There is nothing in life like the closing days of a campaign, especially a losing one. They are days you relive for the rest of your life. Winners move on to face the next challenge. Losers are left second guessing, wondering what they might have done differently. One day, you have 100 reporters flying around with you, cameras recording each arrival and departure. The next day, they’re all gone, moving on, obituaries written. One day, you might be the next President of the United States. The next day, you are a footnote in history, an answer for Trivial Pursuit, 23 across in the crossword puzzles of the future.
‘Does he know he’s going to lose?’ Dick Gephardt asked me of Michael Dukakis during the closing days of the 1988 presidential campaign. Yes and no, was the answer. Fritz Mondale didn’t really need his campaign chairman to tell him that he was facing defeat. And Michael Dukakis didn’t need me. He knew. Sort of. As much as he needed to.
It isn’t easy to fly two or three thousand miles a day, doing five stops in three states, saying the same thing over and over, shaking your one millionth hand. It isn’t easy to do it in the best of circumstances, but it’s particularly hard when the previous night’s numbers are telling you that your future is history.
Today, both Al Gore and George W. Bush believe they can win, and they’re right, even if one of them should know better.
Truth be told, there’s not much to be done at the end. You can pore over the polls and play with the “traffic”—which ads, how many points, what markets. But most of those decisions had to made the previous Friday, the day most television stations close down for the weekend. You can still add a stop. The more stops you do, the more meals you eat. Every time you get back on the plane, you eat again. Every time you land, there’s more food. What’s a few pounds when the fate of the free world is on the line?
You can fly all night, doing extra tarmacs—landing at a few more airports, stopping in Ohio one more time, going back to Michigan for one more hour. But will it matter? If you haven’t found your voice in a year, or a career, can you find it in the last days? What’s the point of polling on Monday night? What do you do with the results?
What you can do is keep the candidate up. Don’t make mistakes. Let the field operation do its job. Get the weather forecast. No hint of defeat, even if it’s certain, because the hint becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and a betrayal of everyone else on the ticket and of all the people working on the ground. The more likely you are to lose, the more important it is to act like a winner. It’s what we call professionalism.
In 1980, I was in Florida, running the get-out-the vote operation in Dade County. I had an office full of volunteers, hundreds of drivers, bagels on order for breakfast. The polls had yet to open when I got the call from Washington telling me that we were facing landslide defeat. ‘Who was that on the phone?’ someone asked. ‘No one,’ I said. Carter conceded minutes after the polls closed in the East, hours before they closed on the West Coast. He was not a good loser.
Victory has 1,000 fathers. Defeat is an orphan. That’s the ugly part. In winning campaigns, people fight for office space in the White House in the closing days; in losing ones, they fight about who will take the hit.
Weeks ago, stories started leaking from the Gore campaign about who was mad at whom for what, who was responsible for what failures, and then who was responsible for leaking the stories about who was mad at whom. Bad form? Definitely, particularly when a race is this close. But after the second debate, things weren’t looking good. And when things don’t look good, the blame game begins in earnest. At that point, good behavior tends to be rewarded by bad press.
When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping. In 1988, I found a red suit in Filene’s Basement, with a waist band that could be rolled up if it didn’t button, and a long jacket to cover a year and a half of extra lunches and dinners. Look like a winner, especially if you’re going to lose. And then you sit. Vote. Get exit polls. Eat. Sit. Get dressed.
There was an hour or so, in 1988, when it actually seemed possible that we might win. Could it be? It couldn’t.
Two speeches. Formally, you always need to have two speeches ready. But most of the time, you work on the one you think they’ll be hearing. Being gracious in victory is easy: a victory speech is the beginning of the next chapter. Being gracious in defeat is far more difficult. If you lose by a lot, you can at least tell yourself that nothing you did in those last days really mattered; that another stop in Ohio, a new ad, a step instead of a misstep, wouldn’t have made any difference. In that sense, Jimmy Carter and Fritz Mondale and Mike Dukakis–and I–had an easier time. Whoever loses this week won’t be so lucky.
