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Jules Witcover, a nationally syndicated columnist for TheBaltimore Sun, has been covering Washington politics for almost half a century. He is the author of ten books, including the best-seller Marathon, about the 1976 Carter/Ford race. He is also the co-author of four works with Jack Germond.

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For all the confusion and frustration over the way the 2000 presidential election ended, it did serve the useful purpose of proving how far things have gone wrong. Veteran reporter Jules Witcover has covered every presidential election since Eisenhower and in No Way to Pick a President, he blasts the current system, from the money-drenched, front-loaded primaries to Election Day itself. Sharp, revealing, and rich with presidential history, No Way to Pick a President takes a journey through the debased thickets of presidential campaigning and concludes with an intelligent set of prescriptions to improve the way America selects its leaders.

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No Way to Pick a President

Routledge

Chapter One

Me for President

Every American mother likes to think that her son (or, nowadays,her daughter) can become president. Although it isn't likely to happen,the long odds don't prevent a fair number of Americans whohave attained the constitutional age of thirty-five from trying.Many don't seem to have much else in the way of qualifications forthe job, but that doesn't stop them.

    It's said that when John F. Kennedy first thought about seekingthe presidency, he looked around the United States Senate, saw anumber of his colleagues who were being mentioned as prospectivecandidates, and asked himself: Why not me? Kennedy at thattime was forty-two years old and had served six years in the Houseof Representatives and seven in the Senate. Many others who havereached for the White House have had much less experience to recommendthem, but if they're old enough, are native-born, andhave resided in the United States for fourteen years, as the Constitutionalso stipulates, nothing but good sense prevents them fromreaching for politics' shiniest brass ring.

    Long service to one's political party does remain important,however, particularly in the Republican Party. In recent years, a sortof pecking order by longevity has been established, with only occasionalintrusions by candidates with sufficient celebrity to breachthat order. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, for example, brushedaside the party stalwart Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio in 1952, andRonald Reagan barged in on patient GOP foot soldiers GeorgeBush and Robert Dole in 1980. In between, party regulars who had"earned" the nomination?Richard Nixon in 1960, 1968, and 1972,Barry Goldwater in 1964, the short-time incumbent Gerald Ford in 1976,Bush in 1988 and 1992, and Dole in 1996?all were anointed as toilers in theparty vineyards. Dole, forced to wait in the wings by Reagan, and then by hisvice president, Bush, campaigned in 1996 on the argument that it was "myturn."

    "It's always seemed to me," says Dole, "you should have some party experience,you should have done some legwork in the party. I don't say you earnthe spot; I mean, it's never yours. But I think it's just the way it ought to work.If I want to go out and run as a Republican, I should be able to go out and tellthe people in Iowa and New Hampshire whoever I've been able to deal withover the years. If I wake up some morning and say I want to be president, havingdone nothing in the party, but I've got a lot of money in the bank or whatever[Steve Forbes, please note], there's something missing there, the way I lookat it. You've got to have a feel for the people you represent. You get thatthrough experience and hard work, and defeat. In my case, I started off as ayoung Republican district chairman, way, way, way back. That's when you hadto work your way up in the party. Now you just need sort of celebrity status orthe money. Once you're sort of established, then you start doing things for theparty."

    On the other hand, Dole says, "I was considered by some too much of aninsider, I had too much experience." Some, he recalls, "said he's been there solong, he has no ideas, he's tired. I didn't feel that way, but some people hadthat view: that it's good to get this fresh face, somebody who just pops out ofthe sky."

    The imposing task that running for and winning the presidency has become,however, has discouraged many distinguished Americans from makingthe try. So has the knowledge that they will run in a glass fishbowl, their everyword and action exposed to public scrutiny. At the same time, some of themost improbable political figures have sought the office, and a few?like anobscure peanut farmer and former one-term governor of Georgia namedJimmy Carter?have won it, encouraging others to emulate their boldness.

    There was a time when the most prominent political leaders did step forwardto seek the presidency, or were pushed to the fore by their peers in the famoussmoke-filled rooms where party nominations were negotiated. Thesepeers were well equipped to assess the prospective candidates on two criticalaspects: their qualifications for the presidency and their prospects for electionto the office. Theoretically, the chances of an untested candidate seizing theprize were minimized by the gauntlet of party elders the nominee had to run.On other occasions, the necessity of multiple convention ballots before anominee could be agreed upon inevitably led to delegation horse trading bystate and big-city party leaders, producing eventual nominees who, whileprominent at the time, proved to be eminently forgettable. Typical was JamesA. Garfield in 1880, a former Union general and Ohio congressman, chosen tobe the Republican nominee on the thirty-sixth ballot to break a deadlock betweenJames G. Blaine of Maine and John Sherman of Ohio.

