I talked to a veteran of one of the big 2012 Republican presidential campaigns, and he noted that very few politicians know what it is like to be vetted at the level of security that occurs in a presidential campaign.
He thought back to the 1996 cycle. California governor Pete Wilson was, at first glance, a top-tier contender. The New York Times declared, “it is hard to imagine anyone in a better position to run for the Republican presidential nomination next year than Pete Wilson, the boyish-looking 61-year-old Governor of California.” One might think that a man who had been elected mayor, elected and reelected U.S. senator, and elected and reelected governor of the most populous state in the union would have already been thoroughly vetted by the state’s press corps.
Not quite, it turns out; 17 years earlier, Wilson had unknowingly employed an illegal immigrant from Mexico as a housekeeper, and failed to pay her Social Security taxes. Wilson’s bid didn’t take off for quite a few reasons, but that brouhaha, particularly after Wilson’s association with Proposition 187, hurt.
Another top contender that year was Texas senator Phil Gramm — former member of Congress and two-term senator. Again, you would think reporters had combed over the history and life of a longtime elected official in the public eye . . . until the The New Republic found that Gramm had invested $7,500 in a brother-in-law’s effort to make an R-rated spoof called “Beauty Queens” that some characterized as soft-core pornography. Gramm said he had never seen a script of the movie, and that it was never produced.
In 1988, Joe Biden was a three-term senator, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and a top fundraiser — undoubtedly living in the public eye, and the subject of profiles, for years and years. Then Maureen Dowd found that Biden had “lifted [British Labour-party leader Neil] Kinnock’s closing speech with phrases, gestures and lyrical Welsh syntax intact for his own closing speech at a debate at the Iowa State Fair on Aug. 23 — without crediting Mr. Kinnock.” Then the New York Times found that he had plagiarized a law-review article in law school. Within a month, his campaign had ended.
You can argue whether this level of scrutiny is fair or not, but you can’t argue that it isn’t going to happen, and it’s naïve for a candidate and/or his staff to think that rivals and the opposing party won’t attempt to use these past mistakes or unsavory aspects of a candidate’s past.
At first glance, this would appear to be an argument for one of the rerun candidates — Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, or Mike Huckabee — under the notion that they’ve already been vetted by the national press corps. But a party can’t just keep rerunning the same guys forever, and there’s an obvious wariness about candidates whose appeal proved limited four to eight years earlier.
Perhaps it’s a good thing for Republicans to have so many serious options at this early stage — because we never know when any of the first-time candidates could suddenly be forced to confront something in their past that either blows up or severely complicates their bid for the nomination.