A good-looking young senator, short on experience, is seeking the White House, after what critics say are too few years served in the job he is holding, too few accomplishments in it, and altogether too little of the experience, tempering, grooming, and seasoning they think that a president needs. He is in his early-to-mid-forties, about 10 years less than the age at which most men seek that office, and creates resentment and anger in the generation he is trying to shoulder aside. On the plus side, he is highly articulate and keenly aware of the nature of words and their power. He still has his hair, most of it still its original color (though this will change quickly if he becomes president), and he tends to be trim and vigorous where his opponents are rumpled or wrinkled, thick in the middle, and/or baggy-eyed. These among other things annoy his opponents, who quickly indict him for presumption and arrogance, as well as for jumping the queue.
In 1960 he was John Kennedy, in 2008 he was Barack Obama, and in 2016 he is Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio (though Cruz looks and seems older)—forming a set of the young and the hungry who annoyed their peers in the august upper chamber by running for president while still in their forties and while in the Senate for less than eight years. All were religious and/or ethnic minorities, all were impatient and restless by nature, and none fit the mold of a Senate insider. And Obama and Kennedy are two of only five men to be elected president whose last public job was senator, and the only ones elected while in the Senate, other than Warren G. Harding back in 1920. This seems a strange score for our greatest deliberative body, and what seems even stranger is that the people who manage to make this transition (a) don’t seem to like the Senate, (b) are not its leaders, and (c) haven’t been in it for long.
Why is this true of an institution one might have thought would be a seedbed of national leaders? Are there similarities in these men that set them apart from their colleagues? Why are the newbies the few who can make it? Are there things about the Senate that blight men’s ambitions? And if so, what might these things be?
With his exotic background, messianic appeal, and symbolic resonance as the first president to belong to a race that had once been enslaved in this country, Obama seems to be one of a kind, but the lines that unite the other men seem much more convincingly real. Kennedy and Rubio went into politics young, winning their seats in the House and state legislature at age 29, and jumped to the Senate while still in their thirties, in long-shot races against established favorites that they were widely expected to lose: Rubio beating Florida governor Charlie Crist (who would go on to lose elections as a Democrat and independent, too); Kennedy beating Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., whose father had beaten Kennedy’s grandfather in a Senate race 40 years earlier, and whose son would lose a Senate race to Kennedy’s brother in 1962. Kennedy won with the aid of tea parties, featuring his mother (the daughter of a local political legend) and three of his sisters; Rubio won with the help of the Tea Party, the ad hoc grassroots organization that arose in reaction to Obama’s massive expansion of government in 2009-2010. Both made their names in speeches on foreign policy matters, but once in the Senate, they were not happy long. “He’s very frustrated with the fact that the Senate doesn’t do anything,” one of Rubio’s donors said, which is in fact a fairly old story, as it is exactly what Kennedy told his friend Charles Bartlett, among many others, about the rules, the procedures, and the manifold courtesies that made it so difficult for anything whatsoever to get done. “In a 1960 tape recording, explaining why he was running for president, he said that the life of a legislator was much less satisfying than that of a chief executive,” writes JFK’s biographer Robert Dallek. “Senators and congressmen could work on something for two years and have it turned aside by a president in . . . one stroke of a pen.”
Starting their runs, they were resented by colleagues a decade or two older, in Rubio’s case by his ex-mentor Jeb Bush; in Kennedy’s, Adlai Stevenson, the party’s failed two-time standard-bearer, and Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, a workhorse who was nine years his senior, but after much strife would become his vice president. Johnson condescendingly called Kennedy “Johnny Boy,” “Sonny Boy,” and a “nice attractive young man.” “Good news—Jack’s pediatricians have given him a clean bill of health,” he told a Republican congressman, and went so far as to ridicule the size of his feet, telling a journalist Kennedy was a “scrawny little fellow with rickets. Have you seen his ankles? They’re about so round.” Playing the LBJ role, Chris Christie (who was elected just one year before him) referred to Rubio as the “boy in the bubble,” implying both youth and a sheltered experience, while Jeb Bush said both Cruz and Rubio lacked the “life experience” needed to lead.
