A little over 16 years ago, in the week before my wedding, I began to notice a certain gloom settling over my husband-to-be. It was disconcerting. Wasn’t this supposed to be the giddiest time of our lives? If he couldn’t be enthusiastic now, on the very threshold of married life, did he really want to cross it?
My fiance sought to explain. He wanted the outcome, but hated the process. He wanted us to be married, not to get married.
In political terms, he was an excellent candidate ideally suited to the office, who dreaded the public rigmarole required to secure the job — and it showed. Had I been an Iowa Republican, rather than a bride, I might well have caucused with someone a bit more fervent — and for me it would have been a mistake.
I keep thinking of this whenever people talk of Fred Thompson’s lack of “fire in the belly.” Apart from being a nauseating idea, belly-fire has become the thing we all think we want from political candidates. We want them to pump their fists, and shout rhythmically, and whip us into a froth of expectation or triumph.
We expect candidates to be passionate, to show by the loosening of their collars and the radiant exultation of theirperorations that they really, really want to win. John Edwards is a master of this type of histrionic delivery: HE will FIGHT for YOU!
By contrast, Fred Thompson is so placid he verges on the sepulchral. In a 17-minute YouTube appeal to Iowans this week, the former senator and TV actor sat calmly at a desk and expressed a desire “to talk quietly” about his principles and goals. In perilous times, he said, the country needed a particular type of leader. “It’s a little late in the process to be coy,” Thompson said humbly: “I believe I’m that man.”
He may well be — but the times don’t favor him. Just as body types go in and out of fashion, so, it appears, do personality types. It’s a question not of intrinsic value, but of curb appeal.
For instance, it was once the case that Americans liked the public projection of modesty, sobriety and reticence, along the George Washington model. They were suspicious of intemperate, fire-breathing Elmer Gantry types.
Those days are long gone, of course, swept away by a tide of ebullient narcissism that has given rise to a culture in which emotion rather than content is often what counts most. Reporters say it’s easy these days to get pithy man-on-street comments, because everyone’s been conditioned to speak in sound bites. We are a society trained to emote on demand.
So a subdued guy like Thompson is puzzling — not because he’s behaving oddly or improperly, but because everyone else is so highly caffeinated. Blogger Glenn Reynolds wonders if Thompson is “too sane to be president.” National Review editor Rich Lowry speculated this week that Thompson might be an introvert, someone who “can’t stand — and finds exhausting — random interactions with strangers.”
“Fred is not an introvert, he’s thoughtful,” disagrees a friend of the candidate, who’s known him for a decade. “He isn’t a narcissist, he isn’t an actor — rather, he plays himself.”
Critics have pounced on a remark of Thompson’s that he is “not particularly interested in running for president.” They’ve taken it to mean that he’s not really interested in the White House, whereas surely the salient part of that sentence is the phrase, “in running for.” Perhaps Thompson is interested in government, not politics.
Pursuing the presidency is an arduous and sometimes shameless process of self-promotion and personal exposure that pushes candidates to act in boastful and rude ways that many Americans wouldn’t tolerate in their own children.
There is something refreshing about a candidate who asks to be judged solely on the seriousness of his ideas, not his zealous persona. It’ll be interesting to see whether the country can calm down long enough to listen.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
