The failure of celebrity candidates

Remember when all the McCain campaign could come up with (initially) against candidate Obama was that he was some kind of “celebrity”? (Notwithstanding that he was, at the time, a sittting US senator.) When he won, they seem to have learned “OK, voters, you want celebrities, we’ll give you celebrities,” and they gave us Trump, a non-qualified, inexperienced TV personality with terrific name-recognition and little else to explain his popularity. Now after Trump, Kari Lake, and Hershel Walker have imploded, would you say they’re ready to reconsider that principle of running celebrities, or have they just gotten started? Personally, I hope they keep trotting out candidates like Walker and Lake because they seem beatable most times, weak candidates who can’t stand up to scrutiny, but of course when they do pull off a victory, as Trump did in 2016, they’re awful and inept in office, often to the detriment of the country.

Celebrity candidates have been with us a long time.

Remember Ronald Reagan? He was, of course, a movie actor.

Before him there was George Murphy and Helen Gahagan Douglas

Sometimes they win, sometimes not.

I think the problem for Republicans is that all the lovable A list celebs tend to be liberal.

The only ones they can get are the hasbeens or the grating ones.

Eastwood probably could have been a good candidate for them if only they could have caught him at a younger age.

Yeah. So far the RW have only been able to identify celebrities from within the RW media-o-sphere (e.g. Dr Oz). Who do quite well in their primaries but are much less electable in the real election. It’s an example of the hoary old problem of a hierarchy coming to believe their own propaganda.

Unfortunately, the situation is different for the presidential elections. The winner-take-all nature of the R primaries / nominating process and the 50.1% → 100% Electoral College process, plus the inherent over-weighting of right-leaning ruralia over left-leaning civilization means that an RW celebrity running for President is far more likely to succeed than an RW celebrity running for state legislator, governor, or Federal congressman.

I don’t know… celebrity candidates seem to be pretty popular at lower levels I suspect. How many football players have become state legislators or congressmen?

I’m not sure that plays as well at the national level though, as the celebrity of the candidates has to be more or less commensurate with that of the office they’re running for. Like a guy who played a few seasons in the NFL isn’t going to be helped by that if he’s running for President, but it will definitely help if he’s running for a state office of some sort in the state he played college or pro ball in.

They have Schwarzenegger.

True, though by current Republican standards he’s a squishy RINO.

Not really. I remember Obama being criticized for his lack of experience, but that’s not the same thing. If he was a “celebrity,” it was as a politician, as opposed to being famous for something else and then deciding to go into politics. He did have charisma, which was a big part of his appeal, but he was a charismatic politician.

Celebrity politicians include Ronald Reagan, as already mentioned, as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Al Franken. Whatever you think of any of them, they weren’t “awful and inept in office” the way Trump was. And they had some interest in politics and government before they ran for office.

Celebrity candidates may have an “unfair advantage” because of their name recognition and the halo effect, but they’re not necessarily bad if—and this is the big if—there’s something besides their celebrity that makes them a good, qualified candidate.

From what little I’ve seen of them, candidates like Herschel Walker—like Trump himself—have a certain perverse charisma and entertainment value, where I can see why people might enjoy their “performances” and support them as candidates in a purely fictional setting, just because they find them so amusing. I’m also, of course, horrified at the thought of them in a position of responsibility and influence. I suspect that a lot of their supporters have the first response but, somehow, not the second.

The only 2 that come to my mind were Sonny Bono and Fred Grandy.

It has much less to do with celebrities, and much, much more to do with good old fashion bigotry. Trump wasn’t nominated, then elected because of celebrity. He was there because the right wing base’s reaction to having a black, unbigoted President was to double down on the racism and anti-LGBTQ+ hatred. Dog whistles became overt. Silent hatred became enacted/ruled discriminatory laws. We shouldn’t blame celebrity for good old fashion bigotry against minorities.

Jesse Ventura was the first to come to my mind for some reason.

I don’t think being a celebrity gives someone an unfair advantage due to their name recognition. They still have to campaign for months and be able to put two intelligent sentences together, something Herschel Walker seemed to struggle with at times.

Reagan could debate well, especially on TV, and people genuinely liked him, even if they disagreed with his politics. I think Trump is a different animal. Yes, he had name recognition, and people knew about his hotels, casinos, and golf clubs, but I don’t think he won 2016 as much as Hillary lost. The GOP successfully demonized her, and that was something she could not get away from.

I knew little about Trump except after seeing him on the Apprentice. Still, I assumed his candidacy was doomed when I saw him coming down that escalator and lambasting Hispanics. Quite the contrary, the GOP ran with it and paid off at least once. Will the GOP continue looking for high-profile celebrities versus boring politicians? Time will tell. It worked for them for a while.

