23 Months Until New Hampshire
Matt Bai writes about the Democratic potentials for president in a Sunday New York Times Magazine profile of recent Virginia governor Mark Warner:
There are, as yet, no announced candidates for the 2008 Democratic nomination, and even those who expect to run probably won’t make their final decisions before the end of the year. But the process is playing out earlier and more visibly than ever, in part because candidates like Warner are scrambling to make sure this nominating season isn’t over before it begins. Usually when there isn’t an incumbent Democratic president or a vice president with title to the nomination, the presidential field would feature a blended ensemble of candidates, some better known than others but each singing the part of some distinct constituency. At this time in 2002, for instance, the prospective Democrats included the candidate of the foreign-policy establishment (John Kerry); the candidate favored by many Clinton New Democrat types (John Edwards); the anti-Washington candidate (Howard Dean); the Big Labor candidate (Dick Gephardt); and the African-American protest candidate (Al Sharpton). Races like this winnow slowly. On the eve of the Iowa caucus in 2004, with the exception of Sharpton, each of these candidates — and, additionally, Wesley Clark — were still very much in contention for the party’s nomination.
The Democratic field now emerging, on the other hand, is looking a lot like Gladys Knight and the Pips — and you can guess who gets to be Gladys. The party’s insiders, expecting [Hillary] Clinton to be a virtually unstoppable force, seem to be falling in line behind her, which means there will be only so much additional money and organization left over for those who would challenge her. But more than anything, Democrats will tell you that they are desperate to win next time around, and a lot of pragmatic activists and voters worry that Clinton is simply too divisive a candidate to take back the White House. (In a Gallup poll in January, 51 percent of respondents said they would definitely not vote for her.) These Democrats are actively shopping for a candidate who can derail Clinton before the party, as they see it, dooms itself to yet another near miss. And so the conventional thinking holds that there may only be room for two serious candidates by the time the primaries roll around: Hillary and the anti-Hillary.
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There are various interpretations among the party’s cognoscenti as to which hopefuls belong in the coveted “top tier” of potential candidates. As of the end of 2005, Kerry had more than $15 million in contributions stashed away for another bid, as well as a handful of major fund-raisers who remain loyal to him, but the general assessment among Democratic insiders is that his Swift boat has already sailed. Edwards and Clark, meanwhile, won three primary states between them last time around; both have the potential to be serious players in 2008, but neither will appeal to those Democrats who say that the party needs an unfamiliar face.
What remains is a genuinely impressive field of hopefuls whose perceived flaws, in any other year and against any other opponent, might not prompt such dismissiveness from the party elite. Conventional wisdom holds that Joe Biden, who last ran in 1988, can’t raise enough cash, and that the populist Russ Feingold has currency mostly as a protest candidate. Evan Bayh, a centrist senator and former governor, comes across as thoughtful and steady on foreign policy (he also looks the part, bearing a remarkable resemblance to the actor Kevin Kline), but the early word is that he’s a bit too stilted and senatorial, prompting insiders to discourse, yet again, on how few sitting senators are ever elected president. (For the record, there have been only two, and both of them died in office, presumably a coincidence.) Among the governors, Tom Vilsack of Iowa gets high praise from big-time donors, but the next thing they tell you is that he can’t compete financially. As a former United Nations ambassador and energy secretary, Bill Richardson, now New Mexico’s governor, has as wide a range of experience as anyone in the race, but his aggressively extroverted personality makes party insiders uncomfortable — and that was true even before his female lieutenant governor, a Democrat, publicly complained in December that he wouldn’t stop poking her at official functions.
That leaves Warner, onto whom a lot of anti-Hillary Democrats have suddenly projected their hopes. The negative rap on Warner is a lack of relevant experience; he’s a one-term governor (he would still be in office if Virginia allowed its governors to serve consecutive terms), and critics argue that a credible candidate needs to have foreign-policy experience to run in the new, terror-obsessed world. Nonetheless, Warner, on paper, fits the party’s most conventional and tested idea of what constitutes an electable candidate. Though he doesn’t speak with a drawl (he grew up in Indiana, Illinois and Connecticut and moved to Virginia when he was 32), Warner was the popular centrist governor of a Southern state — just like the last two Democrats to actually win the White House, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. He’s also really, sickeningly wealthy. As a co-founder of the cellular-telephone company that ultimately became Nextel, Warner has access to a personal fortune that is said to approach $200 million, and he has already demonstrated, during an unsuccessful run for the Senate and then in his gubernatorial campaign, that he’s willing to use it.
