Posted on 12/13/2003 6:19:37 PM PST by bdeaner
With early and sustained leads in the polls, in contributions, in the enthusiasm of crowds, and in the proficiency of his media appearances and campaign organization, former Vermont governor Howard Dean is the man to beat in the 2004 race for the Democratic Party's Presidential nomination. This has surprised political analysts in Washington and the national media.
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The conventional explanation is that Governor Dean has positioned himself well to the left of the other candidates on the war in Iraq, taxes, health care, and other issues. By leveling harsh attacks at President Bush, he has energized the left-liberal Democratic Party "base" in a way that the other, more seasoned and moderate candidates have not.
Democratic Party activists and primary voters are indeed more liberal than the rank-and-file, just as their GOP counterparts are more conservative than Republicans as a whole. But many primary voters also appear to want to win general elections, even at the expense of doctrinal purity. In recent primaries, more moderate candidates have routinely beaten more liberal or conservative candidates: George W. Bush over Steve Forbes, Bill Clinton over Tom Harkin, Bob Dole over Phil Gramm and Pat Buchanan. Governor Dean obviously appreciates this tendency: He has already recast himself as a moderate, emphasizing his record as a tight-fisted, budget-balancing, Second Amendment-respecting governor. As the long pre-primary season has worn on, the resilience and durability of the unexpected front-runner has become a political story of its own.
A better explanation of Howard Dean's lead, one that suggests it will continue, is that his political experience and identity are as a governor, while all of the other candidates, with the exception of Wesley Clark, are legislators. The Dean Surprise is merely the latest episode of the Governor Surprise, a quadrennial political drama. The year before a Presidential election, a clutch of candidates from the out-of-office party toss their hats in the ring, and Washington politicians and the national media focus intently on the senators or congressmen such as Al Gore, Bob Kerrey, Howard Baker, John Glenn, and Richard Lugar. But when the primaries arrive, the national legislators are swept away by a governor--Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush. One has to go back to Senator Barry Goldwater's defeat of Governors Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton for the GOP's 1964 nomination to find a clear exception to this pattern.
The dominance of governors in our Presidential politics is an old and durable phenomenon. Since the election of 1828, when Andrew Jackson's landslide victory over John Quincy Adams ended our initial era of Founding Father Presidents, governors have won more major party nominations and more general elections than any other category of Presidential candidate--and vastly more than candidates whose main political experience was in the U.S. Congress. The table on page 29 lists the occupational backgrounds of our main Presidential candidates since 1828.
The most striking pattern is the overwhelming dominance of governors and military leaders. Governors and generals together account for 52 percent of our major Presidential candidates (46 of 88) and 55 percent of our elected Presidents (17 of 31). They are also our most successful Presidents, with much higher re-election rates than those from other political backgrounds; as a result, governors and generals account for nearly two thirds of the Presidential victories since 1828 (28 wins in 44 elections). Only three of our 31 elected Presidents have come from a primarily legislative background, and none was re-elected.
The dominance of governors and generals over legislators is even more striking when one considers that the pool of legislators is much larger. Even if we limit the potential nominees to senators, there are always exactly twice as many senators as governors. So if senators were the equals of governors as Presidential candidates, we would have, over a long span of years, approximately twice as many senator-nominees as governor-nominees. In reality, the ratio is not 2:1 but rather 1:3 (11 senator-nominees to 32 governor-nominees).
Several candidates classified as "statesmen" (my catch-all category for those whose primary career positions had been unelected) had served in the Senate or House, but only incidentally. Of the four statesmen who were elected President, two had been legislators. Abraham Lincoln's single term in the House was incidental to his career as lawyer, orator, and Illinois Republican leader. James Buchanan served a decade in the House and a decade in the Senate, but prior to his nomination he had been Secretary of State for four years and ambassador to Great Britain for four years, and these positions were decisive to his nomination.
The dominance of governors and generals in American Presidential politics has persisted through many epochal changes in the composition of the U.S. electorate, in the nature of the issues confronting candidates, in styles of political campaigning, in the techniques of campaign financing, and in the procedures for selecting candidates. The pattern therefore reveals something essential and enduring about our political system and Presidential preferences. But what is that something, and is it likely to continue as our political system evolves further?
