August 13, 2006
Fortunate Sons Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:55 PM EST I very much like the point Fred Smoler raised about John Lindsay and elites in politics. In the story he relates about his experience in the 1969 Lindsay campaign, Mr. Smoler finds an excellent description for the phenomenon of voters’ attraction to aristocratic candidates: “social deference to a local notable we had mistaken for our natural leader.” Many candidates who come from elite backgrounds, and act like it, seem to have an intangible appeal to their potential constituents. Lindsay is a perfect example of this. And I think the kind of experience Fred Smoler had with Lindsay is not limited to young people and local notables. Much has been made of what Fred Schwarz calls the “Regular Guy Theory of Elections.” As Mr. Schwarz explains it, this theory says that “American presidential races tend to be won by the candidate who does a better job of impersonating someone you’d want to watch a football game with.” This may often be true at the national level. But in contests farther down the ballot there are plenty of examples of just the reverse: candidates whose popularity depends on their distance from the average man. One of the figures from recent history who best exemplifies this is William Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts. In 1991, after being elected governor, Weld courted initially hostile Democrats by putting his own elite background on full display. At an event to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, the patrician Weld joked: “My family has not always had it easy. My ancestors arrived here with nothing but the shirt on their backs and a couple of million pounds of gold.” His enemies were charmed, and by using this kind of charm Weld went on to two full, reasonably successful terms on Beacon Hill. Weld, though, is only one such example. Pennsylvania’s John Heinz, serving in the Senate from 1977 until his death, was another. And while Weld got mileage out of poking fun at his ancestry, Heinz tended to let his behavior and appearance speak for themselves. In his obituary, the Washington Post noted that Heinz was “tall and athletic, with good looks to match,” “enjoyed a good game of tennis or a quick downhill run on skis when he was not politicking,” and had “a particular liking for Dutch and Flemish still-lifes.” With these habits and degrees from Exeter, Yale, and Harvard, Heinz was no “regular guy.” And he didn’t pretend otherwise. The same obituary noted that Heinz was not “especially popular” with his colleagues, but the voters of Pennsylvania found his posh personality and dignified demeanor more appealing. The list of pols like Weld and Heinz, whose public personalities rested on their upper-class manners, goes on, including men like Thomas Kean, Prescott Bush, and, of course, the Kennedys. The phenomenon is not a strictly Northeastern one, either: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist first campaigned for Senate in 1994 as an accomplished surgeon, but also as the dashing and respectable scion of an old Nashville family. That was doubtless part of his appeal. It is, as one might expect, possible to overdo this kind of aristocratic pose. Sheldon Whitehouse, who will be the Democratic nominee for Senate in Rhode Island, fumbled in 2004 when he said he was “basically bred” for public office. This struck some Rhode Islanders as more than a little stuck up, adding new meaning to the term “presumptive nominee.” Fortunately for Whitehouse, his likely opponent, Lincoln Chafee, son of the late Senator John Chafee, is in no position to use the word “patrician” as an insult. Like Fred Smoler, I have had my own John Lindsay experience. In the 2004 presidential cycle, during my first experience in political campaigning, I was perplexed to hear Democratic primary voters using the term “electable” to explain John Kerry’s advantage over candidates like Howard Dean and John Edwards. At the time, I liked the liberal senator from Massachusetts, but that seemed the wrong word to describe him. The term that seemed more appropriate to me, and the word I have since heard used by more than one former Kerry adviser, was “presidential.” I’m still not completely sure how to more precisely define that adjective, but Senator Kerry’s commanding voice, craggy good looks, and, most of all, his aristocratic bearing surely inspired its application to him.
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