Almost President (40 page)

But the 2000 election was the last hurrah for the Reform Party. Real estate developer Donald Trump initially announced he was interested in the party nomination but changed his mind, and the nomination instead went to conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan, who had sought the Republican nomination in 1992 and 1996. Buchanan tried to adopt some of Perot's economic nationalism for his platform, but he remained best known for his conservative views on social issues, such as abortion. Those Perot voters wanting nothing to do with the “culture wars” fought to form rival Reform Party entities in their respective states. Despite appearing on forty-eight state ballots, Buchanan won less than a half percent of the popular vote, and even Perot announced he had voted for Republican George W. Bush.

The ongoing legal battles among various local parties, each vying over which had the right to identify themselves as the official Reform Party entity, continued the party's decline. With Perot no longer funding the effort, the remnants of the Reform Party in 2004 simply chose to endorse the independent candidacy of Ralph Nader, who won barely a third of a percent of the popular vote. In 2008, the Reform Party qualified for the ballot in only a single state, Mississippi, where its presidential candidate, a local businessman, received fewer than five hundred votes.

More disheartening than the demise of the Reform Party was the reappearance of budget deficits. During the George W. Bush administration and the early years of Barack Obama's administration, a combination of events—the bursting of the tech and housing “bubbles,” the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the two ensuing costly wars waged in response to those attacks, large tax reductions, increased spending on entitlements, and the collapse of the world financial markets—conspired to balloon federal deficits once more and increase the federal cumulative debt to fourteen trillion dollars in 2011. Fourteen trillion dollars was more than twice the debt a decade before and more than three times the level that had alarmed Perot and his followers back in 1992.

Yet, Perot said virtually nothing publicly about the issue. He had all but disappeared from public view. In January 2008, he contacted
Newsweek
magazine to announce he was supporting former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, a successful businessman and the son of the founder of American Motors, instead of former POW and Arizona senator John McCain in the Republican primary. He was still angry that McCain had called him “nuttier than a fruitcake” for persisting in his belief that there had been live POWs left behind in Southeast Asia.

Perot also told
Newsweek
that he had launched a website with the kind of charts and graphs he had used to such great effect in 1992 to again educate Americans about the problems he had talked about in his two presidential campaigns but were still not resolved. As of 2011, it did not seem the site was being regularly updated, except for a counter that showed the national debt increasing at the rate of one hundred thousand dollars per second. A polarized political establishment seemed unable to address the issue, leading conservative
New York Times
columnist David Brooks to wonder if what the nation needed now was “a saner Perot.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

AL GORE, JOHN KERRY, AND JOHN MCCAIN

2000, 2004, 2008

“I'm the . . . loyal opposition. And both words, I think, are operative.”

—John McCain

In a nation that has fretted for decades over whether it has properly honored its Vietnam War veterans, it is ironic that the three presidential nominees who served in Vietnam—Al Gore, John F. Kerry, and John McCain—were all defeated, while the two men of the Vietnam generation who were elected president did not serve in Vietnam. Bill Clinton avoided military service entirely, while George W. Bush spent the war stateside as a member of the Texas Air National Guard.

Yet each bucked the conventional wisdom of the time to serve, partly out of family obligation, partly out of idealism, and partly under the misapprehension that a military record would be necessary to pursue a career in public service. When Gore sought advice about whether to enlist in the army and risk being sent to Vietnam, one of his Harvard professors, Richard Neustadt, told him, “If you want to be part of the country twenty-five years from now, if you want any future in politics, you've got to serve.” Neustadt later ruefully acknowledged that he had given that advice from “a World War II perspective that didn't prove to be exactly right.”

While their status as veterans may not have been key to their later political success, their service certainly helped define Gore, Kerry, and McCain as different from other politicians of their generation who avoided service and as individuals who struggled with concepts of honor and duty more familiar to earlier generations of Americans. Similarly, these unsuccessful presidential candidates are, each in their own way, bucking the recent convention that losing presidential candidates should quietly fade from view. Instead, as they did in their decision to serve in Vietnam, they are looking to past traditions to reclaim a level of influence and power that losing presidential candidates once enjoyed. For this reason, this chapter looks at their experiences collectively to see if the role of presidential loser is being redefined.

