The most honest political concession speech of the last quarter century was made in a rented motel ballroom in Columbus, Ohio on November 6, 1972. The conceder was the incumbent Democratic governor of Ohio, John Gilligan, who had just been defeated by James Rhodes. His margin of defeat was .4 percent.
Gilligan stood before the cameras alone – no props, no flag, no distraught wife, no sniffling children, no sad-faced advisers. He said, “I think the election was purely and simply a repudiation of me.”
The sparseness of his words has not been equaled or even approached, certainly not in this current presidential race by any of the present or former nine Democratic and thirteen Republican candidates.
The Washington Post recently collected the phrases and clichés that the 2008 crop has been using to ease the pain of a close second-place finish, a crushing loss, even a withdrawal.
Bill Richardson: “The fight goes on.”
Rudy Guiliani: “We’ve made a lot of good friends here.”
Barack Obama: “I’m still fired up.”
Fred Thompson: “The fight goes on.”
Mitt Romney: “Two silvers and a gold.”
Joe Biden: “I feel no regrets.”
Chris Dodd: “The fights we’ve waged …will not end tonight.”
Going back through my notes and copy from the eight presidential campaigns I covered, I nominate the campaign of 1976 as producing the most inventive, audacious and genuinely funny political excuses used by the thirteen Democratic and two Republican candidates. There were just two Republicans that year because Gerald Ford was a sitting president and only Ronald Reagan took him on. The Democrats, however, regarded Ford, the successor to the disgraced Richard Nixon, as less than an incumbent and the White House as almost empty. The Democratic field, therefore, was huge, ranging from Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia, an unknown quantity, to another unknown quantity, Governor Milton Shapp of Pennsylvania.
The New Hampshire primary, on February 24 that year, made Carter the early front-runner. His opponents were not prepared for his victory. Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma who finished fourth said the worst thing “to happen is to run first.” Sargeant Shriver, George McGovern’s running mate in 1972, finished fifth and said, “A couple of more weeks was all I needed.” Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana said, “I said if we could run second we would be credible.” Bayh finished third.
A week later came the Massachusetts primary when Senator Henry Jackson of Washington State set Carter back on his heels. Carter, who finished fourth, said his Georgia crowd wasn’t used to the cold weather. “The snow didn’t help,” he said. George Wallace of Alabama, a strong third in Massachusetts, wasn’t bothered by snow. Besides, he said, “We were mostly second and first at one point.” Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, barely visible in twelfth place, said it was “nice not to have the Secret Service with you every minute.”
It was the Florida primary on March 9 that, in effect, made Carter the next Democratic nominee. The big losers were Jackson and Wallace. Jackson seemed to prefer carrying cities rather than whole states. “What’s significant,” he said, “was we carried Dade County.” And on the Republican side, Ronald Reagan lost to Ford because he found out too late that Florida was not “a normal, typical Southern state.”
One of these days a defeated politician might remember how John Gilligan did it 25 years ago. But we should not hold our breath. Admitting defeat is probably the hardest thing a politician has to do.
One of the most effective rejoinders came from the young sons of Sargeant Shriver after their father and George McGovern were flattened by Nixon in 1972. Taunted by their classmates, “Your father lost! Your father lost!” the Shriver boys would reply, “Your father didn’t run.”
Roger Mudd was a congressional correspondent for CBS News for eighteen years and chief Washington correspondent for NBC News for five (and a co-anchor there for two years). He has also been a political correspondent for the NewsHour, documentary host on The History Channel, and taught at Princeton and at Washington and Lee. His book The Place to Be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News will be published by PublicAffairs in March. Mudd is one of several veteran journalists who are appearing as guest writers for CJR’s Campaign Desk during the course of the presidential campaign.