Ron DeSantis and Other Infamous Campaign Launches
A crazed general, a disastrous TV interview, and a Twitter fiasco
Back when Ron DeSantis was first embarking on his presidential campaign, I was contacted by a Washington Post reporter for a piece they were doing on presidential campaign blunders. This was when observers were mocking the governor’s semi-disastrous campaign launch on Twitter.
Obviously, the technical issues that DeSantis and Elon Musk experienced weren’t a great look for a presidential announcement, but it seemed to me the story wouldn’t be calamitous to his campaign as long as it wasn’t followed by other missteps. In that case, a narrative would surely develop about the governor’s inability to manage the massive undertaking that is a presidential campaign. But if was a one-off event, chances are the story would slowly fade away. That seems to be what happened, although the DeSantis campaign was certainly plagued by other challenges.
It did get me thinking, however, not so much about past candidate mistakes but rather about blunders that were specifically associated with the launch of a presidential campaign.
This isn’t a long list, partly because these announcements tend to be meticulously planned out but also because there just isn’t a long history of these things. The big public launch of a presidential campaign is more of a modern phenomenon.
In the early days of presidential campaigns, relatively few candidates even gave public speeches. At all. To do so was considered beneath the dignity of a potential president.
William Henry Harrison in 1840 and Stephen Douglas in 1860 were among those rare candidates who did give speeches, but it wasn't until 1896 with William Jennings Bryan that this became common practice. Moreover, primaries for presidential nominating contests only started in 1912, and there are only a handful of instances before 1972 in which these primaries were even consequential.
So the whole idea of candidate-centered politics with noteworthy campaign launches is fairly new. Even John Kennedy, the first major candidate to master the medium of television, had a rather placid launch to his 1960 campaign with a press conference in the U.S. Senate Caucus Room.
Ted Kennedy’s 1980 campaign launch
The most disastrous modern campaign launch is perhaps the one associated with another Kennedy, the unveiling of Ted Kennedy’s 1980 campaign, when the Democratic Senator from Massachusetts challenged Jimmy Carter, the incumbent president of his own party.
Kennedy’s campaign announcement went off alright, with a speech on November 7, 1979, to 5,000 people in Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall. “I believe in the hope and daring that have made this country great,” he said that day. “The only thing that paralyzes us today is the myth we cannot move.”
But Kennedy’s campaign still crashed on the launch pad because of what happened three days earlier, when CBS News aired an interview with Kennedy. At the time, Kennedy was riding high and leading Carter in the polls. But in an interview with Roger Mudd, he famously struggled to answer a softball question about why he wanted to be president.
Kennedy stammered his way through a long-winded answer without ever truly answering the question. His performance was widely panned, and Kennedy’s aura of seeming invincibility was quickly punctured.
Now, it also didn't help Kennedy that November 4 was the very same day that Iranian students seized the US Embassy in Iran and took Americans hostage. Carter initially benefited from a rally round the flag effect and gained a polling bounce, which also helped him overcome Kennedy's primary challenge.
Nevertheless, Kennedy was seriously wounded by his weak performance in that CBS News interview. Although he eventually won some notable late primaries, this stumbling start enabled Carter to gain a big early lead that Kennedy never overcame.
Vice-presidential rollouts that went off the rails
A couple of other ill-starred launces come to mind, as well, although they were for vice-presidential candidates and not for the person heading the ticket.
Dan Quayle in 1988
One of these was the shaky performance by Dan Quayle when he was introduced in 1988 as George H.W. Bush’s running mate. A Senator from Indiana, Quayle somehow seemed unprepared for the spotlight. He had a deer-in-the-headlights feel about him and was so over-exuberant when introduced that the media compared him to “a game show contestant who had just won the Oldsmobile.” He was also quickly overcome by questions about his resume, including whether his family had pulled strings to get him into the National Guard during the Vietnam War era.
General Curtis Lemay in 1968
Another shaky veep rollout was in 1968 when the independent presidential candidate George Wallace introduced General Curtis Lemay, a hero of World War II and former chief of staff of the Air Force, as his vice-presidential nominee.
Wallace was polling as high as 21% in September and seemed poised to win enough electoral votes to prevent either Richard Nixon or Hubert Humphrey from gaining a majority of electoral votes that fall. But despite his military credentials, Lemay was also a bit of a wild card, having served as the model for a crazed general in the 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove. When introduced as Wallace’s running mate, Lemay said to reporters: “We seem to have a phobia about nuclear weapons.” His comments became headline news and Wallace’s poll numbers plunged.
Thomas Eagleton in 1972
However, the worst vice-presidential launch has to belong to Thomas Eagleton, who was nominated to run with George McGovern on the 1972 Democratic ticket.
Shortly after McGovern announced the Missouri Senator as his running mate, news reports surfaced about Eagleton's past electroshock treatment for depression. The news led to such a media feeding frenzy that McGovern eventually asked Eagleton to resign. This seriously wounded McGovern’s campaign, as he was cast as incompetent in the aftermath and numerous leading Democrats later turned down the opportunity to replace Eagleton on the ticket.
McGovern finally selected Sargent Shriver, former Ambassador to France, Director of the Peace Corps and a Kennedy brother-in-law. But McGovern’s campaign never recovered from this debacle. He may never have beaten the incumbent Nixon in any case, but this episode didn’t help his cause and may have contributed to the landslide nature of his loss.
It's safe to say that DeSantis’ Twitter fiasco doesn’t rise to the level of some of these other failed campaign launches. His campaign announcement wasn’t exactly successful, but it’s not something people are likely to be talking about a few decades from now.