Good Column.
From early peaks, candidates can fall
By Howard Mortman, MSNBC
Gary Hart, Phil Gramm, Ross Perot, Bill Bradley. What do they all have in common? They're all past presidential candidates who once rode high during the campaign but then, according to the media, "peaked too soon."
DOES HOWARD Dean belong in that club? Well, he's passed the first requirement for membership. He's become a media darling. That's what good poll numbers, flashy fund-raising, and covers of newsweeklies will do for you. Now we wait for step two of the initiation rites, when the media writes him off as peaking too soon.
It may have already started. The conventional chatter is a low rumble for now to be sure, but it will get louder and louder. It always does.
And which better place to hear the early whispering than the New York Times. On July 30, 2003, the Times said this about Dean: "His surge also creates the risk that he could peak too soon."
The New York Times is always generous about letting candidates know that they peaked too soon. Bill Bradley was lucky to get the word. On Feb. 7, 2000 -- when Bradley really was going down to defeat against Al Gore -- Richard Berke wrote, "[M]any of Mr. Bradley's supporters say his challenge is far deeper than the retooling of his message. Simply put, they fear that he peaked too soon. For weeks, Mr. Bradley, a former senator from New Jersey, outpaced Mr. Gore in polls in New Hampshire, and his face was emblazoned on magazine covers. But now, at a more crucial time, when actual voting has begun, it is Mr. McCain who is on the covers of Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report."
Former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, who ran in the 1996 Republican presidential primaries, also peaked too soon, according to Berke. Here's Berke critiquing Gramm on CNN on Feb. 13, 1996: "I think he peaked too early. He scared off a lot of the potential rivals, from Jack Kemp to Dan Quayle to Dick Cheney, who were scared off by his big money-raising machine and his call for saying you had to raise $20 million to be a competitor. He scared off the competition but then he peaked too soon and never really caught on when the real voting began."
Perhaps New York Times language expert William Safire could do a Sunday column explaining what peaking too soon means. Handicapping the 2000 Republican primary back in June 1997, Safire wrote that "John Kasich may have peaked too soon. The Ohio budget-balancer with a feel for the House's mood and a sense that the media world is mad has embraced triangulation, but maybe marriage and a few zaps in the press will settle him down. With his experienced innocence, this post-boomer could surprise on the primary campaign trail."
Kasich never did.
Over the last 30 years, the list of presidential candidates who were generally accepted to have peaked too soon includes such other luminaries as Bruce Babbitt, Jerry Brown, Jesse Jackson, Ed Muskie and John Glenn.
The classic -- and perhaps most quantifiable -- case of peaking too soon was Ross Perot. During the bizarre summer of 1992, Perot honest-to-goodness really did peak too soon. A Gallup poll taken in early June showed Perot at 39 percent, with George Bush at 32 and Bill Clinton at 24 percent. That was Perot's high point. Two weeks later, the Bush and Clinton numbers stayed the same, but Perot dropped to 34 percent. Blame the Perot collapse on the "undecideds" increasing in number, fleeing Perot.
And don't forget also in 1992 ex-President Bush's classic free fall while running for re-election. He led Bill Clinton in the polls all the way up to the Democratic convention. That was his early peak. Clinton won in November.
Four years later, in the weeks leading up to Iowa and New Hampshire, Steve Forbes rode a publicity wave of self-financed TV ads to the top of the polls. But in the final days before the Iowa caucuses, people had had enough of the ads. Forbes slid from his peak atop the polls. Bob Dole won Iowa.
Designating when a candidate peaks too soon is an art, not a science. Often the media gets it right, but sometimes -- ooops. Witness The Economist magazine, which wondered in November 1987, "Has Mr. Richard Gephardt peaked too soon? His campaign for president, which formally started in February but has been taking the form of frequent visits in Iowa over the past two years, seems to be stuck." Mr. Richard Gephardt ended up winning Iowa in 1988. He's trying again in 2004 -- and so far he's nowhere near peaking too soon.
THE AWAKENING ESTABLISHMENT
Time magazine noted during the 1996 campaign that, "In every presidential campaign, there comes a moment when the Establishment wakes up one morning, blinks hard and realizes that someone it had barely noticed before is emerging."
That tautology holds true today. The Establishment has woken up to an emerging Howard Dean. And sure enough, in this month's cover story on Dean, Newsweek reported, "One danger for Dean -- and his people know it -- is that he may have peaked too soon, leaving room for another entrant to ride a popular wave."
Thus the bottom line lesson for Howard Dean -- what the media giveth, the media taketh. If Dean's going to peak, he should keep it to himself.
Howard Mortman, a former editor and senior columnist for National Journal's Hotline, is a producer for "Hardball with Chris Matthews." Tune into "Hardball" at 7 p.m. ET, M-F, exclusively on MSNBC cable.
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