(SEE SECOND UPDATE BELOW.)
Howard Dean has, of course, been the candidate usually compared to McGovern. But something just dawned on me.
If Kerry is nominated, he’ll join McGovern as being the only sitting Senator to run against an incumbent President in the modern electoral era– since Bob Dole resigned from his seat before the general election. Indeed, as far as I can recall McGovern is the only sitting Washington official of any kind to remain in office throughout a race against an incumbent president running for re-election since the turn of the 20th century. (Charles Evans Hughes stepped down from the Supreme Court to run against Woodrow Wilson.) How far back before that we would need to go I don’t know– my meory for campaign trivia runs out eventually.
I wonder how that kind of thing affects the conduct of business in Washington? W isn’t much in the habit of one-on-one negotiations with backbench members of the Senate minority; he and Kerry probably don’t run into each other all that often. But there are protocol issues at stake, I would think. The President properly shouldn’t attack members of one of the coordinate branches as a matter of course, and to a lesser degree the same holds in reverse.
Kerry’s campaign will not have one feature that Dole’s would have and that (I’m pretty sure) McGovern’s did. He’s a member of the minority. Therefore the race won’t in any way be a proxy separation-of-powers struggle. Gingrich and (to some extent) Dole talked about tilting the institutional balance of power from the President to Congress. Had Dole remained in office while running, the campaign would have taken on features of an inter-branch struggle. I’m pretty sure the Democrats controlled the Senate in 1972, but I don’t know whether there were any such overtones in that race. But Kerry is not part of the institutionally dominant part of the Senate. No one is going to think he speaks on the body’s behalf.
I don’t have a clear conclusion here– just noting a potentially intersting factor. I’m going to think more about what it does both to campaigning and to governing when one has this constellation of offices and roles.
UPDATE:
Whoops. Sydney Henderson points out via e-mail that John Anderson was a sitting Representative when he ran against Carter (and lost to Reagan.) The list of candidates I ran through in my head had only included Ds & Rs. That case may not have created quite the same kind of tension, since Carter clearly welcomed Anderson’s campaign (Anderson had been a Republican until losing the 1980 primaries to Reagan), but it does serve as a counterexample.
Henderson suggests that, before McGovern and Anderson, the most recent case was Henry Clay in 1832.
Benjamin Harrison, suggested by a couple of correspondents, doesn’t qualify– his one term in the Senate ended a year and a half before the Presidential election in which he unseated Grover Cleveland.
If we restrict the case to Senators, then Kerry and McGovern would be the only sitting Senators in 170 years to run in the general election against an incumbent President. I can imagine a (Dean-friendly) reason for this. Unseating an incumbent President effectively requires an anti-insider campaign, a “We’re going to take back Washington” theme that’s just not as credibly pursued by someone running from an important Washington office. Most of the nominees who ran against incumbent Presidents seem to have been sitting or former governors, not even former Washington officials.
It’s well-known that Senators do a poor job in winning their parties’ nominations in the first place. The pattern I’ve noticed here may be purely an artefact of that fact; that is, the fact that the race is against an incumbent President may not have independent explanatory power. But my eyeballing of the lists of candidates suggests to me that there is a difference– Washington officials in general and sitting Senators in particular are at least a little more frequent nominees when the Presidency is open than when it’s not.
SECOND UPDATE: I’m slipping, and so are Volokh readers. It took hours for someone to point out the following name to me:
Barry Goldwater.
I know exactly what the synapse misfire was in my case– I set my mental search engine on “Presidents who were elected twice” and looked at their major-party opponents when they ran for re-election. LBJ, of course, assumed office on JFK’s death about a year before the ’64 election.
Now I’m willing to abandon the pattern I thought I saw. Of course, the names “Goldwater” and “McGovern” suggest another pattern– blowout defeats.
Comments are closed.