    Garfield's claim on history was his assassination in his first months in officeand the elevation to the presidency of an even greater obscurity, Vice PresidentChester A. Arthur, a former Collector of the New York Custom House.Arthur had been tapped as Garfield's running mate as a payoff to New YorkRepublican bosses. The Garfield-Arthur ticket was a rebuke to the notion thatthe smoke-filled room was a reliable if undemocratic vehicle for producing effectivenational leadership.

    So was the nomination forty years later of Senator Warren G. Harding ofOhio by the Republicans in the most famous smoke-filled-room exercise. Afterfour inconclusive ballots, a group of fellow senators called Harding into ahotel suite and questioned him into the wee hours before determining he wassufficiently inoffensive, and anointing him. Their attempt to put another Senatecolleague on the ticket, however, was rejected by the convention delegates.Instead, they nominated the benign governor of Massachusetts, CalvinCoolidge, with fateful result when Harding, like Garfield, died in office, onlyseventeen months after taking the presidential oath.

    By this time, the power of the cigar-puffing party bosses to handpicknominees was being diminished by the development of presidential primariesto select convention delegates. By 1916, twenty-six states had adopted primarylaws as part of the Progressive reform movement. That trend flagged duringand between the two world wars, but it resumed with a vengeance in the1970s, again reducing the power and influence of party kingmakers. The now-dominantprimary process in effect issued an open invitation to anyone withthe ambition and, in the absence of strong qualifications, the chutzpah to run.

    The would-be presidents who have tried and failed rival in their near-anonymityand forgettableness our elected vice presidents. Who cannot butremember Larry Agran, John Ashbrook, Roger Branigin, Ned Coll, Phil Crane,Lar Daly, Ben Fernandez, Lenora Fulani, Milton Shapp, Morrie Taylor, andSam Yorty? Such long shots are often asked whether they are not really runningfor the vice presidency. Shapp, a nondescript governor of Pennsylvaniawho had won some local acclaim for settling a massive truckers' strike, wassuch a nonbelievable presidential prospect in 1976 that he was asked at a pressconference in Washington whether he was "really running for Secretary ofTransportation"!

    In late 1979, a Republican senator from South Dakota named LarryPressler, widely considered one of the Senate's and his party's lightest lightweights,threw his hat in the ring. When in only three months the folly of hisinitiative struck him as it had everybody else, he pulled out. But senators, asmembers of an exclusive club of one hundred, often consider themselves to bein the prime breeding ground for presidents, although only two, Harding in1920 and Kennedy in 1960, were directly elected to the Oval Office from theSenate in the twentieth century. The latest example of presidential pipe-dreamingis Republican senator Robert Smith of New Hampshire, a vacuousnonentity who in 1998 indicated his intention to seek his party's nomination,hoping to use his state's first-in-the-nation primary to jump-start a nationalcampaign. By mid-1999, his dismal progress persuaded him to quit the GOPand consider switching his doomed candidacy to an obscure third party.

    Before World War I, when the United States first emerged as a worldpower, being governor of a state was considered the best place to prepare forthe presidency. That job's administrative responsibilities made it seem like agood training ground for running the country, and much political powerrested in the governorships. But as the foreign-policy responsibility of thepresidency greatly enlarged, and as the election of delegates to the major parties'nominating conventions became more democratic, other officeholdersand men prominent in other fields were able to project themselves into presidentialcontention and garner the delegates required to capture the nominations.

    The mortality rate of presidents in the twentieth century eventually madeit clear that a job once shunned as a dead end, the vice presidency, was in factthe best stepping-stone to the Oval Office. The deaths of four presidents?WilliamMcKinley, Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Kennedy?elevatedTheodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson;and the resignation of Richard Nixon put Gerald Ford, the nation's first unelectedvice president under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, into the WhiteHouse.

    While the presidency began as an exalted position to be occupied by exaltedmen?George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison,James Monroe?it also in time fell prey to unimpressive and forgettablefigures as well?William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, James Polk, ZacharyTaylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan?before AbrahamLincoln strode onstage. Thereafter, another nine quadrennial elections passedbefore another giant appeared?Theodore Roosevelt, himself elevated fromthe vice presidency. And in the century to follow, only a handful?WoodrowWilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and, insome quarters at least, Ronald Reagan?were regarded as superior.

