Two of the most popular — and unconventional — candidates for their party’s 2016 presidential nomination are Republican businessman Donald J. Trump and Democratic Senator Bernard Sanders. Sunday’s column surveyed some historical “outsiders”. Here are some notes about more recent “outside-the-box” campaigns for president. These “mavericks” will be remembered by many people living today.
The most influential campaigns of the past 50 years are probably those of Eugene McCarthy in 1968, George Wallace in 1968 and 1972, Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, and Ross Perot in 1992.
Eugene McCarthy was the senior senator from Minnesota, also the home state of sitting Vice President Hubert Humphrey. McCarthy played a pivotal role in the tragic events of 1968. The Democratic Party, like the rest of America, was becoming more and more opposed to President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War. But no Democrats dared challenge Johnson for the nomination until McCarthy stepped forward on Nov. 30, 1967, as an avowedly anti-war candidate for the Democratic nomination for president.
No one but the young college students of America took him seriously until he began winning primaries, due in large part to the “Clean for Gene” campaign waged among the national’s college students who shaved their beards, dressed in suits, shed their excess jewelry, and flocked to work for Gene (a former college professor) in the first primary in New Hampshire where McCarthy got 42 percent of the vote. This showing plus all the demonstrations and adverse press caused Johnson to withdraw from the campaign in March, the day before McCarthy won 58 percent of the Wisconsin primary vote.
This sequence of events inspired Sen. Robert Kennedy, brother of the assassinated President John F. Kennedy, to throw his hat into the ring. Thus began a heated battle between the two anti-war senators, which was virtually won by Robert Kennedy on the night he won the California primary in June. That night, he too was assassinated.
The Democratic Convention in Chicago brought about the most violent and distressing political convention in modern history, sometimes called “bloody August”. The result was the nomination of Humphrey, the splintering of the Democratic Party, the election of Richard Nixon, and the complete overhaul of the Democratic Party’s nominating process. The revised procedures among other things linked primary vote results to pledged convention delegates for the first time. These rule changes facilitated the nomination of George McGovern in 1972, who lost overwhelmingly to President Nixon.
Another force appeared on the 1972 political scene in the person of Governor George Wallace (Alabama Democrat). Wallace had first gained prominence as an avowed segregationist, who used the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment (1791) to justify segregation as a legal right of each state. The Constitution states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Wallace had run for president in 1968 on a third party ticket and gained 10 million votes with his fiery rhetoric. By 1972, however, Wallace had expanded his message to include a reversal on segregation, a populist message for organized labor, anti-war advocates, and displaced workers and their families, along with an isolationist foreign policy, delivered in his entertaining and colorful campaign style. Wallace was the leading Democrat for the nomination when he was shot four times in the back on May 15, 1972. He survived his wounds after a lengthy recovery but was confined to a wheel chair for the rest of his life.
It is widely held that Nixon’s “southern strategy” – economically and culturally conservative with an anti-federal, states’ rights bias – was derived from Wallace, who might well have been a major rival for the 1972 election. This strategy eventually led to the transition of the South from predominately Democrat to predominately Republican territory. With Wallace gone, Nixon won by a landslide.
Another third party candidate, who is often forgotten, is Congressman John Anderson (Illinois Republican), who sought to re-assert the so-called “liberal Republican” as a viable political position. He ran in 1980 and got nearly 6 million votes, mostly from Democratic President Jimmy Carter. If Anderson’s votes and those of the other third party candidates had been combined with President Carter’s 35 million, President Carter would have come within a hair’s breadth of Reagan’s 44 million. People tend to forget Anderson and the fact that Reagan won with only 50.75 percent of the popular vote in a very splintered election.
Far more substantial were the campaigns of Rev. Jesse Jackson for the Democratic presidential nomination. Like Mr. Trump, Rev. Jackson held no public office. He was a pastor, best known as a civil rights activist. In many ways, Rev. Jackson was a transitional candidate, as the first serious African-American candidate for president who showed that he could attract white voters as well as minorities. Running as a Democrat, he polled 18 percent of the primary votes in 1984 with 3.2 million votes. He doubled those results in 1988, when he was briefly the leading Democratic Party candidate for the nomination after he won 55 percent of the Michigan Democratic caucuses on March 28, 1988.
Rev. Jackson’s platform was wide and deep, reaching from foreign policy (disarmament, reduction of military), to New Deal- type programs for farmers, infrastructure, labor and welfare, to an Equal Rights Amendment, single payer health system, higher taxes on the rich, and other proposals which sound very contemporary even today.
His theme was the “Rainbow Coalition” of African-Americans, Hispanics, Arab-Americans, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, family farmers, the poor and working class, homosexuals, and white progressives. He was an electrifying orator, and became widely respected as a public figure. Eventually, his bid for the nomination was defeated by Governor Michael Dukakis (Massachusetts Democrat), who lost the election to George Herbert Walker Bush. Rev. Jackson’s convention speech remains a classic of the genre.
In many ways, the candidate most like Mr. Trump was plain-talking businessman Ross Perot, who reached his zenith in presidential politics in the summer of 1992. Founder of a pioneering computer services firm, Perot was an energetic, colorful entrepreneur, who briefly captured the imagination of the American public. One February evening, during an appearance of the popular television show, “Larry King Live”, he announced to the stunned host that he was going to run for president if his supporters could get him on the ballot in all 50 states. He advocated balancing the federal budget, defending the Second Amendment (freedom to carry guns), reversing the outsourcing of American jobs. He quickly became a potential candidate and soon polled even with the two major party candidates, President George H. W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton. At one point in June, Mr. Perot led the polls with 39 percent versus 31 percent for President Bush and 25 percent for President Clinton.
That was as good as it got for Mr. Perot. He became his own worst enemy, quarreling with his professional staff, firing people who had helped him get to where he had come, and eventually, dropping out of the race altogether in July. He then re-entered in October.
Mr. Perot eventually received 8.9 percent of the popular vote, nearly 20 million votes in the 1992 election. Some analysts claim that his presence in the race took the same percentage of votes from each of the two major candidates, but no one will ever convince the Republicans of that. They are convinced that he cost George H.W. Bush the election.
Mr. Perot was an entertaining speaker, mainly for his plain talk, rather than eloquence. He eschewed what today is called “political correctness “He also touched a raw nerve with his description of “that giant sucking sound” of Mexico and Latin America taking American jobs. Had he been of a different temperament, he might well have become a major factor in American history. As it was, he held on to his third party and tried again in 1996 with minimal results. In 2000, Mr. Perot’s Reform Party nominated Patrick J. Buchanan for his third and last unsuccessful presidential bid. (But Mr. Perot endorsed George W. Bush!)
This brief survey suggests that there has long been a disenchantment with American politics on the part of a significant portion of the American public. It dates back at least to the Great Depression when Huey Long flourished. It has inspired several notable spokesmen in the post-World War II era, but none has succeeded in organizing those potential voters into a dominant force. George Wallace, Jesse Jackson and Ross Perot came the closest. Today’s question is, will that “silent majority” finally find its voice in 2016? We shall see.
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