Never underestimate the Power of Incumbents

By Thomas Griffith

Until the Florida primary, it could be argued--and Ronald Reagan's people were so arguing--that the 1976 election was unlike any other in our history, and that therefore the old rules did not apply. They did not apply particularly inside the Republican Party since, after all, this is the first time the country has had a President who was not his party's choice for national office. Still, all past experience points in one direction and can hardly be ignored. Its lesson is the tremendous advantage of incumbency. That advantage is too often low rated, as if it were no more than an intangible plus, like the home-court advantage in basketball, which usually--though not always--revs up the home team. The incumbent's advantage is really much more than that.

In fact, in the past 40 years every sitting President who has run for re-election has won. These 40 years are the only proper ones for making presidential comparisons because they encompass the modern presidency--that cataclysmic expansion of federal services and presidential powers that began with Franklin Roosevelt. So simple and quiet was the White House even in Herbert Hoover's time that Hoover, the last of the old era, continued the custom of shaking hands with tourists for an hour every day. He had another distinction: he was the last sitting President to be defeated at the polls.

Roosevelt, of course, stayed in the White House until death overtook him (and felt so possessive of the office that when running for his fourth term in wartime, he argued ingenuously that the Commander in Chief, like an ordinary soldier, had a duty to stay on the job). The advantage of occupying the Oval Office worked even for those accidental Presidents who, like Gerald Ford, were raised up from Vice President in an emergency. Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson both stepped into the presidency in midterm, then went on to win election on their own. Perhaps both decided not to run a second time because they thought that they would not win. But this suggests another conclusion from history: if neither Truman nor Johnson could have been reelected, the successors chosen by their party could not make it either. Ronald Reagan and the Republican delegates will have to think about that.

The real peril point in modern presidential politics is the baton-passing moment when a sitting President tries to transfer power to a successor. This has never been done successfully in modern politics. Such elections have been the only ones in modern times when the White House shifted to the other party. Truman could not pass the keys of office to Stevenson, nor Eisenhower to Nixon, nor L.B.J. to Hubert Humphrey.

With the best of will on all sides, the baton-passing act is precarious enough. Even to be designated a President's heir apparent is a dubious honor. Hoover thought it a handicap. The heir inherits his predecessor's crowd of officeholders, loyal to someone else, and does not have a team of his own to start with. When he campaigns, as Hoover was later to complain, he is stuck with defending even those mistakes of his predecessor that he is anxious to undo. This is one reason why Adlai Stevenson wanted the record to show that the Democratic Party had drafted him. The day after Stevenson praised Harry Truman in his 1952 acceptance speech, he wrote privately to Publisher Alicia Patterson: "The line to emphasize is that I am not Truman's candidate. He asked me and I turned it down." Humphrey's humiliating treatment by Johnson is well known. Remember Candidate Humphrey's squirming incapacity as Vice President to separate himself from L.B.J.'s Viet Nam policy? Looking on, Nixon advised his speechwriters: "Be very careful not to reflect on Johnson. Johnson is not playing Humphrey's game, so let's not get too biting. Use something like 'the Administration of which our opponent was a part.' " Nixon knew, and feared, that even a President as unpopular as Johnson could still use the incumbent's advantage to spring a cease-fire favorable to the Democrats just before the election. Humphrey was coming up so fast in the final weeks that Nixon barely squeaked in. Johnson's long-anticipated proclamation of a bombing halt did not come until Oct. 31, delayed by President Nguyen Van Thieu's failure to go along with him. As Nixon Speechwriter William Safire has written, "When people later wondered why Nixon thought so highly of President Thieu, they did not recall that Nixon probably would not be President were it not for Thieu."

To propose a cease-fire in wartime at a politically favorable moment may be an extreme example of an incumbent's advantage. But there are others available to any incumbent, including Gerald Ford. He has long months in advance to structure events his way. He can postpone political actions until after an election; he can arrange (as Ford already has) for election-year tax cuts, with the willing cooperation of Congressmen of both parties, who will hope to benefit politically too. In all reaches of government, ambitious political appointees unabashedly time their popular and unpopular actions by the election clock: if anything can be arranged favorably, it will be.

