Govs 4, Senators 0. Tough Odds
E.J. Dionne, a Washington Post columnist, is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor at Georgetown University.
Sunday, January 4, 2004;
Here's what being a senator means when you run for president:
It means you have thousands of votes on the record that can be distorted in a heartbeat. Sen. John McCain learned this during the Republican primaries in 2000 when a radio ad in New York accused him of voting against money for a cancer research center in the state. The ad, run in support of George W. Bush, picked out a vote McCain had cast against a huge spending bill that included the cancer money. McCain had voted many times in favor of cancer research spending. It didn't matter. He was trashed.
Sometimes, being a senator and running for president means always having to say you're sorry for not being a governor. In 1996, Richard Lugar, one of the most respected members of the Senate, ran what now looks like a prescient Republican primary campaign highlighting the dangers of terrorism. No one paid much attention. At one point in 1995, Lugar found himself on "Larry King Live" trying to describe why a senator with extensive foreign policy experience might have the best training for the job. "Governors and mayors can handle a lot of things in this country," said Lugar, but only the president "can be commander in chief. . . . So we'd better talk about that first, as a prime qualification." Lugar, himself a former mayor, won admiration -- but few votes.
Legislators are sausage makers working in an unruly factory. The very elements that are fundamental to serving in Congress -- the arts of compromise and cajoling, the finality of the yes or no vote -- leave members vulnerable as presidential candidates. As a rule, politicians hate binary choices. They like words such as "but," "both," "and," "maybe" and "in addition to." But many "yes/no" votes require choosing one bad over another, or between two imperfect goods.
Ask Bob Dole. He's one senator in recent times who managed to survive the primaries. His standing as Republican Senate leader made him reasonably famous -- and easy to hold accountable for the actions of others in Congress. In the 1996 campaign, Bill Clinton tied Dole to House Speaker Newt Gingrich, blaming the pair for the 1995 government shutdown and for cuts in "Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment." That was it for Dole.
Or consider Sen. John Kerry, once seen as the front-runner for this year's Democratic nomination. Kerry was upended after he voted for the resolution authorizing war in Iraq and former Vermont governor Howard Dean said he would have voted no if he had been in Congress. In a Democratic Party full of Bush critics, saying no to the war has turned out to be the thing to do -- at least so far.
"I don't think we should pretend that protecting the security of our nation is defined by turning our back on a century of effort . . . to build an international structure of law," declared the antiwar candidate to an Iowa gathering on Oct. 5, 2002. Bush's critics had an obligation to dissent and raise doubts, he said to loud applause. "We need to understand that you have to ask those questions now, because you don't go to war as a matter of first resort; you go to war as a matter of last resort."
Such speeches are what made Dean popular -- except the one just cited was given by Kerry, not Dean. For weeks before the war resolution vote, Kerry regularly took Bush to task. When Kerry finally did cast his vote in favor of the war resolution, it was as an agonized doubter. It was a close call. It was "Yes, but."
But the "but" didn't matter. Dean was off to the races, and the more Kerry tried to explain his reasonable but complex position, the more he looked as if he were trying to have it both ways.
Steve Elmendorf, Rep. Richard Gephardt's chief of staff, says it's Congress's overall image -- not a storehouse of distortable roll call votes -- that has hamstrung most presidential hopefuls from Capitol Hill. "The voting record is less of a problem because everybody who has been elected to an executive job also has a record to defend," Elmendorf said. Dean is learning that lesson, just as Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis did after he won the 1988 Democratic nomination. What will be Howard Dean's "Boston Harbor" and Willie Horton?
Perhaps the decline of Congress's image over the past 25 years helps explain why John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960, was the last candidate to go directly from the Senate to the presidency. Then again, the last senator before Kennedy to make the leap from Senate to Oval Office was Warren G. Harding back in 1920.
