Amateur Hour - the problem with non-politicians running for the presidency

National Review, June 14, 1999 by Richard Brookhiser

Where did all the politicians go?

At the 1936 Democratic convention, H. L. Mencken turned to the novelist James T. Farrell and gestured at the bleating herd on the podium. "Do you see all of those politicians up there?" Mencken asked. "Every one of them thinks he can be president of the United States." Now every nonpolitician thinks he can be president too-particularly in the Republican party. The GOP has taken the Americans with Disabilities Act to its logical conclusion: People who don't know anything can work in the Oval Office. This is bad for the GOP, for conservatives, and for the country.

Half the field of Republican candidates for the 2000 presidential nomination are nonpoliticians. As of now, the pols include a governor (Bush) two senators (McCain, Smith), a former congressman and vice president (Quayle), and a former governor (Alexander). The non-pols are a pundit (Buchanan), a publisher (Forbes), a politician's wife (Dole), and two conservative operatives (Bauer, Keyes). It's as if the party had taken out a help-wanted ad: "TOP EXECUTIVE POSITION: Rule world, lead party. Benefits: Substantial. Experience: None."

The novices do have a neighborly acquaintance with politicking and power. Pat Buchanan, their elder statesman, has plied his verbal skills in two White Houses, during three decades. The rest filled appointive slots in the Reagan administration, from cabinet level (Elizabeth Dole) to gofer level (Gary Bauer). But they have failed-or better, not taken- the ultimate tests of politics: They have never won an election; and they have never been responsible to their constituents afterwards.

Those who have run for president before (Buchanan and Forbes) would have us believe that running and losing is a form of substitute experience. But it only gives them experience as campaigners. Nothing succeeds like success, and nothing tests like it either. Nor is proximity to power the same thing as holding it, with the support (and under the judgment) of the voters who put you there. The non-pols can all claim to have been present, like Dean Acheson, at a variety of Washington creations. But they have not been creators. The buck always stopped elsewhere. That is why Harry Truman's face looks out from historic paper place mats, not Acheson's.

With one category of exceptions, every American president has had elective political experience. So has almost every losing candidate of a major party. The great exception that Americans make is, of course, for officers-partly because the first officer-president, George Washington, set such a good example; mainly because officers, who send men to kill and die, have such a grave responsibility (though it too is under the authority of the elected officeholders who declare and wage war). But even several of the officer-presidents had political experience. Washington spent 16 years in the Virginia House of Burgesses before the Continental Congress picked him to be commander in chief: a lesson in patience that served him well during the screwups and scheming of the war.

Not having held elective office deprives the nonpolitician candidates of an essential skill. When Dwight Eisenhower was about to succeed him, Truman snappishly remarked that "poor Ike" would think of the White House as the Army: He would sit at his desk saying, "Do this" and "Do that," and nothing would happen. Ike, it turned out, was a good politician; after all, coalition warfare-juggling Patton, Montgomery, Churchill, and Roosevelt-had been apt training. Eisenhower was also lucky to have had the gift: Who knew? But Truman's point survives the occasion that prompted it. No one can test-drive the Oval Office. He can, however, practice by operating smaller offices.

The lack of a political record also deprives us, the voters, of a necessary measure of judging candidates. How do we know what the nonpoliticians would do in office? We know what they tell us they will do. But how do we know whether they will stand by what they say? Our doubt arises less from the fear of conscious deceit than from recognizing that every man has a characteristic way of responding to the pressures of power. Pat Buchanan was a speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. So, which man would he emulate? The one who asked Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall or the one who toasted Mao Tse-tung? The one who appointed Justice Scalia or the one who appointed Justice Blackmun? A record of his own would give us a clue.

Partisans of the non-pols, of course, might say that they don't expect their candidates to win; they only want to cast a ballot to register a conviction, and no politician registers their convictions so well. Then the gloomster technophobes are truly right, and television and the Internet have drained reality from the most important arena in public life. It is ironic that conservatives should be the apostles of the virtual and the as-if.

In fairness, we were not the first to yield to the apolitical temptation. That honor belongs to the Democratic party, when Jesse Jackson first ran for president in 1984. Because he was black, he got away with it (although after he won the Michigan caucuses in 1988, George Will did throw him a beanball question about GATT). Then Pat Robertson offered himself to the GOP. Since the religious Right were blacks for most conservatives-i.e., uncriticizable totems-he too got away with it. Then the country at large succumbed. If Ross Perot had not deserted then reentered the 1992 race, he might have won. Colin Powell's triumphal book tour for My American Journey was the apotheosis of apolitical presidential politics. A January 1995 Times-Mirror poll, which broke the electorate into ten socioeconomic and temperamental groups (e.g., Depressed Poor; White Evangelical), found that his rock- bottom approval rating in any group was in the mid-80s.