Project President

by Ben Shapiro

  You could not build a winning campaign around Jimmy Carter’s niceness, Barry Goldwater’s tact, or Michael Dukakis’s status as a “people person.” The total picture candidates create must be different for each. Bill Clinton’s “Man from Hope,” rags-to-riches, likable uncle shtick wouldn’t have worked for John Kerry; Kerry has a long reputation for elitism. Aside from Kerry’s checkered marital past and Brahmin family history, Kerry is widely seen as an arrogant fellow. Such an impression is not without basis. Humorist Dave Barry told of the time he met Senator Kerry:

  Kerry once came, with his entourage, into a ski rental shop in Ketchum, Idaho, where I was waiting patiently with my family to rent snowboards, and used one of his lackeys to flagrantly barge in line ahead of us and everybody else, as if he had some urgent senatorial need for a snowboard, like there was about to be an emergency meeting, out on the slopes, of the Joint Halfpipe Committee.18

  Kerry, in other words, is not the sort of candidate who could “feel your pain.”

  Similarly, Senator Bob Dole (R-Kansas) couldn’t borrow Ronald Reagan’s campaign playbook when he ran in 1996. While Reagan campaigned as a warm and genial father figure, Dole’s caustic wit and less than polished appearance came off as more grandfatherly than fatherly. Dole, as former Clinton campaign manager James Carville put it, was “a candidate without luck or charm.”19

  There is no magic formula to victory. But candidates know that they are the product. If they market themselves badly, they end up next to New Coke in the garbage bin.

  IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN THIS WAY. The politics of personality didn’t begin with the Nixon-Kennedy debates of 1960 or even the advent of television campaigning in the 1952 Eisenhower-Stevenson race. From the very genesis of the American republic, Americans have cared about the person they were electing (of course at the very beginning, many voters cared mostly about the ale the candidates provided). George Washington campaigned subtly; Adams and Jefferson battled it out in the press. Had Adams looked like Jefferson and vice versa, the 1800 election might have fallen in Adams’s favor. Had John Quincy Adams been a western military man rather than an eastern intellectual, perhaps Andrew Jackson never would have been president. Had handsome Franklin Pierce been dour James Buchanan’s lost twin, Pierce would have remained an obscure former brigadier general.

  Our most important presidents have reshaped voters’ perceptions of personality—and appearance. Had Lincoln been clean-shaven rather than bearded, perhaps presidents Grant through Harrison would have looked less like refugees from a ZZ Top concert. Had Woodrow Wilson not looked like a banker, perhaps presidents Harding through Eisenhower would have looked less like the managers convention at Bank of America. Had John F. Kennedy not looked like a matinee idol, perhaps there would be no taboo on presidential baldness.

  That is not to say that we elect candidates simply because they look like JFK (sorry, Teddy!). We elect them based on their positions, their personal histories, their personalities. Ugliness can sometimes be an asset, as it was for Lincoln, who famously turned his ugliness to his advantage in an 1858 debate with Stephen A. Douglas. After Douglas called him two-faced, Lincoln replied, “I leave it to you. If I had another face, do you think I would wear this one?”20 Advanced age can sometimes help rather than harm; Reagan probably won the 1984 election when during a debate with Walter Mondale, he remarked, “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”21 Great masters of politics can turn seeming weaknesses into advantages.

  IF THERE IS NO MAGIC FORMULA for presidential victory, what should candidates do? One school of thought says that voters have an idea of the “ideal candidate”—Mr. President Right—and that if candidates can pattern themselves after that “ideal candidate,” they can win. Shelves of books have been written attempting to define Mr. President Right. In 1959, CBS News journalist Eric Sevareid identified the ideal candidate as the candidate who could

  appear, in other words, to be the universal man, for we are a complex federation, we Americans, of different ethnic strains, economic conditions and geographical identifications, and to all of us he must somehow appeal. What American voters really want in their hearts is a man with whom they can personally identify, yet one who is a little better than they. One who is of them, but yet above them.22

  It would be difficult to find a more vague definition of Mr. President Right than this.Not even Superman and Captain America rolled up into one could embody such a broad characterization.