Many experts I have spoken with suggest that the governor/ general preference displays the advantages of a fresh political face, and the disadvantages of being a Washington insider with a legislative paper trail. A legislator of any tenure, unlike a governor or general, will have cast yea-or-nay votes on a multitude of bills, providing rich opportunities for campaign opponents to select particular votes that are unpopular with important election constituencies. Legislator-candidates are therefore more vulnerable to attack in campaign debate, and less able to maneuver and position themselves according to campaign contingencies. In comparison, governors and generals have greater leeway in fashioning an appealing political identity.
Certainly, the desire to "clean house in Washington" is a strong and recurring one in U.S. politics, and has often worked to the advantage of governors and generals. But it is far from a complete explanation. For one thing, legislators challenging incumbent Presidents or Vice Presidents can rightly claim to be outsiders vis-a-vis the incumbent administration, and will have a paper trail to prove it with more particularity than governors do. In the 2000 Republican primaries, for instance, Senator John McCain was a more vociferous critic of the Clinton administration, and of Washington politics in general, than Governor George W. Bush.
Moreover, governor-candidates are often deeply involved in national affairs. Grover Cleveland championed government "reform" and pro-business causes. Woodrow Wilson promoted "progressive" national economic legislation. Ronald Reagan was known for welfare reform and confronting student demonstrators. Jimmy Carter gained national renown for renouncing racial discrimination in his first inaugural address in Georgia. Finally, the paper-trail explanation does not account for governors' and generals' much higher rates of re-election, when they are themselves Washington insiders with notorious paper trails on national issues.
More important, the focus on Congressional voting fails to capture a more fundamental weakness of legislators in a Presidential campaign--which is that they offer a lower degree of political accountability than governors and generals. Legislators act as participants in a murky, collective enterprise, not as individual decision makers. They often take credit for popular legislation while eluding accountability on controversial matters through omnibus bills, obscure riders, fuzzy legislative language, delegation of hard choices to executive agencies, and an array of procedural maneuvers. Almost any single vote can be explained away by special circumstances. The paper trails of governors and generals are much harder to explain away.
And that, in my view, takes us to the heart of the matter. I suggest that the major reason for the dominance of governors and generals in Presidential politics, and the weakness of legislators, is that governors and generals are CEOs. Governors have submitted budgets, hired and fired subordinates, presided over public emergencies, called out the National Guard, negotiated public strikes, exercised discretion in the enforcement of criminal and other public laws, and endured a succession of victories and defeats large and small. Military leaders have done most of those things and more: They have made decisions involving staggeringly large risks and, usually, have exhibited personal courage of the most impressive kind.
Legislators, in contrast, have made speeches, sat on committees, and cast votes--virtually none of them decisive in the manner of an executive decision. Worse, if they have been successful legislators--skilled at the legislative craft and popular with their peers--they have become legislative leaders, called upon to negotiate political compromises that are, by definition, unprincipled. That is an essential requirement of democratic government, but hardly the profile in leadership that a Presidential candidate seeks to project. Governors and generals also make compromises among conflicting interests, but the nature of the executive function forces them to make real choices and limits their ability to obfuscate and "muddle through."
It is not surprising, then, that of our three legislator-nominees elected to the Presidency, none had been legislative leaders, and only one, Benjamin Harrison, had any significant legislative record (and that during just a single Senate term). The other two, Warren Harding and John F. Kennedy, were blithe shirkers of their Senate duties with little involvement in legislative dealmaking. Nor is it surprising that, to take one of many recent examples, Senator John Kerry's campaign for the 2004 Democratic nomination consists almost entirely of references to his military record in the Vietnam War and his early experience as a county prosecutor, with nary a word about his two decades in the Senate.