Gore, who won the popular vote but lost the presidency to Bush in 2000, traded in the role of politician for prophet. Like William Jennings Bryan nearly a century ago, Gore has used his prestige to promote a cause in which politics intersects with science. The difference between the two is that Bryan staked his legacy on persuading the public to
be wary of
scientific consensus around the theory of evolution, while Gore's struggle is to persuade the public simply to
accept
scientific consensus around the issue of global climate change and do something about it.

In 2007, for his work in sounding the alarm to the danger of global climate change, Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize—an unprecedented honor for a losing presidential candidate. Indeed, only four presidents have ever won the Nobel Prize: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama. But Gore also won prizes that no president has ever won: a Grammy for the spoken word version of his book,
An Inconvenient Truth,
and an Emmy for his global television network, Current TV, an “interactive television service” that gives viewers the power to create and influence content. Gore was also the subject of the Academy Award–winning documentary on climate change,
An Inconvenient Truth,
and he has authored several best-selling books.

Defeated by Bush in 2004, Kerry defied expectations by returning to the Senate in the unusually prominent and influential role of chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Some suggested that Kerry, because of his exceptionally proactive efforts to promote free and fair elections in the Muslim world, had become a “de facto” secretary of state. As Jimmy Carter once earned the reputation of being the most active ex-president in recent American history, admirers said Kerry was determined to become the “best ex-presidential nominee.”

Kerry's role during President Barack Obama's administration parallels Adlai Stevenson's relationship with President John F. Kennedy—though Obama seemed more receptive to Kerry's mentoring than Kennedy was to Stevenson's. Both Stevenson and Kerry had hoped to be appointed secretary of state but were passed over by the young presidents they wished to serve. So they assumed different influential roles regarding foreign policy, though again, Kerry seemed to have the better arrangement as chair of Senate Foreign Relations, while Stevenson held the less effective post of ambassador to the United Nations.

McCain, who lost to Obama in 2008, spurred considerable comment when he broke with recent tradition and became an immediate, prominent, and harsh critic of Obama and many of his policies. McCain's decision to attack Obama's policies within weeks of Obama assuming office led the
New York Times
to comment in a front-page article in March 2009 that McCain was “rewriting the part of presidential loser.” McCain responded, “I'm the, as I said, loyal opposition. And both words, I think, are operative.”

During the second half of the twentieth century, losing candidates generally afforded the winning candidate at least a short grace period during which they withheld criticism. But McCain was not “rewriting” the part of presidential loser as much as he—like Kerry and Gore—was returning to an older script. In attacking Obama for “leading an extreme, left wing crusade to bankrupt America,” McCain evoked memories of Henry Clay's denunciations of Andrew Jackson's supposed pretensions to monarchy or Al Smith's excoriating Herbert Hoover for the ills of the nation's Great Depression. There was a time when a losing candidate stayed in the fray, and McCain's attacks only seemed shocking when compared with the way our more recent losing presidential candidates quietly absented themselves from the public arena.

Bob Dole resigned from the Senate during his 1996 presidential campaign and was only modestly involved in politics after his loss to Clinton. Michael Dukakis finished out his final term as governor of Massachusetts but then devoted most of his time following his 1988 defeat to teaching at colleges in Massachusetts and California. Walter Mondale was urged to run for the Senate again after his defeat in 1984, but he declined. He had noted the cool reception George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey had received from their peers when they returned to the Senate following their defeats. “It's never the same when they come back,” Mondale said. Mondale served as U.S. ambassador to Japan under Clinton and was finally drafted back into the senatorial election arena in 2002 as a last-minute replacement when Senator Paul Wellstone died, but he lost.