All were assailed for votes missed during time spent campaigning, Bush complaining to Rubio that as a Florida resident he had been shortchanged on constituent services by his wandering senator, and Johnson missing no opportunity to blame his younger rival for wasting time “kissing babies” while he was back in D.C. passing bills. Johnson told crowds at rallies that he had voted on 45 roll calls on a civil rights bill, while Kennedy had missed 34 of them. “Six days and nights we had 24-hour sessions. Lyndon Johnson answered every one of the 50 quorum calls,” he told one large audience. “Some men who would be president answered none.”
Kennedy parried the blows by deflecting them deftly and letting resourcefulness speak for itself. When Harry Truman said the times required a leader with greater maturity, Kennedy answered that Truman’s age standards would have kept Jefferson from writing the Declaration of Independence (that happened when Jefferson was 33), Washington from commanding the army (he was 42 when commissioned), and James Madison from fathering the Constitution (he was 36 in 1787). When Johnson challenged him to a debate in a hall packed with his backers and then hit him with a recital of his missed votes in Congress, Kennedy smiled and killed him with kindness, lavishing praise on his “wonderful record,” asked for his help if he should become president, and then won the hostile crowd over completely by saying that Johnson “had made some general references to perhaps the shortcomings of other presidential candidates, but as he was not specific, I assume he was talking about some of the other candidates and not about me.”
At the notorious CNBC debate in November, Jeb Bush “tried to take out his onetime protégé, Marco Rubio, with a graceless attack on Rubio’s Senate attendance record,” wrote Fox News’s Chris Stirewalt. “But Rubio proved to be the new master . . . telling Bush, ‘Someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you. It’s not.’ ” Likewise, Obama in 2008 turned Hillary Clinton’s long record against her, selling himself as a new face—so new he hadn’t yet had the chance to do anything. This got him elected twice as the Hope and Change candidate. But the disastrous Obama presidency is now being used by other and older Republicans as part of their case against Rubio, pressing the point that electing a good-looking fresh face has worked out badly and should not be repeated. But the cause of the problems afflicting our president may turn out to be something else.
If youth is the problem, it hasn’t been historically, as we have had presidents younger than Obama who did not leave chaos behind. Theodore Roosevelt, who was just 42 in 1901 when he succeeded the murdered William McKinley, became an iconic world leader. Kennedy, the youngest president ever elected, was 43, four years younger than Obama was when he took office, and he too became an iconic figure and left behind a booming economy and a stable world order (by today’s standards). The difference was not in their ages but in their temperaments, their political leanings, and the way they reacted to their errors when they committed them, and to the disappointments and failures that came their way.
John Kennedy was a pragmatic moderate close to the center of national politics, who was wary of moving too far from that center; Obama proved to be an ideologue on the fringe of the electable spectrum, who would not be averse to forcing his views on the public when it did not seem to see things his way. Kennedy acknowledged mistakes and tried to correct them, while the idea that he makes any mistakes whatsoever is foreign to Obama’s worldview. And since Obama does not think he makes them, he in fact makes the same mistakes over and over and always finds some other person or party on whom to cast blame. JFK and TR were children of privilege who nonetheless had been tested by the time they became president, having been ill as small children, been ravaged by grief while still in their twenties by multiple losses within their own families, and been toughened up by World War II and the Badlands, in which lessons in survival were learned. A fatherless child from a broken family, Obama had an unsettled childhood, but from college on enjoyed a glide upwards, in which he was largely unchallenged, and often acclaimed as divinely inspired. JFK and TR had been tempered by life and expected bad things to happen. Obama reacted badly when tested, becoming resentful and petulant, and always passing the bill for his disasters on to something or somebody else.
Obama’s problem isn’t his youth, and it isn’t lack of experience, as he’s had seven years of it now and learned nothing from it. Theodore Roosevelt was effective at age 42 (as was Ronald Reagan in his mid-seventies), while men in their prime have been unsuccessful as presidents. Age, at either end, does not seem the problem. Judgment and character do.
