A different twist on Fun Friday from usual: I figured I’d go over some of the worst presidential candidates of all time. My guidelines are simple–I’ll try to stick away from, “Hey, this person was a horrible president, so they’re automatically going to be on the list.” Some people won despite bad campaigns, some people lost despite great ones, but ultimately political skill doesn’t match exactly with outcomes all the time. So I’ll go by party:

DEMOCRATS

1. Alton B. Parker (1904) — Just how popular was Teddy Roosevelt during his presidency? The Democrats nominated to run against him a state Supreme Court member of no real repute, who went on to run a hopeless campaign and lost in a landslide. Parker was underqualified for the job and was not prepared to campaign for it, which might well have been William Jennings Bryan’s very intention. Bryan ran for president twice before and would run four years later. Parker was a brief intermission in between those runs and was incapable of bridging the gap between Bryan’s supporters and the more conservative elements he represented. Even a guy who didn’t let two presidential losses daunt him from making another run wanted no part of running against Teddy. Parker today is a completely obscure figure–as Wikipedia notes, he “was the only defeated presidential candidate in history never to have a biography written about him.” Which is kind of sad, really. Then again, who wants to read about a minor state jurist who lost a presidential election in a landslide?
2. Adlai Stevenson (1952, 1956) — Stevenson probably couldn’t have beaten Eisenhower no matter what. Being the man who defeated Hitler is a pretty good qualification for office, and after twenty years of Democratic control, the time for a change was right. But Stevenson managed not only to lose two elections in epic landslides, helping to give the Democrats a reputation as snobby and over-intellectual in the process, he also managed to undo some of the forward progress on racial issues that had occurred during the Truman years. Stevenson was, according to Robert Caro, the South’s favorite candidate in 1956 because the was the least liberal, and in 1952 he actually put a segregationist on his ticket (albeit one who was moderate on other issues). This was four years after Hubert Humphrey’s moment of glory in getting civil rights included in the party’s platform, by the way. And don’t think it didn’t make a difference–again, Caro notes that Stevenson’s two civil rights-equivocal runs coincided with massive erosions of black support for Democrats, after cleaning up during the Roosevelt and Truman years. Stevenson was no doubt a smart and capable man, but he wasn’t much of a national politician, and in some ways took the Democrats backwards.
3. Mike Dukakis (1988) — Well, we just have to include him in this list, don’t we? Dukakis might get dumped on a little too much–he seems like a nice guy and was a really good governor. He’s even embraced having sucked as a presidential candidate and has a sense of humor about it, which is really commendable. But he did suck. So much. You might think The Duke lucked out in getting the nomination after Gary Hart imploded, but that wasn’t true–he got it thanks to his cutthroat campaign manager, John Sasso, who cleared the way with his famous allegation that Joe Biden plagiarized a speech from British politician Neil Kinnock. The facts of this are now plain as day–Biden routinely used part of Kinnock’s speech and cited the source, but one time he forgot to, and Sasso played a cynical gambit to stop what was then a huge Biden surge in Iowa by sending in the tape and calling Biden a faker. He succeeded, and Biden dropped out. Then Dukakis rather hypocritically fired Sasso after the stink from the whole thing started wafting back to him. So, Dukakis won the nomination, but had lost the very evil genius who could have gone toe-to-toe with Lee Atwater in the general election. You know the rest of the story: tanks, “If your daughter were raped and murdered…” Willie Horton. And an initial 20-point lead turned into a near-landslide the other way. Incidentally, Biden went on to defeat Robert Bork’s SCOTUS nomination, pass the Violence Against Women Act, and is now Vice President. Some stories do have happy endings.
