The Thirteen Keys to the Presidency / See How They Run / Our Country
Barone, Michael & Lichtman, Allan J. & DeCell, Ken
BOOK REVIEWS T f Allan J. Lichtman and Ken DeCell are correct, President Bush may be a lot more vulnerable than he thinks when he runs for re-election in 1992. The economy will almost certainly...
...The party in power in the White House has lost every election since 1860 when six or more of these "keys" have been negative, except for the election of 1876 when the electoral college overruled a popular vote...
...Back in 1980, the Lichtman/DeCell keys said a Reagan victory—or a victory by whoever won the GOP presidential nomination—was inevitable...
...aul Taylor, a fair and painfully honest reporter for the Washington Post, admits that he "spent much of 1987 and some of 1988 thinking Mario Cuomo was going to be elected President...
...In retrospect the erosion of party loyalties and the detachment of what would turn out to be a critical group of voters—white Southerners—from the Democratic coalition were crucial circumstances which permitted the Republicans to win five of the next six presidential elections," Barone writes...
...Okay, is Bush really in trouble...
...Finally, there are charisma keys...
...All thirteen "keys" are presented as equal, though economic performance is surely more significant than an incumbent's charisma, or lack of it...
...Nothing either party has said or done during the fall campaign has ever changed its prospects at the polls...
...Lichtman and DeCell confidently predicted that Bush would defeat Michael Dukakis, when most everyone else was forecasting a Dukakis victory...
...If you prefer, mail check or card authorization and expiration...
...If the economy over four Bush years is reasonably robust, it might still represent a negative key...
...By the spring of 1988, all thirteen keys had come into play, and Bush had only three negatives...
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...24.95 Fred Barnes 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1990 count," Lichtman and DeCell insist...
...Didn't faze me...
...The Iraq crisis could blow up in Bush's face...
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...From the 1920s to the 1950s [it] was a self-consciously liberal, even leftish vote, anchored in the Progressive German-American Northwest and among New York and other big-city Jews," he writes...
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...We wouldn't have heard about Willie Horton, the furlough program, the veto of the Pledge of Allegiance bill, Dukakis's position on defense, etc...
...I think all this mattered a lot...
...And despite his effective performances at press conferences and other public events, Bush lacks charisma...
...It was in the bag all along...
...Don't be held back because of that extra line...
...A little, but not much...
...Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars and months of media attention lavished on them, general election campaigns don't THE THIRTEEN KEYS TO THE PRESIDENCY Allan J. Lichtman and Ken DeCell/Madison Books/449 pp...
...All three books agree that presidential elections are about the past,not the future...
...And Bush still has plenty of time to make a major policy change...
...Some are political keys...
...The New York Times Book Review "This is a penetrating account of the long debate about the kind of public language appropriate for a democratic society...
...Nor is Bush likely to have put any major policy change into effect...
...The economy will almost certainly have been weaker in his first term than it was during Ronald Reagan's two presidential terms...
...What if Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes had bought the Lichtman/DeCell line in late spring and decided that a Bush victory was assured...
...They haven't concluded that about Bush, far from it...
...George Bush did not 'come from behind' to snatch victory from the Democrats in 1988," they write...
...False in 1980, giving Carter a negative key...
...Taylor, the reporter who asked Gary Hart if he'd committed adultery (Hart waffled), admits there are no rules on how far the press should delve into the private lives of public figures...
...It's an elegant, shrewd, richly textured history of national politics since FDR, and not really a book about presidential elections...
...And if Governor Mario Cuomo of New York, a fellow brimming with charisma, emerges as his Democratic opponent in 1992, that would be the crowning blow...
...Average folks with high school or undergraduate college degrees preferred Bush, though their salaries and wealth varied widely...
...The Lichtman/DeCell system has its drawbacks...
...Barone points out that there's invariably a huge swing vote in presidential races...
...Well, I think what happened in 1988 did matter...
...Barone says the seeds of Republican presidential victories in 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988 were sown in 1964, when Barry Goldwater was crushed in a landslide...
...Ten: the administration had no large failure in foreign or military affairs...
...Seven: the administration makes major policy changes...
...6.95 for three...
...But the incumbent party was faring well throughout 1988, and for most of that year I figured the Democrats would win...
...According to Taylor: "This is how elections usually work: voters make retrospective judgments, not prospective ones...
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...Or in a tentative judgment, based on that system, that Bush may be in trouble two years from now...
...Small wonder, then, that their book hasn't been widely reviewed...
...Five: there's no election year recession...
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...Twelve: the incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero...
...Lichtman, a history professor at American University, worked out this theory in the early 1980s and DeCell, a senior editor at the Washingtonian, helped him refine and articulate it...
...True again...
...I have a vested interest in the opposite view...
...He says that a big reason Vice President Dan Quayle got rough treatment in the 1988 campaign is that he "was unacceptable to many members of the working press on a cultural basis...
...They voted accordingly...
...In the last five weeks, candidates should be given five minutes of free TV time on alternating nights...
...Lichtman and DeCell are downright scornful of what reporters write about and what political consultants bring to campaigns...
...By 1980, he had eight negative keys, and he lost to Reagan in a landslide...
...Contrary to popular belief, Harry Truman didn't rally to win re-election in 1948...
...And so on...
...One: the incumbent party holds more House seats after the midterm election than it did four years earlier...
...Four: there is no major third-party candidate...
...False, as Teddy Kennedy challenged Carter bitterly, adding another negative...
...The election was decided...
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...I could go on...
...Two: there's no serious fight for the nomination...
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...I think Lichtman/DeCell and Taylor would agree...
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...And in 1980, "Jimmy Carter could have brought the Iran hostages home in triumph and enjoyed an election-year economic boom instead of a recession, and he still would have lost...