But for the young, old, and middling, the Senate is a bad place from which to try running for president, and most of those who tried have failed. History shows the Senate far down on the list as a cradle of presidents. Vice presidents lead the way, with 14 having become president (8 on the death of an incumbent), as have 9 governors (most of them sitting) and a varied assortment of public officials who had never before faced voters. The early republic had many vice presidents, cabinet members such as James Madison and John Quincy Adams, and military figures, such as generals Washington and Jackson. With Grover Cleveland in 1884, the governors start, and run through William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and the younger George Bush. In the 19th century, Benjamin Harrison and Andrew Jackson were elected as retired senators. And of course three sitting ones won in 1920, 1960, and 2008, none of them having served very long in that body or been one of its leaders. Men became president who had been in the Senate, but most had acquired a patina of executive experience as vice presidents afterwards: Truman and Johnson succeeding presidents who had died in office and Richard M. Nixon, who lost his first bid to succeed Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 and struggled to achieve his ambition, eight years after the fact.
Just how hard is it to run and to win from the Senate? During the years Obama and Kennedy were active in politics, the following people, some of them giants, would run from the Senate and fail: Robert Taft, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater, George McGovern, Gary Hart, Howard Baker, Robert Dole, Edward Kennedy, former first lady Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and John McCain. In addition, Al Gore, Walter Mondale, and Humphrey were all former senators who became vice president and who would fail in their efforts to win the great prize for themselves. Many of these had served three or more terms (Dole was in his fifth term in his last run for president) and were regarded as greats in that great institution.
In fact, it is precisely those people who love the Senate the most, understand it the best, and are able play it like a musical instrument who make the worst showings when running for president. Few loved the Senate more than Bob Dole and Ted Kennedy, and few ever campaigned less effectively on a national platform, Dole spinning his wheels in 1996 against ex-governor Clinton and Kennedy, a heavy favorite in national polls in 1979 before his announcement, within weeks blowing a lead he would never regain. Some people say that senators fail because they have cast too many votes that are then used against them, some say they speak too much of a legislative process that confuses most voters, but the best guess seems to be that there are differences between the executive and legislative branches that make it possible for them to succeed on one stage, but not both.
Ted Kennedy loved the Senate from the first day he saw it and spent nearly 50 blissful years in it, a fate that would have driven his older two brothers insane. Picking a seat to run for in 1946, brother Jack chose the House and then Senate because he wanted to help shape the post World War II order, but the pace and the rules of Congress annoyed him, as well as did having his impact diluted as only one of 100 (or 435) votes. He ran for the Senate more to study foreign relations than to pass legislation, and when he began running for president in 1959 immediately after he won reelection, the credential he offered was not his record in Congress, but his recognized knowledge of foreign affairs.
Sometime after he had become president, Kennedy began speaking his ruminations on life into a Dictaphone, and his ambition was one of the things he addressed. “How does a politician continually raise his sights, leave a job that required complete satisfaction at one time for a higher position? Part of the reason lies in the normal desire to move ahead. Perhaps a more important part lies in the recognition that a greater opportunity to determine the direction in which the nation will go lies in higher office.” On February 3, Rush Limbaugh recounted a phone call he had with Rubio two days earlier, in which the senator told him “how frustrating it is to be in the Senate, saying ‘I’m not staying there. I’m out. . . . The place is just not built for somebody who wants to move as quickly as I do.’ ” And Limbaugh added, “Cruz . . .told me the same thing.”
An executive temperament trapped in the Senate because of his focus on international issues, he felt driven to seek at the first opportunity the one job in the world that fulfilled his ambitions: executive power in foreign affairs. Obama and Rubio seem to have felt or be feeling a similar urgency, and though Obama’s goal—to “fundamentally transform” the American nation—lost much of its prior support when people found out what he meant by it, it certainly sounded inspiring at the time he said it, and it made for a winning campaign.
What seems to win presidential elections are big ideas and clear visions, which don’t seem too often to come out of the Senate, at least of the leadership, which goes more for details and deals. The sad fact is that the senators who run effective presidential campaigns tend to be those who don’t much like the Senate and wish to depart it as quickly as possible. The more that senators love the Senate and fulfill its ideals, the more likely they are to be forced to stay in it. When it comes to senators seeking promotion, the young and the restless prevail.
Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a columnist for the Washington Examiner.
