Since I received it from my sister, I’ve been devouring the book Presidential Campaigns by Paul Boller. With all the talk about next year’s election, it’s put two popular comparisons between this election and previous ones in perspective. While the similarities between previous elections and the upcoming ones are pretty minor, there are obviously a lot of lessons to be learned.
On the left, it’s popular to tar Bush as the new Hoover. Although Bush’s greatest strength has been his ability to fill his campaign coffers, both men had/have an equal knack for filling unemployment lines. With Bush facing a net loss of over three million jobs during his tenure, the Hoover comparison is an easy one to make. But as Boller points out, the similarities end there.
- “By the time Americans launched their thirty-seventh presidential election, industrial production was at a low ebb, unemployment was widespread, and the farmers faced ruin. “Damn Hoover!” exploded a man who bit into an apple and found a worm there. By 1932 millions of people were damning Hoover and the Republican party. When the nominating conventions met in Chicago in June, the Democrats knew they could win if they avoided major errors. And the Republicans realized they faced almost certain defeat.”
. . .
“[Roosevelt's running mate] Garner was so sure the election was in the bag that he advised : ‘Sit down – do nothing – and win the election.’ He did just that himself; he gave only one speech, over the radio, and decided that one speech per campaign was about right.”
Obviously the Democrats can’t emulate Garner and sit back if they expect to win this thing. Unlike 1932, not everybody feels the way about the President that we do. If Democrats want to draw parallels between Bush and Hoover, they’re going to have to work overtime to get that message out to the people.
A far more popular comparison, among both conservatives and centrist liberals, has been to compare senate front-runner Howard Dean to George McGovern. While both men were plucked from near-obscurity to prominence based mainly on their anti-war views, the McGovern campaign was an awkward one that managed to fail upward during the primaries only to crash and burn in the general election.
As big name Democrats (Ted Kennedy, Ed Muskie, & Hubert Humphrey) all dropped out of the race, McGovern won the nomination seemingly by default. Once assured the nomination, McGovern had a series of missteps ranging from delivering his senate convention acceptance speech at 3 AM, to picking and dumping a running mate with a history of shock treatment, to failing to draw a big enough distinction between himself and his more radical supporters. But perhaps his biggest failure was in the strategy itself :
- “McGovern’s strategy was to do well in the primaries, achieve the nomination with the help of his anti-war constituency, and then persuade party regulars to work for his election. He never achieved his last objective.”
In 1972, there wasn’t a big “anybody but Nixon” groundswell among the left the way we see now with Bush. The biggest difference between then and now is that whoever wins the senate nomination will get the support of mainstream Dems. The Bush administrations policies on the environment, foreign policy, the economy, etc. have been so radical, that you’d see Lieberman stumping for the Kucinich/Chomsky ticket before you’d see a repeat of the 1972 election.
And finally, although there are few similarities between then and now, the closing remarks by Ronald Reagan in his 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter seem especially relevant now. While one of the lines has become a huge clich? in the following 23 years, the sentiment seems more apt now than it was then.
- “I think when you make that decision, it might be well if you would ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we’re as strong as we were four years ago? And if you answer all of those questions yes, why then, I think your choice is very obvious as to whom you will vote for. If you don’t agree, if you don’t think that this course that we’ve been on for the last four years is what you would like to see us follow for the next four, then I could suggest another choice that you have. This country doesn’t have to be in the shape that it is in. We do not have to go on sharing in scarcity with the country getting worse off, with unemployment growing. We talk about the unemployment lines. If all of the unemployed today were in a single line allowing two feet for each of them, that line would reach from New York City to Los Angeles, California.”
Maybe this speech is the real reason the Republicans didn’t want CBS to air “The Reagans”.