    Although some romantics like to suggest that the office seeks the man,that has seldom been true, with only a few notable exceptions?Washington,Franklin Roosevelt after his first term, and Eisenhower. Most presidentialhopefuls, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, have had to goout and get the presidency if they wanted it. Even Eisenhower, sought by bothparties in 1948 but unwilling, four years later at the Republican conventionseized the party's nomination over Taft only after a stiff fight over contestedcredentials. The closest thing to a genuine draft in the Democratic Party in thelast half century came in 1952, after Governor Adlai E. Stevenson II of Illinoishad declined to seek the nomination, saying he preferred a second term inSpringfield. Upon Truman's announcement that he would not run again,eleven hopefuls and favorite sons, led by Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee,joined the fray, but Stevenson was not among them. Truman himself urgedStevenson to run and a group of Illinoisans established a draft committee. Despiterepeated statements declaring his unfitness for the presidency and unwillingnessto seek it, by convention time the Stevenson draft had attractedkey party leaders like Mayor David Lawrence of Pittsburgh. Stevenson wasnominated on the third ballot but was snowed under by Eisenhower in November.

    The route most candidates have been obliged to travel, however, is a torturousone. It requires them to spend a year or more before the election campaignactually starts building name recognition and raising money. They mustspend month after month away from home and family, sleeping in nondescriptmotels and hotels, even on occasion on a supporter's living-roomcouch, as Mayor John Lindsay of New York did in 1972.

    They must submit themselves to the company of rich fools and their harebrainedideas for making the country better or themselves richer, in exchangefor campaign contributions. They must associate with local and state partyhacks, many of them unsavory characters, who dangle support under theirnoses in return for a promised job or a seat at the decision-making table. Theymust attend crack-of-dawn country breakfasts where they are stuffed withhuge stacks of pancakes, mountains of greasy eggs and bacon, and rivers ofwarmed-over coffee before embarking on another eighteen-hour day of glad-handing.Then there are dreary Kiwanis and Optimist Club lunches with localinsurance salesmen and undertakers and their sappy rituals. (MC: "We're honoredtoday by the presence of a good friend from Washington, D.C.?JackKemp!" All: "Hi, Jack!") And each night there is the interminable, barely ediblecold chicken dinner, shaking hundreds or even thousands more hands at a receptionin the local VFW hall, followed by three hours of speeches by localsrunning for sheriff or county supervisor. And the candidates must endure allthis with frozen smiles that they must somehow fashion so as to seem genuine.

    Many would-be presidents do all this while holding down a full-time jobas a governor or in Congress, stealing away hours each day begging for moneyon the telephone or hours each night on quick plane trips halfway across thecountry and back. Others who do not have a full-time job make one of campaigningfor president. An example is Lamar Alexander, former governor ofTennessee and Secretary of Education in the Bush administration, who spenttwo years seeking the Republican presidential nomination for 1996 and, havingfailed, started up again on a second bid almost immediately after the election.His best showings in a competitive primary or caucus in 1996 were thirdplace in Iowa and New Hampshire, which he obviously deemed sufficient encouragementto start the trek all over again. As far as could be perceived withthe naked eye, the groundswell for another Lamar Alexander presidentialcampaign essentially began and ended in his own head, but that is all it takesunder the existing system of candidate self-selection.

    For every individual who attains his party's nomination, let alone thepresidency, there are dozens like Alexander who make the same debilitatingand dehumanizing commitment and come up empty. And not only once, butseveral times. It used to be that when a presidential aspirant ran, lost badlyand tried again, he was regarded as a screwball. Exhibit A was former Minnesotagovernor and Eisenhower cabinet member Harold Stassen, the classichopeless candidate for the presidency more than half a dozen times. Nowthere is a certain method in the madness.

    "Given the nature of the primary process," says the pollster and campaignstrategist Robert Teeter, "you have to spend a lot time running for president?twoor four or maybe ten years. And who's to say that's bad? The process tendsto surface people who have been around for a long time. Certain people areseen as acceptable; you may not vote for them but they don't scare you todeath because they've been around for three or four cycles?HubertHumphrey, Ed Muskie, Bob Dole, Jack Kemp?and have gone through pressscrutiny, and the public has gotten used to them. Those candidates who comeout of nowhere, like [Governor Michael] Dukakis [of Massachusetts], are notsuccessful."

    But persevering is not for everybody, even ambitious politicians like WalterMondale in the 1976 cycle. After more than a year of actively exploring apresidential candidacy, he suddenly announced in late 1974 that he was abandoninghis quest because he was no longer "willing to go through fire" for theDemocratic nomination. He was weary, he said, of "sleeping in Holiday Inns."But presidential ambition, once experienced, does not die easily. Less than twoyears later, when Jimmy Carter, the presidential nominee, was shoppingaround for a running mate, Mondale made himself available. Referring tohis 1974 complaint, he now observed: "What I said at the time was that Ididn't want to spend the rest of my life in Holiday Inns. But I've checked andfound they've all been redecorated. They're marvelous places to stay, and I'vethought it over and that's where I'd like to be."

