Power Game (122 page)

In the campaign game, the winning presidential candidate builds a personal organization, but the successful president must work effectively with other organizations. He must work with other factions in his party, his party’s national structure, the leadership in Congress, sometimes the opposition. Indeed, several recent presidents failed because of their inability to deal effectively with rival power centers: Kennedy and Carter unable to forge durable governing coalitions in Congress; Nixon, Johnson and Reagan, overreaching for power, usually in disregard of Congress because they did not want to deal with organized opposition or modify their positions to gain wider support. The contrast between campaigning and governing is, ultimately, the difference between stagecraft and statecraft.

The modern campaign marathon pits candidates against each other but rarely tests the ability to govern: to manage and manipulate the multiple power centers of our system. Established power brokers are bit players in the modern presidential campaign scenario. The whole process is oriented toward television appeal, lavish media campaigns, and thematic homilies and values, rather than substantive understanding or proven prowess in moving the system. Jimmy Carter, a newcomer on the national scene, ran outside the political establishment and won the
nation’s top office without any track record for national leadership except one term as governor of Georgia, endless house-to-house politicking in Iowa and New Hampshire, a something-for-everyone pitch, a look of sincerity, and a memorable television smile.

It is a cliché, of course, but an important one, that the modern campaign is mass marketing at its most superficial. It puts a premium on the suggestive slogan, the glib answer, the symbolic backdrop. Television is its medium. Candidates must have razzle-dazzle.
Boring
is the fatal label. Programs and concepts that cannot be collapsed into a slogan or a thirty-second sound bite go largely unheard and unremembered, for what the modern campaign offers in length, it lacks in depth, like an endless weekend with no Monday morning. “What evidence do you have that you can get Congress or the Kremlin to deliver on your promises?” is the kind of hard-headed question that needs constant asking. Yet as Election Day approaches, charisma and choreography seem to matter more than substance and competence.

“Today choosing policy advisers is insignificant compared to lining up the right pollster, media advisers, direct mail operator, fund-raiser and makeup artist,” complained former Kennedy White House aide, Theodore Sorensen. “Today policy positions are not comprehensively articulated but condensed into bumper-sticker slogans and clever TV debate ripostes that will please everyone and offend no one. Today experience and intellect are no more crucial to the multimedia campaign than the candidate’s hair, teeth, smile and dog. Today volunteers have been replaced by computerized mail, automated telephone banks and other marvels of technology in an industry that has shifted from labor intensive to capital intensive. Today the news media rarely report what the candidates are saying on the issues. They report instead on a horse race—which horse is ahead, which one has the most physical stamina, which one is lame and which one is attracting the big money.”
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Running vs. Ruling

It is ironic that Sorensen should raise this sad litany because his boss, Jack Kennedy, began the modern campaign game. In an article for
TV Guide
in November 1959, titled “A Force That Changed the Political Scene,” Kennedy argued that television would alter campaigning by putting the main emphasis on the candidate’s image. Kennedy proceeded to create a personal mystique. By marketing glamour, wit, and personal style and conveying a sense of vitality and elegance, Kennedy
irrevocably transformed presidential campaigning and even the presidency. As a senator, he had a lackluster record. As a candidate he coined a slogan,
The New Frontier
, and then sold the gossamer promise to “get this country moving again” without signaling a clear direction or laying out a clear program. Smiling Irish Jack, with his flat Boston brogue and his glamorous youth, was the first successful presidential candidate to rely on personal appeal rather than the party organization to win the top prize.

As Bob Shogan of the
Los Angeles Times
recalled in his perceptive book,
None of the Above
, Kennedy ran an outsider strategy. He staked his race in the party primaries—not to accumulate an unbeatable number of Democratic convention delegates but to bypass the party bosses and to pressure them through his popular vote and media attention. In 1960, there were seventeen primaries, Kennedy entered eight and had only two real battles—in Wisconsin and West Virginia. Those were the forerunners of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary today. Their impact was magnified far beyond the actual numbers of delegates. In those states, Kennedy took on Hubert Humphrey and beat him, by months of early grass-roots work, by spending plenty of money, and by cleverly daring West Virginia Protestants to prove they were not bigots by voting for a Catholic. With a victorious verdict from the voters, Kennedy forced the party’s power brokers to recognize his popular appeal. His populist assault on the citadels of power was a lesson for the future.

In office, Kennedy also set a model with his ringing rhetoric, his witty televised sparring with reporters, the moving biblical cadences of speeches limned by Sorensen. He redeemed his promise to get the country moving with the bold, symbolic adventurism of a manned mission to the moon. The mystique of political Camelot, a noble time and a special grace and company, was his creation. And yet as a coalition builder moving the government to turn his visions in law, Kennedy fell short. He was not able to translate personal popularity into effective leverage with Congress. It took Lyndon Johnson, a master legislative craftsman, to pass Kennedy’s tax cut and other major elements of his legislative program.

The problem is that our political system has a built-in requirement for coalitions among rival power centers. Without coalitions, legislation does not move, policies bog down in governmental paralysis, presidents fail, and the public chafes for yet another new leader. But the coalitions of government and the coalitions of electoral success are vastly different. After a marathon campaign in which television and presidential
primary voters have taken over the roles once played by political organizations and party leaders, the modern president has far fewer building blocks than presidents had only a few decades back.

Writing after Richard Nixon’s landslide reelection and resignation, Harvard scholar Samuel P. Huntington observed that the day after the election, the size of a president’s electoral majority is “almost irrelevant” to his ability to govern.

