Chris Hondros/Getty Images After the 2004 presidential election, John Kerry delivered his concession speech at Faneuil Hall following a tense night of ballot counting by election officials in Ohio.Senator John Kerry's nomination to be secretary of state makes him something of a throwback. He is an unsuccessful nominee for president who appears set to ascend to a major new political position following his loss.
If he is confirmed, he will become the first losing general-election candidate to do so since Richard Nixon recovered from his close 1960 loss to John F. Kennedy to win the presidency in 1968.
Since then, failed presidential nominees - Barry M. Goldwater, Hubert H. Humphrey Jr., George S. McGovern, Walter F. Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bob Dole, Al Gore, Mr. Kerry, John McCain and Mitt Romney - have not disappeared. They have sometimes remained active in the Senate or, in the case of Mr. Gore, even won a Nobel Prize. But they have not taken on a new job with the chance to reshape their résumés.
The postelection career opportunities of losing candidates used to be different. A pr esidential loss was once a springboard. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson all lost the general election before winning the presidency. (In the early years of the country, the second-place finisher in the presidential electio n became vice president.)
DeWitt Clinton, who lost the presidency to James Madison in 1812, later became governor of New York. Adlai Stevenson served as ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Kennedy after losing to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. Mr. Nixon ran for governor of California in 1962, and lost, before winning the presidency.
More recently, the saturation of media coverage surrounding presidential elections has created a problematic image for unsuccessful nominees. They and their families become the subject of intense attention, only - it seems - to be rejected by the country. Candidates who lose the nomination and receive less attention, by contrast, find it easier to run again or take on wholly new roles.
Mr. Kerry has experienced the problems of losing the general election himself. His line about a bill to pay for the Iraq War - “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it†- has become a standard political joke, and Mr. Romney's struggles in the 2012 campaign were sometimes compared to Mr. Kerry's in 2004.
Yet he is on the verge of overcoming those problems in a way that no other politician has in almost a half century.
Follow David Leonhardt on Twitter at @DLeonhardt.
