Trump debacle dissuades future "nontraditional" candidates - good or bad?

Politics & Elections
1

While mowing the grass, I thought that Trump’s debacle would dissuade obviously unqualified celebrities from thinking they should play a major role as Presidential candidates in future elections. But then I wondered if that was entirely a good thing…

Sure, Trump is toxic - everyone shoulda known a long-time, world-class boorish sleazebag like he would have plenty of skeletons eventually come spilling outta his closet. But would our political system be the better if there were more nontraditional candidates such as (competent) businessmen or professors? Do we want out elected offices to be peopled solely by career politicians who have striven never to do or say anything controversial?

I feel I’m not phrasing this well. Basically, I’m wondering what effect the Trump experience will have on the types of Presidential candidates we see in the future.

2

I don’t think this will affect the status quo very much. The combination of being:

  • rich enough to run for President as a completely unqualified outsider;

  • unqualified enough not to inspire any confidence among your party establishment/moderates;

  • unscrupulous and attention-hungry enough to say whatever will appeal to a core of enthusiastic supporters, regardless of what anybody else thinks;

  • and delusionally egotistical enough to believe that this is all going to work out just great for you—

—is likely to remain pretty rare.

3

It should encourage them. If someone this unqualified managed to get this far, imagine what someone only marginally less unqualified could do?

4

Well, Elizabeth Warren is a law professor and public policy advisor who became a US Senator without previous legislative experience. Zephyr Teachout is another law professor who’s running for Congress, also without previous legislative experience. Al Franken is a comedy writer and performer who became a US Senator, also without previous legislative experience. Arnold Schwarzenegger… well, you get the idea.

And wouldn’t you consider a lot of recent Tea Party politicians to be “nontraditional candidates”? Cliff Stearns, John Fleming, and a number of other Reps with no political background before a Tea Party candidacy for the US House?

I agree that that sort of “nontraditional” background is a lot harder to parlay into office at the Presidential level, but at least when it comes to the national legislature I don’t think we’ve got a problem with the admissions criteria being too narrow. (Except when it comes to wealth and in many cases ethnicity, of course, but those are separate issues.)

5

Hopefully the lesson is that Money, Fame and Ego are not enough to elect a complete douchebag to the highest office.

For that you need to be a career politician. :stuck_out_tongue:

6

But they wouldn’t have the name recognition or the performer chops of a showbiz celebrity like Trump. I still maintain that you’re not likely to find someone who’s simultaneously that rich and that famous and that charismatic and that incompetent and that lacking in self-awareness more than once in a very blue moon.

7

Yeah. And you seem to see more of it at the state level. Here in IL we’ve got a governor who is basically a rich guy.

My focus is often on the SCt (yeah, not elected, I know), where the justices are all lawyers/ex judges from a couple of east coast law schools, and are all Catholic or Jewish. I’ve wondered if more nontraditional justices would be of value. Maybe a politician or businessman or 2, to inform them as to the real world implications of their decisions.

Trump is probably sui generis. The truly rich can have influence a la the Kochs - by buying elections for others, rather than running themselves.

8

I don’t think Trump’s example will dissuade future “non-traditional” candidates. I doubt it will even dissuade future bad candidates.

For somebody with no qualifications and a horrible personality, Trump has been surprisingly successful. Even if Trump fails to get elected, future candidates are going to look at Trump’s campaign and think “I’m nowhere near as bad as he was. If that idiot could almost get elected, I could go all the way.”

9

Heck, picture Donald Trump minus the impulse-control problems in general, and minus the ‘sexual predator’ accusations in particular: just a rich businessman with enough sense to get elected Governor instead of running for President from zero.

You’re picturing Mitt Romney, right?

10

This is a good point: SCOTUS justices do tend to have a very “establishment” educational background.

[QUOTE=Dinsdale]
[…] and are all Catholic or Jewish.

[/quote]

This is not a particularly good point. The three most recently retired justices are all white Anglo-Saxon Protestant types, and so were almost all SCOTUS members before them. The current Court is more diverse in terms of gender, ethnicity and personal background than it’s ever been in the past. The fact that the sitting justices all happen to be Jewish or Catholic is not in the least “traditional”.

11

I don’t know what lesson the party will or won’t learn from this. It’s conceivable that people will come to the same conclusion as the OP. But I think that the primaries really displayed one thing the strongest, and that is that the Republican party platform is so restrictive that you can’t reasonably differentiate between candidates. If 5 of them run for the job, then you’ve got 5 guys saying the exact same words in, more or less, the exact same way. The only thing to recommend one over the other is the demographics he brings with him.

If only one real Republican had run, probably they could have easily defeated Trump. But because there were a slew of them, Trump won out by being the only one able to distinguish himself in any way.

The Republican party has really painted itself into a corner. They’ve been losing ground with the young and the intelligent. Their base is shrinking and, similar to how Hollywood has sunk a death grip into popcorn flicks as a last resort to keep people coming to the theater, rather than trying to embrace the new world, the Republican party is doubling down on Fundies, racists, and the elderly. And, since this is the real world, we can be pretty certain that one of those three groups is going to pass on and be replaced. Which is why it’s such a big deal that they aren’t bringing in the young. Without a rebranding, the Republican party can’t last 40 years. Given their performance in 2012, when everything was unified and the economy was still not great, I think it’s reasonable to conclude that they’re already at the tipping point. The generation who was for them has already mostly passed on.