4. Jimmy Carter (1976, 1980) — Yeah, Carter managed to win in 1976. But it wasn’t that impressive a win. Carter was running against Nixon’s chosen successor, the guy who had pardoned the great old crook (thus infuriating the left), as well as the guy who had granted amnesty to draft-dodgers (thus infuriating the right). In fact, Ford had managed to irritate the right so much that Reagan ran against Ford in the GOP primary, and but for a few Mississippi delegates, would actually have beaten an incumbent president. Which hasn’t happened in nearly two centuries. Ford came to the general election battered and bruised, his authority over the right deeply suspect (he had to pull his era’s version of the Paul Ryan pick, and bumped Nelson Rockefeller in favor of Bob Dole). He compounded this by making an infamous statement about Poland not being under Soviet domination, which turned out to be a responsible and diplomatic answer calculated not to inflame Soviet feelings. He was torn apart for it. Oh, and the economy really sucked, thanks to a Republican Fed Chair’s loose money policies leading to inflation (imagine that!). Yep, Ford really did hurt himself, meaning that those Chevy Chase skits weren’t all that inaccurate. And Ford wound up losing the general election in a landslide by two percent. That’s right. After Ford did everything possible to politically immolate himself, he lost in a squeaker. Why? Because Carter won the nomination of a party he wasn’t really ideologically in step with (he grasped the new realities of the nominating system before anyone else did_, and then proceeded to turn a 2-to-1 lead into a nailbiter thanks to various PR disasters (the Playboy interview!). By the election, people looked at the guy who had screwed up so much and wondered if another four years of Chevy Chase skits would really be that bad. Then he lost to Reagan in 1980, which was only partly due to self-inflicted wounds. Oh, for a time machine to go back to 1975 and convince Jerry Brown to get into the race just a little bit earlier.
5. Hillary Clinton (2008) — It’s amazing to think that one sentence separated one individual and the presidency. But that was exactly the case in 2008. All Hillary Clinton had to say was, “I was wrong to support the Iraq War, I regret it, and I’ll never do it again.” With that said, she would have won without much of a challenge. But Clinton refused to say it, for fear of looking weak. She would occasionally talk about how Bush had fooled her, which is not an attractive quality in a potential president, being fooled by one of the most ignorant men with power in recent times. Clinton even doubled-down on the hawkishness, voting for the Lieberman-Graham Amendment that essentially endorsed a pre-emptive strike on Iran. But this just made her look weak in a different way–incapable of changing her mind, admitting mistakes, going a different way. After eight years of that from Bush, a lot of people had just had enough. A large number of primary voters didn’t trust her judgment or integrity, and it left an enormous opening for Barack Obama to sweep them up by arguing that he had opposed the Iraq War from the beginning. Considering that the only real differences between Clinton and Obama were on foreign policy, and that Obama then had Clinton run his foreign policy, you kind of have to wonder what the point of all that was.

