Posted on 07/25/2004 7:05:24 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
BOSTON - At conventions devoted to electing next presidents, there's always the question of what to do with ex-presidents, not to mention those who ran and lost.
The answer: as little as possible, and get it over with.
Democrats go into their convention Monday needing to accommodate one big brassy winner, Bill Clinton (news - web sites); the towering Kennedy legacy, and a succession of people who have accomplished much but don't wear the magic aura of success. A few of them, in fact, represent crushing defeat.
Clinton was allotted a prime time speech Monday night, a hail to the two-term chief that amounts to a fare-thee-well a safe distance from nominee John Kerry (news - web sites)'s night on the stage Thursday.
The party doesn't want Clinton's outsized personality overshadowing Kerry. Officials also don't want defeated Democrats crowding Kerry's space.
Jimmy Carter, the one-term president, and Al Gore (news - web sites), the almost president, also join the opening act. Other standard-bearers of the past are to be little seen, little heard.
Michael Dukakis, beaten by the elder George Bush in 1988, figures he'll get to wave to the crowd this week and that's about it. In the convention's opening hours, the former Massachusetts governor is taking people on a walking tour of Boston.
George McGovern and Walter Mondale, who lost by historic proportions in 1972 and 1984 respectively, also are not front and center. When a speaker at the 2000 convention wanted to describe Democrats as the party of Mondale and McGovern, organizers purged their names from the remarks.
Old war horses are treated gingerly, said Bruce Buchanan, who teaches government at the University of Texas in Austin. "It's always a delicate matter on how to use them, whether to use them, how to get them to say what you want."
As Bob Dole once said in quoting a line from the poet Carl Sandburg, "The past is a bucket of ashes." Never more so than at a political convention, where the imperative to look ahead was drummed home in the 1992 Clinton-Gore theme, "Don't stop thinking about tomorrow."
"You want to move forward without bringing up too much of the past," said Eugene Alpert, a Washington, D.C., political scientist who studies conventions.
It usually won't do to ignore an ex-president, he said, but "if they don't fit in a theme the candidate is trying to portray, then you just don't want them there, or you want them quickly on and off. It's a very strange situation."
The Democrats have more living losers than the GOP — 5 to 3. And the elder Bush, who shares presidential defeat on the Republican side with Gerald Ford and Dole, is remembered these days as the father of a president rather than as one who lost the job.
To be sure, Republicans have their ghosts, too. After Richard Nixon left office in disgrace, he was never invited back to a GOP convention.
But Herbert Hoover, unbowed despite being forever associated with the Great Depression that cost him his presidency, came to seven Republican conventions thereafter and was treated, historians say, as one of the boys.
Carter was given scant attention for two conventions after his 1980 defeat by Ronald Reagan (news - web sites), regarded as a "failed president who did not represent the new sense of direction," Buchanan said.
This time, he joins others on the stage. "On Monday they're on, they're gone," Alpert said.
Organizers have to take care with the "800-pound gorillas" — as Buchanan called the big winners — as much as they do the chimps.
Adored by his party, Reagan unavoidably stole thunder from the first President Bush (news - web sites) at the 1992 convention — a meeting thrown off balance even more by Pat Buchanan (news - web sites)'s attention-stealing speech on the culture war.
And Lyndon Johnson found his acceptance speech immediately upstaged in 1964 when Robert Kennedy followed him to introduce a film about his slain brother, John, bringing a 16-minute ovation.
Forty years later, the Kennedys still loom large at a Democratic convention — this one in their home state. Scores from the family are coming and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (news, bio, voting record) will speak and receive the tribute of Democrats on Tuesday.
After that, it's the John Kerry-John Edwards (news - web sites) show.
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