Four of our last five presidents -- Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush -- came to the presidency as active or former governors. The clichés about why are well-rehearsed: Governors have executive experience, they exude leadership (or at least they're supposed to) and they are outsiders (or at least try hard to look that way). Both Clinton and Bush took potshots at their party in Washington when doing so was useful. They were picking up from Carter, the outsider pioneer. Dean is carrying on the tradition.
Most presidents since 1900 have come from governorships (the recent four plus William McKinley, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt) or the vice presidency. Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson all ascended to the Oval Office when the president died. Richard Nixon's last public office before president was vice president. When he resigned in 1974, his vice president, Gerald Ford, took over. The first George Bush won in 1988 after two terms as veep. William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover were Cabinet secretaries, and Dwight Eisenhower was a war hero and college president. As Gephardt supporters prefer not to note, the last president to rise from the House was James Garfield in 1880.
But Sens. Kerry, Lieberman, Edwards, take heart: This list disguises a wealth of legislative experience. Nixon, Truman and Johnson all served in the Senate. Ford was the House Republican leader, and McKinley had an important House post. The first President Bush also served in the House (as did JFK, LBJ and Nixon). Both Roosevelts, Coolidge and Carter were state legislators (as was Howard Dean).
Trashing legislative politicians goes back a long way. Coolidge famously said they were "twice spoiled" -- "spoiled with praise and . . . spoiled with abuse. With them nothing is natural, everything is artificial."
Yet there are times, says historian Robert Dallek, when a legislator is exactly right for the job. He sees Lyndon Johnson as "the greatest executive legislator in the country's history." Johnson's greatest achievements, notably the civil rights acts, reflected his understanding of how Congress worked. "If you are in a period when you need some big domestic reforms, you want someone with legislative experience like Lyndon Johnson's," Dallek says.
George McGovern became the 1972 Democratic nominee while a senator and argues that his friends and sometimes rivals in the Senate -- notably Hubert H. Humphrey and Edmund S. Muskie -- would have been exceptional presidents. And he is quick (and correct) to say that his own defeat at Nixon's hands had less to do with his Senate background than with the politics of the moment.
Sen. Joseph Biden, the Delaware Democrat, tried briefly for the presidency in 1987 and pondered a run this year. He thinks it's a "killer" to be a senator in the majority party with committees to oversee -- or, in Dole's case, the whole Senate. If you take your job seriously, "you can't be in Iowa, you can't be in New Hampshire, and you can't do 3,000 fundraisers."
And Biden worries that the Senate may be set up to breed lousy candidates. He quotes no less an authority than Bill Clinton, with whom he consulted last January on whether to enter the race. "Have you ever asked yourself why governors get chosen over you guys in the Senate?" Biden recalls Clinton telling him. "It's not because people think we were all great executives. It's because when you get to Washington, the only people you talk to are elites: elites in the press, elites among the lobbyists, elites that you hire on your staff. You're not regularly talking to ordinary, everyday people." Governors have to.
Not surprisingly, Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, agrees with every reason offered above about the importance of being a governor. Especially for the party out of power, he says, governors are in a stronger position than Washington insiders to present themselves as "agents of change." And he thoroughly agrees with Clinton's point about language. Legislators, Trippi says, talk " 'legislatese' -- NAFTA, GATT, HR121."
Governors, he says, "talk English, or at least sort of talk English."
Exactly. But when does plain speaking veer into recklessness? Dean is about to find out. The legislators whom he berated all during 2003 for timidity are now pouncing on statements Dean has had to back away from -- "embarrassing gaffes," Gephardt harrumphed. Members of Congress accustomed to choosing their words with sometimes stifling care ("I hold the distinguished member in minimal high regard" is a classic congressional insult) may yet have a leg up on talkative governors.
If Dean falls, watch this space for the new conventional wisdom: that only a long career in Congress fully prepares a politician for the rigors of a national campaign, etc., etc. Unless, of course, Wesley Clark is the one left standing. Then you can count on learning why former generals are singularly appropriate to the country's current political circumstances.
And the poor legislators will get trashed all over again.
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