  If there is no Mr. President Right in theory or practice, we’re left with our impressions. We gather those impressions from incidents like John Kerry’s $1,000 haircut. The American public has a quick, keen eye for character; we want likability, toughness, charm, grit, honesty, energy, competence, sugar, spice, and everything nice. Most candidates don’t have it all. But, as the old joke goes, candidates don’t have to outrun the bear—they just have to outrun their opponents. Each candidate has one shot to prove to the public that their personality makes them the right person to claim the most powerful position on the face of the earth. How candidates parlay that shot into victory or defeat is the story of Project President.

  1

  Suits vs. Boots

  WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON of Ohio was not a particularly strong candidate for the presidency of the United States in 1840. A “minor military figure,”1 the sixty-eight-year-old former governor of the Indiana Territory was an able politician. He had won the Whig nomination for president by outlasting such giants as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, but he had not been chosen for his superior intellect or political acumen. He had been chosen because he, like Andrew Jackson before him, was a general. He had also been chosen because he, unlike Webster in particular, had rural support; the Whigs had run three presidential candidates in 1836, with Harrison representing the West.

  Most of all, Harrison had been chosen because he had no political convictions whatsoever. As campaign biographer Robert Gray Gunderson wrote, Harrison had wholeheartedly adopted Nicholas Biddle’s 1835 advice:

  If Gen. Harrison is taken up as a candidate it will be on account of the past, not the future. Let him then rely entirely on the past. Let him say not one single word about his principles, or his creed—let him say nothing—promise nothing. Let no Committee, no Convention—no town meeting ever extract from him a single word, about what he thinks now, or what he will do hereafter. Let the use of pen and ink be wholly forbidden as if he were a mad poet in Bedlam.2

  Harrison embodied the Marcel Marceau theory of politics: keep quiet and you can silently mimic laughter all the way to the ballot box. Harrison could afford to run on an invisible platform (the Whigs literally had no party platform in 1840)3—he was running against the unpopular, unattractive, and unsuccessful incumbent Democrat president Martin Van Buren. While Harrison was no natural beauty, he could invoke his long career of military service; Van Buren, ten years younger than Harrison and a lifelong politician, had no way to dismiss his shortness (five-feet-six inches), baldness, and general resemblance to Mr. Magoo. Van Buren was the Karl Rove of his day, except with more personal ambition; Harrison was Dwight D. Eisenhower, 112 years early.

  Still, the election was not going to be a cakewalk for Harrison. Van Buren was Andrew Jackson’s successor, and possibly the cleverest politician of his day. He had outmaneuvered Southern firebrand and former vice president John C. Calhoun years earlier, earning his nickname “The Little Magician.”4 He was a master of “efficient party organization,” a mastery he used to triumphant effect in the election of 1836.5

  It would take something special for Harrison to knock the “Red Fox” from the White House.

  It would take pizzazz.

  It would take sparkle.

  It would take . . . logs and cider.

  Harrison’s campaign managers had scoured the earth for the right campaign imagery. They had labeled Harrison “Old Tippe-canoe,” reminding voters of Harrison’s somewhat
inconsequential military victory against Tecumseh in 1811. In 1834, a Whig newspaper had labeled Harrison “Old Buckeye,” using his Ohio roots to link him with Andrew Jackson’s similarly woodsman-oriented nickname, “Old Hickory.”6 It wasn’t quite good enough.

  Then, on December 11, 1839, one week after the Whig National Convention, Harrison’s campaign strategy suddenly presented itself.A Democrat newspaper, the Baltimore Republican, suggested that if the American people truly wanted to get rid of Harrison, they should “give him a barrel of hard cider, and settle a pension of two thousand a year on him, and my word for it, he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin by the side of a ‘sea coal’ fire, and study moral philosophy.”7

  Two of Harrison’s advisors, Thomas Elder and Richard S. Elliott, immediately seized upon the log cabin and cider imagery. If Van Buren was going to campaign against Harrison’s western, hardscrabble, pioneer credentials, they thought he would lose and lose big. “Within the month,” wrote Gunderson, “cabins, coons, and cider became symbols of resurgent Whiggery.”8

