12 Skills
You must know yourself and you must know the times.
—Benjamin Disraeli, on what it takes to succeed in politics
My right flank is weakening, my center collapsing. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
—Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch, before turning the tide at the Battle of the Marne, 1917
To borrow the title of Richard Ben Cramer’s epic political psychoanalysis, what does it take to win in polarized politics and advocacy today?
Fortunately during our greatest crises, Washington, Lincoln, and FDR all knew themselves and their times. In the modern era, political genius is rare but usually easy to spot. Harvard and Yale law school classmates of both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton report that they’d nudge each other and say, “That guy’s gonna be president someday.” Asked at a TV audition how a modern outer-space alien might sit, Mork-to-be Robin Williams immediately stood on his head in a chair—and got the job. All of them were “naturals.”
But for mere mortals, politics has become what Jefferson feared—a business. That’s the conclusion of Alan Ehrenhalt’s The United States of Ambition, a 1991 book on how professionalized our world of politics has become. In my home state, most of our top officials (Andrew Cuomo, Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bill de Blasio, Scott Stringer) were all kid pols who self-nominated to climb the greasy pole—and succeeded. Apparently, to prevail in a brutal Darwinian process requires, in Liam Neeson’s signature line in Taken, “a very particular set of skills.”
While public officials have mixed motives—power, service, money—there are still right and wrong ways to do it. So for all those thinking about entering the fray, below are 12 valuable skills/assets, followed by the false prophets of luck and lying. Though hardly Machiavelli’s The Prince, consider these Mark’s Rules based on examples both personal and historical.
If you score 10 or more out of 12, you’re FDR and can go straight to a presidential library (Mount Rushmore’s full). If you’re a 7 to 9, I’d bet on you. But if you’re a 4 or less, maybe Wall Street or the family business is preferable to this very high-risk/high-reward process. For politics is, quite literally, the ultimate winner-take-all profession. While being the second-best surgeon, Realtor, or retailer in your town will earn you much respect and wealth, coming in second in a political campaign in a state with 20 million is as good as coming in 20 millionth. Oscar losers aren’t expected to go on stage to explain why they didn’t win in concession speeches, a gauntlet that unsuccessful candidates must endure.
Here’s how to come in first:*
1. Be Relentless. “If you do everything,” Senate candidate Lyndon Johnson said, “you win.” That means more events, more street campaigning, more fund-raising, more spy-versus-spy strategizing. A fellow Georgian who knew Stalin as a youth describes “his unquestionably greater energy, indefatigable capacity for hard work and . . . organization talent.”
With the work ethic of Nader as my model and a deadline called The Election, I’d urge campaign staff to over-schedule me. I may not be able to affect the weather on Election Day or bin Laden’s murderous intervention, but I sure as hell want to leave nothing on the table over things I can control. I started a tradition of campaigning all night before Election Day to symbolically convey my enthusiasm for service for all, including the midnight shift. And I’d treat every day as consumer commissioner and public advocate as a day lost unless I was as productive as possible, both to advance consumer justice and to enhance myself for whatever comes next.
There it is—that mix of idealism and selfishness that’s embedded in every public person to varying degrees. So while I adore my family as much as anyone, I will do a half-dozen churches, pressers, brunches, receptions every Sunday for eight years while my talented rival Alan Hevesi is catching Jets and Mets games with his sons, a difference that cumulatively proves telling in our 2001 mayoral primary. Not that Alan was wrong or that I’m now proud of this truth, but “what it takes” is a level of immersion seen in Jiro Dreams of Sushi and Whiplash. Relentless drive is a level beyond standard ambition. It’s Rafael Nadal, “who plays every point as if he were broke,” according to Jimmy Connors. It’s Lyndon Johnson, whose cousin said of him, “days meant nothing, nights meant nothing, weekdays, weekends, they meant nothing. He could not stand to lose, just couldn’t stand it. He had to win, had to.” It’s Ted Williams swinging hundreds of thousands of times in front of mirrors until it becomes as natural as breathing. “The way the inevitable came to pass,” said Justice Holmes, “was effort.”
That means being in the moment nearly every moment . . . which we understand when it comes to driving, skiing, even baby-sitting, when even one mistake could be one too many. That includes a complete focus on the goal because, notes the Chinese proverb, “He who aims at two targets hits none.” The essential golf skill, according to a popular book, is “Take. Dead. Aim.” Which is why John Kennedy chose Lyndon Johnson for VP. His brother and key labor supporters opposed LBJ because he was no liberal and had said that JFK’s father was a “Nazi sympathizer.” But none of that mattered once Kennedy realized that the choice increased the chance of winning Texas electors and therefore the presidency.
