More and More Candidates Using Presidential Platform to Take Stands

Lamar Alexander--two-term governor of Tennessee, former Education secretary--has left the presidential race. And Warren Beatty--actor, director and behind-the-scenes Democratic activist--might enter it. That’s a sure sign some new curves are emerging on the road to the White House.

Candidates used to run for president for one reason: because they wanted to be president. Now candidates with faint prospects of winning also enter the race to send a message. As Beatty’s flirtation suggests, the presidential race is growing more attractive for message candidates, even as it becomes more daunting for conventional contenders like Alexander.

Every four years, fewer conventional candidates have any plausible chance of success. Since 1980, the playing field has been steadily tilted toward front-runners by both parties’ rush to compress the primary schedule into a narrow window after Iowa and New Hampshire. That’s hurt challengers who lack the financial capacity and political backing to compete everywhere at once. With each passing election, the party elites tighten the noose by coalescing earlier and more uniformly behind one chosen candidate, as if they want to preempt the primary process itself.

That movement has reached a crescendo this year. On the Democratic side, Vice President Al Gore’s advantages scared from the race all but one challenger, former Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey. On the Republican side, Texas Gov. George W. Bush’s assets have already squeezed from the race two conventional candidates (Alexander and Rep. John R. Kasich of Ohio) and left former Vice President Dan Quayle as a dead man walking. It’s still possible to swipe the nomination from the anointed one, but every four years the odds of an upset grow longer.

Message candidates--such as Democrats Jesse Jackson in the 1980s and the turtle-necked Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr. in 1992, or Republicans Patrick J. Buchanan and Gary Bauer this year--don’t have to worry about those odds because they can succeed without winning.

They all hope that lightning strikes and propels them to the top of the field. (After Jesse Ventura’s election as Minnesota’s governor, the line between electable and message candidates is admittedly blurring.) But, realistically, messengers know that even if they never win a primary, the presidential race provides them an unparalleled platform to air their views and influence their party.

Precisely because they are not expected to win, messengers are immune to many of the forces that doom conventional candidates. When ordinary candidates no longer look like viable winners, their money dries up because their contributors are investing in a campaign, not a cause. Message candidates usually have a more loyal base (and run shoestring campaigns to begin with). The flip side is they have trouble persuading a broad audience to consider them a viable president. Messengers tend to have a solid floor of support but a low ceiling.

Which brings us to the question of whether Warren Beatty would really plunge into presidential politics as the voice of pre-Clinton liberalism--an amalgam of liberal Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone, Jerry Brown and Beatty’s own mad-as-hell Sen. Jay Bulworth. Beatty’s history offers conflicting hints. He understands what he’d be getting into; as an advisor to George S. McGovern in 1972 and Gary Hart in 1984, Beatty has been as intimately involved in the upper levels of presidential politics as any Hollywood figure ever.

And, as an advisor, he was always drawn to the dramatic gesture. After the 1984 campaign, Hart recalled that Beatty had a penchant for “bold stroke stuff,” like betting the campaign bankroll on a single national television buy. It’s hard to imagine anything more “bold stroke” than a Beatty presidential bid scourging big money and mushy centrists.

On the other hand, in his own interaction with the public, Beatty has been far more cautious. He does nothing impulsively. When some Democrats approached him about running in the 1974 California governor’s race, Beatty pondered and declined; he demurred again in 1976 when some Hubert H. Humphrey supporters urged him to run as a stand-in for the former vice president in the final stages of the Democratic presidential primaries. Years later, in a series of interviews for a book I wrote on Hollywood and politics, Beatty told me that he didn’t think there was an audience for his message that America faced “decline” without radical change. But he also added: “I never wanted to play Don Quixote.”

Even now, Beatty probably wouldn’t jump in if he didn’t think he could run respectably; on screen, or off, he’s never been inclined to make himself a spectacle. Uniquely among political celebrities, he has spent more time as a whispering advisor than a spotlighted spokesman. He has always behaved with a healthy respect for America’s ambivalence about celebrities. Running for president would expose him to the press and the public in an utterly uncharacteristic way.

And yet not totally unprecedented. He campaigned some in public for McGovern (before growing disillusioned with the role and slipping backstage). After Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, he made a series of speeches for gun control groups--some in very confrontational settings. He’s unburdened by doubt about his ability to engage an audience or sell himself on television.

Practical questions would loom immediately if Beatty joined the Democratic race (or, less likely, ran as an independent). Could he persuade voters to take him seriously enough to hear his message? Could he convince liberals he wouldn’t just siphon anti-Gore votes from Bradley--who’s emphasizing the themes of campaign finance reform and poverty that Beatty might stress. And could the methodical Beatty--as meticulous in his own way as Elizabeth Hanford Dole--handle the chaos of the campaign trail and the daily jousting with reporters?

Politicians can’t control their environment the way stars do; it’s one reason why not only Beatty but most celebrities interested in politics have usually stepped back when tempted to run. Beatty could find other less vulnerable ways of advancing his interests, like, say, chairing a campaign finance group. Yet elbowing in beside Bradley and Gore would attract more attention than anything else Beatty could do. That spotlight could illuminate his causes, but it would also expose him to risks--of ridicule, of failure, of privacy lost--that he’s never auditioned for before.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears in this space every Monday.

See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: https://www.latimes.com/brownstein.