Handicapped On The Hill

Washington, with the highest concentration of television cameras per acre in this galaxy, and with more journalists per capita than is wholesome, makes national names out of legislative luminaries such as Gary Hart, Birch Bayh, Howard Baker, Richard Lugar, John Glenn, Joseph Biden and other failed seekers of presidential nominations. Yet it is well known that only three serving members of the national legislature have been elected president--James Garfield, Warren Harding and John Kennedy.

This year it is notable that the four serious Democratic presidential candidates from Congress--Sens. John Edwards, John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman and Rep. Dick Gephardt--are making smaller waves so far than a governor of a small state (Howard Dean of Vermont) and a general from a small war (Wesley Clark, conqueror, from the air, of Serbia).

Who can explain all this? Christopher DeMuth, that's who. He is head of the American Enterprise Institute, and author of a soon to be published (in the January-February American Enterprise) essay "Governors (and Generals) Rule."

In it he sorts through the 88 winning and losing major-party candidates in the 44 elections that have produced 31 elected presidents since 1828, the beginning of the politics of mass mobilization. He divides them into five categories--governors, military leaders, legislators, statesmen and activists (e.g., William Howard Taft, William Jennings Bryan), and vice presidents.

Governors and generals are 55 percent of elected presidents (17 of 31) and 52 percent of presidential nominees (46 of 88). The pool of legislators is much larger than the pool of governors, but only three of the 31 elected presidents came from legislative backgrounds--and two, Harding and Kennedy, were, to say no more, inattentive to their Senate duties, with little involvement in legislative dealmaking.

Executives make decisions. Legislators make speeches, attend committee meetings, cast votes and leave a paper trail of positions taken and poses struck, mostly without consequences clearly ascribable to them as individuals. A senator is 1 percent of, and a representative is 1/435th of, one half of one branch of government. So legislators have less accountability than governors, who, not surprisingly, are more apt to have a leader's demeanor. That demeanor is, of course, part of the training and job description of a general.

Leaders of legislatures make compromises in order to broker concessions to build coalitions to form majorities. This bending and trimming of principles is crucial to democratic governance but interferes with creating a profile of leadership. "I am," said Everett Dirksen, leader of Senate Republicans from 1959 through 1969, "a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times." Thus it is not surprising, says DeMuth, that none of the three legislators elected president had been a legislative leader.

DeMuth says that governors more than legislators are apt to have "oratorical facility--the ability to crystallize in words, from the confusion of political conflict, that which is essential, ennobling and expressive of vital national aspirations." He notes that in the 20th century four of the five two-term presidents were governors who were gifted orators--Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. The other was a general--Dwight Eisenhower.

It takes years of training in legislative mores, and especially seasoning in the Senate's habits of unlimited debate and its belief that self-congratulatory sonorousness is eloquence, to produce a person as inarticulate as Bob Dole. He authored the Americans With Disabilities Act, which should have a category for persons rendered by Senate life prone to speaking to the country in the shorthand patois of a small, face-to-face society like a legislature: "... my perfecting amendment to the tabling resolution..." No wonder legislators find it difficult to talk to a continent.

Finally, governors seeking the presidency are always served by the desire to clean up "the mess in Washington." Last week Dean appealed to this hardy American perennial when he compared Washington politicians, including most of his serious Democratic rivals, to "cockroaches" who will scatter when he turns on them the bright flashlight of his fearlessness.

The nation's tilt toward governors as presidents is, DeMuth argues, another unanticipated blessing from the nation's founding: "One if the hidden virtues of our form of government--where the states possess a degree of independent sovereignty (rather than being administrative subdivisions of the national government, as in France), and where the head of government is elected independently of the legislature (rather than in parliamentary systems)--is that it tends to cultivate and elect national leaders whose skills and temperaments are distinctively executive rather than legislative." Also, governors do not take their cues from the Washington press corps.

This does not, of course, mean that either Dean or Clark will be the Democratic nominee. The future is usually like the past--right up to the moment when it isn't.