After losing a congressional race in 1980, I visited Lorne Michaels—a brilliant, focused person pretending to be a laid-back Canadian—whom I got to know during the week that Nader hosted SNL. In an office with various memorabilia from his many shows, Lorne gave me this advice about what to do next: “Figure out what you want and then apply yourself to it almost without consideration of anything else.” That apparently worked well for SNL graduates Eddie Murphy, Martin Short . . . and, moving to local politics, Marty Markowitz, who served 22 years as a state senator while aching to become the borough president of Brooklyn. With that destination always in mind, he ignored other prospects until his time came in 2001, when he defeated a favored opponent and completed three terms, being the cheerleader who helped to turn that county into one of the coolest “cities” in the world. Then he plausibly considered running for mayor in 2013, given his popularity with both the Jewish and black communities, but he passed it up. After all, it wasn’t borough president.
Relentless drive includes a level of anticipation essential to chess masters and generals. The best enumeration was the thinking of the great Chinese military tactician Sun Tzu: “If your enemy has superior strength, evade him. If your enemy is temperamental, seek to irritate him . . . The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand.” That is, think way ahead and put yourself in the other guy’s shoes.
Last, a relentless drive means being insatiable. It’s Arianna Huffington pushing herself and the Huffington Post to open yet more verticals and bureaus, Chuck Schumer continuing his Sunday press conference habit as he conquers the Senate, Bill Buckley knocking off his twenty-fourth book while on a two-week boating trip.
Where does this superhuman willfulness, focus, preparation, and insatiability come from? Quien sabe? Probably owes to unusual genetic wiring. But without it, the next 11 skills/traits probably won’t suffice.
2. Always Optimistic/Never Defensive. What Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama had in common was one parent who let them know they were beyond the moon and had to reach for the stars. In his book The Defining Moment, Jonathan Alter concludes that FDR “seemed to be missing the normal emotional equipment that produces worry” and traces it back to Freud: “A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feelings of a conqueror. That confidence of success often induces real success.” Adds Alter on FDR: “He was the first presidential candidate since his cousin Theodore to smile regularly and act as if he were enjoying himself.”
A deep belief in yourself is a political essential because every candidacy is daily poised between a triumph and an embarrassment and no one’s a prohibitive favorite in his/her first race.† Fifty reporters covering the 1948 presidential campaign were asked that summer whether Truman could win—not one thought so. When Roger Federer was 178–0 after winning the first two sets in majors and then won the first two sets against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in the 2011 Wimbledon, no one gave the Frenchman any odds at all. Guess who won?
The lesson: there’s almost no such thing as impossible odds. I won a primary as a laughable underdog in 1986 and lost a general election as a near-prohibitive favorite in fall of 2001—and it’s not until later that it’s clear why. “You never know,” former representative Jack Brooks (D-TX) once told me, “when you’re going to get caught wearing a blue shirt in a white-shirt year.” (After winning 22 straight terms, Brooks lost in 1994.)
The irrepressible Lee Atwater memorably explained the best approach when you appear to be slipping or on the defensive: “Attack, attack, attack . . . if you’re explaining, you’re losing.” The trick is how to turn an apparent defeat into a Dunkirk. Stories about a slush fund jeopardized Nixon’s place on the ticket in 1952 until he figured out the right tone, images, and words in his Checkers Speech—end of story. After Governor Bill Clinton was nearly hooted down due to his too-long, boring, and well-lit introduction of nominee Mike Dukakis at the 1988 Atlanta convention, I watched him carefully as he then smiled and glad-handed his way around the arena’s circular walkway. A couple days later, he went on The Tonight Show armed with an hourglass and plopped it on Carson’s desk. Johnny laughed uproariously, and his flop went poof. Barack Obama lost badly in an ill-advised congressional race against incumbent Bobby Rush in 2000. Then he figured out what went wrong and ran for the U.S. Senate, against the advice of consigliore David Axelrod. He ended up doing pretty well for himself.
3. Maintain Flawless Discipline. If you “can resist anything except temptation,” in the words of Oscar Wilde, you shouldn’t go into politics. Or as the fictitious Frank Underwood tells his wife who lost her temper in public on House of Cards, “courage is knowing when to shut up when the stakes are so high.” For in public life, you’re only as strong as your worst moment, your stupidest mistake that can be incessantly advertised so a voter can’t think of you without thinking of that.