Honorable Mentions: Joe Lieberman’s campaign in 2004 certainly deserves a nod. John W. Davis in 1924 was pretty awful as well, but the party was undergoing a shift at the time and it could be argued he was doing the best he could.

REPUBLICANS

1. William Howard Taft (1912) — Elected as TR’s designated successor. Lost the next year after a series of really stupid moves, like tariff increases so drastic they actually led to the creation of the income tax, once (and again?) an anathema in US politics. He finished third, the last major party candidate to do so. In his defense, Taft was no glad-handing politician, he was a cabinet officer and a legal scholar. Roosevelt I was unwise to pick the guy, though some aspects of his record (i.e. the trusts) are underrated.
2. Tom Dewey (1944, 1948) — The GOP’s great moderate hope during the forties, and still occasionally brought up by wingnuts as a cautionary example. Dewey would not have been an awful president IMO, and since the public wasn’t tired of FDR in 1944 he wasn’t going to win. But the campaign he chose to run, a bitterly caustic one that frequently insinuated that FDR knew about the Pearl Harbor attack ahead of time, was seriously ill-advised during a time of war and patriotism. Now in the era of eternal war, slashing partisanship during a foreign occupation is unavoidable because there’s always one going on, but back then it was shocking. Dewey lost, then picked himself up and ran again in four years (he also ran in 1940 but never got off the ground), only this time he made the complete opposite mistake. Overlearning the lessons of the earlier campaign, Dewey coasted through the campaign, confident that Truman was toast. The book 1948 sets the scene of Dewey HQ, in which Dewey avoided attacks on, or even engagement with, the president, preferring to audition endless candidates for ambassador and cabinet secretary slots instead. After getting the reputation of being nasty, Dewey did the complete opposite in 1948, trying his very best to be cool, statesmanlike, a worthy choice for people tired of Truman. They apparently rested. Dewey’s chief sin wasn’t moderation, which was also fellow moderate Dwight Eisenhower’s stock in trade. It was a lack of true political instinct. But aside from those runs, he had a pretty great career, as a legendary prosecutor and a pretty successful governor.
3. George W. Bush (2000, 2004) — Yeah, I’m going with W. Sure, both his campaigns “worked” in that he was declared the winner of both, but he lost the first one in every way except legally, and the second one he came a lot closer to losing than he should have. Dubya had a lot of help with the media–the whole concept of having a beer with him being hilariously inappropriate since Bush is a recovering alcoholic–but not from the gloriously overrated Rove, who had Bush stumping California before the election and was completely blindsided by the DUI October Surprise. Toss in a few lousy debate performances, studied ignorance and a demeanor that was incredibly unpresidential, and you get two elections far closer than the fundamentals suggested. Gore outpolled him by half a million votes, and that guy was being advised by Bob Shrum. Bob Shrum.
4. John McCain (2008) — A thankless role, to be sure, following Bush. But McCain did his best to scotch his own meager chances. Putting aside his own lurch to the right to get the nomination, McCain frequently criticized Obama for his inexperience, but he did so in much the same way as Clinton did in the primaries–as a coded character attack whose message was, “I’m great!” The whole “Will he be ready to pick up the phone at 3 A.M.?” question isn’t an experience qualification, but a character one. Spending another ten years in Congress won’t change whether you panic or not in that moment. So it’s essentially, “I’m tough and awesome, and he’s a wimp!” that they’re saying. That was Clinton’s attack, but McCain did stuff like that all the time, and then there was the “celebrity” ad that mocked Obama for being well-known for being a politician who had few substantive accomplishments, a concept completely alien to John “Meet The Press Every Sunday” McCain. Then McCain torched his campaign theme of experience by picking someone dangerously ill-experienced for his running mate. So, yeah, McCain was probably going to lose no matter what, but he didn’t exactly play the hand he was given.
5. Mitt Romney (2012) — You had to know he was going to be in there, right? Romney’s particular crime is holding to Rovian strategic orthodoxy long after everyone should know it’s junk. The fundamentals of the situation would call for a certain kind of campaign for Romney–the economy’s weak, which means swing voters are inclined to go against the incumbent, but it’s not depression weak, and the public still largely blames the last guy. There’s an opening there for sure, but one that requires deft maneuvering. The smartest move would have been for Romney to do what he needed to do to win the nomination and then pivot on issues that are less important to the base right now. I mean, he can’t embrace Obamacare, but come on, he could easily have supported an end to the Afghan War, which hardly any of the faithful seem to think much about these days, and he could have tossed out a few moderate stands like favoring the DREAM Act without all that much blowback. The thing is, his party has moved so far to the right that even the most modest moderation would really make him stand out and appeal more to the center. But Romney reads from Rove’s Bible, which says that moderate votes are never there, that the only way to win is by jazzing up conservatives and running a harsh, negative campaign against your opponent. The end result: a race that Romney has yet to lead in any meaningful sense, rapidly eroding favorability ratings, and a Paul Ryan-sized bandaid/albatross.

Honorable Mention: Meh. Bob Dole wasn’t all that great in 1996, but the simple fact is that Republicans didn’t pick a whole lot of horrible nominees over their history, at least until the past decade or so. This is easily explicable–in the ’70s and ’80s, liberals shut themselves off from an uncomfortable reality, and the result was a lot of uninspiring candidates whose only skill was keeping a disparate party together. Now, this easily describes Republicans. Why would smart, dynamic people want the bother of leading a crew like that into battle?