DETROIT – The other day, thinking about the approaching impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, I had a flashback to the fall of 1994, when I stopped by the newsroom of the Boston Globe, where I had been doing some freelance work. U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy was in the reelection fight of his life against a young Mitt Romney, and new polls had Romney narrowly ahead.
I was mildly stunned. Could Ted Kennedy, a legendary fixture in the Senate, really be in danger of losing to a Republican from Michigan? There had been negative stories; the senator had gone through a nasty divorce, and his history of problems with alcohol were no secret to anyone.
But when I asked a veteran politics editor, the man just smiled. “You have to understand Irish Catholics,” he said. “They sin, and get caught, and the parish shuns them for a bit. But then they make a speech of contrition and apologize and it all turns out all right.
“That’s what’s going to happen here.”
Sure enough, Kennedy did make a contrite speech promising to do better. He also annihilated Mitt Romney in a televised debate, and his new wife Vicki proved to be a major plus in the campaign. In November, Kennedy won by a 58-41 percent landslide, even as Republicans were having the best midterm election of a lifetime, winning control of both houses of Congress.
In politics as in life, humility can be essential.
Knowing when to apologize, knowing when to appear contrite can be a political asset. President John F. Kennedy took responsibility for the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
Afterwards, his poll numbers shot up, leading him to remark wryly to a friend “the worse I do, the more popular I get.” Even Richard Nixon took some blame for Watergate, saying “I gave them a sword and they stuck it in and twisted it.”
Politicians don’t find it easy to admit mistakes — indeed they all have opponents who are eager to jump at any sign of mistakes and, well, stick it to them if they indeed are handed a sword.
But the best of them know when to admit they were wrong. And that may have been Donald Trump’s most fatal weakness.
He never, ever, took responsibility for anything that went wrong. The phone call to the Ukrainian president, the one that resulted in his first impeachment, was “a perfect call.”
The speech he made on January 6 that many believe incited the riot at the Capitol was “totally appropriate,” he said later.
Clearly, it was anything but.
Every indication is that voters like their politicians strong, but human, and every human, sooner or later, admits mistakes.
Politics is also a sport – and we don’t like sore losers. Twenty years ago, Republicans gleefully savaged Vice President Al Gore and the Gore-Joe Lieberman Democratic ticket as “sore loser man.”
That was because, after initially conceding defeat on Election Night 2000, Gore retracted his concession when the race in Florida tightened to a difference of a few hundred votes.
Not conceding, however, was totally justified. Gore had won the popular vote, had won 267 electoral votes, and would have become President had a handful of extra Democratic votes been found.
But when the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled the counting had to stop, Al Gore told the American people that he had again called George W. Bush to concede, “and I promised him I wouldn’t call him back this time,” he said with a smile.
Every defeated Presidential candidate in modern history has graciously congratulated his rival – but not Donald Trump, though his election was not even very close by historic standards.
To the end, he maintained the election, which he lost by seven million votes, had been stolen, and he refused to congratulate his rival or attend President Biden’s inauguration.
That isn’t what we call sportsmanship.
History is often a good teacher, and most of our presidents have lost an election somewhere along the way, and despite the crushing blow to their ego, admitted defeat gracefully, and learned from it.
Lyndon Johnson lost the first time he ran for the U.S. Senate. George H.W. Bush lost two senate elections. His son lost a race for Congress and Bill Clinton was voted out after his first term as governor. Barack Obama badly lost a congressional primary that strained his marriage and finances.
Even Ronald Reagan lost the toughest fight in decades for the Republican nomination for President in 1976. President Joe Biden tried for his party’s presidential nomination twice before he got it.
Each of those men has said they learned a lot from losing. Donald Trump, on the other hand has been unable to admit he lost, and unable to admit the mistakes he made, possibly even to himself.
Mitt Romney, by the way, made a gracious concession speech to Teddy Kennedy the night he lost. Eight years later, he was elected governor of Massachusetts, and went on to become the Republican nominee for President in 2012. Now he is a U.S. senator from Utah.
President Trump has never admitted that he lost, and left town in a huff before his successor was sworn in, the first President to do so since 1869. There’s no doubt that millions still support him and still believe his election fraud lies – though they are clearly a minority
But Americans have traditionally admired those with grace, and class, upbeat personalities and fair play. Will Trump pay a price for what an earlier generation would have called boorish behavior?
My guess is yes, he already has. And that the payback to come has only just begun.
-30-