In this era of cell phone videographers and political trackers, ask Virginia’s George Allen about political discipline. He called an Indian-American tracker “macaca” at a 2006 event, one slur that knocked him out of contention for a presidential run and for two Senate seats. Or ask what Mitt Romney now thinks when the numeral 47 is uttered. “The clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men” comes not from their great exploits, wrote Plutarch, the Greek biographer of Alexander, two millennia ago. “Sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression of a jest, informs us better.”
The public is often waiting for that betraying moment. If a candidate gets intellectually bored saying the same thing ad nauseam or relishes spontaneity, he or she could be walking toward a land mine. John McCain couldn’t resist parodying the Beach Boys hit by singing “bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran” in 2007, which critics exploited as evidence of his knee-jerk militarism. It was also evidence of a candidate going way off message. Despite promising his staff to stop his favorite activity of wind surfing because of the “optics,” an athletic John Kerry snuck out one afternoon from his Nantucket home when he thought no one else was on the beach; the eventual footage was incessantly shown in Bush ads about how he swayed with the wind.
When I run against a little known opponent for reelection as public advocate in 1997, I agree with advisors not to take the bait at a debate since I’m ahead by about 130 points. But after eight minutes of, in my view, his needling comments, I completely lapsed into my Crossfire habit and just verbally decked him. Contrast that with Al D’Amato who, if nothing else, was a political pro when we debated in 1986 and I was the one 130 points behind. Nothing I said in my kitchen sink of criticism provoked him to flinch or raise an eyebrow. Nothing. He just stared straight ahead rope-a-doping me, perhaps losing the debate on points but easily winning reelection.
After Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton for the nomination in 2008, she gave a rousing convention speech for him. Watching her put aside many slights perceived by the Clinton camp, close friend Judith Hope confided to Hillary after she left the podium, “I’m amazed at your capacity for political generosity.” Replied the future Obama secretary of state and possibly Clinton 45, “Life is too short to stay in the bad places.”
NYC comptroller Scott Stringer vowed after one election loss to hold no grudges, adding with a mischievous grin, “with, at most, three exceptions.” That’s good advice, but do I feel the rush of schadenfreude that State Senator Carl Kruger today sits in prison, District Attorney Joe Hynes is himself under criminal investigation, and the late Assemblyman Vito Lopez was ruined by sexual harassment charges? I claim immunity under the Stringer rule-of-three.
4. Use Memorable Language (i.e., Find Your Voice). When the CIA was having difficulty explaining its policy toward Cuba in early 1962, the agency’s chief of covert operations, Richard Helms, instructed a flummoxed aide, “There are 500,000 words in the English language. Use them.”
“A government of, by and for the people,” . . . “a rendezvous with destiny,” . . . “Ask not what your country can do for you,” . . . “I have a dream,” . . . “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” There’s no formula to predict what precise emphasis or sequence of words will move audiences, but certainly the ability to draw vivid word images can promote political success. At the risk of oversimplification, there are three keys to language that soars and connects. It has to fit the occasion, be fresh, and convey an image or story that endures. Reagan could have said at the Brandenburg Gate, “This wall divides us”; Kennedy in his inaugural, “We should all contribute to public service”; and King at the Lincoln Memorial, “I have an agenda.” But who would remember that?
Think of the creativity behind language we now take for granted. FDR doesn’t just throw money at the British in its hour of peril but proposed what he calls “Lend Lease,” which is like “lending a garden hose to your neighbor” when his home was on fire. Running against 73-year-old Bob Dole in 1996, the 49-year-old presidential incumbent couldn’t comment directly on their age discrepancy. Instead Clinton aspires that his second term be “a bridge to the 21st century,” which leads all to quietly wonder whether Dole can even last that long.
The language of politics especially includes imagery and stories that are “sticky.” In their much-cited books and articles, behavioral psychologists George Lakoff and Drew Westin explain how politicians can create narratives that project who they really are. Historically such examples include Lincoln as the “Rail-Splitter,” Kennedy’s PT-109 tie clips, Lawton Chiles’s boots as he walked Florida state, Joni Ernst’s castration of pigs (“I’m going to Washington to make ’em squeal!”), Occupy Wall Street’s “we are the 99 percent”—these all convincingly embody a candidate or cause.‡
So find a voice. Especially with social media putting a premium on conveying your thoughts in under 140 characters, it’s helpful to stand out with something distinctive, i.e., your brand. The late publisher Peter Workman was considered a marketing genius. When shaping my book The Consumer Bible, he told me to make it either the shortest such advice book or the longest: “But you must stand out either way.” (The book is 652 pages.)
