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WHAT'S IN A NAME? THE PRESIDENCY!

07/07/1999

NEW YORK -- I enjoy reading perplexed analyses of how George W. Bush went from zero to warp speed in about four minutes as a presidential candidate. Who is that guy who popped out of the bushes?

He is, of course, a Bush! Son of Barbara and George H.W. By my estimate that is worth something between $50 and $100 million.

Name recognition is all in the great media storm. Shakespeare may have been right when he wrote, in "Romeo and Juliet," that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. But that is no longer true. We don't have the time to smell things we have not heard about somewhere. What's in a name now? Just about everything.

"Bush" is a brand. So, to a greater or lesser degree, are Gore, Bradley, Dole, Buchanan, McCain and Forbes. We will have a brand-name president in 2001 no matter who wins.

The campaign worth of Bush, son of a president, is derived from the amount of money someone else would have to spend, mostly on television, to get where he was when he was baptized.

The worth of Al Gore, son of a pretty well-known senator, Albert Gore Sr., probably ran closer to $25 million before he became vice president in 1993. Now he is up there with Bush.

Going down that list, Bill Bradley made his own name when he surfaced on television as a basketball star, first at Princeton and then with the New York Knicks. When he first was elected to the Senate, having made his living in short pants until then, Bradley was frustrated by the fact that other senators were more interested in meeting him to talk sports rather than politics.

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Elizabeth Dole (nee Hanford) gained her $20 million in name recognition when she married Bob. Pat Buchanan gained maybe $10 million shouting at people on television.

John McCain's name was worth something when he ran for the Senate because his father, Adm. John McCain, was the U.S. commander in the Pacific during the Vietnam War. The younger gained more recognition first as a prisoner of war and then as a former prisoner of war.

Steve Forbes, like Ross Perot before him, paid good family money for name recognition. His father, Malcolm Forbes, had a seven-figure name. In addition to running the family magazine, Forbes, Malcolm ran for governor of New Jersey and was a flamboyant fellow of many homes, motorcycles and hot-air balloons. The father lived the belief that all publicity is good publicity. The son, however, not flamboyant by nature, has used his own money to do something that no one could have predicted: He has out-done his father in the recognition name game. Extraordinary.

It goes without saying that Lamar Alexander shouldn't be running for president. He is an insult to American celebrity. The same goes for Orrin Hatch. These are uppity originals who have no right to claim even the 15 minutes of celebrity promised by Andy Warhol.

Even pre-Warhol names made news, and news made presidents. There were the sons and other relatives of presidents, beginning with John Quincy Adams, and there were the pre-celebrity famous, usually warriors, from Andrew Jackson to Ulysses S. Grant to Dwight Eisenhower. Ronald Reagan showed the uniform itself was as important as what one did in it, and he won war-hero status without leaving home.

In 1962, you may remember, Edward Moore Kennedy, running for the Senate in Massachusetts, was mocked by an opponent, who said that if Kennedy's last name were Moore he would be laughed off the stage. (The anti-nepotism opponent, Eddie McCormack, was the nephew of the then-speaker of the House, John McCormack.) But now, with political parties little more than ballot lines, organizations of one, which is what name-branding is, are becoming our own version of multiparty politics.

There are, of course, exceptions to any rule, including, as we have seen, Shakespearean maxims. The great exception to name-branding in recent times has been one William Jefferson Clinton. He established his own brand from nothing. It is now valued at about $10 million and is being used by his wife, with 200 reporters trailing her around this very state.