‘Why Not Me?’ Often Lures Candidates to Vie for Presidency

For all the aura surrounding the world’s most powerful elected office, presidential candidates’ decisions to pursue the White House often stem from basic human emotions rather than lofty idealism, campaign strategists told a UC San Diego symposium Friday.

On the second day of a three-day conference on presidential politics, campaign experts and one former presidential candidate discussed the often simple, mundane factors that go into making the seemingly momentous political decision that one is the single American best qualified to lead the nation.

For some candidates, that decision stemmed from what Patrick Caddell, a top adviser to former President Jimmy Carter, termed a “Why not me?” feeling spawned by individuals’ failure to be either intimidated or overly impressed by other presidential contenders.

In Carter’s case, occasional meetings with prominent national politicians viewed as potential presidential candidates during his term as governor of Georgia in the early 1970s convinced him that he was quite capable of playing in their league, Caddell said.

George McGovern offered a similar explanation for his 1972 candidacy against Richard Nixon, according to his campaign manager, former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, who himself later twice unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination.

“He said, ‘I looked at the field and decided, if they can be president, I can be president,’ ” Hart recalled. “It’s not familiarity breeding contempt. It’s just familiarity removing the aura or the mystery or the magic of the presidency.”

Ronald Reagan, meanwhile, first spoke of challenging President Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination after a brief encounter with a woman while flying to Los Angeles with one of his top advisers, Michael Deaver.

“A woman came by and said, ‘You’ve got to run,’ ” Deaver said, noting that Reagan surprised him and other confidants by concurring with the woman’s judgment.

“He made that decision . . . by talking to people,” Deaver added. “He didn’t really care what the pollsters showed or what the pols (believed). It’s what he got from being out there.”

Although Hart may have shared McGovern’s and Carter’s “I can do that too” motivation, he explained that his decision to seek the 1984 Democratic nomination won by former Vice President Walter Mondale also arose from the political fallout from Reagan’s landslide 1980 victory.

In the 1980 election, a number of prominent Democratic senators and potential presidential candidates were swept from office, leaving a leadership vacuum and setting the stage for what Hart believed would be a battle between the “old” and “new” Democratic Party in 1984. From Hart’s perspective, he was best positioned to represent the “new” challenge to the “old” leadership embodied by Mondale.

At Friday’s two three-hour sessions, the former campaign directors and strategists, who have been involved in White House campaigns since 1960, also debated whether and how the growing influence of the broadcast media has altered presidential politics over the past three decades.

Even as they continue to rely primarily on television to convey their central themes and messages to a nationwide audience, presidential candidates have been slow to recognize how technological advances have altered the dynamics of the campaign-to-voter communication, the strategists said.

Most presidential candidates continue to base their strategies on “what television was in 1980” and still devise campaign game plans targeted primarily at getting on the three major television networks nightly, Deaver said. But, in doing so, Deaver argued, they fail to pay heed to how the proliferation of cable television stations and growing popularity of radio talk shows have dramatically changed how most Americans get their news about politics.

“Appearing on the ‘CBS Morning News’ for 30 seconds is not worth that much,” Caddell added.

In light of the much broadened competition for viewers’ or listeners’ attention, Deaver--widely referred to as Reagan’s “image guru” because of his mastery at staging impressive backdrops for his policy statements--said campaign handlers need to adopt even more clever methods of packaging their candidates’ messages for mass consumption.

Adhering to his philosophy that “the picture is just as important as the spoken words,” Deaver explained that he sought to underline and amplify Reagan’s messages by “filling up the space around the head” on television screens.

Footage of the President standing in an A-frame with construction workers, for instance, more vividly dramatized an increase in housing starts than a rather dull recitation of statistics from behind a podium in the White House would have, Deaver said.

During Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign, for example, advisers pressed him to visit the California plant where the B-1 bomber was being built. Aware that polls showed that Reagan was seen by many Americans as being more likely than his opponents to lead the country into war, Deaver resisted that notion--until he found a way to transform “the space around the head” into a more positive image.

Because 40,000 jobs were involved in the B-1 project, Deaver decided to position Reagan in front of a B-1 bomber draped with a huge banner saying “Prepared for Peace.”

“I never wanted Ronald Reagan on television unless I filled up the space around the head with stuff that said the same thing he was saying,” Deaver concluded.