Whatever some may think of Nader’s blunt righteousness, Buckley’s polysyllabic high-browisms, and Trump’s bullying and bragging, no one would doubt these different people each has a memorable voice. You know who they are.
5. Stay Calm! Calm is when Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson all betray not a trace of anxiety to observers when, respectively, (a) they console the mayor of Chicago just shot at FDR’s side in 1933, (b) receive the news in October 1962 that the Russian freighters carrying nuclear missiles to Cuba have turned back, and (c) oversee the transition of government from Parkland Hospital and Air Force One on November 22, 1963.
People want to know that a principal can handle controversies and concentrate on results because, according to New York Mets manager Terry Collins, “When the manager panics, everyone panics.” On most days, a candidate will hear both terrific news and awful news that would clobber most people—or would lead a rational human being to believe either that s/he can’t lose or can’t win . . . when in fact neither is almost ever true.
I grow up with an older brother repeating that “the Eleventh Commandment is—thou shalt not sweat.” That’s planted and grows in my formative mind. In high school, my on-field varsity baseball nonchalance earns me the nickname of “Sparky.” That Sparky irony, however, helps me persevere on discovering with a month to go that my 1986 Senate primary opponent is outspending me 10 to 1 due to his inherited wealth, and drives me to deliver upbeat concession speeches over the years when the impulse, as Adlai Stevenson famously said, is just to cry.
Calmness can confound critics. It’s pretty humorous how Barack Obama’s “insufferable serenity”—his combination of Mr. Spock and Joe Friday—infuriates opponents. They disparage him as too aloof, disconnected, lacking an emotional register,§ actually the very same things that were said about John Kennedy. (“As far as backslapping with the politicians,” JFK told an interviewer, “I think I’d rather go somewhere with my familiars or sit alone somewhere and read a book.”) After Bush 43’s impetuous bring-it-on personality and presidency, Obama’s steady-Eddie manner—whether dealing with a rumored terrorist attack at his 2009 inauguration or joking at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner hours before the raid that killed bin Laden—seems far preferable.
6. A High IQ Is Good/A High EQ Essential. Teddy Roosevelt published 32 books, Woodrow Wilson was among the most noted historians of his era pre-presidency, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a leading sociologist pre-Senate. The brilliance of all three surely boosted their ascents.
One needn’t be the smartest person in the room to succeed in politics, only “smart enough,” as the often-ridiculed Eisenhower and Reagan surely were. Far more urgent than a big bandwidth is a superior EQ—for emotional quotient—the intuition of being able to interpret signals from your immediate environment. It is as easy to imagine playing tennis blindfolded as to believe a person can survive public life without being able to successfully read people and situations. It was said of Lincoln by his law partner that “he understood politics because he understood human nature.” The best description of this kind of intelligence in the next century comes from the young John Maynard Keynes, observing British prime minister Henry Lloyd George at the Versailles Conference in 1919: “To see [him] watching the company, with six or seven senses not available to ordinary men, judging character, motive, and subconscious impulse, perceiving what each was thinking and even what each was going to say next, and compounding with telepathic instinct the argument or appeal best suited to the vanity, weakness, or self-interest of his immediate audience was to realize that the poor President would be playing blind man’s bluff in that party.”
The best modern approximation to Lloyd George has been, by common consent, Johnson. He often remarked that his father admonished him that “no man belonged in politics unless he could walk into a room of people and know at once who was for him and who against him.” In his books on LBJ, especially Master of the Senate, Robert Caro described how he knew the price of every liberal and southern senator and then how to stitch them together into one coalition. This one a chairmanship, that one a cash donation, another a hint about VP—and he and aide Bobby Baker would be the tellers of this favor bank.
Another way to look at this is that Lloyd George and Johnson had great intuition. After analyzing many previous studies, researchers at Leeds University concluded that “an unarticulated, often unarticulatable, feeling—that something is right or wrong—is the brain drawing on past experiences and current external cues to make a decision; a process so rapid that the reaction is nearly subconscious.” It’s Bill Clinton’s political fast-twitch muscles taking over when he makes a judgment call. Or in the movie Premium Rush when bike messenger Joseph Gordon-Levitt is speeding down NYC streets and a mental computer pops up on screen showing him making hundreds of calculations a second about the best route to take without running over anyone or being run over. Good time for good intuition.