...If they don't, it loses...
...snatierhills® 131 Townsend Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1990 41...
...However, "the key swing vote in American politics from the 1960s to the 1980s . . . was a self-consciously conservative vote, anchored in the white South and among ethnic and blue-collar whites in the big metropolitan areas...
...False...
...And thirteen: the challenger is neither charismatic nor a nationalhero...
...True...
...But the record of the Lichtman/DeCell keys is a lot better than the seat-of-the-pants system used by most political reporters, including me...
...I like to cover campaigns, and if they don't matter, there's no reason to track them...
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...Unless lightning hits, the Republican party won't be as strong in the House of Representatives...
...Y ou simply are not "with it" without a fax machine —it's as indispensable as the telephone...
...True, at Camp David...
...Democrats got the liberal swing vote, Republicans the conservative...
...Some keys judge the administration's performance...
...Reagan was (and is) a charismatic figure...
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...Eleven, the administration had a major foreign policy or military success...
...False for Carter...
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...True in 1980...
...False, decidedly...
...For that would give Bush six negative "keys," under the authors' new theory of elections...
...Rather than anything that occurs during the campaign, what matters is the judgment voters make on the incumbent administration...
...You can connect it in seconds...
...Bush would have found it unnecessary to pledge no new taxes...
...Eight, there was no sustained social unrest...
...Cmiel manages to do justice to both sides...
...Nine: the administration suffered no major scandal...
...When is a scandal major, for example...
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...Democratic Eloquence The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth- Century America Kenneth Cmiel "Based on wide reading and much original research . . . rewarding for anyone with a serious interest in what the author himself terms the `prehistory' of our time...
...22.95 OUR COUNTRY: THE SHAPING OF AMERICA FROM ROOSEVELT TO REAGAN Michael Barone/The Free Press/764 pp...
...As you may recall, he wasn't even running...
...The American people did not succumb to the manipulation of cynical, media-savvy political strategists or the influence of sound bites and television images...
...False, since John Anderson ran as an independent, giving Carter a third unfavorable key...
...Three: the sitting President is seeking re-election...
...Their keys consist of thirteen true/false "conditions that favor the re-election of the incumbent party...
...Normally I wouldn't put much credence in a rigid system for determining who wins presidential elections...
...Most reporters have had this experience...
...At midterm, voters had reached the conclusion that Carter was weak and whiny...
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...incumbent administrations hold the outcome of presidential elections in their hands...
...Taylor writes as much about the press as about the 1988 campaign, andlaments its "bad news bias," saying most reporters practice "anti-institutional journalism...
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...I thought Iran-contra was, or at least was trumpeted as such by the press and Congress...
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...Without the assault on Dukakis, my guess is Bush would have lost...
...But I was nervous on election day...
...That made eight negative keys, and by late spring of 1980, all of them were clear...
...It might get worse...
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...In November 1988, the voters looked around and this is what they saw: a 5.3 percent unemployment rate, a seven-year run of low inflation, seventy-two consecutive months of economic recovery, a communist empire that seemed to be in terminal decline...
...He'd have to turn the struggle with Saddam Hussein into a national tragedy and embarrassment for that to happen...
...Moreover, so would have Kennedy or any other Democrat...
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...Michael Dukakis did not `blow' an election that was within his party's grasp...
...It comes with its own power supply...
...The campaign, including the Carter-Reagan debate, was irrelevant...
...They wouldn't have gone to the trouble of running a negative campaign against Dukakis, labeling him a liberal...
...False in Iran, tacking on a fatal sixth bad key...
...If they perform well, their party wins...
...Carter, for instance, had only three against him halfway through his term, but things fell apart rapidly after that...
...economic growth in the last term exceeds growth in the previous eight years...
...Taylor, by the way, has a proposal for improving presidential campaigns...
...When it was plain nobody else in the universe agreed, I tilted to Reagan...
...Michael Barone, co-author of The Almanac of American Politics, one of the few indispensable political books, has a broader, looser take on presidential elections in Our Country...
...But that didn't dawn on the political press until the final week of the campaign...
...Six: Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...There is little that the challenging party can do to affect the outcome of an election," Lichtman and DeCell say...
...False, so Carter got his fifth negative key...
...This may be belaboring the obvious...
...But presidential races usually crystallize the politics of an era...
...The past is more knowable, and voters prefer to deal with what is real...
...But it would be a plus, not a minus, in 1992...
...And some of the keys are subjective to the point of squishiness...
...Debates, television appearances, fundraising, advertising, news coverage, and campaign strategies—the usual grist for the punditry mills—count for virtually nothing on Election Day...
...Barone isn't explicit on this point, but Lichtman/DeCell and Taylor are...
...They've alienated the cohort of potential reviewers...
...In 1988, the uneducated and the overeducated went for Dukakis, despite their very different economic situations...
...rr hus, there are no upsets, no comebacks, no surprises...
...In 1988, the judgment was favorable, and Bush won...
...This reviewer's biggest qualm is with their flat assertion that general election campaigns have no influence on the outcome...
...Lichtman/DeCell say it wasn't...
...True...
...The debate continues today, with critics of improper usage like Safire and Newman confronted with the objection that the standards they defend are arbitrary and elitist...
...In fact, as he approaches the midpoint of his first term, Bush has dimmer hopes of re-election than Jimmy Carter had at this point in his presidency...
...Barone's thesis is that "in the United States politics more often divides Americans along cultural than along economic lines...
...His effort to bring the Soviet Union into a collective security arrangement may already represent one...
...24.95 SEE HOW THEY RUN: ELECTING THE PRESIDENT IN AN AGE OF MEDIAOCRACY Paul Taylor/Alfred A. Knopf/305 pp...
Vol. 23 • November 1990 • No. 11
