On the menu today: The Charleston, S.C., Post and Courier has the scoop that former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley will formally announce she is running for president around the middle of this month. This means the indisputably impressive Haley is going to be the subject of a lot of media profiles in the coming weeks and months, a part of how the media introduces presidential candidates to the public as a primary approaches. But lately, I’ve been wondering whether the generally credulous coverage of aspiring presidents amounts to enabling the delusions of grandeur for political figures who don’t really have much of a chance of getting elected, adding to the ever-growing fields of long-shot candidates crowding the debate stages.
Glowing Profiles Don’t Make Presidents
In a recent conversation with my colleagues, I played devil’s advocate and offered a proposal that I’m not sure I really believe but feel like should be on the table and chewed over anyway: We shouldn’t write nice profiles of presidential candidates.
This doesn’t mean that presidential candidates shouldn’t be covered as news. But there’s a certain kind of profile that helps a lesser-known candidate get taken more seriously and that helps generate buzz. They usually have a headline along the lines of, “Could This Man/Woman Be the Next President?” (Recall the adage that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no.’”) The featured photo makes the candidate look as presidential as possible, sometimes deliberately evoking images of earlier presidents. The article almost always offers a bit of the candidate’s life story, lists their accomplishments, serves up some gushing quotes from colleagues, and then, somewhere in the middle, adds a “to be sure” section that lays out but probably understates the enormous obstacles that the long-shot candidate would have to overcome. There’s a certain credulity that courses through the bloodstream of these profile pieces. Presidential campaigns run on belief, and these pieces implicitly or explicitly declare that, “This figure you haven’t heard all that much about really could be sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office in the not-so-distant future.”
And because the writer, editor, and reader all quietly know that this person is in fact not likely to be the next president and has a good chance of running out of money or flaming out in Iowa or New Hampshire or some other early state, the ending note is vague, declaring something like, “This is one to watch” or the candidate is “ready to make a splash.”
Perhaps my weariness and wariness about these profiles comes from having written variations of those pieces over the past two decades and change, and my growing reluctance to play a role in enabling someone else’s delusions. Or perhaps this comes from watching a lot of long-shot candidates come and go, with almost all of them flopping and some embarrassing themselves.
The anecdote I am probably too fond of sharing is the example of former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, who, in 2016, received twelve votes in the Iowa caucuses — not 12 percent, not winning 12 precincts, twelve total votes out of more than 186,000 cast — and later said it didn’t matter because he was focused on the New Hampshire primary. The following week, Gilmore won an entire 130 votes in the Granite State primary, or five one-hundredths of one percent of all votes cast.
You don’t run for president unless you have enormous confidence in yourself, and to us mere mortals, that often comes across as near-unhinged overconfidence. Running for president is hard — much harder than it looks from the outside. You must go and speak to hundreds of crowds, both large and often disappointingly small, and you need to stand out from a bunch of other candidates who have more or less the same agenda that you do. Where you do disagree, you must pretend your differences are huge and consequential. You must pretend that you genuinely believe that one rival’s proposal to lower the top income-tax rate to 36 percent is too timid, another rival’s proposal to lower the top tax rate to 34 percent is maniacal and reckless, but your proposal to lower the top tax rate to 35 percent is just right.
Alas, the world of politics is full of semi-famous figures who not only dream the impossible dream, but eagerly step onto the stage, convinced that America is just waiting to fall in love with them.
Back in 2017, I warned Democrats that their own version of Jim Gilmore was coming:
America has many politicians who are unremarkable beyond their inexplicable adamancy that they deserve to be the next president of the United States. For several cycles, these wannabes have treated our presidential primaries as book tours with bigger crowds and more balloons, eating up airtime and media oxygen, certain that even if they failed miserably, a television gig, higher speaking fees and maybe another, bigger book deal awaited them after the marathon. The primary electorate’s serious duty of sorting through genuinely qualified candidates is made harder by these globs of candidate cholesterol clogging up the arteries of democracy.