7. Listen and Learn. If someone doesn’t consider politics a “learning profession,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reportedly said, they won’t be very good at it. Society, issues, and popular opinion shift rapidly, and to stay a representative, you have to understand those you represent.
Listening isn’t a slogan but an essential ingredient in the sauce of democracy. Lincoln famously spent hours personally meeting with petitioners during the Civil War in what he called his “public opinion baths.” It was how he figured out that the country was not ready to emancipate the slaves in 1862 but, after a few victories on the battlefield, was on January 1, 1863. FDR got mixed grades as a listener, often using up time in meetings with long, funny stories. Still, as journalist Dorothy Thompson said, “Every pore in his body was an ear.” Lyndon Johnson’s father was apparently an axiom machine since his son also attributed this to him: “you ain’t learning nuthin’ while you’re talking.”
It’s also essential that officials set aside time every day to learn and not merely respond to fire alarms. I recall how Nicholas Johnson, a former FCC commissioner under LBJ, asked me in the 1970s how much time I set aside a day to read. I guessed up to a couple of hours. “Not enough,” he replied, and we settled on three hours as ideal. In this context, I find it reassuring that, after his wife and kids are asleep, President Obama reportedly surfs the Internet getting an unfiltered look into what people are saying and thinking. Isn’t that sort of a modern Lincoln’s “baths”?
In this category too go the previously discussed Hillary Clinton “listening tours” in 2000 and 2015/16.
8. Balance Ego and Empathy. The most common trait of politicians, says one psychologist, is the “impulse to dominance”—the belief that among 600,000 or 320 million citizens, respectively, s/he would be the best congressperson or president. That requires a large amount of confidence and optimism, as noted, but if it’s too large, then a person can plunge over the cliff into narcissism if not solipsism, a place where others exist only for your enhancement. And extreme self-absorption is inconsistent with the public good of serving everyone. According to Craig Malkin, author of a book on the subject, the key is “to love yourself but not too much.” Nader was getting at this in the chapter above when he said that avoiding excessive ego is essential since the public person is then wasting effort on appearance, position, and spin rather than bearing down on the substance and the goal.
Most close observers of Franklin Roosevelt agree that it was only his devastating infantile paralysis after 1921 that erased a youthful superciliousness and helped him understand people who needed help to survive. “There were two Franklin Roosevelts,” writes Ted Morgan in his biography of FDR, “before and after polio.”
Two with a terrible imbalance between ego and empathy were General Douglas MacArthur and Mayor Ed Koch. According to author David Halberstam, the former “was addicted to publicity and fame,” and it was revealing that his most famous utterance was “I shall return” to the Philippines, not “we” shall return. Curiously, Koch’s most well-known refrain was “How’m I doing?” He boasted to aides that his name appeared every day somewhere in the New York Times over his first term. Or as journalist Dan Janison of Newsday once wrote, Mayor Koch was always “unavoidable for comment.” He’d fall asleep at meals with friends if the conversation veered away from him, and he took delight in being vindictive, once snapping at the young son of a councilman he was feuding with, “No one likes your father!”
After Koch chided Giuliani on our NY1 TV show for being “a nasty man,” the title of his book on Rudy, I teased him about the irony of his title. “When was I ever nasty?” he asked, seriously curious. “When you bragged that you made city council president Carol Bellamy cry.” “Well,” responded Ed, his voice rising to a shriek, “she deserved it!” I felt like dropping my mic and flipping my bat. A few days after Koch’s death, I joined a NY1 panel with Eliot Spitzer, Al D’Amato, and Carl McCall to comment on his career. I agreed that he was a good mayor in his first term, far less so his third, and that “he loved New York City and himself and wisely merged the two so it seemed as one.” “Who did he love more?” inquired McCall. “We’ll never know,” I answered.
At the other end of the ego-empathy spectrum, there’s Obama and Hillary Clinton. I first met Obama at an East Side apartment in 2007 while he was on a book tour for The Audacity of Hope. I was standing with Jonathan Alter, a journalist who knew him well. “Where are the sound bites and the me, me, me’s?” I asked after hearing the author’s subdued, substantive talk. Alter, who would go on to write the definitive book on Obama’s first term in the White House, explained that his style is more issue-based than self-centered. Later out-of-context quotes about how he wanted to “slow the rise of the oceans” reflect not his personal megalomania, as Romney and others would tease—though he obviously has a monumental self-regard—but a far-reaching idealism. On the empathy scale, when Barack Obama unexpectedly said of Trayvon Martin that “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” and then, Trayvon Martin “could have been me,” it’s hard to doubt the sincerity of the sentiment.
