Nunn Tests the Waters
During the brief period of Mike-o-mania last month that broke out over reports that New York mayor Michael Bloomberg might run for president on a third party ticket, some eager pundits went so far as to speculate about Hizzoner's potential running mate, and the name Sam Nunn came up. Yesterday the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a story by Jim Galloway based on interviews with Nunn and several close associates, and reported that the former Senator had ruled out being anyone's running mate, but was exploring a presidential bid of his own, presumably in conjunction with the Unity '08 third-party project, in which two Georgians, Hamilton Jordan and Gerald Rafshoon, are playing a prominent role.
Before I go any further, I should disclose that I was Nunn's speechwriter and legislative counsel from 1989-92, and will always respect him tremendously. Indeed, his post-Senate career, focusing largely on dealing with the nuclear proliferation threat (one that the Bush administration has been almost criminally slow to tackle despite its alleged national security obsession), has been especially admirable, given the opportunities he had to instead devote himself to the accumulation of personal wealth or become a super-pundit.
But the Nunn-run talk stimulates a strong sense of deja vu. He gave some thought in 1984 to the possibility that Walter Mondale might tap him as a running mate. He seriously considered a presidential bid going into the 1988 and 1992 cycles. And in 1996, the year Nunn retired from the Senate, Ross Perot tried to get him involved in the Reform Party at some high level, perhaps even as a candidate. In every case, Nunn demurred.
During the 1992 runup, when Nunn was asked about his presidential ambitions, he sometimes cited the "Reagan Rules" as making it possible for him to delay a run until his late sixties. He's now 68. So it probably is now or never, but which will it be?
In some respects, Nunn is the perfect vehicle for a High Broderist third-party run based on rejection of partisan polarization and a sort of Government of National Salvation designed to end gridlock in Washington. He was always as popular among Republicans as among Democrats in the Senate, and with the exception of a brief period after his successful opposition to John Tower's confirmation as Defense Secretary and his unsuccessful effort to deny Bush 41 the right to invade Iraq, was also very popular with Republican and independent voters in Georgia (he was re-elected three times with no serious Republican opponent). While he never strayed from fidelity to the national Democratic Party in presidential elections, he insisted on calling himself a conservative, and wasn't very happy when the Democratic Leadership Council, which he chaired for two years just prior to Bill Clinton, decided to name its think tank the Progressive Policy Institute.
Moreover, Nunn's domestic policy views (which never got much attention) during the latter stages of his Senate career never fit neatly into either party's agenda. He was (after 1990) pro-choice, but mainly because he considered abortion bans unenforceable. He was the principal architect of the don't-ask-don't-tell compromise on gays in the military. Always a fiscal hawk (he spent some time as co-chairman of the Concord Coalition after leaving the Senate), his long-standing belief that "entitlement reform" is a critical national challenge has never sat well with Democrats. And right around the time of his Senate retirement, he became a prominent advocate for a consumption-based income tax scheme--an unpopular idea among Democrats as well as Republicans, who typically want to scrap income taxes altogether.
The overriding rationale of a Nunn run would probably be the argument that Democrats are too allergic to the use of force to be entrusted with national security, while Republicans have proven to be both incompetent and excessively ideological, seriously damaging U.S. credibility. Nunn would be very attractive to neo-realist elites in both parties who think the Bush-style Global War on Terror has been a disaster, but who do not favor a significant retraction in U.S. overseas commitments.
Does Nunn have the political chops to run a serious third-party campaign? That's hard to say. He's been in a grand total of one competitive electoral contest in his career (his first election to the Senate way back in 1972). He's always been highly disdainful of modern media-oriented campaigns (one of his closest friends was the late Lawton Chiles of Florida, famous for his throwback style of campaigning). And while he's actually a lively and even witty man, his public persona has always been high on gravitas but low on charisma. Most importantly, Nunn is just not that well known anymore, outside Georgia and elite circles in Washington.
On the positive side, if Nunn were to run a serious campaign with Unity '08 backing, he would presumably have a chance to seriously contest southern states, where neither national party is particularly popular at the moment; it's sometimes forgotten that Perot's political achilles heel in 1992, even at the height of his campaign, was his inability to make a mark in the South. And unlike, say, Michael Bloomberg, Nunn would not likely be dismissed as a vanity candidate with no real qualifications for the presidency.
My own hunch is that Nunn probably won't take the plunge; he's a notoriously cautious man, and despite his unquestioned passion about issues like nuclear proliferation, it's hard to imagine him maintaining a fire in his belly throughout the drudgery of a presidential campaign. And Nunn aside, I personally think the whole Unity 08 effort represents a fundamental misreading of the American electorate, which is likely to produce a sizable Democratic majority in 2008 if we let them (i.e., don't do anything stupid). Today's third-party enthusiasts are reminiscent of the group of former Labour politicians who launched the British Social Democratic Party even as Tony Blair was beginning to position Labour to win a landslide victory.
http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/strategist/2007/08/nunn_tests_the_waters.php
