Modern history holds more bad news than good for Kamala Harris as she tries to ascend from the vice presidency to the nation’s top public post. Three quarters of those who have tried in the post-World War II era have failed. But she can find some solace in an unlikely example: George H.W. Bush.
Ronald Reagan’s vice president, Bush won the presidency in 1988, against what initially seemed like long odds. Not so three other vice presidents who tried but failed to make the same transition: Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and Al Gore in 2000.
Some important lessons can be drawn from each experience.
In 1960, Nixon suffered from a problem typical of those who serve in the number-two post: stunted stature, though not in comparison to his opponent but rather relative to his boss. Dwight Eisenhower, the war-winning former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, carried the aura of a statesman who existed above the domestic political fray. By contrast, Nixon, a red-baiting Republican, was viewed as a shifty and divisive partisan. As he tried to emerge from Ike’s formidable shadow, Nixon, running as a man who would continue the peace and prosperity the United States had enjoyed under Eisenhower, needed a beneficent boost from his boss.
That’s not what he got. When Eisenhower was asked in late August of 1960 to specify an area where an idea of Nixon’s had become a major policy initiative, the president replied, “If you give me a week, I might think of one.”
Eisenhower’s dismissive comment gave John F. Kennedy’s campaign a weapon it used to slicing effect in a TV ad. Ike’s belated effort to save the day for Nixon by touting his experience didn’t do the trick and Kennedy won by a hair.
The lesson for Harris: Make sure your boss is ready and willing to give you credit where it’s due – or even where it’s not.
When he ran for president while serving as Lyndon Johnson’s vice president in 1968, Humphrey had to deal with both a particularly thorny political issue – the unpopular war raging in Vietnam – and a domineering and ungenerous boss.
That July, Humphrey’s team developed a proposal that, at least rhetorically, held out the prospect of ending the bombing of North Vietnam.
But when the diffident Humphrey broached that plan with LBJ, the reaction was vehement. Johnson told him that “if I announced this, he’d destroy me for the presidency,” Humphrey recalled to an aide. When LBJ finally stopped the bombing, just days before the election, Humphrey enjoyed a late surge, but it wasn’t quite enough. Nixon, the GOP nominee once again eight years after his failure to succeed Ike, eked out a victory.
The lesson: On crucial matters, a vice president has to have the fortitude to go into damn-the-torpedoes mode and break with the boss.
Let’s skip ahead to the third failed VP-cum-nominee, Al Gore in 2000. Gore made two mistakes as he ran to succeed Bill Clinton, who was presiding over a strong economy but had been tarnished by his sexual relationship with a White House intern and his sometimes boorish behavior toward other women. Fearing that Clinton’s personal negatives would hurt him, Gore distanced himself from his boss. But doing so made it difficult for him to share credit for the booming economy.
Gore compounded that error by waging a discordant people-versus-the-powerful campaign, an odd overarching message for a quasi-incumbent in strong economic times.
Progressives applauded – and in fairness, Gore did win a popular vote majority. But we elect presidents via the Electoral College. Running as a class warrior, Gore failed to win his home state of Tennessee, whose 11 electoral votes would have put him in the White House. Nor did he carry Clinton’s home base of Arkansas, whose 6 electoral votes would have secured a win. He also failed to win the swing state of New Hampshire; adding even the Granite State’s four electoral votes to his tally would have carried the day. However, once the US Supreme Court blocked as unconstitutional a state-court-ordered plan for a manual recount of undervotes in some counties, Bush carried the state by 537 votes – and with Florida’s 25 electoral votes, won the presidency.
Joe Biden doesn’t have a scandal problem, so Harris can embrace his economic success without fear of being tarnished by association. Yet as she tries to solve her own geopolitical puzzle, there is a lesson for Harris to take away from Gore’s messaging muddle. Motivating the Democratic base and firing up turnout may beckon in the populist direction, but winning the necessary 270 electoral votes means not tacking hard to port. Simply put, a message that is too far left for must-have Pennsylvania would almost certainly lose her the election.
Now on to the one VP-as-nominee post-World War II winner.
In 1988, it wasn’t so much a stature gap that Bush suffered in comparison to his boss, self-styled California cowboy Ronald Reagan, but a masculinity disparity. Newsweek even ran a story about the modest, self-effacing, reedy-voiced GHWB entitled “George Bush: Fighting the ‘Wimp Factor.’ "
Bush started the campaign saddled with high negatives and a double-digit deficit to Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, then governor of Massachusetts. Mild-mannered except when he shifted into do-whatever-it-takes campaign mode, Bush addressed his problems by launching a series of hard-hitting attacks on Dukakis designed to portray him as an out-of-touch elitist who was weak on crime and defense.
“He went after Dukakis and drove Michael’s negatives as high as his own,” recalled Democratic consultant Michael Goldman.
Some of it was tinny and unfair. But with Dukakis slow to respond to what he saw as self-evidently ridiculous assertions, Bush’s approach worked. On Election Day, he won a strong victory, leaving Dukakis with just 10 states and the District of Columbia.
The lesson from that campaign: A candidate can change their image, or at least make themselves seem like the most palatable of two unappetizing choices, by aggressively driving the political case against their opponent.
And that is something Kamala Harris is eminently qualified to do.
This column first appeared in The Primary Source, Globe Opinion’s free weekly newsletter about local and national politics. If you’d like to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
Scot Lehigh is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at scot.lehigh@globe.com. Follow him @GlobeScotLehigh.