It was hard not to feel a bit sorry for Mitt Romney as he rambled his way through an explanation of his “forty-seven per cent” comments at yesterday evening’s press conference. He has to apologize for not just one or two errant phrases, but for a full-length, stream-of-consciousness rant—the sort of fed-up, worn-out, over-emotional outpouring you might hear from your grumpy grandpa as dinner stretches into its second hour. It’s incidents like this that make you realize how unpleasant running for President must be. Temporary, adoring crowds notwithstanding, it’s just one apology and embarrassment after another.
In her sprawling, extraordinary 1975 article, “Running,” Elizabeth Drew offers an admirably thorough account of just how horrible Presidential campaigning really is. Drew interviewed a number of top Democrats—including George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Edmund Muskie, Morris Udall, and Kenneth O’Donnell, a chief adviser to J.F.K.—to find out what campaigning is really like. The answer, Drew writes, is that it’s “strange and brutal.” Candidates “undergo an experience from which few human beings could emerge whole.” “I was mad, I was exhausted, I was unnerved,” one candidate recalls. Another campaign adviser sums up the experience by simply repeating, “Crazy. Crazy. Crazy.”
The first warning sign is the sense of physical powerlessness, which sets in as soon as the campaign starts. Being a candidate means being manhandled. George McGovern, who was the Democratic nominee for President in 1972, tells Drew that “one of the cruellest things that go on in Presidential politics is the struggle for the candidate’s body.” Candidates don’t eat or sleep on regular schedules; instead, the usual patterns of daily life are subsumed beneath a mind-numbing succession of visits to interchangeable factories, coal mines, corn fields, and supermarkets. Moments of adrenalized, ego-boosting mania (rope lines are “a pretty heady experience,” McGovern says) are undone by periods of groggy, exhausted stupor. (At one point Udall accepts some chewing gum from an aide, and tells Drew, “This is probably all I’ll get to eat tonight.”) O’Donnell, Kennedy’s adviser, recalls one day, in 1960, when “John Kennedy opened his Wisconsin campaign at five o’clock in the morning at an Oscar Mayer plant,” and then went on to visit two more hot-dog plants that same morning. Stretched over weeks and months, these events reduce the candidate’s brain to mush. “When someone asks at 11P.M. ‘What did you do today?,’” one anonymous adviser tells Drew, “it’s amazing if you can remember ten minutes.”
Edmund Muskie, who ran for Vice-President in 1968 and President in 1972, says that staffers think of their candidate as “a mechanical man … a frenetic thing moving around the landscape proving you’ve got more energy, more charisma, more instant answers than anyone else.” One campaign manager tells Drew that “the physical, emotional, and energy strain is so staggering that you end up with a person whose emotional and physical level has to be beyond human—it has to be animal.” In many campaigns, he says, the staffers are witness to the candidate’s gradual mental implosion. Eventually, “they are like an automobile whose lights have been left on overnight—and just maybe you can start it. The whole thing is excruciating…. At the end of the day, the candidate used to look at me with red eyes and say, ‘For what? How much more do I have to do?’” Even years later, the scars persist: in a conversation between friends, one former candidate admits, “I still wake up nights campaigning.”
Exhaustion, of course, can never really be an excuse for a Presidential candidate: grace under pressure is a requirement of the Oval Office. It can’t be an explanation, either: Romney evidently believes something of what he said at that fundraiser in May. Still, it’s worth remembering that the Presidential campaign process is arranged so as to show us each candidate at his best and his worst. For most candidates, Drew concludes, it’s not worth it. “Good people can get through campaigns and survive,” she writes, “but at a heavy price—for them and for us.”
[#image: /photos/590955142179605b11ad4172] Featured Article:
“Running,” by Elizabeth Drew.
December 1, 1975
Available in the digital archive.
Photograph: WWD.
