Why it actually matters how presidential candidates announce

Sen. Ted Cruz announces his candidacy for president at Liberty University on Monday. (Chris Keane/Reuters)

The world will little note nor long remember what Ted Cruz said when he announced his campaign this week, even after he has become president and abolished all taxes and legalized machine guns and replaced school recess with mandatory prayer. Just like nobody remembers what Bill Clinton said at the Old State House in Little Rock in 1991, or how George W. Bush flew around for a few days after his 1999 announcement in a plane he called, with self-mocking irony, “Great Expectations.”

That doesn’t mean, though, that we all shouldn’t pay close attention as a parade of candidates march out to make their intentions known in the weeks ahead. We can learn something from the way all these hopefuls go about announcing their candidacies — and if they’re smart, so can they.

Campaigns these days tend to spend an awful lot of time and money on getting the official rollout right, but the truth is that there’s not a whole lot to be gained, strategically, from your formal announcement. The dynamic of the Republican race won’t be changed because Rand Paul stood in front of an aircraft carrier, or because Jeb Bush rented the nicest ballroom in Coral Gables, or because Rick Perry seceded from the Union and annexed Mexico on horseback.

From left, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry (Getty Images)

What counts, really, is that nothing goes terribly wrong. Stuart Stevens, who advised Bush and later Mitt Romney, says planning your announcement is like giving away your daughter. “Big wedding, small wedding,” he says. “At the end of the day, all that matters is that nobody gets food poisoning.”

That’s why Stevens and some other veteran strategists with whom I talked this week — both Republican and Democrat — counted Cruz’s first-of-the-season announcement as a modest success. He grabbed some headlines, gave a nice talk and did nothing to embarrass himself. At this stage of a presidential campaign, that’s a solid win.

Months or even years later, though, when you look back at the way a campaign officially began, you can often see the foreshadowing of future success or, more often, crushing disappointment. In hindsight, the vibe and venue of an announcement can be a clear window into the vulnerabilities that underlie a candidacy.

The announcement generally tells you, of course, what kind of overarching theme a candidate intends to pursue. A lot of governors and senators choose their childhood homes or their statehouses, or some other local venue that contrasts the futility of modern Washington with our more idealized notions of local politics. That’s the classic outsider motif.

That Cruz chose the stage at Liberty University in Virginia, rather than a venue in Texas, was a clear signal that he sees himself as a vehicle for a spiritual and ideological uprising, rather than a geographic one. Like Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan before him, Cruz intends to run on values, rather than on governance, and that’s probably the path that best suits both his temperament and the political reality.

Cruz at Liberty University on Monday (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

But the kickoff event can tell you something less obvious about a candidate’s thinking, too. In 2011, Tim Pawlenty announced what seemed like a promising presidential bid in Iowa, rather than in neighboring Minnesota, where he’d just served two terms as governor. Another former governor, Romney, held his 2012 coming-out party in New Hampshire, just over the border from his home in Massachusetts.

When I see a candidate make this kind of overt appeal to a specific media market, rather than bringing the voters into the world he inhabits, it tells me a couple of things. One is that the candidate is thinking more tactically than substantively and is probably spending too much time on figuring out the delegate math and not enough time on an actual agenda. Another is that the candidate isn’t thinking very hard about how to relay his own story to voters.

Some announcements tell you, when you look back on them, whether a candidate had a good sense of his own strengths and weaknesses. You may recall that in 2007 Barack Obama announced his campaign in front of a cheering throng of thousands in Springfield, Ill., the home of Abraham Lincoln. The front-runner Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, announced in an oddly impersonal video that showed her sitting on a floral couch, like North Korea’s dear leader.

Obama understood that his had to be a campaign grounded in history and inspiration, and it had to embody the idea of grassroots participation. Clinton thought herself self-evidently presidential and able to stay above the fray. One of them was right.

You can get a glimpse of telling personality traits, too, in that first big speech. I think of two former senators I’ve known well through the years: Gary Hart, who was the presumed Democratic nominee in the 1988 race, and Bill Bradley, who challenged Al Gore in 2000.

Both are private, deeply thoughtful men who announced their candidacies, to much anticipation, in ways that made them appear oddly alone; Hart spoke by himself at a news conference in Colorado’s Red Rocks Park, and Bradley faced reporters awkwardly at a community center in Newark, N.J. The same sense of isolation and diffidence would shadow both of their unsuccessful campaigns (and, in Hart’s case, would make it harder to withstand a ruinous scandal several weeks later).

If you haven’t done the hard work of preparing yourself to run for president, either mentally or logistically, the bland campaign announcement can become a treacherous moment. Consider the infamous example of Ted Kennedy, whose 1980 campaign ran into problems on the eve of his official announcement tour because he couldn’t tell the newsman Roger Mudd why, exactly, he wanted the job.

Then there’s Jon Huntsman, whose announcement in 2011 turned into one of the stranger examples of the genre. The idea was for Huntsman, the former Utah governor, to speak at the Statue of Liberty. But first he had to endure a power outage, and then he and his family made an interminable walk across the lawn to an accompaniment of slow fiddling, like the kind of old saloon music you’d hear in a Ken Burns documentary.

Huntsman did fine, but the overall impression was of an overwhelmed candidate and a hastily thrown-together campaign — an impression quickly borne out in New Hampshire and Iowa.

Someone this time, Republican or Democrat, will probably experience a similarly ominous campaign launch. So if some candidate asked my advice (and there’s no reason anyone should), I think I’d suggest that he or she look at the announcement not as a way to get attention or influence polls, but rather as an opportunity to test the foundation of a campaign — to make sure there’s some clarity of vision to what you’re doing before you actually do it.

Do you know what you want to do as president, and have you figured out how to articulate it? What do you want people to see when they look at you standing up there? Do you know who you’re talking to and why?

If you can answer those questions clearly, you’ll at least do yourself no harm. If you can’t, you may look back at the announcement as the high point of your campaign.