True. Also, the range of skills and abilities that help a person to get elected are not necessarily the same as those that help a person do the job once they are elected.
Exactly. That last part is the key. None of our elected leaders started out as politicians. The unstated implication of those who have a blanket opposition to celebrities running for office seems to be that only certain careers (lawyer and business owner seem the two big ones) qualify one to run for office. Why shouldn’t a retired astronaut, or reverend at a prominent Baptist church, or actor who played the president on TV, run for office, even if they start out running for a higher office?
As I’ve been thinking about those examples (all of whom are/were in Congress a decade or more ago), there are some important differences between them, and the more modern examples of “celebrities as candidates” – many of them were not running solely on their celebrity, but were also serious students, and/or had been doing work in politics or government before running for Congress:
- Bradley graduated magna cum laude from Princeton (his thesis was on Truman’s 1940 Senate campaign), and delayed his entry into the NBA for two years, as he had received a Rhodes Scholarship to do graduate study in “Politics, Philosophy, and Economics” at Oxford. During his NBA career, he worked on various political campaigns.
- Kemp did postgraduate work in economics, and during his NFL career, worked on Republican political campaigns, and for the RNC.
- Bunning was a leader of the MLBPA (the players’ union) during his baseball career, and was one of the key individuals who brought in Marvin Miller to lead the union (which led to reforms in player contracts). Politically, he started out serving in a local city council, before moving up to the Kentucky state legislature, before moving on to the U.S. Congress.
Now, I have no doubt that name recognition and fame from their athletic careers played a part in their initial political success, but they did have some actual political and knowledge chops, as well.
…which subject matter is, famously, the politicians’ degree course.
This particular course has produced a significant number of notable graduates …. Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, David Cameron, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom; Hugh Gaitskell, William Hague and Ed Miliband, former Leaders of the Opposition; former Prime Ministers of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto and Imran Khan; and Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke and Tony Abbott, former Prime Ministers of Australia….
Source: Philosophy, politics and economics - Wikipedia
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There was a lot of buzz around Eastwood’s future in politics when he was elected mayor of Carmel, CA in the 1980s. But he had more baggage than most people knew about: multiple out-of-wedlock children to different women. He didn’t like it when 60 Minutes confronted him about this during an interview. He gave them the ‘Dirty Harry’ squint.
Today, it wouldn’t have been as big a deal (for a Republican anyway) but things were different forty years ago.
True enough, but a lot of them started out at a local level where they learned how to govern, enact ordinances or state laws, negotiate common ground, etc., or they came from a legal background and so hopefully have an understanding of law and the Constitution. Otherwise, there is a lengthy period where they are relatively useless to their constituency while they learn the ropes from scratch. I prefer to vote for people running for national office based on their experience in lawmaking and governance, in addition to their platforms.
This, exactly.
I don’t care where someone comes from when they start out. But start lower down and learn the ropes.
There’s a lot more to governing than just being charismatic and popular. It takes years to hone foreign policy expertise, the intricacies of legislating successfully and just plain understanding Constitutional law/ramifications and unintended consequences of one’s ignorance.
I love Obama and he is truly gifted, as well as a Constitutional scholar. But I still worried in 2008 that his lack of experience would derail his presidency. He exceeded my expectations by quite a lot, but he’s a genuine rarity. And of course, he picked a very experienced VP.
In general, give me a stodgy old – but extremely experienced and effective – Biden any day. I hate seeing experience undervalued.
I worry that Matthew McConaughey will run for president on the Republican ticket in 2024. Nice guy perhaps, great voice… and entirely unprepared for the office.
I do.
Well, huh. I have no memory of that. I remember him being painted by the right as being a bit of a Messiah figure for Dems and that Dems deify him, but that’s odd that I don’t remember “celebrity” being used like in the ad. By that metric, McCain was a celebrity, too.
This issue is less about supporting smart but reactionary Bob vs average but progressive John than it is about how we get to Bob and John as our two candidates. Smart Reactionary Bob is up against a half dozen other reactionary candidates in the primary, and Average Progressive John is up against a half dozen other progressives.
Do we want Smart Bob to be our reactionary candidate or GED Jane who is a popular TikTok celebrity focused on lifestyle videos but hasn’t held a normal job, or paid rent and seems to have a fleeting understanding of any issues of importance?
The issue with celebrity candidates isn’t that their celebrity gives them a leg up, it’s that some number of wholly inadequate celebrities manage to become candidates for important positions.
Oh, I know. I had several versions of the post, including one about how Largent’s name recognition in Tulsa from growing up there, playing college football there, and being on TV every weekend in the NFL played into his Oklahoma congressional aspirations. Another version went into Tommy Tuberville for Senate.
I was just pointing out that name recognition like that probably would be a bigger deal at lower level elections than national ones. To some degree everyone running for President is going to be a celebrity of some kind, even if it’s just being famous for being a Governor or Senator, or maybe Cabinet Secretary.
The “celebrity” attack angle, IIRC, was that Obama didn’t have a lot of experience when he first ran. The idea was that he only being talked about as a candidate because he gave a good speech at the DNC four years earlier, and not because he’d actually done anything useful as a public servant. “Celebrity” was being used ironically, to infer that he didn’t have any real credentials other than looking good on the TV. It wouldn’t really apply to McCain, who had decades of experience in elected political office at that point.
OK, that I clearly do remember. I, myself, thought he still needed to wait about 8 years before he was a candidate, and that it was too early to run him after a single “rock star” speech at the DNC. Glad I was wrong. But, yes, it was definitely “well, he sure does talk well, but what has he actually done?”
[quote=“pulykamell, post:19, topic:976133”]
I have no memory of him being criticized as a celebrity.
[/quote]
Here’s an article critical of the McCain ad comparing Obama to Britney Spears:
It was big news for a while–at the time, it struck me that McCain’s campaign had nothing to use against Obama and were flailing around for a way to attack him.
Ironically, Raphael Warnock was not a politician before he won the 2021 special election, but a minister. He won over Kelly Loeffler, who was not a politician before being named to the empty seat in 2020, but a CEO of a technology firm. Joe Ossoff, who won the other special-election seat, had run for office before but never won.
New York, my home state, likes putting non-politicians in high office. Hillary Clinton, Daniel Patrick Monihan, Jacob Javits, Robert M. Kennedy, James L. Buckley, and John Foster Dulles never ran for office before being elected or appointed Senator and that’s just since WWII. They were deeply involved in politics, to be sure, but had no legislative experience at any level. Same for governors Nelson Rockefeller and Averill Harriman, who again were deeply involved in high-level affairs but also were two of the wealthiest men in the country.
Some celebrities have been successful in office but most are footnotes. Tommy Tuberville, the ex-Auburn football coach, won the Senate race in Alabama in 2020 and he’s noted for nothing but trying to overthrow the government. Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Susan Collins, Ron Johnson, and Mike Lee, as scurvy a lot as no one would want to have represent them also never held office before the Senate.
But the same lack of electoral experience is true for Elizabeth Warren and was for Al Franken.
I still come down on the side of wanting experience in politics. Pure celebrities are a waste of air.
Who??
The M stands for Milhous.
I don’t mnow how that typo toom place.
If Arnold S ran for president, I would have to give it a little thought. He seems like he deeply cares about this country and its processes. I wouldn’t agree with some (most) of his policies (a New Yorker long article about him was edifying pro and con), but he seems 100% sincere and hard-working.
I agree with this, though he’s not eligible, not being a “natural born” American citizen.
True enough, but there has to be someone who could fill that role. God knows who.