12

Fair observation. Interesting as the gender representation improved, religious affiliation narrowed. One reason I was a tad disappointed at the Garland nomination. Sure, he’s majorly capable and qualified, but I would have liked to see someone like Sri in there. Maybe someone like a younger Warren, who isn’t a career lawyer/judge. Never gonna happen, but a Justice Obama would be welcome…

13

This is nothing new. Daniel Patrick Moynihan became Senator from NY with very similar qualifications to Warren’s. You can learn on the job as Senator. As President, not so much.

Fiorina’s qualifications are not much better than Trump’s. Actually worse before we learned how much money Trump lost.

14

Good. President of the United States is not an entry-level position.

15

Yeah. You need at least eight years’ experience as President, good references from internships, and three additional references who can’t be your family or political appointees.

More seriously: Anyone who doesn’t realize Trump’s major problem is Trump is too stupid to win a Presidential election. (Not too stupid to win a GOP primary, however.) This shouldn’t affect anyone’s desire to run for President: If you are that stupid, nothing is going to dissuade you, and if you’re not that stupid, you’ll realize you have so little in common with Trump that none of these lessons apply to you.

16

Why WOULD Trump’s loss dissuade an egomaniac with a lot of money?

I’m not saying that, say, Mark Cuban WILL run for President in 2020. But if he were thinking about it, well, wouldn’t Trump’s string of successes encourage him? Wouldn’t it give Cuban confidence that he could get a major party nomination by working the media?

17

I think its a good thing if Trump ends up dissuading similar outsiders from seeking office.

As much as I sometimes come off as a rabblerouser, I recognize that America is a pretty damn great place to be in. I try not to fall into the delusion that just because some things are bad (NSA spying, corporate welfare, systemic racism, gender inequality, religious fundamentalism, anti-science meatheads, etc.), everything is bad. I’m fine with my life, and yes, that’s a product of my circumstances. If I were poorer, a different color, or lived in a different area, I might want to throw a wrench into the cogs. But I’m not, and I feel that most of our problems can be solved by tweaking them rather than burning the whole institution down and starting from scratch.

Yes, unaccountable Wall Street bankers crashed the economy and got off pretty much scot free, but I don’t want to end the Fed or have government appointing CEO’s. I want incremental changes to regulation, 2 steps forward, 1 step back, so as not to disrupt most people’s finances. And yes, I know that black males disproportionately are put in jail, but I don’t want to just open the doors of prisons and let everyone out, I want for-profit prisons made illegal, then sentencing reform, and a de-escalation of anti-drug policies for some drugs.

In short, I like the establishment. Its not cool, but I want people in suits and pantsuits with glasses crunching numbers and telling us why we can’t do this law, or that we have to wait a few years to study the impact of that law. I’ve no problems voting for an establishment candidate. None at all. And I don’t want some nutcase in an orange wig bringing torches and pitchforks to the doors of the IRS even if I can’t stand government bureaucracy. I don’t want a multi-party system, I think 2 parties is enough to represent the vast majority of Americans. Any more and people will have to make alliances so that some extremist doesn’t get into office. I don’t want to ride that roller coaster. I want to ride on something that may not have very many highs, but minimizes the lows as well.

Basically, I look at our system of government like an 80’s superhero cartoon. If Skeletor or Cobra or the Decepticons just win once, its over. They’re going to blow everything to shit and usher in a thousand years of darkness. The heroes have to win over and over again just to maintain the status quo. I don’t want a situation where the villain can even sniff a win, because then its over

18

  1. Trump will probably lose, and it really sucks to lose a presidential general election by all accounts of previous losers. He will not be a happy camper, narrow or wide defeat. But narrow or wide defeat will make a difference how much of a ‘debacle’ it’s viewed as by the undoubtedly many potential candidates, not even all on the generally right side of the spectrum necessarily even, who might imagine themselves channeling the appealing unconventional aspects of Trump, in some respects but I don’t think we’ll see somebody much like him overall, trying to jump from zero to president in politics, for awhile.

  2. This is the big mystery to me, why this didn’t figure more heavily in the minds of primary voters, even considering all other potential attractions of Trump. It was so predictable, I thought, and I don’t think of myself as much of a political predictor in general. It’s also now the aspect IMO most likely to be generally accepted as the negative lesson of nominating Trump. Some on the right mocked McCain and Romney as Boy Scouts, but it really is easier to campaign if you don’t have to battle credible allegations of sexual misbehavior extending to the arguably criminal.

  3. Personally I’m anti-populist. Was before this, more so now. I don’t see any positive advantage in not having political experience when interviewing for the job of chief politician. There are substitutes (commanding general in a major victorious war perhaps), and I don’t particularly favor presidential candidates who’ve done nothing but politics. But Trump is not alone in being a misfit to the job in part because of his lack of experience in anything but being his own boss in the private sector. I saw the same problem with Perot. It would take a really superior type of person IMO to be an optimal candidate for president without some background of success in elected politics. That’s obviously not Trump but I can’t think of any public figures who would make that grade right now.

19

George Clooney said he could not run for any office due to so many skeletons in his closet. They tried to get him to run for governor or senate

20

Well, at least everyone now knows what super delegates are for.