Kevin Drum asks:
With the specialized exception of Eisenhower, every single other president has had at least 14 years between first winning political office and becoming president. George Bush had six.
I just don’t get it. Sure, he’s a Bush, but even so how did he manage to convince the vast majority of the Republican party apparatus that he should be their favored candidate? After all, he had minimal experience, he obviously didn’t have any special intellectual or personality characteristics that make you sit up and take notice, and his father wasn’t even that popular with most Republicans after his dismal loss in 1992.
So how did he do it? It remains, to me, the most mysterious of questions.
I was actually thinking about this over the weekend, after reading the NYT’s Week in Review retrospective of the Dean bubble, with the recent Kerry-bubble debate in mind as well.
Because W was a bubble candidate, in just the same way.
The early history, you may remember, went something like this. The Bush heir apparent, Jeb, let down the family side by not winning his first Florida gubernatorial race in 1994, while George W (then universally considered the weaker of the two as a future leader) won himself some giant-killer credibility by beating family enemy Ann Richards and taking the Texas governorship.
By early 1998, George W. was getting included in some of the standard matchup poll questions regarding the 2000 election. By May ’98, he was leading the Republican field in polls, and matching or slightly beating Gore in the hypothetical presidential race. He had by that time been in office less than four years. When he ran for re-election in 1998 it was a live question whether he was even seriously thinking about running for President. But there were those polls.
1998, you may recall, was the Year of Monica. That made it a good time for a certain kind of nostalgia about the boring, preppy, upper-class awkward northeastern stiff of a president who preceded the libidinous southern lawyer– the one who couldn’t complete a sentence with a subject and a verb, rather than the one whose sentences seemed carefully parsed and prepared to avoid perjury charges. That earlier President was named George Bush. And it appears that a fair number of the people who expressed support for George Bush in the polls didn’t understand that there were two of them. Not unreasonable, actually. While only one President has served non-consecutive terms, it’s not that uncommon at the level of Governor or Representative. People reprise past electoral matchups, or just come back and avenge past defeats (Nixon ’68, for example). As examples of political ignorance go, voters who thought in 1998 that George HW Bush might run for President again isn’t an especially egregious one.
That wasn’t the whole story behind W’s rise in the polls. Texans, presumably, knew who W was, and voiced their support (they re-elected him in a landslide in 1998, after all). And none of the other Republican candidates came from such big states. Some Republican loyalists were just excited about the man who had beat Richards. And some probably let their HW nostalgia rub off on W, understanding that they were not the same person.
In any event, W had a very, very good 1998 in the opinion polls. And there were a lot of very energized Republicans who badly wanted to beat Gore in 2000, people who wanted to support a strong Republican candidate who had a good chance of winning. Though this wasn’t the word used, they wanted someone who was electable. And so they gave, and raised, money for a W-for-President campaign. And then they gave, and raised, some more. Movement conservatives were ambivalent, as were Congressional Republicans. But eventually, all that money became even more important than the poll numbers in making W look electable, look like a very strong candidate. A bubble. People who didn’t necessarily think, in their own right, that W was the strongest future president saw that there were other people who supported him. They came to support him on that basis, and it grew.
He (like Kerry) was helped by the fact that his major challenger in the pre-primary competition proved a complete bust: Elizabeth Dole. By the time she dropped out and John McCain stepped up as the major challenge to W, the latter had so much money and so much party support that he was pretty much unstoppable.
Of course, that’s what we all thought about Dean two months ago. Then the bubble popped. Dean started saying dumb things, started taking serious attacks, and stopped seeming so invincible. The more vincible he seemed, the less he seemed like a sure bet to beat W, and the more support he lost. What was different in 2000? Why didn’t W’s bubble pop after New Hampshire?
One difference is: W by then had only one serious challenger left, McCain. He could, and did, go after McCain with a vengeance in South Carolina. When the air started going out of Dean’s bubble, he couldn’t respond by taking his opponents out; there were too many of them. Increasing Gephardt’s negatives helped Edwards, not Dean, and so on. The other is: Dean blew all his money. W got bloodied in New Hampshire, and still had an ungodly amount of bubble money left with which to crush McCain.
Given this year’s proccupation with describing campaigns in terms of stock bubbles, I propose the following as a way to understand what happened in 1998-2000. If you time things right, you can still make a killing in a bubble market. One of the ways to do that is to translate the bubble-currency into something else before it’s too late. Turn all your AOL stock into ownership of Time-Warner, for example. W turned his opinion-poll bubble into money and institutional support; he held onto the latter resources so that he didn’t collapse the first time he ceased to look electable (New Hampshire); and he got luckier than Dean in terms of who his opponents were and how many of them were still around. So he managed to translate a bubble-resource into a hard-resource at the right time.
All of which means that bubble-like support doesn’t necessarily doom a candidate. John Kerry can take hope, I think.
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