Several served in the U.S. House, including Jack Kemp (former Chargers and Bills quarterback), Steve Largent (former Seahawks WR), J.C. Watts (former University of Oklahoma quarterback), and Heath Shuler (former Redskins and Saints quarterback).

In addition, there was Bill Bradley (former pro basketball player, who became a three-term Senator), Jim Bunning (former MLB pitcher, who served in both the House and the Senate). And, currently, former college football coach Tommy Tuberville is now one of Alabama’s senators.

Kemp and Bradley both ran for president, but failed to gain their parties’ nominations.

It’s a source of nearly lifelong puzzlement for me. You wouldn’t hire a plumber to fix your car, but our country seems to have no problem with hiring doctors, athletes and assorted riff-raff to run the government.

Nope; according to the dominant Trumpist/authoritarian wing of the part he’s a Flaming Liberal in capital letters, just to the right of Mao Tse Tung. Some them tried to start conspiracy theories that he was actually homosexual and/or belonged to Hillary Clinton’s pedophile sex cult but I guess none of those had legs. If he was still active in politics beyond making the occasional video mocking Trump and his lackeys while accompanied by his miniature horse and donkey the GOP would be going after him like they are Liz Cheney and Cindy McCain but I guess they cam’t be arsed and/or understand how much conflict that would create among fans of his ‘Eighties action movies.

Stranger

Plumbing requires specific, detailed knowledge and experience - it makes perfect sense to find someone trained and with experience to do that work.

What is the specific, detailed knowledge and experience needed to be a good politician? I’d say that the range of skills and attributes are pretty wide ranging and sometimes contradictory. Assuming a basic level of intelligence (not always a good assumption) having the ability to inspire people, to achieve emotional connections, different life experiences, consensus building, etc. can be great assets to a politician, and those can come from many different backgrounds.

There is no one specific career path that makes for a good politician. IMO, in a perfect world, our political institutions would be filled with people from all sorts of previous jobs, and they’d be able to go back to those jobs after a few terms in office. There’s no reason that doctors and athletes shouldn’t be in that mix.

An Average Joe is generally not going to have the time, money, or name recognition to run for office. Most of the athletes and celebrities that have won at least grew up in average households. Recycling rich folks through prestigious schools to prestigious jobs to prestigious political posts doesn’t seem like a good idea. In the past we’ve voted for former military but they don’t seem to get the same name recognition, and rich kids people haven’t gone to war since WW2.

I don’t think hoping our leadership comes from all walks of life is a bad thing.

Sure, but that’s comparing apples to oranges. Politics isn’t about having a specialized body of knowledge. It’s about serving the people, and as such what’s important in our elected leaders is who they believe “the people” are and what sort of “help” the people need.

Let’s take two hypothetical candidates running for senate. The first, John McDecentman, is a well known actor who graduated from college with a bachelors degree in English and has no graduate level education. He believes that “the people” includes all Americans, not just conservative white protestants. He believes that global warming is real and the greatest threat facing mankind even though he doesn’t have any technical knowledge about why CO2 retains more heat than nitrogen and oxygen, or how feedback loops with melting glaciers can make warming proceed more rapidly, etc. As such he favors legislation to lower CO2 emissions. He believes that the wealthy should pay their fair of taxes, at a higher rate than working class people, even though he never took advanced classes at Harvard business school. As such he favors progressive taxation.

The second candidate, Bob Quissling, has an IQ of 140, graduated from Harvard with undergraduate degrees in both biology and economics, went on to business and law school, and practiced law at a top law firm. He knows the science of global warming, understands the details of the tax code, etc. but prefers to use that knowledge to help large corporations whose activities produce a lot of CO2 emissions and to set up the tax code so that the very wealthy have ways of hiding that wealth without being taxed on it.

Why should we support Bob instead of John in such a situation?

To take more concrete examples, what if say, Stephen King had run against (and likely beaten) Susan Collins for her Maine senate seat back in 2014? I can’t imagine that he would have done a worse job than Collins.

Yeah, I have no memory of him being criticized as a celebrity. He was a young up-and-coming politician, the rising star of the Democratic Party, but “celebrity”? Only in the sense all public figures are celebrities of some sort.

It’s not necessarily a bad ideas. The athletes listed by kenobi_65 above all performed fine. (I don’t know Heath Shuler, but Bradley, Bunning, Kemp, Largent and Watts were fine) The idea of “citizen legislatures” is not terrible, if they’re reasonable smart and honest.