The modern standard for presidential candidates initially is set at perfection. But question by question, cut by cut, yesterday’s can’t-miss hero is whittled down.
At the start, fealty in marriage is a requirement. Other desirable qualities: excellence in the classroom, valor in the military and purity on matters of drugs and alcohol. Experience is a must, though too much can be reduced to a negative.
In the age of the “have-you-ever” question, candidates for the nation’s highest office increasingly face trials on the most intensely personal and the most extensively general.
The latest example: Can you name the leader of Chechnya? Pakistan? India?
Republican front-runner George W. Bush couldn’t, setting off a debate about whether the media are debasing modern politics or whether voters were provided an early glimpse of Bush’s possible shortcomings.
“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that modern presidential campaigns are basically a torture test,” said Republican political consultant Don Sipple. “And, in the end, the process is fairly revealing and allows voters to get a better handle on things that are outside the prepackaged desire of candidates.
“To some extent, the end does justify the means,” he said.
Last week, when a Boston television reporter decided to give Bush a pop quiz and asked him to name the leaders of Chechnya, Pakistan and India, the Texas governor flunked.
He did name the leader of Taiwan. Many, including President Clinton, quickly came to his defense and said he should not have been expected to know the names of leaders of various trouble spots, but that he should be expected to learn them over time.
And clearly the question smacked more of a pursuit of trivia than of substantive foreign policy.
In his own defense, Bush said Monday, “I haven’t memorized every leader’s name, but I know how I want to lead in peace,” Bush said at a news conference.
Whether the incident causes Bush great damage in the coming campaign is unknowable at this point. Bush has been the beneficiary of a highly favorable first impression on the American electorate in the early months of his campaign, as reflected in poll numbers that show him trouncing anyone in the GOP field and either Vice President Al Gore or former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley.
He has faced questions about possible past drug use, and some have bluntly questioned his intelligence. One acid article in U.S. News & World Report began “Is Dubya dumb?”
“As time goes on and voters study (Bush) with increasing scrutiny, they will see if the first impression is wrong or reinforced,” Sipple said.
And voters will decide if Bush was treated unfairly by an overzealous reporter. “I don’t think in and of itself it’s a big deal,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. “Voters will say, especially Republicans, `there goes the press again trying to put a political candidate in a bad light.’ “
“On the other hand, if George W. has an Achilles heel, it is one of gravitas,” Kohut said. “Is he really up to the job? Is he enough of a leader? Does he have the background? . . . But I think it will take a lot more than not being able to name the leader of the Chechnyan province to sink his ship.”
For some other candidates, however, a highly publicized miscue has had profound consequences. In 1968, Michigan Gov. George Romney found his hopes for the Republican presidential nomination dashed when he said he had been “brainwashed” on a trip to Vietnam.
“It is remarkable, historically, how a single blunder or comment, something that suggests naivete, can derail a candidate,” said Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University.
The peril for Bush, who despite his Ivy League degrees and prep school background has never claimed to be a stellar student, is that he will be seen as provincial and possibly not up to the role of commander-in-chief.
“I sort of have a theory that everyone is created equal in terms of intelligence, but a lot of people make themselves stupid,” said Robert Ferrell, a historian and presidential scholar at Indiana University.
“In Bush’s case, he probably is in serious trouble because sooner or later he can’t be covered and one or two stupid remarks fan out. He doesn’t need to be a genius, but he needs to know what he doesn’t know,” Ferrell said.
Bush has been receiving a steady dose of briefings from some of the nation’s better-known foreign policy specialists. Some political scientists said that form of tutorial probably isn’t enough without other experience.
“You have to internalize a lot of this stuff out of experience,” said Erwin Hargrove, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University. “You can’t just go to school. It takes an awful lot of repetition and redundancy before you really begin to understand a subject. A canned lecture does not suffice.”
Hargrove said Bush would have come off as more credible had he simply declined to answer the questions and said, “That is not a way to approach foreign policy.”
“The initiative is with the candidate,” Hargrove said. “I am afraid that George W.’s strength is amiability.”
That was also a strength of Ronald Reagan, who rarely was accused of being an intellectual.
No one questioned the brainpower of Jimmy Carter, a nuclear engineer, but many questioned the effectiveness of his presidency.
“Because Reagan made his central values clear, he could tack and weave,” Hargrove said. “Jimmy Carter could not make his central purposes clear, so it appeared nobody was in charge.”
Bush also must live with the problem that his statements were recorded on videotape and can be trotted out by his opponents.
“I think it will have an enduring impact,” Baker said. “Whether or not it is decisive is another thing.”