Hillary Clinton had the ego and guts to tee off on Senator Edmund Brooke at her 1969 commencement address at Wellesley and much later to run for the U.S. Senate, initially against hometown favorite Mayor Giuliani. But in a conversation with an associate of mine, she modestly described her anxiety in her first campaign for president at being the short woman on stages with so much testosterone. She never seemed to indulge in the did-you-see-me-on-TV mode that was like breathing to Koch. And from her student organizing to her legal aid work, efforts for the Children’s Defense Fund, and adoration by staff, there’s little doubt that her big heart is not a tactic but a trait.
9. Know When to Fold ’em. Asked what was the most essential skill for a general, George Washington replied, “To know when to retreat and dare to do it.” (The general lost most of his battles during the Revolutionary War but not the last one.)
Basically, a smart politician will need to know when to insist on principle—Obama pushed for his health-care bill when Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel predicted it would fail—and when to retreat, as Washington did for nearly all of the Revolutionary War until Yorktown. A stressed-out but savvy Andrew Cuomo understands this strategy when he drops out of his failing gubernatorial race in 2002 assuming he can come back another day, and does. When I’m falling behind Chuck Schumer in 1998 for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination, some friends and family suggest that I consider dropping out and run instead for attorney general. But my personal approach about focus and odds make me stubbornly push onward. Years later, AG Eliot Spitzer says that if I had dropped down to his attorney general’s race, he would have had a hard time competing.
Ditto the day that Ferrer demands that I fire two people because he thinks (incorrectly) that they organized the distribution of derisive literature about him and Sharpton. As discussed earlier, I refuse because I can’t stomach publicly throwing two good, loyal, innocent people under the bus based on a losing candidate’s pique and my political exigency. But is “stomach” the right consideration? Obama almost surely wasn’t telling the truth when he went six years as president saying that he was “evolving” on marriage equality so as not to risk his presidency . . . until public sentiment caught up to his private belief. During the Ferrer fracas on the campaign’s final weekend, Bill Clinton suggests that we figure out “some way to get past this until after Tuesday.” He’s politically right, of course. What’s the point of sticking to Thursday’s principles if by Tuesday night you’ll be in no position to implement them? But at the time, we can’t figure out a way to quell Ferrer’s anger and bridge different goals—he cared mostly about saving face and protecting his base, I about winning the election.
10. Be Friendly, Funny if Possible. When asked early in his 1980 presidential run why he thought he could be president, George H. W. Bush replied without a pause, “Well, I’ve got a big family and lots of friends.” In an era when it’s good to be liked by billionaires with super PACs and by voters watching TV, it’s ideal to be personable.
TR was immensely warm and entertaining (so long as you didn’t get in his way) with a ready, explosive laugh. When he exclaimed “Bully!” it was not in the Chris Christie sense. FDR was like “opening a bottle of champagne,” according to Churchill’s apt metaphor. But at the level of sheer likability, Eisenhower was in a class by himself. There’s a reason he won two landslides (though beating the Nazis helps). A modestly mannered Ike was a man without enemies.
Humor is wonderful if situational and doesn’t take a bite out of anyone. In the modern era, Congressman Mo Udall (D-AZ) was an exemplar, as when he commented after losing a race for majority leader, in which some colleagues promised support but then voted against him in a secret ballot: “The difference between a cactus and a caucus is that in a cactus, the pricks are on the outside.”
Speaking personally, I absorbed from my father the ingratiating impulse to be immediately jokey whenever I meet someone. My friend David Bender believes this instinctive kibitzing to be a Jewish defense mechanism, evolved over centuries of self-doubt and pogroms. When Danny Goldberg told me that his very discerning wife “really likes you,” I immediately shot back, “You mean for a politician?” Danny later told me, “I love your New York shtick but can sure see why others wouldn’t.”
11. Have a Mentor. There are exceptions who rocket to high office without a major helping hand, but it’s a lot easier if you have a mentor as a model and door-opener.
