The Nuances of a Good Endorsement in Campaign 2000

Long a staple of American politics, the candidate endorsement is playing a complicated role in Campaign 2000. In a brand-new world where independent voters are more important than ever before, one entrenched interest endorsing another is hardly the best means to ignite the indifferent.

George W. Bush, for example, lost miserably in New Hampshire, hopped a plane for suddenly-more-crucial South Carolina, and hit the ground with a secret weapon.

Dan Quayle.

It was supposed to have been a strategic endorsement, a move tailored for conservative ears alone. But the rest of the world was listening, too. It was not impressed.

Endorsements Can Hurt the Candidate

“If the national glare wasn’t so bright in South Carolina, the Dan Quayle endorsement may have helped more than hurt,” says Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political scientist at Claremont Graduate University. “Part of the problem right now is that endorsements, per se--particularly of established politicians--are not helpful to George W. It takes away from his argument that he is the Washington outsider.”

Still, the Bush campaign keeps sending out e-mails touting endorsements from all over--44 Senators, 175 members of Congress, a former American Farm Bureau Federation president, officials in Guam and American Samoa.

The press releases also fly from the Al Gore campaign, boasting that every hyphenate special interest with Democratic leanings is really on his side.

Even so, the campaigns that proudly proclaim their lack of endorsements (McCain, Democrat Bill Bradley) just as proudly trot out the few plugs they do get. For McCain, it was former rival Gary Bauer on Wednesday; for Bradley, basketball legend Michael Jordan last week.

Getting endorsements has been a mixed bag for the Texas governor in his quest for the Republican presidential nomination; losing them is flat out painful, as he found out Wednesday when Bill Jones, California’s secretary of state and highest GOP officeholder, decamped for the insurgent McCain.

“All I can say to Bill is that he’s got every right in the world to make any decision he wants to make,” Bush said. “But if he’s interested in being on the team that’s going to win the Republican nomination, he’s made the wrong decision.”

Now the hot topic in Republican establishment circles--which are increasingly nervous the weaker Bush looks--is who else may flee the Bush camp. In addition to Jones, former Washington Gov. Dan Evans also defected Wednesday to endorse McCain. Will there be more tomorrow?

“I got any number of people stopping me on the street, asking me about McCain,” says Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), a longtime, now lukewarm, Bush supporter who got second thoughts when Bush appeared at the fundamentalist Bob Jones University in South Carolina where interracial dating is banned.

“Yeah, I’ve endorsed [Bush],” King says. “But I’ve become really disenchanted, especially with this whole Bob Jones issue. . . . My wife has come out for McCain. [The establishment] feels concern that the Bush campaign is not getting traction.”

The most valuable political endorsements come from people and organizations that can put money and volunteers behind a candidate. For Bush, that means the 31 Republican governors who have jumped to his aid; for Gore, labor unions.

Then there are the man-bites-dog endorsements, powerful for being counterintuitive.

Anita Dunn, Bradley’s communication director likes to point to Lowell Weicker in her camp, a man with a long list of formers by his name: former Republican (he’s now an independent), former U.S. senator (Connecticut), former governor (see previous).

“Our endorsement list? It’s pretty short,” Dunn acknowledges. “We have three senators and eight congressmen and women.”

Charles E. Cook, who publishes a nonpartisan political newsletter, doesn’t fault the Bush campaign for an endorsement-heavy strategy crafted “in terms of a very conventional year.”

But when, he asked, was the last time a GOP candidate promised--as Bush did--a tax cut but got no bounce out of it? When was the last time endorsements didn’t work? It’s been that kind of year.

The endorsement strategy is “not working, but it didn’t become obvious until the Quayle fiasco,” Cook said. “Quayle’s not a bad guy, but he’s not a person anymore. He’s a symbol. He’s not the right symbol. At the time it was almost a joke.”

The Importance of Endorsements

Asked at a news conference Wednesday whether he thought anyone paid attention to endorsements, Bush was taciturn: “Sometimes.”

What about independent voters who brought him such grief in New Hampshire and loom large over the South Carolina landscape? “Oh that? I don’t know. You all can figure that out.”

McCain thinks he already has. Rolling through South Carolina earlier this week, he said the only endorsement that would matter would be Nancy Reagan, speaking on behalf of the ailing former president.

“I think all other endorsements are really not that meaningful in a high visibility race,” he said.

Until Wednesday. Until Jones. Until Bauer, who will campaign for the Arizona senator here, in Michigan and, perhaps in California.

Appearing with Bauer at a Greenville news conference, McCain said Bauer will help him reach out to Christian conservatives.

“I view him as a trusted advisor,” McCain said, “a person who will provide lines of communications for me to parts of the party that my lines of communication was not as strong as I would have liked it to have been.”

Times staff writer T. Christian Miller contributed to this report.