…cause their own defeat in running for Prez, because they have to take the hit for unpopular positions of the current administration (Vietnam war for Humphrey, lying about sex for Gore) which any other Democratic candidate could easily distance himself from. IOW, they have all the liabilities of an incumbent running for office but none of the advantages (which are mostly “We’ve got a track record as President to judge this guy on, he’s been President for a long time and we’ve done pretty well on his watch, etc.").
If McCarthy in 1968 or Bradley in 2000 had won the nomination, they could have attacked the incumbent President (very selectively) and at the same time attacked their Republican opponent. But as sitting VPs, Humphrey and Gore were in excellent positions within the Party to GET the nomination, so they took advantage of those positions and (very narrowly) lost the general election.
My question is whether it’s clearly the smarter strategy for such sitting VPs to decline to run as successors and deliberately to work on staging a comeback campaign four or eight or even twelve years down the road, when they’ll still have experience at the highest level but will no longer be required to defend every unpopular position taken by their Presidents. If you were advising a sitting VP (ANY sitting VP of ANY party), would you advise him to wait at least four years before seeking the nomination? Would Humphrey in 1972 or 1976 or Gore in 2004 or 2008 have been stronger (because never-defeated) candidates for Prez? Or is there a serious downside to this strategizing that I’m not seeing? (Other than the obvious danger of being regarded as old-hat in future elections.)
Gore tried to distance himself from Clinton. Lieberman was chosen as a running mate partially because he was a anti-Clinton Democrat.
It was a mistake, says I. Clinton was hugely popular and Gore would have done much better if he would have let Bill campaign for him and had largely promised us more of what we got during the Clinton years.
Gore’s campaign made several mistakes. He ignored Florida until the end, and completely ignored Ohio. He also didn’t go after Ralph Nader and let Dubya’s miserable record as Texas Governor go unremarked upon. But the singlemost thing he could have done was to ask Dubya at one of their debates, “So what exactly don’t you like about peace and prosperity?”
Given the closeness of the election, it’s hard to maintain that Gore lost because he was the VP, when any one of a number of factors would have changed the election.
Firstly, due to the way delegate selection worked in 1968, there was no chance that McCarthy or (had he lived) Robert Kennedy could have received the nomination.
Secondly, with McCarthy, there’s a chance that, had he been nominated, it would have resulted in a McGovern-style disaster four years early, with more of the blue-collar Dems that stuck with Humphrey voting for Nixon (or George Wallace).
[QUOTE=Governor Quinn]
Firstly, due to the way delegate selection worked in 1968, there was no chance that McCarthy or (had he lived) Robert Kennedy could have received the nomination.QUOTE]
Cite? i’ve read a persuasive Master’s thesis (by a guy named Mabus who later became, i think, Governor of Mississippi, or maybe Alabama) that studied the '68 nomination process carefully, specifically to see if RFK had a real shot to get the noimination, and he concluded that he probably would have.
And if Humphrey had stayed out, as I’m suggesting, after RFK’s assassination, then McCarthy certainly would have been the nominee.
Finally, don’t you think that McCarthy might have brought in at least as many disaffected Democrats (who sat out an election between two pro-war candidates) as he would have driven away Wallace Democrats?
A sitting VP does have a difficult task to win the presidency. Bush ONE did it but not many others.
The major problem of passing on the nomination if one is VP already is getting the nomination is difficult itself and the best chance is to be VP. How many good chances does one get?
I don’t think that Gore lost the election because of Clinton. If he lost at all, he did it on his own. I say that as a long time Gore supporter who remembers him before he turned to cardboard.
The comics always take swipes at the Veeps. The more they talked about how stiff Gore is, the more awkward he became. Before he became the Vice President, I don’t ever remember anyone mentioning that he appeared to be stiff or awkward at all. He was very personable and well-liked. I believe he had never lost an election in Tennessee in approximately the 25 years of his political career. Then it became almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. At least, that it the way it appeared to me to unfold.
So I think that being the Vice President actually hurt his chances.
First of all I am sorry that I don’t accept Democrat Underground as a credible unbiased source regarding information on GW Bush’s goverorship abd here is why. Some of that information is just dead wrong.
Wrong. In fact Texas ranked #27 in teacher’s salarys when GW left office.
Not exactly “dead last” huh? I would say that under Bush teachers did very well.
I don’t have the time right now to post refutations for all the arguments in your quote but since I have proven that your source is printing outright lies I don’t think I have to do so. If life was so bad under Bush then why did he win re-election in the biggest win in the history of Texas. If life is so bad in Texas then why do more American citizens move to Texas then move from it? This is not true for any state in the northeast by the way.
Since I have shown at least one of them to be an outright lie, I will wait for you to prove the other examples in your quote, I don’t have the time to waste on them right now. I will grant you that Houston’s pollution level is one of the worst in the nation but that was also the case before Bush took office. (Houston is the 4th largest city in the US so we should expect it to be somewhere at the top anyway).
As for executions – the Governor of Texas has no control over the execution of criminals. We have separation of powers here in Texas and the governor can not either force the judges and jurys not to impose the death penalty nor can the governor write laws that ban or limit the death penalty (that is the legislature’s job). The only power the governor has in regard to executions in Texas is the power to grant a temporary reprieve for individual criminals. He (or she, any Texas governor) couldn’t stop an execution even if he or she wanted to.
The sources that I used (none of them availible online, Barone’s “Our Country” and the 1969 book “American Melodrama” were among them) show that most of the delegates were selected by conventions, and that quite a few of the primaries were of a non-binding nature. The men (and they were all men) that controlled the state conventions (Bailey of Connecticut, Daley of Illinois, Tate and Green of Pennsylvania, and a few others) were not going to support a party insurgent like McCarthy, and were also not likely to support Kennedy for the same reason. I’ve never seen the Mabus (Governor of Mississippi, BTW) work, however.
How many Dems stayed home? The voter turnout statistics from 1968 show only a slight drop from 1964 (60.9% vs. 61.9%). Meanwhile, comparing Humphrey’s votes to McGovern, Humphrey received 31,275,166 votes in 1968 to McGovern’s 29,170,774. Extrapolation would suggest that McCarthy would have had to recover at least these 2,000,000+ votes.
I have to agree with the people above who noted that Gore’s MAJOR mistake was distancing himself from Clinton, who was only too willing to punch the stump (out of the gutter, people!) for his Veep. Considering that I’m pretty sure that, had Clinton been allowed to run again, he would have blown Bush so far out of the water Dubya would still be in orbit today, Gore’s obvious desire to never have his name and Clinton’s linked in the same paragraph during the campaign was a very bad choice.
I’d also like to give full disclosure, in that I would pay to watch the Republican Congress foam at the mouth for another four years of a Clinton White House. Really I would.