    After a year or more of chasing money and supporters, the candidatemust go delegate hunting. From February through June in each presidential-electionyear, voters in state primaries and caucuses choose the delegates theywish to represent them at one of the two major-party conventions. The delegatesare usually designated in these exercises according to the presidentialcandidate for whom they announce they will vote. The most politically activecitizens in each state must be courted assiduously by the candidate to wintheir support and then keep it. It is a long and costly obstacle course not recommendedfor the faint of heart, the deficient of wallet, or the sore of feet.

    In earlier days, when presidential nominees of the major parties were chosenby state party leaders in the legendary smoke-filled rooms of the nationalconventions, a certain peer review applied in making the selections fromamong men?exclusively men?prominent in party affairs, at the big-city,state, and national levels. The most likely candidates were large-state governors,prominent cabinet members, and, occasionally, members of Congress ormilitary heroes. Rarely, an individual well established in a nongovernmentfield?a newspaper publisher, financier, or businessman?would be considered.Not only the perceived qualifications of the candidate to be an effectivepresident but also the practical consideration of his chances of being electedwere uppermost in the judgment of those making the choice. Factionalismand ideology also counted, with much wheeling and dealing among the parties'power brokers.

    In these circumstances, the chances of a little-known candidate breakingthrough with little establishment backing were slim. But with much greaterpopular participation in the process, given the proliferation of direct primariesand party caucuses, it has become closer to the truth (yet still farfetched)that any mother's son could become president. Increasing numbersof them tried, qualifying for a ballot position in various states, sometimes attainingit, but never getting much beyond that initial stage. As the processbecame more open, however, more and more candidates entered into contention,not because fellow Americans demanded their services, but becausethey decided to offer themselves. Seeking the presidency for many was likeclimbing Mount Everest?because it was there.

    Others, to be sure, were propelled into the race because of their politicalsuccess at another level, having demonstrated voter appeal or a superiorrecord in administering a state, running a government department, or fightinga war. The vice presidency, once considered the equivalent of a gold watchawarded for faithful party service and a one-way ticket to political oblivion,came to be viewed differently: in seven of the last nine presidential elections,in fact, one or both of the major party presidential nominees had served asvice president.

    An irony in the competition for president is that because of the physicalhardships imposed and the costs of running not only in dollars but in lost privacyand in unwanted scrutiny of private and financial affairs, many of themost respected Americans choose not to run. As the bar is lowered, many lessqualified or less known Americans see their own chances raised, at least intheir own minds. In 1992, for example, the decision of the popular and respectedgovernor of New York, Mario Cuomo, not to seek the Democraticnomination opened the door for a governor from Arkansas relatively unknownto most Americans named Bill Clinton. And in 1996, General ColinPowell's rejection of strong overtures from the Republican Party invited alarge field of presidential contenders to challenge the old party warhorse BobDole.

    Self-selection in deciding who shall compete for the presidency has beenunderscored by the recent phenomenon of wealthy men?Ross Perot in 1992and 1996, Steve Forbes in 1996 and 2000?bankrolling their own campaigns.Rich men, certainly, have as much right to run for president as poor men. Buttheir money enables them to bypass hurdles that presidential hopefuls withouttheir financial resources must clear?becoming well known and postingachievements that can garner the popular and financial support required tomake a respectable showing.

    Candidates with plenty of money or the ability to raise it therefore takethe playing field with a tremendous advantage. In today's political combat, itis not enough to be a formidable candidate. One must be supported by a vastarray of political talent and foot soldiers schooled in the refinements of seekinghigh office in the era of television, computer technology, and mass persuasion,and one must have or raise the millions of dollars it takes to finance theirefforts.

    Considering the immense personal and financial sacrifices demanded ofpresidential candidates and their families, it is not so surprising that some ofthe nation's most prominent and promising public figures elect not to seek thepresidency. Considering the same sacrifices, and how low public service generallyhas fallen in the esteem of the citizenry, it is also surprising how many doseek the job. With a true presidential draft a far-fetched prospect these days,and with the party mechanisms that once brought forth presidential nomineesfrom the top echelons no longer functioning as of yore, the field ofprospective presidents is left basically to self-selection.

    The man who picks himself and then goes about the business of gatheringan organization around him, like the manufacturer of a new product, sets outto find the right people to develop, shape, test, and market it, using state-of-the-artequipment if he can afford it, making up for lack of it with personalenergy, ingenuity, charm, and luck if he can't. And because the needs are therefor many specialized skills, the free-enterprise system brings forth other menand women who have them. Today they are known, often disparagingly, as"hired guns." They are at the heart of presidential politics, leading the parade,in Bill Clinton's favorite phrase, over the bridge to the twenty-first century.

Continues...

Excerpted from No Way to Pick a Presidentby Jules Witcover Copyright © 2001 by Jules Witcover. Excerpted by permission.
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