At the beginning of the day, you stand on the verge of becoming the most powerful person on the planet; by the end of it, you're unemployed and being forced to make a speech expressing humility and gratitude for losing to a man that you know, with every fiber of your being, you are better than. All of the staffers and followers and flashbulbs fade away into the ether. The Secret Service agents and security that had been amassed to protect you had you won get in their black Suburbans and drive off to look after the other guy—the President of the United States that is not you. Presidents Day weekend has to be a particularly hard time for the men who were within an arm's length of The White House, but came up short. Without exception, these men were doomed to live out the rest of their days defined in the public imagination by their greatest defeat. The first line of their obituaries has been set and Presidents Day is just a yearly reminder of the what might have been—a celebration of an anniversary that never came.
It is with this in mind that I humbly suggest making the Wednesday after Presidents Day into Almost Presidents Day, a holiday that celebrates the men who might have been King, had they done a few things differently. And, in honor of this new holiday, I have decided to rank all of the presidential also-rans from the past century in order from best to worst. The only rules behind my rankings are that, in order to be qualified, the losing candidate can not have lost as an incumbent (Hoover, Ford, Carter, H.W. Bush) and can not have gone on to become President at a later date (Nixon). Let's get started:
(1) 1972: George McGovern (D)
As has been mentioned on this site before, Senator McGovern is in many ways my political inspiration. He is proof positive that a man of integrity, compassion and empathy can make it in Washington and that a politician need not sell his soul to win his party's nomination for president. If you want to learn a little more about why I hold this man in such reverence, you can read an obituary I penned on the occasion of his passing back in 2012 and which I recently republished. He was the last genuinely liberal candidate we've had for President in this country—the truest expression of our best selves on so high a stage. Some people point at McGovern's campaign in 1972 as irrefutable evidence that a progressive candidate can never win The White House. These are the same people who caved in to neoconservative pressure and led us into the war in Iraq. They are the people who take millions in campaign donations from big finance and let oil companies dictate our energy policy. George McGovern was not one of those people, which is what made him so special.
(2) 1968: Hubert Humphrey (D)
When he finally earned the Democratic nomination for president on his third try in 1968, Hubert H. Humphrey was seen as the party's establishment candidate. Stepping out of the Texas-sized shadow of the then descendent LBJ, the “happy warrior”, as he was known, hung the albatross of the Vietnam around his neck and tried to win the White House with an unpopular war front and center on his platform. While he would beat out fellow Minnesotan Gene McCarthy at the Democratic convention, but would lose the popular vote to Richard Nixon by seven-tenths of a percentage point. However, while he was derided by the anti-war movement and the American Left during his presidential run, there are plenty of liberals and progressives today who would give their right arm to have a man like Humphrey in the presidential field for 2016. Perhaps more than any other political act, his fight to include a federal fair employment coalition on the 1948 party platform helped turn the Democrats from the party of Dixie to the party of civil rights. As he said at that year's convention, “To those who say this civil rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”
