Two years ago, two superstars lit up a dazzled political universe — young, stunning, lissome, and bursting with talent — and were propelled ahead of their time into prominence, after a minimal time on the national scene. Two years later, it seems as if this has done them no favors: President Obama is widely seen as “overwhelmed” by his office, and Sarah Palin is meeting resistance establishing her credentials as a possible candidate against rivals with rather more seasoning. On election day 2008, Obama had been in the Senate for less than four years, two of which he had spent running for president, and Palin had spent less than three years as governor of one of the country’s most remote and least typical states. Are their problems aligned with their so-called “good fortune”? Unhappily, yes.
The problems they’re facing are not age alone. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy were younger than they (42 and 43) when they became president, but their records of service were longer, and deep. Roosevelt was a state representative, police commissioner, governor of New York, and vice president; Kennedy spent 14 years in Congress, eight of them in the Senate, and been observing diplomacy at the highest of levels since he was 19.
President Dwight Eisenhower thought him a whippersnapper, Adlai Stevenson attacked him for jumping the line, but he was a political pro and a veteran, a proven vote-getter in what was then a competitive state for both parties, who had worked with people across party lines and from every part of the country, who ran for president only after seven years in the Senate, and for the Senate after six years in the House.
By contrast, Obama ran for president after two years in the Senate, and Palin had been a governor only slightly longer when she was plucked out of semi-obscurity. Kennedy had about eight years of semi-obscurity until l956, when he broke out with his failed run for vice president, and three more after that before becoming a media superstar.
It turns out that eight or so years in this sort of semi-obscurity — working away in the state house or Senate, one of a number of solons and governors, growing into and grounding one’s natural talents — is what a good president needs.
Eight years of this sort of semi-obscurity was what Ronald Reagan had in his two terms as governor, in the last stage of his transition from Hollywood-actor-plus-activist into full-bore political star.
Like Kennedy, he had 14 years from his first run to the White House, and the first 10 were spent finding his feet. Like Kennedy, they were spent in semi-obscurity, mildly famous — as a former film star; as a celebrity’s son who was a war hero — but hardly the object of media frenzies.
No one was scanning their words for inadvertent misstatements, or wholly involved in their glory or failure. Like wine, they matured in the dark, over time.
Obama and Palin needed the six years or so of semi-obscurity they were about to embark on before ambition — and John McCain — intervened. Instead, their growth was checked at a critical moment, and, as it seems now, won’t be resumed quickly — not in the presidency as Obama is learning, or in a media frenzy, as Palin has found.
They are famous for life; they will always have money; what they can never have back are the years washed out by destructive celebrity. “She’s been microwaved, she needs now to marinate,” somebody once said of Palin. But the time for slow-cooking is gone.
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Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to TheWeekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