None of this is to denigrate the importance of legislative practice, which is as crucial as executive practice to the success of representative government, especially in a vast nation such as ours with innumerable regional, economic, ethnic, and social divisions that must be reconciled in some manner. But legislative work attracts individuals, and produces résumés, of a different character than executive work, and the latter are likely to be much more impressive to voters selecting our most important public executive. Indeed, we may say that one of the hidden virtues of our form of government--where states possess a degree of independent sovereignty (rather than being administrative subdivisions of the national government, as in France), and where the head of government is elected independently of the legislature (rather than being the leader of the largest faction of the legislature, as in parliamentary systems)--is that it tends to cultivate and elevate national leaders whose skills and temperaments are distinctively executive rather than legislative.
It is worth noting that the tendency emphasized here is just that--a tendency, not a complete explanation. If executive ability were the only thing voters looked for in a President, we would see many business executives in the White House. In fact we see none.
What is clear is that Americans are very skeptical about politicians in their purest embodiment: the career legislator. They seek in their President someone who appears to transcend politics-as-usual. Successful experience as a public executive or military leader is an excellent means of cultivating the requisite political transcendence, while demonstrating an ability to make important policy decisions. Another means is oratorical facility--the ability to crystallize in words, from the confusion of political conflict, that which is essential, ennobling, and expressive of vital national aspirations. Four of the five two-term Presidents in the twentieth century were governors who were also eloquent speakers: Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Occasionally, great rhetorical skill alone will suffice (Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy). But more routinely, executive experience and temperament alone, even when accompanied by a plain or even inarticulate speaking style (think Dwight Eisenhower), conveys a no-nonsense position above conventional politics that appeals to voters.
Will governors and generals continue to dominate our Presidential politics, and will legislators continue to be also-rans? The analysis presented here suggests they will, but we need to consider whether recent developments might change that analysis. The past prominence of governors was in part the result of the central role of large states in the party conventions that chose Presidential candidates up to the 1970s. Today, the party conventions have become largely ceremonial, and candidates are selected by an accumulation of primary elections heavily dominated by the media and mass campaigning. These changes may be thought to work to the relative advantage of legislators--who are better known to national reporters, and generally receive most of the media attention in the early phases of campaigns.
The growing importance of the media and the "nationalization" of the selection process may indeed have drawn more legislators into the fray. But to date there is no evidence that changes in the selection process have altered the results to the advantage of legislators. To the contrary, the relative success of governors has increased over time: It was greater in the twentieth century than in the nineteenth century, greater in the latter half of the twentieth century than in the first half, and greatest of all in the latest quarter century of media-and-primary-driven nominating contests.
If anything, modern selection procedures may have advantaged governors, by expanding the field of plausible governor candidates to include those from small states with few electoral or nominating-convention votes. The governors of Georgia, Arkansas, and Vermont would have gotten short shrift at the state-boss-controlled party conventions of times past, but governors Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Howard Dean have been highly proficient in mobilizing modern campaigns. Today's more democratic, media-driven politics may be amplifying the natural advantages of governors over legislators, casting in more vivid relief the differences between executive and legislative abilities, records, and temperaments.
The future of generals involves an additional issue. The previous prominence of military leaders was in part the result of the central role of the military in the settling of the continent and in the Civil War. Since the 1880 election between Civil War Generals James Garfield and Winfield Hancock, only a single military leader has been a Presidential candidate in a general election: World War II Supreme Commander Eisenhower. World War I, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and the protracted political-military contest of the Cold War were not the sorts of conflicts to produce popular military heroes. The twentieth-century generals who might have been Presidential timber, such as Douglas MacArthur, George Marshall, and Colin Powell, did not make the run.
But that may be changing now. The collapse of the Soviet Union, and the arrival of a new war on terror, have led to a succession of military actions that have displayed the proficiency of U.S. armed forces and revived appreciation for the martial virtues. Public approval of the military is now higher than at any time since World War II, and higher than for any other profession or public institution. The near candidacy of Colin Powell in 1996 and the 2004 candidacy of Wesley Clark may presage the return of the military leader to our Presidential politics and, eventually, to the White House.
Christopher DeMuth is president of the American Enterprise Institute.
I heard rumors of Hillary and Clark, but I doubt if she would run for VP..And Clark wouldn't consider VP.
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