Defeated Candidates Strive for Graceful Exit, Quips

Getting out gracefully is more difficult than any debate or sleepless campaign tour for presidential losers, surrendering their ambitions to the reality of defeat after the most intense and demanding of political quests.

But only two can escape it, and only one of them for good. Eight months hence, either Vice President Al Gore or Texas Gov. George W. Bush will be the man conceding.

Now, though, it is Democrat Bill Bradley, ending his campaign, and Republican John McCain, suspending his, within an hour of each other Thursday. As a practical matter, there’s no difference. Each held onto the delegates he’d won, saying they had earned a voice at the national party conventions next summer.

The strain was showing.

Even in gamely pledging to support the vice president after their campaign hostilities--he was shut out in 18 state contests--Bradley had a last rebuke for “distortions and negativity” that he said Gore used against him.

“I hope that he’ll run a better campaign in the general election,” Bradley said.

But his script was a traditional one otherwise, an endorsement of Gore in the name of party unity.

McCain offered no such pledge to the Bush ticket when he ended his active campaign an hour later. He said simply that Bush may very well become president and anyone in that role deserves the best wishes of all Americans. “He certainly has mine,” he added.

Both Bradley and McCain said they would keep striving for the causes on which they challenged the front-runners, including the campaign reform issue they shared.

But there were no famous last words in these farewells.

Nothing even close to Adlai Stevenson’s 1952 concession, borrowed from Abraham Lincoln after he lost an election. “He said he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh,” Stevenson said.

And nothing so wryly candid as the Democrat Morris K. Udall’s remark on a losing presidential primary night in 1976. “The people have spoken,” Udall said, pausing for effect. “The bastards.” The Arizona congressman smiled when he said it, no offense taken because Udall bequeathed a treasury of political wisecracks and humor. Not that he wasn’t a serious contender against Jimmy Carter that year; he came close in primary after primary, a strain on even his legendary patience and wit. He kept both.

In the 2000 campaign, a Republican field that began at 10 is down to Bush, the certain nominee, and minor player Alan Keyes.

Five Republicans quit before the first vote was cast, one because he had flopped in a statistically meaningless straw poll, others saying they couldn’t afford to keep going. “The bottom line is money,” Elizabeth Dole said when she dropped out. “It would be futile to keep going.”

Bush was piling up his treasury--largely spent now in his bout with McCain. Former Vice President Dan Quayle had dropped out earlier for lack of funds. “I could see 50 ways that this would end, but this was not one of them,” he said in withdrawing. Actually, there are only two. Win or lose.

The personally moneyed candidate, Steve Forbes, kept going, and spending, but lost badly in the first three Republican contests and then quit, after spending $30 million of his publishing fortune. “As my father once said when he lost a governor’s race in New Jersey, we were nosed out by a landslide,” Forbes said.

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) quit after managing only 1% in the Iowa caucuses. “It is now clear that there will not be time to build sufficient support for my candidacy,” he said, a conclusion most everybody else had reached long before he did.

“He won, I lost,” Bradley had said of Gore after Super Tuesday. But no candidate wants that as the only epitaph, and losing presidential entries say, as he and McCain did, that they’ve succeeded in putting their issues on the agenda. Forbes said he had, and that the money he put into his losing campaigns in 1996 and 2000--about $67 million--was therefore money well spent.

There has to be some consolation--as when George Bush, who later would be president, was trounced by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 campaign. Bush said he was surrendering to “the perception that the campaign is over.” The reality was the same.

When Fred Harris, then senator from Oklahoma, gave up his Democratic campaign in 1976, he said he hadn’t done poorly enough to call it a defeat or well enough to claim victory. “We didn’t know what to call it, so we just decided to call it quits,” he said.

Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas knew what to call it when he ended his GOP presidential bid in 1996.

“When the voter speaks, I listen,” he said. “Especially when the voter is saying someone else’s name.”

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Walter R. Mears has reported on Washington and national politics for the Associated Press for more than 35 years.