Every four years, they appear—the candidates running for president who clearly have no chance of actually being elected but who devote months and sometimes even years to tilting at windmills.
The list of quixotic candidates is long and largely undistinguished—filled with might-have-beens like former Connecticut senator Chris Dodd, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, has-beens like former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, who ran for president in 2012, and never-will-bes like Alan Keyes, who ran for president in 1996 and 2008.
Or what about Carol Moseley Braun, who, after losing her Senate race as a Democrat in Illinois—no easy task—decided that making a presidential run in 2004 made all the sense in the world. That view was not widely held by voters, donors, or activists. Braun dropped out of the race just days before the Iowa caucuses and endorsed former Vermont governor Howard Dean, who went on to crash and burn in the Hawkeye State.
Or Alexander Haig, who after a distinguished career of service in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations—he spent time as White House chief of staff and secretary of state—decided to run for president in his own right in 1988. It seemed a kamikaze mission from the start designed to derail then vice president George H. W. Bush. In a 1987 debate Haig famously told Bush “I never heard a wimp out of you” regarding a nuclear treaty—a put-down that was widely regarded as Haig’s attempt to cast Bush as insufficiently tough to be president. Bush laughed last, however. He became the Republican nominee and the president. Haig, on the other hand, dropped out of the race before the New Hampshire primary and endorsed then Kansas senator Bob Dole.
To the average person, it’s beyond baffling why these people run. Why spend time, money, and heartache on something where the outcome is not only predetermined but also almost certain to be bad? It’s seems odd, at best, and incredibly depressing at worst.
That way of thinking misses the point, however. After all, thousands of people train for marathons—not exactly a joyous thing to put your body through with no expectation of winning the actual race. I play pickup basketball twice a week and do everything I can this side of cheating—and sometimes the other side of cheating—to win, even though the result is ultimately completely meaningless. Winning then need not be the only reason why people take on challenges. In fact, for lots of us it’s not a reason at all. The same goes for the men and women who run for president.
Take each of the politicians mentioned above. Each of them is indicative of a major reason why politicians who have no real chance of grabbing the brass ring reach for it anyway.
Let’s start with Dodd. On paper, Dodd’s résumé was as impressive as anyone’s in the 2008 Democratic presidential field. The son of a senator, he spent six years in the U.S. House in the mid-1970s before winning a U.S. Senate seat in 1980. (By the time he ran for president in 2008, Dodd was the longest-serving senator in the long and glorious political history of the Nutmeg State.) He spent two years at the helm of the Democratic National Committee during the 1990s and was seen as a major liberal force—along with his best friend Ted Kennedy—on the policy front in the Senate.
Of course, campaigns aren’t fought on paper or in a vacuum. And from the start Dodd was badly overshadowed by bigger names like Clinton, Obama, and John Edwards. Dodd did everything he could to stand out—running ads highlighting his résumé and mane of white hair, moving his family to Iowa for the final two months of the campaign (not kidding, he really did that), and attacking the front-runners as unproven commodities in a dangerous world.
But politics is at least part pizzazz, and Dodd could never find a spark. He looked and felt like the old guy in the race, talking about all the battles he had won in the past rather than about what he would do in the future if he managed to get elected. Despite devoting untold amounts of campaign time to the state—to reiterate, he moved his family, including two young daughters, to Iowa in the dead of winter—Dodd failed to get even one percent in the caucuses (gut punch!) and dropped out of the race shortly afterward. To add insult to injury, Dodd’s 2008 presidential bid laid the groundwork for his eventual forced retirement from the Senate in 2010, as Connecticut voters didn’t love the idea of a guy whose salary they were paying uprooting his family to Iowa for a few months.
So why did Dodd do it? Because he had always wanted to run for president and would have spent his life regretting it if he hadn’t given it a try. Remember that Dodd was an up-and-comer on the Democratic political scene for most of the 1980s and early 1990s—he was only thirty-six when he was elected to the Senate—who was always in the mix when conversation turned, as it inevitably always does, to who might run for president at some point down the line.
But the timing just never seemed to work out for him. In 1988, Joe Biden filled the slot of “hotshot young senator” in the presidential race. (Biden was regarded as a major player until a plagiarism scandal. He ripped off lines from a speech given by Neil Kinnock, a Welsh Labour Party politician.) In 1992, Dodd was up for reelection to the Senate, making a presidential run a near impossibility. In 2000, Vice President Al Gore was the heir apparent as the Democratic nominee. Dodd thought seriously about running in 2004 but ultimately decided to bow out and support his home state colleague Joe Lieberman, who had been Gore’s running mate four years earlier.
By 2008, Dodd was sixty-four years old—a young upstart gone gray (white, actually) who still carried national ambition inside him. Dodd knew enough about politics to know he had only the longest of long-shot chances to wind up as his party’s nominee. But he also knew that he would always wonder what might have been if he didn’t run in 2008. And so, he ran. Was it quixotic? His inability to win even one percent in Iowa says that it was. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t successful in scratching that itch that had irritated Dodd for the better part of three decades.
Rick Santorum’s reasons for running for the Republican nomination in 2012 were, like Dodd’s, not centered primarily on winning—although he came remarkably close to doing so. Instead Santorum ran to reclaim his image within the party as a serious and credible person who had a demonstrated appeal to voters—an image that had been severely tarnished when he was destroyed in his bid for a third term by Senator Bob Casey in 2006.
