In 1960, four politicians were running for president. Each had begun his national journey in the late 1940’s. Each had a record as long as your arm.
In 1948, Hubert H. Humphrey and Lyndon B. Johnson went into the Senate together from Minnesota and Texas, respectively. Each had spent a decade or so in tumultuous state politics. In 1946, John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon had entered the U.S. House straight from the Navy. Nixon became a senator in 1950 and then Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president; Kennedy reached the Senate two years after that. Both served on important committees and won reputations as serious people with a particular interest in foreign affairs.
It would no doubt stagger Pete Buttigieg, running for president on his record as mayor of Indiana’s fourth-largest city, to realize that Kennedy was assailed when he ran as a “boy” and a Johnny-come-lately. Despite his war service and his time in the Senate, Kennedy was told he should wait ten years more.
Clearly, standards have changed since those far-off days. Kamala Harris, who won a seat in the Senate in 2016, started running for president the day she took office. Julian Castro and Beto O’Rourke ran from the House despite having no real achievements. O’Rourke and Stacy Abrams, who had both lost narrowly in statewide races, planned to run on the fact they had done better than expected. Their losses were thus almost as good as wins.
Abrams, complaining that the vote had actually been rigged in her home state of Georgia (she lost by only 50,000 votes), claimed at first that she was the rightful governor, that suggestions she run for another state office insulted her dignity, but that she might deign to accept the post of vice president if she were asked nicely. O’Rourke, apparently deciding that his loss to Ted Cruz in Texas in 2018 was a sure sign he could beat President Trump two years later, started running for president in 2019, dropping out some months later at about 2% in the polls.
So yes, the candidates of old probably tended to have a more respectful view of the size and demands of the office, to say nothing of a more realistic idea of themselves.
Nothing says more about the decline of the Democrats than the difference between the two Robert Francises — Robert F. Kennedy and Beto O’Rourke. They stand at the opposite ends of the sixty-year chasm between them. Beto was laid back and ephemeral; Bobby was intense. Bobby’s swimming coach at Harvard called him “heavy in the water” — drownable, dense. Beto, by contrast, seemed light as a feather, as if even a strong breeze could blow him away.
Beto was a dilettante who wafted his way through various interests; Bobby was knee-deep in vital concerns: crime and punishment; civil rights and segregation; aggressive communism vs. the West. It’s quite a shock to realize that Beto today is four years older than Bobby was when he was murdered. Beto today looks like a young person, whereas Bobby looked like an old man.
In his last campaign, when he drew the hysterical crowds some people today thought Beto’s resembled, people who covered Bobby were stunned by his looks. “The brown-blond hair was turning gray, and the once-boyish face was deeply lined,” wrote Evan Thomas. Columnist Joe Kraft had “never seen him look so bad, so tired; his blue eyes were standing out really like a death’s head from his skull.”
Nobody needs a president to look quite that bad, but the unlined vacuity of some of these candidates seems at least as disturbing: a candidate needs a few lines on his visage or at least traces of thought. The lowering of the experience bar shows disrespect for the office and arrogance on the part of some of the candidates. Anyone bright enough to one day become president surely should understand that.