FDR had his fifth-cousin Teddy as an adored, obvious example. Then Eleanor became almost a second president because, unlike him, she could more easily move around absorbing and sharing intel. Of course, Andrew Cuomo had his father as a gubernatorial model and blocking back, and Bill had Hillary—and then Hillary, Bill. As Clinton confidant Bernie Nussbaum has said, he wouldn’t have been president without her, nor she without him.
LBJ is perhaps the classic pol with mentors. Entering the House a big-eared freshman in 1937, he immediately attached himself to a fellow Texan, Speaker Sam Rayburn, who got him on the right committees and showed him the ropes. Once in the Senate, he did the same thing with the powerful Richard Russell of Georgia. These father figures plus his own savvy created a Senate majority leader in his first term.
For me, that would be Nader. Like so many Raiders reflecting on our years with him, I’m reminded of what Stephen Colbert said on Jon Stewart’s final Daily Show: “We owe you because we learned from you. You were infuriatingly good at your job.”
12. Raise Money. Then Raise More. Perhaps the most miserable feeling in politics is if you’re indeed a superior candidate with a story to tell but lose because you run out of fuel in the last lap of the race. This is what spurred me to make those 30,000 phone calls to potential donors in my 2000–2001 mayoral campaign and what makes Chuck Schumer unbeatable. With the amounts essential to success rising geometrically after Citizens United, this skill becomes a ticket of entry to the game of politics. It was considered awesome when incumbent Richard Nixon outspent Senator George McGovern $60 million to $25 million in 1972. In 2016, it is expected each party’s presidential nominee will end up raising well over $1 billion. Same trend lines, though involving lesser amounts, for House and Senate seats.
Raising the most money in a campaign does not guarantee victory. But raising the least means you have to hope to be among the fortunate 1 in 10 who wins nonetheless.
Skills 1 to 12 basically add up to vitality and judgment—the first you’re born with, and the second you learn by a lifetime of mistakes. So do you “want to be in the room where it happens,” with the risk of perhaps giving concessions speeches in front of your weeping family, or choose the family business and wonder what might have been?
On Luck and Lying
How’d you do? You running for office?
If you have a so-so score on the big 12 skills, there are two other routes to political advancement that are neither reliable nor sustainable.
One is luck—the hope that chance taps you on the shoulder. For all the quotes about it being “the residue of design” that benefits “the prepared mind,” luck is still just fortuity. When it heavily rains upstate but not downstate on the day of my Democratic Senate primary on September 9, 1986, it depresses the more conservative upstate turnout for my opponent John Dyson and elevates the downstate liberal vote for me. But the law of averages says that such external variables even out over the course of a career. They did with me.
Knicks coach Red Holzman and President Kennedy were fatalists who understood luck and preparation. Holzman was once asked to explain a one-point loss and sensibly remarked that he’d either be regarded as brilliant or a bum only in hindsight once the final shot either went through the hoop or happened to bounce off the rim. Kennedy told his friend Ben Bradlee late in the 1960 presidential contest that after doing everything he could, he’d either win the presidency narrowly or go off to head a small college somewhere.
Relying on lying to win, however, exploits our evolutionary instinct to believe what we’re told. As Sissela Bok explains in her book Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, imagine what life would be like if nothing could ever be believed.
Every person at some point in their life lies. No one frets little white lies (“Grandma, you look great!”). And then there are those acceptable “lies” politicians tell when everyone understands what’s going on, like when a candidate quits a race to “spend more time with his family.” Then there’s something beyond the innocent but short of sinister/impeachable. Consider: for national security reasons, Eisenhower flatly lied about U2 flights over the Soviet Union in 1960, until Francis Gary Powers was shot down and captured; the Kennedy campaign denied that the candidate had Addison’s disease throughout 1960 (he did); also, there were the early Clinton-Lewinsky denials, although presumably most people would lie about an extramarital affair.
May I cop to the one time I blew smoke?
I’m allergic to lying, even of the innocent kind, as family and friends will vouch. But when I was asked on a Sunday news program during my 1986 Senate race whether I ever smoked marijuana, in a blink I decided not to be the very first candidate in this pre–“I never inhaled” era to end his career on this routine private matter. “No,” I heard someone with my voice say. “I grew up thinking myself an athlete and always avoided smoking anything. Those days are long past but my habit of not smoking hasn’t.” I’m amazed and chagrined at how easily I spoke those words, especially when staff later laughed about this denial from a boss who grew up culturally in the Sixties. (Yes, that was really the last time I did anything like that.)
