On the Trail

WHEN JOHN ANDERSON opted to make a run for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1978, he was known to knowledgeable Capitol Hill watchers is as an outspoken Congressman with 20 years of experience. That same year, he hired Mark Bisnow to be his chief speechwriter, press side, and personal advisor, for a 1980 Presidential campaign.

Bisnow, now a second-year student at Harvard Law School, wrote Diary of a Dark Horse to give a first-hand account of Anderson's Republican nomination bid, and letter his independent candidacy. Upon reading it, one suspects he did so to make sure that the version that tells what really happened is Mark Bisnow's, and no one else's.

The reason for this is that Anderson's campaign, according to Bisnow, was actually two separate bids for the White House: one run by Bisnow, and one run by act New York political consultant David Garth. And judging from Bisnow's repetitive negative representations of Garth as the figure who crushed Anderson's once positive campaign outlook, it seems that the author has a personal interest in telling the "inside" story of Anderson's defeats. Anderson was actually more popular when Bisnow ran the campaign, according to polls, than after he was abruptly displaced by Garth.

Yet Bisnow's analysis is more than just a chance to get even with Garth. It is a close examination of the quirks and surprises of trying to raise a candidate from a small "asterisk" notation in the polls to an almost household-name awareness, of how an obscure Congressman can become a likely alternative to the candidates provided by the two-party system.

When Anderson lost the Republican nomination, his announcement that he would continue as an independent isolated him even further from more conservative party members, and endeared him to Democrats who found Carter too incompetent to continue to run the nation. Anderson could boast the support of a quarter of the electorate, while another 40-odd percent said they didn't know enough about the Congressman to vote for him.

Yet come election time, he drew less than 7 percent of the vote, probably because Anderson, once touted as the candidate with "new politics," a back-to-issues approach that voters really sought, became a sad, fading shadow scuttling behind Reagan and Carter. He came to be perceived as very much the politician concerned about his image, not the intellectual, upfront candidate the press and public had grown to know.

ANDERSON'S CANDIDACY is now little more than a foot-note to the 1980 election, a reminder that he might have won out over Reagan. His dark-horse campaign probably only has significance for those who trace the history of presidential campaigns closely.

Because of his relationship to Anderson, Bisnow saw more than his public image, and could comment on some of his flaws, such as his habit of speaking extemporaneously when he could have been using a well-prepared speech.

I used to chide Anderson about how he could have delivered the Gettysburg Address, if Lincoln's text had been placed in front of him.

About 70 or 80 years ago, which is to say, about four score--and yet who knows, with the new math--our fathers--and I hasten to say our mothers, too, because I am, and have always been, a strong supporter of the ERA, which as you know refers to the Equal Rights Amendment in the Congress, very hard. I might add, our fathers--and among them, I include my own 95-year-old father, who came to the shores of this great nation from his native Sweden, yearning for the new life America promised; our father brought forth upon this continent, from east to west, and north to south and let us not forget the Midwest, from which I myself hail, a new country, a new entity, a new nation, conceived in liberty, or, as the French would say, liberty, egalite, fraternite, although actually the French of the Constitution surely looked as much to English sources, such as Edmund Burke, as to the French philosophes. ...but I digress...

Bisnow's light, funny presentation offers more than just political trivia. Diary is a lesson to all voters, as well as any candidate seeking to rise to national prominence from relatively obscure ranks in 1984-Reuben Askew, and the slowly popularized Gary Hart come to mind.

Anderson became well-liked because he was outspoken, and was willing to give specific answers to issue-oriented questions. The press, when it began taking him seriously, shortly after his decisive showings in the Massachusetts and Vermont primaries, liked his honest non-political approach to campaigning. He was highly accessible to reporters and received favorable coverage, and the voters who read began liking him as well.

That was supposedly the genuine Anderson. When he became an independent candidate, he acquired Garth's imported-from-New-York image, which the press targeted with some cynicism, and his poll rating dropped steadily, week by week.

THE LESSON TO VOTERS: only vote by what the candidate is really like, if it's at all possible to find out. Politicians might also try to be honest and straightforward, Bisnow argues, rather than sticking with the tradition of catering to special interests groups with their campaign speeches.

He implies that there's a lot of packaging to campaigning, which is nothing new, but with a dark horse candidate who doesn't have a large budget, it's possible to get a clearer picture of who is what. Still, voters not close to campaigns can be easily manipulated.

Bisnow's book is especially timely. Its lessons on electing a candidate or running a grass-roots campaign are presented in a detailed, humorous way. He examines the possibility of a third-party candidacy (Anderson is supposedly gearing up for another try as part of the National Unity Party) and paints the scenario for when it might work: when the two-party system yields two equally incompetent candidates.

Diary includes Herblock and Doonesbury cartoons from the pre-Garth days of the campaign. It was then that Garry Trudeau's Mike Doonesbury joined the Anderson campaign, and members of the Washington press corps immediately recognized the parody of Bisnow.

Anderson was quoted in one Washington journal after reading Diary as saying Bisnow was harboring a "sophomoric and romanticized" view about the campaign's transition from "Doonesbury days" to a national campaign effort.

Bisnow's account makes it seem that the initial phase of the Anderson campaign, besides being worthy of a Doonesbury strip, was a credible way of running a campaign. It is conceivable that politicians can just be honest people, and still be liked by the voters. Bisnow demonstrates that for a short time in 1980. Anderson may have embodied that optimistic view.