Koplinski Knows Why Men Run for President

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 20, 2000 | by Michael Rust

Brad Koplinski asked 28 presidential candidates why they ran for the White House and analyzed the last 12 elections. His results may surprise you.

January 1998 was more than the month that Monica Lewinsky entered the lexicon of presidential politics. It also was when Brad Koplinski, a young government attorney, political activist and avid memorabilia collector, decided to write a book to answer some of his questions about the kind of people who want to become president.

"I wanted to know, myself: Why did these people want to run for president? Why did they think they were qualified? How did the commercials we all know come about? tactics worked? What tactics didn't?" says Chicago native Koplinski, who came up with the answers during the next two-and-a-half years. Friends provided the photography and book design, and the result is Hats in the Ring: Conversations With Presidential Candidates, available in stores and at www.hatsinthering.com.

Koplinski lived out a political junkie fantasy, talking to 28 former presidential candidates and researching elections from 1948 through 1996. The candidates range in ideology from Alan Cranston to Alan Keyes, and in prominence firm Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern to Larry Agran and Morry Taylor.

The author believes that onetime contenders deserve to be remembered. "Certainly that was the main goal," he says. "Look at Pete du Pont! In 1988, he was talking about school vouchers. Then he began talking about privatization of Social Security, which George Bush called a nutty idea. Now these ideas are mainstream politics. But people aren't giving du Pont the credit. Maybe Hats in the Ring can play a little part in rectifying that."

Insight: What did these presidential candidates have in common?

Brad Koplinski: I think the biggest thing is their desire to shape the country as they saw it and make it a better place. Whether Republican, Democrat or independent, that's really what they were grinning for -- to make our country a better place and our world a safer place in which to live.

Insight: How did losing affect them?

BK: Certainly some of them might have been a little bitter about the way it turned out, but none regretted running. They all thought it was a fantastic experience. Again, a commonality was that most of them commented on how great it was to be out in America and meet with all kinds of different people. Senators, for instance, said it made them better senators.

Insight: How did they view the political system?

BK: It was a mixed bag. Some thought that [the] Iowa and New Hampshire [caucuses] being the first tests was just fine. Michael Dukakis did, of course, because he was in Massachusetts, right next to New Hampshire. Alan Cranston, from California, did not agree. A lot of them were concerned about the way campaigns are financed and kept going back to how this really needs to be changed. For instance, all of them said the $1,000 limits [on campaign contributions] that were placed in 1976 need to be raised or eliminated.

Insight: Some supposedly fringe or quixotic candidates seem quite articulate and strikingly normal.

BK: Extremely. Again, I didn't really know that much about a few of the candidates -- former Minnesota governor Harold Stassen, 1972 American Independent Party nominee John Schmitz, 1972 GOP challenger Pete McCloskey. And I really came away with a great deal of respect after speaking with them. You can't deny Schmitz the 1 million votes that he received. He had good things to say, most interestingly emphasizing that Nixon was no conservative. If that weren't the case, or at least the perception, how could someone running to the right of Nixon pull 1 million votes?

I had no idea Stassen was such a powerhouse in 1948. The newspapers called him the "Boy Wonder." And he won two or three primaries, running everywhere, while Ohio senator Robert Taft and New York governor Thomas Dewey picked and chose where they would run. He still won in Nebraska and Minnesota; he ran very well in Ohio, challenging Taft there, which was unheard of. So many things in the Stassen campaign of 1948 came to be standard practice for modern campaigns: the debate, for instance, and challenging people in their own state, trying to get popular support in the primaries instead of going to the old boss system. He was really a bright guy, an excellent politician.

Insight: Though you are a Democrat, you do an admirable job treating all your subjects fairly.

BK: It was a conscious effort. In fact, I made it a goal to make sure readers would not be able to identify my personal views. That works both ways. There are both Democrats and Republicans who hold views with which I don't agree.

I think the careful balance you are talking about goes back to the respect I have for these people. Here they were, trying to lead the country in the way they thought it should go forward. You have to respect that to do that they had to commit themselves to a campaign, putting themselves and their family in the spotlight, sometimes in dangerous situations. I think the least they deserve is respect: recognition in retrospect that their campaigns were viable and that they had good issues.