  Harrison supporters toted model log cabins around the country. Whig songs glorified log cabins and hard cider. Horace Greeley’s pro-Harrison campaign newspaper was entitled Log Cabin.9 Harrison took to using the log cabin and hard cider imagery in his speeches. In a speech at Fort Meigs, Harrison apologized for his oratorical shortcomings by referencing his identity as “an old soldier and a farmer,” then guzzled down hard cider.10

  Van Buren’s own image contributed mightily to the Harrison campaign. Van Buren had an unfortunate weak spot: he was a dapper gent. And he was not merely a dapper gent: he was a northern dapper gent—a New Yorker. Even worse than that, he was a dapper gent from New York during a depression—a depression he had likely aggravated by refusing to support the National Bank.

  It was only a matter of time before Whigs began using Van Buren’s taste for shopping at Tiffany’s against him. On April 14, 1840, Rep. Charles Ogle of Pennsylvania took to the floor of the House of Representatives to denounce Van Buren’s lavish proclivities. The speech reads like a transcript from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. “The ‘site’ of the Presidential palace is perhaps not less conspicuous than the King’s house in many of the royal capitals of Europe,” Ogle railed.

  Martin Van Buren—plain, republican, hardhanded-democratic-locofoco Martin Van Buren—has [the East Room] now garnished with gold framed mirrors ‘as big as a barn door,’ to behold his plain republican self in . . . in my opinion, it is time the people of the United States should know that their money goes to buy for their plain hard-handed democratic President, knives, forks, and spoons of gold, that he may dine in the style of the monarchs of Europe . . .What has Martin Van Buren ever done? . . . Placed by the side of Harrison, what is he?11

  Though much of the speech was false,Whigs quickly reprinted it and used it in the anti-Van Buren campaign.12

  Other descriptions of Van Buren made Ogle’s seem tame by comparison. Davy Crockett said that Van Buren “is laced up in corsets, such as women in town wear, and, if possible, tighter than the best of them . . . It would be difficult to say from his personal appearance, whether he was man or woman, but for his large red and gray whiskers.”13 John Quincy Adams, no rustic backwoodsman he, stated that Van Buren was “an amalgamated metal of lead and copper” with a “tincture of aristocracy.”14

  Whigs also took to song to express the contrast between “Golden Spoon” Van Buren and “Log Cabin” Harrison. One song carried these lyrics:

  Old Tip he wears a homespun coat

  He has no ruffled shirt-wirt-wirt.

  But Mat he has the golden plate

  And he’s a little squirt-wirt-wirt.15

  Another, to the tune of Auld Lang Syne, went like this:

  No ruffled shirt, no silken hose,

  No airs does Tip display;

  But like “the pith of worth,” he goes

  In homespun “hoddin’ gray.”

  Upon his board there ne’er appeared

  The costly “sparkling wine,”

  But plain hard cider such as cheered

  In days of old lang syne.16

  It wasn’t exactly Cole Porter, but it got the message across.

  Of course, the message was largely wrong.William Henry Harrison was hardly a poor boy from the wrong side of the tracks; his log cabin was rather plush, his birthplace was a two-story brick house in Virginia, and he also owned a “palatial Georgian mansion in Vincennes, Indiana.”17 And, according to Lincoln, Van Buren spent less on upkeep for the White House than any other president.18

  The truth didn’t end up mattering very much. On Election Day, William Henry Harrison won a resounding victory over Martin Van Buren, carrying nineteen of twenty-six states, including most of the Northeast.

  Harrison gave a two-hour inauguration address in bitter cold weather, during which he did not swig hard cider. He should have. One month later, William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia, brought about by a cold he contracted during the address.19

  AMERICANS LOVE FARMERS AND COWBOYS, rough and tumble characters from rural areas, candidates who work fields instead of crowds and wear boots instead of suits.We always have. Our roots are in the soil, not in the big cities; our hearts are with those who civilize the wilderness. Show us a candidate shoeing a horse, and our hearts palpitate; show us a candidate who walks the floors of the New York Stock Exchange, and we grow restless. Cowboy boots trump Armani suits.

