Border wars in fight for presidency
ALTHOUGH IT is far too early to predict the presidential nominees, the front-runners - Senator Hillary Clinton and former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani - are poised for a toe-to-toe contest for the presidency.
If both are nominated, it will be the fourth time that New York presidential nominees will have faced off. Three such contests occurred from 1904 to 1944 when New York cousins Presidents Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt defeated fellow New York residents in 1904 (Judge Alton Parker); 1940 (Wendell Willkie); and 1944 (Governor Tom Dewey).
New York so dominated presidential politics that New York natives and/or residents received 47 major party nominations for president and vice president from the first election in 1789. In 22 elections from 1868 to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, then the president of Columbia University, New York-based candidates received 28 of 88 major party nominations for president or vice president - a percentage of 31.8. No other state comes close. So dominant was New York State that 21 of those 22 contests - except 1896 - had at least one New Yorker named to one of the top two major party slots.
No longer do New Yorkers dominate. The last New York resident with a major party nomination was California-born Jack Kemp, vice president nominee on Bob Dole's ill-fated 1996 ticket. The last native New Yorker named on a major ticket was Democrat Geraldine Ferraro on the even more ill-fated Walter Mondale ticket of 1984. She was not the only native New Yorker vice presidential nominee to sink on a ticket. US Representative William E. Miller lost with Barry Goldwater in 1964.
The last native New Yorker president was Franklin Roosevelt (1933-45). The last vice presidential New Yorker was Maine-born Governor Nelson Rockefeller (1974-77) but he was appointed by President Gerald Ford and not elected.
What happened to New York? The first explanation is the New Hampshire primary. It emerged on the presidential landscape in 1952, when Eisenhower defeated US Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio in the Republican primary and US Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee ended President Harry Truman's reelection bid in the Democratic one. Ike went on to win the nomination and the election - the first of 10 consecutive New Hampshire primary winners to capture the presidency from 1952 through the 1988 victory of Vice President George H.W. Bush, thereby creating the legend of New Hampshire's primary. Only two New York-based candidates have won a New Hampshire primary - Texas-born Eisenhower in 1952 and California-born Nixon in 1968. New Hampshire voters prefer the New Yorkers they vote for to be transients.
Beneficiaries of the New Hampshire primary have been nine fellow New Englanders - Massachusetts Democrats John Kennedy (1960), Michael Dukakis (1988), Paul Tsongas (1992), and John Kerry (2004); Massachusetts-born Republicans Henry Cabot Lodge (1964) and George H.W. Bush (1988 and 1992); Maine-born Edmund Muskie (1972) and Connecticut-born George W. Bush (2004). Although the younger Bush has forgotten his New England roots, his father relied upon New Hampshire Governor John Sununu, whose successful primary campaign for Bush I led to his becoming White House chief of staff.
The second explanation is the laudable propensity of New Yorkers to put non-white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males - the traditional model - into the state's major offices - the US Senate, the governorship, and the mayoralty of New York City. The last New York WASP male senator was Charles Goodell, appointed in 1968 to replace Robert F. Kennedy, who defeated Kenneth Keating in 1964, the last elected male WASP senator. Goodell replaced Kennedy, a Massachusetts native but lost in 1970 to James Buckley, a Connecticut independent.
New York has sent such Catholics as Kennedy, Buckley, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Alphonse D'Amato to the Senate - and elected Jewish Senators Jacob Javits and Charles Schumer. Clinton, a practicing Methodist, meets the WASP criteria but not the gender one. WASP males have also been scarce in both the New York governorship with Nelson Rockefeller, the four-term governor leaving in 1974 and the mayoralty of New York City with John V. Lindsay's departure in 1973.
Does it matter? In the 218 years since 1789, the presidency has been held by WASP males for all but the three John F. Kennedy years, 1961-1963.
Democrats have nominated diverse candidates for president - Catholics Al Smith, Kennedy, and John F. Kerry, and Greek Orthodox Michael Dukakis. For vice president, there have been such Catholics as Edmund Muskie, Thomas Eagleton, R. Sargent Shriver, and Geraldine Ferraro, and Joseph Lieberman, the first Jewish candidate on a major party ticket. Of the nine non-WASP Democratic nominees - seven from New York and New England - only Kennedy won in the closest contest of the 20th century. While Democrats have diversified, the only Republican Catholic selected among their 76 nominees was Goldwater's 1964 running-mate Miller.
If Clinton and Giuliani hold their poll leads, then New York State will not only have presented nominees to the nation after a long political drought, it will have diversified American politics dramatically for generations to come.
However, before that day arrives, Giuliani may learn a hard lesson from New Hampshire's voters that retail politics still matter and the state's neighbors like Mitt Romney of Massachusetts can slow if not derail even the most poll-driven candidacy.
Garrison Nelson is a professor of political science at University of Vermont. 