Having run twice, and unsuccessfully, for the presidency, Hillary Rodham Clinton is now an official object lesson in how not to run for political office. No doubt, Clinton was a subpar candidate—especially when compared with her husband—but one strike against her is manifestly unfair: that she had no “message.”
True, in hindsight, her message was not as compelling as Donald Trump’s appeal to working-class voters. And equally true, the hacked emails from Clinton pollster Joel Benenson to campaign colleagues—”Do we have any sense from her what she believes or wants her core message to be?”—make for embarrassing reading. But in fact, Hillary Clinton had three messages: I’m the best-prepared candidate for president in living memory; my opponent is a dangerous alternative; and it’s time for a woman president. Of course, none of them resonated sufficiently with voters—not even the appeal to sisterhood—to overcome Trump, but that’s not the same as their being nonexistent.
Moreover, if things had gone slightly differently in this close election—if she had spent a day or two campaigning in Wisconsin, for example, or had ever been truthful about her private email server—we would now be drawing the opposite conclusion: That the American people voted for familiarity over uncharted waters; that Republicans made a fatal error in embracing Trump; and that the dream of a female president was irresistible to millions of voters. Instead of posing for selfies in the woods around Chappaqua, Hillary Clinton and her well-oiled campaign would be the subject of admiring seminars at Harvard’s Institute of Politics.
What, after all, is any campaign’s message? Just as most political journalism tends to be wishful thinking, a certain mythology attaches to winning campaigns. We like to tell ourselves, in retrospect, that successful candidates were historically inevitable or, worse, were elected unanimously. Yes, the American people embraced the handsome 43-year-old John F. Kennedy in 1960, but a very nearly equal number embraced his jowly opponent, 47-year-old Richard M. Nixon. It seems unimaginable that anyone might have voted against Franklin D. Roosevelt in the midst of World War II; but in 1944, 22 million Americans (46 percent) did exactly that.
Our most successful contemporary president, Ronald Reagan, is a case in point. It is now generally believed that Reagan was elected in 1980 because of the debacle of the Iranian hostage crisis: Americans were looking for a reason to vote Jimmy Carter out of office, and the Ayatollah Khomeini gave them one. But of course, in the Democratic primaries that same year, when Edward Kennedy challenged Carter, the hostage crisis worked to Carter’s advantage. In such emergencies, Americans tend to rally around the commander in chief, and for most of that year, Carter led Kennedy and Reagan in the polls. At the time, political journalists would have explained that economic issues—inflation, stagnation, gasoline shortages, unemployment—were driving the campaign, not foreign policy. And they would have been right. Reagan’s message was not especially sophisticated but was surely compelling: Carter must go, and I’m ready to replace him.
It could be argued that the best “messages” in presidential politics are either simplistic (“Back to normalcy,” 1920), self-serving (“Don’t swap horses in midstream,” 1864), or deceptive (“He kept us out of war,” 1916). Indeed, deception is especially effective when overtaken by events. In 1932, FDR never mentioned constructing the American welfare state; he promised a “new deal” for the American people (whatever that meant) and to balance the budget. Yet simple phrases can also be deceptively subtle: When Dwight D. Eisenhower declared, in 1952, that “I shall go to Korea,” he managed to convey the idea, in five words, that the Truman administration was bogged down in an unpopular war while reminding voters that he had successfully prosecuted a bigger one seven years earlier.
To which an important corollary must be added: More than a few presidents have been elected to office because voters were determined to un-elect the incumbent—message or no message. Herbert Hoover had grown sufficiently unpopular by 1932 that Roosevelt merely had to smile and wave on the campaign trail, at which he excelled. Ike won in 1952 partly because he was an American hero and largely because the Democrats had occupied the White House for 20 years and grown stale and corrupt. Lyndon Johnson’s “message” in 1964 was that the American people didn’t want three presidents in one year, and that his opponent (Barry Goldwater) was an extremist. Four years later, Nixon’s “message” against LBJ’s vice president (Hubert Humphrey) was another throw-the-rascals-out impulse in the wake of an unpopular war.
Of course, the obverse of all this is that—Hillary Clinton notwithstanding—candidates sometimes win because voters want continuity. William Howard Taft won Theodore Roosevelt’s third term in 1908—although, of course, TR sought to reclaim it four years later. George H. W. Bush was the obvious, and eminently well-qualified, inheritor of Reagan’s mantle in 1988, but Al Gore failed to benefit from Bill Clinton’s popularity in 2000. Perhaps if Gore’s message had been more spellbinding he might have won the electoral vote. By the way, what was Gore’s message that year? I don’t remember, either.
Philip Terzian is literary editor of The Weekly Standard.
