The Twists and Turns of Presidential Elections - Part 1

The modern era of presidential campaigns was ushered in by John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon with their series of televised debates in 1960. The consensus is that Nixon won on substance and Kennedy on style. Since Nixon was a well-known commodity, having served as Eisenhower’s vice president for the previous eight years, the debates were more critical for Kennedy. At age 43, he needed to demonstrate the gravitas necessary for the job as well as the mettle to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Nikita Khrushchev.

Kennedy succeeded in matching and even surpassing that bar and the debates – along with Nixon’s 5 o’clock shadow – catapulted him to the presidency by the narrowest of margins. Since then, there have been a series of seminal events that have not only defined subsequent campaigns, but also largely determined the winners. Let’s start with LBJ and a mushroom cloud…

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson was aching to get out from under JFK’s larger-than-life legacy and to be considered his own man. However, in his way stood a conservative cowboy from Arizona named Barry Goldwater. Demonstrating the political genius, cutthroat tactics, and questionable ethics that had won him both his Senate seat and his leadership post there, Johnson authorized an infamous television ad that depicted a little girl picking daisies. As she counted the petals to nine, a foreboding off-screen voice then said, “Ten”. The picture quickly transitioned from the young girl to a missile and then an explosion, followed by a billowing mushroom-shaped cloud.

Under heavy criticism, Johnson’s campaign withdrew the ad the very next day, but the damage was already done as the buzz it generated monopolized newscasts for weeks. LBJ proved once again that it is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission… while Goldwater’s presidential ambitions went up in smoke.

The spring of 1968 was an especially traumatic time in America. After a surprisingly close second-place finish by Sen. Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary demonstrated Johnson’s vulnerability, Robert Kennedy sensed an opening and also jumped into the race. When LBJ withdrew his candidacy later that month, McCarthy became the de facto Democratic frontrunner along with RFK and Johnson’s ever-loyal vice president, Hubert Humphrey.

A month later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and in June, Sirhan Sirhan ended Kennedy’s campaign – and his life – with a flurry of bullets in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. McCarthy failed to win over enough of Kennedy’s delegates to fend off Humphrey and the senior senator from Minnesota won the nomination on the first ballot.

However, the critical moment of the 1968 campaign didn’t happen inside the convention hall, but rather on the streets outside the arena where Chicago police, on order from Mayor Richard Daly, gassed and beat scores of anti-war protesters. The riots were carried live across America and the visuals played right into Richard Nixon’s “law and order” based Republican campaign. Credit the Democrat riots – and the third-party candidacy of George Wallace – for Nixon’s razor-thin victory in November.

Three other presidential campaign turning points occurred on a debate stage. In 1976, President Gerald Ford told a grinning Jimmy Carter, an incredulous moderator, and a dumbfounded television audience that, "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.”

Max Frankel of the New York Times responded by asking, "I'm sorry, what? ... did I understand you to say, sir, that the Russians are not using Eastern Europe as their own sphere of influence in occupying most of the countries there and making sure with their troops that it's a communist zone?" For whatever reason, Ford doubled down on his assertion and simultaneously, kissed the presidency good-bye.

Four years later, Carter was on the receiving end of Ronald Reagan’s congenial, but deadly effective head tilt, eye roll, and “There you go again” refrain. Game, set, and match for the Gipper.

Reagan also bested Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, in 1984. After a sluggish first debate raised concerns about Reagan’s relatively advanced age, he rebounded with the single most memorable quip in presidential debate history. "I will not make age an issue of this campaign,” Reagan said. “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience."

The audience roared, Walter Mondale chuckled, and dispirited Democrat voters knew that the election was a fait accompli as Reagan carried 49 of 50 states.

The 1988 presidential campaign came down to two TV ads. The first was produced by the Bush campaign and drew attention to Michael Dukakis’s ill-fated decision as Governor of Massachusetts to allow weekend furloughs for convicted felons. When Willie Horton - serving a life sentence for murder - didn’t return from his furlough but instead, committed assault, armed robbery, and rape, the Dukakis campaign was sent reeling. They then compounded their problem by running an ad with Dukakis riding in a tank, where he more closely resembled Beetle Bailey than the Commander-in-Chief. Game over.

Ironically, the critical moment of the 1992 presidential campaign actually occurred four years earlier. In his acceptance speech at that year’s GOP convention, George H.W. Bush looked directly into the camera and said, “Read my lips: no new taxes.” But when the Democrat-controlled Congress refused to accept Bush’s budget proposal in 1990, his no-new tax pledge came back to bite him. The eventual budget compromise produced a devastating sound bite that, along with Bush’s disastrous photo-op involving a supermarket price scanner, gave us eight years of Bill Clinton.

(Stay tuned for Part 2, which will cover 2000 to 2020, and include my last-minute advice to President Trump).