Prior to that eighteen-point defeat, Santorum had put together a mighty impressive political and legislative career. Santorum beat a long-standing Democratic incumbent in a Democratic-leaning western Pennsylvania congressional seat in 1990, and four years later he did it again at the statewide level, ousting then senator Harris Wofford in one of the most high-profile and expensive races of 1994. Despite representing a Democratic-leaning state, Santorum was unabashedly conservative once he got to the Senate—an ideological purity that when coupled with nearly unbridled ambition allowed him to rise through the leadership ranks of the GOP. By 2001, Santorum was the chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, the third-ranking leadership position in the chamber. But his high-profile conservatism in that job sowed the seeds of the defeat that was to come.
Though he had won a second term with ease in 2000 thanks to a lackluster and underfunded Democratic opponent, Santorum was at the top of most target lists heading into 2006. His time in Republican leadership was coupled with a fatigue with President George W. Bush and Republicans more broadly that made 2006 a very difficult year for the party across the country. Santorum’s vulnerability was made worse by the candidacy of Casey, the son of the former governor of the state, whose last name remained a major asset in the eyes of voters. From the start of the race, Santorum was doomed; Casey regularly led by double digits in polling and went on to hand Santorum a historically bad defeat for a sitting Senate incumbent.
That defeat turned Santorum into a punch line in the political community, overshadowing all of his previous accomplishments in the process. And so when Santorum made clear that he was planning to run for president in 2012, the overall reaction from the professional political class—Democrats and Republicans—was a collective eye roll. Santorum, of course, knew that and ran to change how history would remember him.
Way back in September 2009 I sat down with Santorum at a coffee shop on Capitol Hill to talk about the prospect of his running for president in 2012. (And, yes, even way back then he was thinking about it.) Here’s how he pitched himself: “The beauty that I bring to the table is that I have sixteen years of doing. I have a pretty good record of tapping into the concerns of the American public and effectively following through and passing legislation that has made a difference.”
Santorum, even way back then, had his legacy on his mind. He didn’t want to be remembered as the guy who lost reelection by eighteen points in 2006. He wanted to be remembered as the guy who ran for president in 2012. And, to his credit, Santorum’s hopes of legacy-molding paid off. No one—and I mean no one—thought that Santorum had any chance of winning the Iowa caucuses. He did. No one thought he would have a fighting chance of emerging as the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney. He did.
Santorum ultimately came up short—unable to overcome the financial and organizational advantages enjoyed by Romney. But is there any argument that he emerged from the race as a much bigger—and more respected—figure within the party than he was when he started running? Santorum reclaimed his political life and legacy in his losing bid, which, of course, makes his candidacy the opposite of quixotic.
If Santorum was running to prove something, Alan Keyes ran to say something. Or a lot of things, to be more accurate. Keyes is a prime example of the perennial candidate, a person whose job—whether or not he is willing to acknowledge it—is to run for public office as a way of keeping his name and voice in the public dialogue.
All told, Keyes has run six times unsuccessfully, three times for president and another three (1988 and 1992 in Maryland, 2004 in Illinois) for Senate. (That last race came against Barack Obama; Keyes, who lived in Maryland, was recruited to run by an Illinois Republican Party desperate to field a candidate after it lost its nominee in a sex club scandal. Yes, all of that really happened.)
In each of his races, Keyes focused almost exclusively on the ills of abortion. (Keyes accused the candidate Obama of adopting the “slaveholder’s position” by supporting abortion rights during the 2004 Senate race.) While he talked quite a bit—Keyes is an eloquent debater and speaker—he rarely if ever talked about the sort of kitchen table issues in which voters were interested. It’s not surprising then that Keyes was a total nonfactor in every one of the races that he ran in. (His best showing ever was 38 percent in his 1988 race against Democratic senator Paul Sarbanes.)
Winning, of course, was entirely besides the point for Keyes. His goal was to give his views on things like abortion and homosexuality as wide an airing as possible. Keyes always ran causes, not campaigns. Without the megaphone afforded to him by running for president, Keyes’s viewpoints would have never reached as big an audience as they ultimately did. Running then was a means to an end for Keyes. It allowed him a platform, which he could get no other way, to voice his views. The very fact that he was included in debates that aired on national cable television was a major victory for Keyes.
There’s also another, more capitalist reason why people like Keyes run. In raising their profile—“presidential candidate” looks pretty nice on a résumé—they raise their earning power. Keyes’s speaking fees likely went through the roof after his 2004 Senate race and 2008 presidential bid. He became a national figure, a hot commodity for conservative groups looking for speakers and for other organizations looking to affiliate with a recognized champion of the conservative movement. His candidacies also help drive attention to—and sales of—his book, Our Character, Our Future, which was released in 1996 and can be bought for $3.04 on Amazon at the moment.
The broader point here is that candidates run for office for all sorts of reasons. The main reason is to win, but there is a whole substrate of candidates for whom winning is almost beside the point. Remember that Don Quixote has become a symbol not of hopelessness but of valor in our society. Just because a candidacy is quixotic doesn’t mean it’s pointless.