Mark Warner yesterday became the first possible serious Presidential candidate to announce he was not a candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination. He will certainly not be the last to do so.
Running in any multicandidate primary is extremely difficult work. Running in an endless series of multicandidate primaries is the most difficult of all possible tasks.
Any possible Presidential candidate starts off with a base of only a fraction of the Democratic Party. The larger the field, the more difficult it is to grow that base. Warner shared Southern roots to varying degrees with former Arkansas First Lady Hillary Clinton, Arkansas resident Wesley Clark, former North Carolina Senator John Edwards, and Delaware Senator Joe Biden.
In 1974, Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota was facing a similarly large field. He announced he would not run for President because he did not want to spend two years in Holiday Inns. When picked for Vice-President in 1976, he was more optimistic. "I hear they've redecorated," he said of the Holiday Inns.
Mondale's early announcement of non-candidacy left him without any battle scars and enabled him to be a noncontroversial pick of Jimmy Carter. Similarly, Al Gore's early decision not to seek the 1992 Democratic Presidential nomination, after having been a somewhat polarizing candidate in 1988, made it easier for Bill Clinton to select him.
That these are the last two men to actually be elected Vice-President may be an interesting coincidence, or it may say something important about the Presidential process.
The question about whether one is stronger for having engaged in a tough primary or primaries or for skipping a tough primary or primaries is a perennial one for political strategists. One makes enemies as well as friends by actively competing. And one looks weaker rather than stronger by competing and doing badly.
One thing is certain: anyone who wants to compete and run impressively has to have the strong conviction that victory is possible, and the enthusiasm to believe that victory is important. The more one is subject to doubts on either or both counts, and the more attractive other uses of one's time and emotional energies are, the less likely an actual candidacy is.
A state legislative candidate whom I have known for decades ran in a contested primary recently and came in third. She was subject to much needling for saying after it was over that she would have won if the other two candidates were not in the race. But she was expressing a core truth about politics: it very much matters who else is in the race for any office.
There is no shortage of well-qualified and potentially electable Democratic Presidential candidates for 2008. Whoever gets the Democratic nomination will win on the basis of pre-existing support, fundraising, organization, money, convincing messages, communication strategies, and a large measure of luck.
The decision of candidates to run or not run is a key part of the consensus building process for both parties. Gradually a large potential field will shrink into a much smaller field of actual candidates, and this field will further shrink into a field of major candidates, from which--obviously--one person will be chosen.
How this field shrinking process works--whether it is peaceful or polarizing, consensus building or bitterly divisive--will be a major factor in determining the ultimate success of the nominee of each party.