×
SENATORS AND THE PRESIDENCY. Robert Geilfuss smartly shreds the idea that Senators are obviously disadvantaged as presidential candidates because their voluminous vote records present some sort of near-insurmountable problem:
While Harding and Kennedy were the only direct Senate-to-White House candidates, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman, Benjamin Harrison, Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce, John Tyler, William Henry Harrison, Martin Van Buren, Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and James Monroe all served in the world's greatest deliberative body before running for president. If voting records are so important, how is this possible? It's not like records have statutes of limitation.[...]Every officeholder has a record, and every record can be used against a candidate. George H.W. Bush's campaign--under the direction of Lee Atwater--didn't spare Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis the Willie Horton fiasco (or its scorn for vetoing a Pledge of Allegiance bill) just because he wasn't a senator. In fact, if the press distinguished current and former governors, the conventional wisdom might easily be that a governor is the natural long shot, not a senator. Since 1920, only three sitting governors have been elected president: Franklin Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. Six governors (seven if you count Thomas Dewey's 1944 and 1948 campaigns) won their party's nomination before losing the general election, compared with only four senators in the same period.All that said, the Senate does have some natural quirks that render it problematic as a presidential testing ground. The virtues rewarded by the heavily ritualized, slow-moving legislative body are not those necessarily rewarded by the national electorate. Speechifying gets you noticed and compromise renders you effective. Moreover, I'm not convinced the culture of Washington isn't, for most national candidate, a problematic testing ground, as the sort of vaguely ironic, cynical intellectualism praised by the Press Corps doesn't quite translate into a winning campaign style. Someone once wrote that Bob Kerrey and Bob Dole, for all their hype and apparent appeal, always had a bit too much self-consciousness on the stump, always gave the impression of staring out from deep within themselves and arching an eyebrow at the absurdity of it all. The media liked it, but the people didn't. Not all Senators absorb those characteristics, but those likeliest to gain national prominence and appear legitimate presidential contenders often do, as those are the characteristics the Beltway media rewards. --Ezra Klein