Beyond the innocent and tactical, there’s a Nixonian level of lying to help someone stave off what is perceived to be a disaster. (Lance Armstrong and steroids come to mind.) But should this become habitual, it forces the practitioner to always halt, however briefly, to calculate what s/he has previously said in order to fabricate consistency. However useful in the short run, the habit of lying on many small or some big things drains energy and means you’re one slip-up away from self-immolation.
So—unless you’re an especially entertaining reality-TV star with a hardcore racist following—skip it if you intend to be around for the long term.
The Rule for Advocates
What traits does it take to be an effective advocate?
I’ve met talented people who were great pols though not great advocates, and great advocates who were not great pols. There are very, very few who are both.
In politics, it’s essential to figure out your leverage and use it. Bloomberg had money, Bush 43 and Cuomo 2 their last names, Obama and de Blasio their interracial stories. In advocacy, the sine qua non is a set of beliefs that you embody and project. While politicians necessarily compromise to get elected or bills enacted, advocates have a core moral principle that cannot be compromised away. This is what Shaw meant by “unreasonable men” whose commitment and credibility draws followers, allies, media, funds. Think of Louis Brandeis a century ago exposing the railroad monopoly in New England. Or Gandhi: “His rejection of power enhanced his authority,” wrote biographer Louis Fischer.
Who has leapt the chasm between inside pol and outside advocate? One is Robert Reich, who was an effective secretary of labor under President Clinton and candidate for governor of Massachusetts before losing a primary to a party regular. He then went on to become an even more influential public intellectual on economics. Going in the other direction is Ron Wyden, a leader of the Gray Panthers in Oregon in the 1980s when he won a House race and then a Senate seat. Civil rights heroes Andrew Young and John Lewis successfully made the conversion from cause to politician. Elizabeth Warren was a law school professor in 2008, ferociously devoted to fixing the bankruptcy system; then, due to a series of unusual events—like running for the Senate only when Republicans wouldn’t allow her to head the Consumer Finance Protection Board—six years later she’s a nationally renowned senator due to her smarts, drive, and voice.
Nader, of course, is a classic advocate: obstinate, idealistic, apolitical. He doesn’t calibrate positions based on an electoral career and can’t quite understand when others do. In mid-2014, he criticized George Miller (D-CA) over what Ralph argued was a weak push for a minimum wage increase. Said a Miller aide later to me, “He has no idea or concern about the politics of it and what we can and can’t do.”
“Unreasonable men” and women like Norman Thomas, Jeanette Rankin, Upton Sinclair, Ramsey Clark, Robert Reich, and Ralph Nader all seek office but end up being strong-willed and full-throated outsiders pressuring insiders to make law. They get presidential or mayoral pens at bill signings and the satisfaction of adding to the saga of democracy.
As for me, it turns out that I too am a better advocate than politician. Several years into electoral retirement, while writing books and hosting a radio show, I spot a longtime friend at a funeral. “I love the new Mark Green,” says an astute Robert Zimmerman, a DNC official and businessman, “who turns out to be the old Mark Green who’s found his inner Nader.”
Notes
* Suggestions involve traits, not tactics, not what percentage of the budget should go to social media versus field.
† Those who lost very early races include Lincoln (House; Senate, twice), Teddy Roosevelt (mayor), FDR (Senate), LBJ (Senate), Bill Clinton (House), George H. W. Bush (Senate, twice), George W. Bush (House), Barack Obama (House), Daniel Patrick Moynihan (city council president), and Rudy Giuliani (mayor). It appears that an early loss is a near prerequisite for the presidency if not other high offices.
‡ The problem, though, according to George Orwell’s 1946 classic Politics and the English Language, is that “political language [can be] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Language can mislead as well as inspire. Consider “enhanced interrogation,” “mission accomplished,” and “death panels”—all had good runs until exposed as “pure wind” for only primed Fox viewers to inhale. Also, recall John Ford’s timeless observation that “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Babe Ruth told friends that of course he never pointed to where he’d hit a home run in Wrigley Field in the 1932 World Series, “but if those bastards want to think I point to center field, let ’em.”
§ Four days before the 2008 general election at an NYC fund-raiser for the candidate, I ask Patrick Gaspard, a top Obama campaign aide, “Does your boss ever get angry?” Gaspard pauses awhile, then says to the audience, “Just once—when the New Yorker ran that cover with Michelle as an Angela Davis terrorist figure. We had to hold him back on that.”