Ah, for the good old days, when Harry Truman could summon Adlai E. Stevenson and tell him he was running for president. Adlai lost (twice), but he was running for a sixth consecutive presidential term for his party against the man who ran the invasion of Normandy, and emerged with his prestige enhanced as a national leader.
This can’t be said of the current Republican entries, who thus far have only diminished their standing, especially governors Jon Huntsman of Utah and Rick Perry of Texas, whose campaigns have been dreadful, though their records are good.
While candidate fields are expected to showcase the cream of their parties, this crop is the dregs, or close to it. The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger says the A team has been benched, while the scrub team is playing. George Will says the issues are clear, and party united, while the leaders are lacking. As leaders, they barely exist.
This is the result of bad luck and bad timing, allied to a misguided law. The crash and the crisis – not to mention the president – gave the Republicans their big opportunity, but fate may be taking their chances away.
The defeats of 2006 and 2008 swept out a number of stars who might have been ripe for the 2012 cycle, while the stars swept in by the 2009/2010 off-year and mid-term elections remain just a little unseasoned.
It was too soon for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell; for Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and South Carolina’s Gov. Nikki Haley, who may one day be giants.
It was four years too soon for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to try to follow his father and brother, (who held the White House for 12 of the past twenty-three years of our history.)
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour was the wrong type to run against the slim and urbane first black president. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels declined for unique personal reasons.
Of the previous crop, (which seems Olympian compared to this year’s field of dreamers), Sen. John McCain of Arizona was too old, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson had been too inept to try for a new run at office.
This left us with Mitt Romney, who like Al Gore and Dick Nixon, is brainy enough, but tries much, much, too hard to seem like a human, and who can no more inspire than fly.
As for the non-Mitts, they sprang up like mushrooms on a field devoid of more robust vegetation.
Truman pushed Stevenson because he distrusted Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver, whom he thought superficial. Harry would weep.
Doubtless, the reformers thought they had done the right thing when they took power away from the “bosses” (who in 1968 had nominated a sitting vice president who never ran in the primaries) and put it in the hands of the people, whom they trusted to do the right thing.
But this opened the door to the cracked and eccentric, to those pushing a book or a cause or a theory; to the egocentric, in love with themselves and their voices; to the has-beens, craving a last glimpse of daylight; to a system where, as Robert Merry has written, “candidates emerge based on their own judgment of their over whelming talents and virtues … and when the vetting process has been truncated to a point where it relies on happenstance to save the system from people nobody really knows.”
Voters may be free to vote as they please, but they can only choose among those who come into the system, and when the wrong people select themselves choices are limited.
The time may have come for adult supervision. Harry, we need you. Come back!
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to TheWeekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
