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Senators as Presidential Candidates
Rich Galen Monday August 23, 2004
From New York City
The Republican National Convention
I am in New York for the run-up to the 2004 Republican National Convention which begins on August 30 and will run through September 2. I am the able and lovely assistant to the communications director of the Platform Committee, Ginny Wolfe, who is far more able and infinitely more lovely than I could ever hope to be.
I do not believe I have dealt with the matter of United States Senators as Presidential candidates in Mullings before, so here goes:
In the entirety of the 20th Century, only two men were ever elected directly from the US Senate to the Presidency: John F. Kennedy in the election of 1960 and � wanna guess?
In the election of 1920, Warren G. Harding. Yeah, yeah. I know. That was going to be your very next guess.
One of the reasons Governors are elected President with such frequency is they have the skill set to manage complex systems - such as, in 2004, the world. No Governor in the history of Governors has ever called the Director of Motor Vehicles and said, "We've been handing out license plates with the wide side toward the customer. I think it would be better if we handed them across the counter narrow side out."
U.S. Senators do that sort of thing every day: They will work on a semi-colon buried in the 13th paragraph of a second degree amendment to a minor bill for weeks on end. And be darned proud that it was adopted by voice vote.
The way this translates into Presidential campaigns is what we are seeing today as Senator John Kerry tries to deal with the furor over some of his claims about his service during and after Vietnam.
All Senators running for President sooner or later decide they need to take personal charge of some segment of their campaign - sometimes it is the advertising, sometimes it is the press operation, many times it is the schedule.
If I am the campaign manager and you are the political director there will come a time when you know that any decision I make can be appealed to THE SENATOR.
And I know that.
And THE SENATOR knows it and, in fact, encourages it.
Soon all the senior staff decides they can appeal my crummy decisions to THE SENATOR who likes being involved in the process because that is exactly what he or she is trained to do as a Senator.
When that happens, the campaign begins to sag because the decision-stack sitting in THE SENATOR's inbox keeps growing and growing.
In yesterday's NY Times, Maureen Dowd who is so angry at the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the campaign of President Bush that she, in essence, blamed Lee Atwater (who died in 1991) for John Kerry's problems.
Nevertheless she correctly points out that it Kerry has been slow in responding to these attacks, writing about Kerry: "The Skipper would do well to get a swifter boat," also writing that the world's champeen of quick response, Bill Clinton, "implied two weeks ago that Mr. Kerry was acting sluggish."
By allowing the charges and counter-charges to gain headway, the Kerry campaign is now �
Dear Mr. Mullings:
Please don't write what we think you're going to write
Signed,
The National Society for the Eradication of Purple Prose
�seriously off course and may be heading for the rocks.
Arrrggghhh! We KNEW you were going to write that!
The Kerry campaign is now under the day-to-day control of, as Ms. Dowd put it, Skipper John Kerry. That is the worst possible position for the campaign - or THE SENATOR - to be in.
On the Secret Decoder Ring Page today: No explanations. No links. Just four excellent photos. One of which is of � Women's Beach Volleyball!
--END --
Copyright © 2004 Richard A. Galen
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