Why Insurgent Candidates Fail

Please forgive me for beginning this with a personal note, but I feel it’s important.  It looks like I'm going to be doing a lot of this, and it's time I established my personal bona fides.

 

I’m supporting Bernie Sanders this year, and I hope he wins.  But in terms of insurgencies, this isn’t my first rodeo.

I was born into a political family.  My parents were conservative Democrats, though they remembered FDR with affection and opposed to the racism of Harry Byrd's political machine.

My father served an interim term as Attorney General of Virginia, and then eighteen years in its General Assembly.   I myself, just three years out of law school, was appointed Secretary of the Commonwealth by John Dalton, Virginia’s second Republican governor of the modern age.

This was part of my migration from the party of my birth to the Republican Party, which seemed to me a better home.   But I was a progressive Republican – in the tradition of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, and farther back, proto-Republicans such as Henry Clay and Alexander Hamilton.

Shortly after joining the GOP, I backed John Warner for an open Senate seat – against a moderate former governor and a Reaganite conservative.  Warner was a long-shot candidate, an insurgent.  He lost at the state convention, and only the death of his conservative rival – in a plane crash just weeks after the convention – gave him that Senate seat.

Warner was the first insurgent I backed – and, so far, the only Republican insurgent.  My efforts and convention skills took me to the inner circle of his campaign, but I had only two years to go as a Republican.

The nomination of Ronald Reagan, a decent man whose followers made – and still make – me cringe, led me to leave the party.  A year later, I lost my job for refusing to fly while Reagan was jailing striking air traffic controllers.

From that point on, politics was not my principal concern, but I got involved in several insurgencies.  In 1984, I became a player in Gary Hart’s Virginia campaign – even chairing his caucus at the state convention, holding it together until it became viable.

In 2004, during winter break – I was teaching high school then – I flew to Manchester, New Hampshire, to knock on doors for Howard Dean.

All in all, then, it’s not surprising that I’m in Bernie Sanders’ camp.  I love insurgents, because they speak to my understanding that our political system is – and has been, at least since 1980 – broken.

But, having grown up in politics and achieved a degree of influence in the campaigns of both parties, I also know that insurgencies usually fail.  And I think I understand why.

It’s not about “pragmatism”, or money, or any of the other things the journalists and political scientists pontificate about.

It’s about professionalism.

If you’re a liberal, a progressive, or even a serious moderate (not just a moderate because you can’t make up your mind), you’re bound to have a fondness for The West Wing.  And if you remember that show, you’ll remember that there were several flashback episodes about how Bartlet’s insurgent campaign overcame the well-oiled machinery of Senator John Hoynes to grab the Democratic nomination.

It was a great fantasy, but it wasn’t entirely unbelievable, for one reason.  Bartlet might have been an underdog, but his campaign was run by three serious professionals – Leo McGarry, Josh Lyman, and Toby Ziegler – and some rising stars, Sam Seaborn and C. J. Cregg.  These were people who knew how campaigns work.  They had experience. 

The fantasy wasn’t that such a team could make an insurgent candidate President.  The fantasy was that an insurgent would ever be able to assemble such a team.

Which brings me to my point.  Candidates like Gary Hart, Howard Dean, and Bernie Sanders don’t lose because of the things the pundits talk about.  They lose because their campaigns have to re-invent the wheel, every single time.  The Party Establishment has hundreds of skilled operatives from whom to build an organization.  The insurgents always have to start from scratch.

Because that extra staffing effort takes so much energy, it diverts from the actual business of campaigning. 

And because it’s so easy for the Peter Principal to kick in:  Some loyalist who has been with you from Day One, but who is not really up to the challenge of a national campaign, stays too long in a job he or she can’t do – and makes a fatal mistake.

You see, unlike the Establishment operatives, the insurgent types don’t have a home between insurgencies.  Most of them are one-and-done.  How many old Deanites have key positions in the Sanders campaign?

Those who do stay in politics, as a rule, eventually migrate into the Establishment.  They promise themselves they won’t compromise their principles, that they won’t go along to get along.

But that’s not realistic. 

I'd guess that the people who are running Hillary Clinton’s campaign – probably including the candidate herself – were once genuine reformers, even revolutionaries.  But that was a long, long time ago.

The Bottom Line:  I really hope Bernie makes it.  It’s a strange year, and he has a chance.

But if this country is very to develop a permanent drive for reform – what I hesitate to call, “a permanent revolution” – it will need to find a way for the insurgents of one campaign, and one generation, to stay together – and stay in practice.

And that isn't going to happen within the current, two-party system.  More than likely, it's going to require a whole new entity - a new party, or something like it - with a long-term mission of changing this country in the ways that count.

Until then, it's always gonna take a miracle.  And America might just have used up its quota of miracles.