“What counts then is his ability to mobilize support from the leaders of the key institutions in society and government,” Huntington argued. “He has to constitute a broad government coalition of strategically located supporters who can furnish him with the information, talent, expertise, manpower, publicity, arguments, and political support which he needs to develop a program, to embody it in legislation, and to see it effectively implemented. This coalition must include key people in Congress, the Executive Branch, and the private-sector ‘Establishment.’ The governing coalition need have little relation to the electoral coalition. The fact that the President as a candidate put together a successful coalition does not insure that he will have a viable governing coalition.”
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His comments had a prophetic ring—for Jimmy Carter. Carter’s campaign strategist, Hamilton Jordan, shrewdly doped out the chessboard intricacies of the primary system. To voters sickened by the Watergate scandal, Carter sold his political innocence, his promise that “I will never lie to you.” But four years as governor of Georgia had not schooled Carter for handling an assertive Congress, even one controlled by his party. Nelson Polsby, a leading scholar of elections at the University of California at Berkeley, observed that the primary process and general election left great gaps in Carter’s political education. Having won the White House with a go-it-alone, outsider’s campaign, Carter had no links with other Democrats. He did not know how to put together congressional coalitions to pass his programs. He was missing the linkage between ends and means. Carter did pass some legislation, and he got the Panama Canal treaty ratified. But his overall record with Congress was poor.

“Nothing in Mr. Carter’s prior experience as a politician, certainly nothing in his experience of the nomination process, led him to the view that he needed to come to terms with the rest of the Democratic Party,” Nelson Polsby commented.
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Certainly, marathon campaigns test the health, endurance, resourcefulness, plausibility, tenacity, good humor, and verbal agility of candidates, as well as their fund-raising and public relations skills. All of
these, except fund-raising, are necessary in the presidency. But most tests in the campaign are rhetorical. What is most egregiously missing is testing by other politicians: not rival debaters, but powerful figures who will later affect the president’s policy success or failure.

“Up until the late sixties, if you wanted to get the nomination, you had to go around and deal with the party leaders and get to know them,” recalled Austin Ranney, a political scientist at the University of California in Berkeley. “That gave you something to leverage when you got into office. Now, the politics of the campaign very much go against the politics of governing. If someone is good at both, we are very lucky. The campaign is keyed to television. The person who comes off well is the ‘good guy’ and the guy with the little ‘factlets.’ And that’s not the essence of good governing. That involves identifying good people, getting good information and advice from them, developing solutions. That involves quiet discussions, not quick adversarial exchanges but colloquy.”
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Historically, the relationship between running and ruling was much closer. In Washington and across the country were the power barons in each major party—governors, mayors, senators, the bosses of city machines, big businessmen, or union leaders—who privately took the measure of the contenders. To succeed, candidates not only had to win popular approval, but they needed to gain the confidence of political peers, a valuable asset after the election. These were political pros who had a sense of what the job required and who could assess the candidate from personal experience. Making political alliances in the campaign often required a candidate to strike deals or to modify his positions on central issues. Such bargaining with established leaders tested his knowledge of major issues and his ability to forge political coalitions—not merely with a public whose interest was fleeting, whose knowledge was superficial, and whose loyalties were fluid, but with political heavyweights whose own survival was affected.

What’s more, once a candidate had won the support of regional party leaders, it usually continued after the election. A president could look to regional power barons to help deliver votes from their congressional delegations. So the system of brokering for electoral support had the advantages of testing the mettle of a leader among experienced politicians he would have to lead, and of providing building blocks for a governing coalition.

Surely, the process of back-room deals had its seamy side, for like the current system, the old paths to power influenced what types of politicians made it to the top. Since the Civil War, we have had three
different systems of presidential selection, each with its own type of victor, according to Samuel Kernell, a political scientist at Brookings Institution. As recently as William McKinley, it was regarded as bad taste to seek the nomination aggressively. From 1876 through 1932, Kernell explained, the party barons were looking for someone safe who would abide by the tacit rules of the game: spreading patronage, the spoils of victory, and distributing federal largesse to the states. The party power barons were not looking for greatness. Grover Cleveland was typical of the era, though the system also produced Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

By Kernell’s scheme, the second stage came in 1932 when the party barons shifted to picking national coalition builders. Nominations were still brokered at party conventions, not settled by primary voters, but the power barons gravitated toward nominees who could stitch together the disparate elements of the party and appeal to the nation. Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower were quintessential examples. Power brokers were wary of Tennessee’s Senator Estes Kefauver, with his televised hearings on organized crime or on drug abuse. Kefauver’s populist style made the party barons uneasy; they preferred an establishment figure such as Adlai Stevenson.

But trends began to change with Jack Kennedy in 1960. By 1972, with the Democratic party’s internal reforms, power was taken from the bosses and given to the masses. The barons were formally overthrown, the conventions virtually stripped of power, and the nominees chosen by direct primaries. The new campaign game favored image makers, not coalition builders: political individualists such as Jack Kennedy and Barry Goldwater and outsiders such as Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
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The 1988 race showed similar characteristics. Senator Gary Hart, an outsider in style and temperament, rose and fell in the media. The shower of media attention after Hart’s modest but unexpected second-place finish in the 1984 Iowa caucuses made him a sudden contender, and he came close to the nomination. In 1986, rather than seeking a third Senate term, Hart left Washington for full-time presidential campaigning. His candidacy was initially killed by the media hunt after his tryst with actress Donna Rice fired controversy over his extramarital relations. And his chances, after his surprise reentry into the race in December 1987, depended heavily on using media coverage to reach the electorate. Three more outsiders, Bruce Babbitt, twice elected governor of Arizona; Pierre S. du Pont IV, two-term governor of Delaware; and Michael Dukakis, a third-term governor of Massachusetts,
followed Jimmy Carter’s route, hoping a strong early showing would vault them into the White House without Washington experience. Television evangelist Pat Robertson built his race around his mass following, despite his lack of government experience. Robertson’s television appeal was enough to make him a contender, or at least an influence on Republican fortunes.