  In the battle between suits and boots, the boots have the upper hand. Presidents from non-northeastern states have an immediate advantage, particularly since the end of JFK’s tenure: only Nixon, running nominally from New York, has emerged from the Northeast.

  After we factor in the images of the candidates themselves, the suits versus boots divide becomes even more apparent. Boots aren’t restricted to the South and the West, and suits aren’t restricted to the Northeast. Eisenhower ran from New York and Adlai Stevenson from Illinois in both 1952 and 1956, but it was Stevenson, not Eisenhower, who came off as the suit. Reagan was from California and Mondale was from Minnesota, but Mondale came off like a high school principal.Wearing the boots in a presidential campaign is like putting Roger Clemens on the mound to face Gwyneth Paltrow. Except more one-sided.

  A northeastern candidate has not won the presidency since John F. Kennedy in 1960; we’ve had three elected presidents from Texas, two from California, one from Arkansas, and one from Georgia. Every one of them campaigned as a weathered wilderness man with a rags-to-riches story—or at least as a man who can ride a horse.

  Meanwhile, suits have fared poorly in presidential elections. Candidates who appear too buttoned-down or intellectual annoy the public. In recent elections, such candidates have been Democrats; when such Democrats lose, the media portrays them as high-minded citizens unable to get in touch with an ignorant populace. But the problem isn’t with the American people—it’s with a Democratic Party unwilling to adopt a winning strategy. Like Republicans, when Democrats cultivate the boots image, they facilitate victory.

  SUITS VERSUS BOOTS DIVIDE has been a factor in presidential elections since the very beginning. Leading up to the election of THE 1796, Jefferson carefully maintained his image as a philosopher-farmer in the mode of the ancients. As historian John Ferling put it, “Jefferson wrote letter after letter proclaiming his contentment . . . Jefferson claimed that his days were so absorbed with farming that he had time for little else, including reading out-of-state newspapers or books or reflecting on public matters.” As Ferling also pointed out, Jefferson was apparently unoccupied enough to write 220 letters during 1794 and 1795.20

  Jefferson’s farmer image wasn’t enough to win him the presidency in 1796; John Adams was George Washington’s handpicked successor. But in 1800, Vice President Thomas Jefferson used his image as a Virginia farmer to great effect against former Massachusetts lawyer and incumbent president John Adams.While Jefferson disingenuously protested that his “private gratification would
be most indulged” if events would “leave me most at home”—at idyllic Monticello—he simultaneously campaigned vigorously against Adams.21

  The Jefferson campaign consistently championed Jefferson’s farming background, citing his Notes on the State of Virginia,22 in which Jefferson wrote, “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.”23 As a farmer, Jefferson certainly knew how to spread the horse manure.

  Meanwhile, the Jefferson campaign labeled Adams an elitist and closet monarchist. Though Adams was also a farmer (his farm can still be visited in Braintree, Massachusetts), he was unable to counter charges of elitism. Jefferson’s faux boots triumphed over Adams’s manufactured suit.

  JEFFERSON’S BOOTS SQUASHED ADAMS; Andrew Jackson’s squashed Adams’s son. Andrew Jackson ran in 1824 and in 1828 as the boots candidate against Adams’s son, John Quincy Adams. Secretary of State J. Q. was a learned diplomat, a keen philosopher, a brilliant fellow. Jackson was a general, the former military governor of Florida, a rough-and-tumble character. In both 1824 and 1828, Jackson defeated J. Q. in the popular vote, campaigning largely on the basis of his own wilderness credentials and against J. Q.’s hoity-toity resumé.

  “Old Hickory” campaigned as a wilderness man. And he had the most sought-after qualification in presidential politics: he had been born in a log cabin. He had made his reputation for intestinal fortitude at age thirteen, when he refused to clean a British officer’s boots during the Revolutionary War. The British officer retaliated by cutting Jackson’s face and hand with his sword; Jackson retained the scars.24