewide. He thinks he can ignore the lesson of history, which is that Iowa and New Hampshire may not pick the presidential nominee, but they winnow the field. He thinks his shtick of "workdays," in which he toils in ordinary jobs, will play nationally as well as they have in Florida, winning votes.
Sorry, Bob. you don't have enough time, and probably wouldn't have even if you had begun campaigning in 2001, like your serious competitors.
Graham's message is based on the faulty premise that he can convince liberals, who dominate Democratic primaries, that his vote against the Iraq war makes him acceptable when his decades in politics say the opposite. Being pro-death penalty, suggesting cruise-missile attacks on terrorist camps in Syria and supporting the economic embargo of Cuba and the adoption of the North American Free Trade Agreement won't win the chablis and brie crowd. Neither will his recent condemnation of Dick Gephardt's plan for universal health insurance.
His strategy requires that he outmaneuver Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, the party's 2000 vice presidential nominee, as the "moderate" in the primary race despite being unknown to almost anyone who isn't a political junkie or Florida resident. Lieberman's 2000 run for veep is a leg up with that limited number of Democratic primary voters, and Graham's stance against the Iraq war will hurt with that group.
Finally, even if Democratic primary voters knew who he was -- and it's unclear whether his late start and relatively poor cash situation will ever put him in that position -- he is not an easy candidate to sell to that electorate. He just doesn't set people atwitter.
Yes, Jimmy Carter did come from nowhere to win the presidency in 1976, but that's the last time a serious dark horse won either major party nomination. Moreover, Carter -- and countless others who have tried to follow in his footsteps -- began campaigning almost before the previous election was over.
Graham made his first campaign foray into Iowa and New Hampshire last month, just nine months before those states begin picking delegates, and years after most of the presidential wannabes.
Although the wisdom of giving Iowa and New Hampshire a major say in picking presidential candidates is debatable, there's no doubt those states have major clout. Since the 1970s, no candidate who didn't finish first or second in one of those contests has been nominated.
A poll of New Hampshire Democrats last month showed Graham tied for eighth with 1 percent of the vote, trailing Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware and retired Gen. Wesley Clark, neither of whom is even running.
Similar polls in Connecticut, California Illinois, Iowa North Carolina and New York -- the only state polls outside of Florida from which I could find data -- show Graham at 2 percent or less.
Graham, of course, argues correctly that, when he began his political career with a long-shot run for governor, he was in a similarly precarious situation. Perhaps, but in this race, he sure looks like the 2004 model of Lugar and Hatch |