An incumbent who can thus sometimes manipulate foreign affairs and the economy is in an even better position to control appearances. Presidential Press Secretary Ron Nessen once complained of the "terrible political liabilities" of incumbency, because "no other candidate has to live with the consequences of his actions." On the face of it, this is a pretty silly whine, since of course no other candidate has such an unrivaled chance to show what he can do, or so much visibility in whatever he does. Look at the recent desperate scrambling of Democratic unknowns even to get known, let alone known for their views. No one could blame them for getting discouraged, not so much by their poor standing in the polls as by their low marks in what pollsters call the recognition factor.

The White House has always been a stage, though a distant one; television, bringing the audience close up, has greatly increased the theatricality of presidential politics. Even if a President does not quite know what to do about the economy, he can at least pose with his solemn advisers, conveying the impression that he is busy handling things, or at any rate working on the problems. If relations with another country are wintry, they can be left to the ambassador or an Under Secretary of State; if they are promising, the other leader will be as anxious as Henry Kissinger and the President to be on camera, all eager to show that they are reasonable men. Behind all these stagings, of course, stands a taxpayer-paid network of presidential advisers, handlers and public relations men, all concerned to put the best face on whatever situation the President finds himself in. There is yet another incumbent's subtle advantage. This is the voter's longing to have a President, even one he might not have voted for, look good in office. Coming to power in the way he did, Gerald Ford was the very special beneficiary of a universal desire that he succeed in the presidency.

But what if, come convention time, the mood of the country (not just among Republicans) was that Ford, though a decent fellow, was not really up to the job? Could the Republicans then choose someone else? With the momentum Ford has gained in the early primaries, it seems unlikely that he would withdraw. Until Florida, several potential Republican candidates--John Connally, Nelson Rockefeller, Charles Percy and Howard Baker--could entertain hopes that Reagan might knock Ford out, only to be found unacceptable, accused of regicide. These men now seem entirely out of it. Reagan himself vows to go all the way to the convention. What if, through circumstances not now foreseeable, Reagan were to win at Kansas City? In Republican terms, that would be an awkward baton-passing ceremony indeed. Presumably, Gerald Ford would play the good sport, would lock upraised arms with his successor in the television lights and manfully pledge to support the ticket. But have Reagan supporters--and even in defeat, they represent nearly half the Republican vote cast so far--considered what would happen next?

Any Republican nominee but Ford would immediately find himself on an equal footing with his Democratic opponent in the most important respect of all.

The public that constantly sees and gradually gets used to any man in office as President can only guess how a candidate, even an anointed one, might do in the job. The only close elections in recent years have been those without a familiar incumbent, so that the public had to imagine how either of the two rival candidates would be as President, whether Kennedy or Nixon in 1960, or Humphrey and Nixon in 1968, would look more presidential coming down the steps of Air Force One to the strains of Hail to the Chief.

In addition, any Republican nominee but Gerald Ford would have a special problem, indeed a unique one. Ford, though repudiated by his own party, would still be the White House incumbent for the balance of the year. Any other Republican nominee would then find himself at the most vulnerable angle of a triangle. Presumably having vowed to close ranks in the interests of party harmony, he would be in no position to run against, or repudiate, Ford's Administration. He could therefore expect to be cross-examined closely by the Democratic opponent and the press about whether he supports or disagrees with every step Ford takes during the rest of his term. A mild foretaste of how this would work can be seen in the instructions Nixon passed to his "attack squad" in 1968: "All speakers should ask over and over again for Humphrey to name one issue where he differs from L.B.J. or the policies of the last four years . . . Humphrey has said that he offers new leadership--make him indicate those areas where he thinks the old leadership fails." Such are the problems that get passed along with the baton, which may be why baton passing has had such poor results.

History never dictates; it only suggests. What it suggests is that Republicans, for all the lack of enthusiasm for Ford among some of them, will in the end find themselves heeding Hilaire Belloc's cautionary tale for children, the one about "Jim, Who ran away from his Nurse and was eaten by a Lion":

And always keep ahold of Nurse For fear of finding something worse.

Thomas Griffith

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