And indeed, as I predicted back then, the Democrats had too many candidates to fit on one debate stage in the 2020 cycle. Many of those candidates proved so indistinct and inconsequential that few people remember their campaigns, even just three years later. You no doubt recall Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris — and probably Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Buttigieg. Maybe you remember Marianne Williamson warning about a “dark psychic force” and claiming that while Donald Trump had harnessed fear for political purposes, she was going to harness love.
But quick, when I write “John Delaney,” does any face come to mind? Do you remember anything he said during the campaign? Do you remember anything from John Hickenlooper’s presidential campaign? How about Jay Inslee? Seth Moulton? Bill de Blasio? Do you remember anything about Kirsten Gillibrand’s campaign besides that woman who just wanted to get some ranch dressing?
Steve Bullock? Julian Castro?
How about Joe Sestak? No, I didn’t make up that name. He was a real candidate, a retired admiral, and a former congressman. I talked to him.
When one lesser-known figure decides to announce a presidential run, a bunch of others see that and think, “Why not me?” even though there are a lot of good reasons to conclude, “No, not you.” From that 2017 piece, recalling the 20-car pile-up that was the 2016 GOP presidential primary:
Long stretches of the debates turned into repetitive rhetorical sludge.
A discerning primary voter could fairly ask some of the lesser-known, longest-of-long-shot, uninspiring, cookie-cutter candidates . . . “Why are you here?” (Anderson Cooper came close to this in one of the early Democratic presidential debates when he pointed out to Lincoln Chafee, “You’ve only been a Democrat for little more than two years.”) Their agendas, campaign speeches, and commercials were similarly indistinct; the senators and retired governors all started blurring together into HuckaSantoruGilmorePatakiGraham.
When America gathers to watch the next presidential inauguration on January 20, 2025, it is extremely likely that the person being inaugurated will be one of four people: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, or Ron DeSantis. Could there be some sort of odd, unpredictable scenario that results in some other Democrat such as Gavin Newsom getting the party’s nomination? Could some other Republican shock us all and win the nomination? Sure, if modern life has taught us anything, it is that politics is unpredictable. But the last figure to rapidly rise from relative obscurity to the presidency in a short span was Bill Clinton in 1992, and today, we live in an extremely different political, media, and financial world compared to those days when CNN was the lone cable-news channel.
I don’t dislike the figures who are thinking of running for president right now. I just think that most presidential candidates drastically underestimate the challenges they’ll face and wildly overestimate their own innate charisma and persuasiveness.
Which brings us to the big political news of the morning, from Charleston’s Post and Courier:
Cementing what has been in the works for months, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley will formally announce she is running for president and will seek the Republican nomination for her party’s 2024 ticket, The Post and Courier has learned.
According to an invitation soon going out to her backers, Haley’s advertised “special announcement” will come Feb. 15 at the The Shed at the Charleston Visitor Center, a downtown gathering spot that could draw hundreds of supporters into the heart of the city’s tourism district.
The confirmation she is entering the race came Jan. 31 from a member of Haley’s inner circle.
I like Nikki Haley. She’s an impressive figure and has wide-ranging accomplishments in government. She’s a rare GOP leader with significant experience in state government (three terms in the South Carolina House of Representatives, six years as a two-term governor) and foreign affairs (two years as the U.S. representative to the United Nations). She served on the board of directors for Boeing until stepping down over her objection to a government bailout during the pandemic. She serves on the Clemson University Board of Trustees. She’s the daughter of Indian immigrants, and her husband, Michael, is a combat veteran who deployed to Afghanistan.
In other words, Haley, her life story, and her record offers a lot of fodder for one of those glowing profiles. But as we’ve seen, the subjects of glowing profiles don’t necessarily become president.
ADDENDUM: When four-star Air Force general Mike Minihan, who leads the Air Mobility Command, writes in a memo that he believes the U.S. will be at war with China by 2025, we should probably sit up and take notice. It’s not a guarantee, and Minihan writes that he hopes he’s wrong. But I noted that two years before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, most of the U.S. foreign-policy world thought that Vladimir Putin was ruthless but rational, and that he wouldn’t risk the whole Russian relationship with the West over some historical grievances.
Those scenarios that Western foreign-policy wonks find unthinkable can often turn out to be very “thinkable” in the mind of a man convinced he will win a great victory and alter the world’s balance of power.