McGovern, who returned to the Senate after losing to Richard Nixon in 1972, and Humphrey, who returned to the Senate two years after losing to Nixon in 1968, had hoped to be acknowledged leaders and spokesmen for their party. They had plenty to say, but few were interested in their opinions. After Humphrey's loss to Nixon in 1968, he was not invited to speak at any Democratic Party function for almost a year. He was even rejected by his colleagues in his bid to become Senate majority leader, despite his previous prominence as a senator and vice president. His peers felt so guilty about the rebuff that they created a new honorary post, deputy president pro tempore, just for Humphrey.

McGovern famously gave a speech at Oxford University on the day of Nixon's second inauguration in which he claimed “the United States is closer to one-man rule than at any time in our history.” McGovern was chastised for what he was told was “unsportsmanlike conduct toward my victorious rival,” and
New York Times
columnist Joseph Kraft added that McGovern should have had “the grace to keep quiet for a while.”

But this notion that the presidential loser should keep quiet is relatively new. Clay was merciless in his attacks on Jackson whom he believed to be, as McCain was said to believe of Obama, unqualified for the presidency. Bryan led the campaign against President William McKinley's “imperialist” ambitions in the Philippines. Thomas Dewey, after first excoriating the conservative wing of his own party for wanting to “turn back the clock” to the “good old days of the nineteenth century,” turned his fire on the Democrats by charging in the summer of 1949 that Truman seemed determined to “throw China into the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.”

Stevenson, too, had no qualms about challenging the policies of Eisenhower and the Republicans weeks after Ike took office. On February 11, 1953, Stevenson gave a highly regarded speech in New York City, which he concluded with an attack on Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy and his supporters for laying “rough hands” on the Bill of Rights. Traveling on to Washington, D.C., the next day, Stevenson was greeted by hundreds of cheering Democratic congressmen and their aides—a different welcome from what McGovern or Humphrey received.

In making public attacks so soon after an election, Clay, Bryan, Dewey, and Stevenson were acting in the unofficial capacity as the titular leader of their party, a post that seems to have disappeared in recent decades, though it seemed McCain was trying to resurrect the title. Being the titular leader of a political party is unique to the American form of democracy. Unlike a parliamentary democracy, there is no official leader of the opposition party in American politics who can speak on behalf of the party. That duty is often split among the opposition party leaders in Congress, the party chair, and those most likely to obtain the party nomination the next election cycle.

But there was a time when the most recent presidential loser was automatically considered the de facto spokesperson for the party out of power until the party nominated someone else. But the last person generally acknowledged as the titular leader of a nonpresidential party was Stevenson, who held that title from 1952 until the Democrats nominated Kennedy in 1960. Richard Nixon had disqualified himself for the role by his behavior following his loss in the California governor's race in 1962, and the dimensions of Barry Goldwater's defeat in 1964 sent Republicans immediately searching for a new standard-bearer.

Observers debated whether McCain attempted to resurrect the title following his 2008 loss to Obama. The news media seemed intent on bestowing it upon him. In the first two years after his loss to Obama, McCain appeared on the prestigious Sunday morning news interview shows more than two dozen times—far more appearances than any other official, Republican or Democrat, during the same time period. Also, in contrast to McGovern's and Humphrey's return to relative anonymity, McCain returned as the ranking Republican on the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, which made him a particularly sought-after spokesman for the Republican Party on foreign and military affairs.

Because the concept of a titular head of a party had disappeared for a half-century, McCain's behavior was carefully scrutinized. Commentators debated whether McCain was speaking out on principle or whether he was simply bitter and envious of Obama's victory.

While the McCain-Obama race was not particularly vitriolic by the standards of past presidential campaigns, Obama's status as the first African-American presidential nominee added a new tension to the contest, as did the economic crisis that engulfed the globe during the final months of the campaign. As noted in chapter one, there was genuine concern during the campaign that the ill will would not abate following the election, but McCain then gave his exceptionally gracious concession speech and tempers seemed to cool almost at once. Then there were some commentators who went too far the other way and suggested that McCain and Obama might develop a partnership similar to that enjoyed between Franklin Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie.