Dreaming of Glenn Youngkin
I was at a political gathering a few months ago and saw a veteran New York Republican whom I’ve always liked and respected. I asked him who he thought was going to have the edge in the GOP presidential primary that was only then getting revved up.
“Youngkin!” he said without a moment’s hesitation, referring to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who at that point had been in office for less than a year and a half after beating Democrat Terry McAuliffe.
I asked if he had a sense of when Youngkin would get into the race. “He’s already in,” my acquaintance said archly.
Again, this was a few months and two car-crash GOP primary debates ago, and Youngkin remains undeclared. Last week, he told Fox News that he remains focused on flipping Virginia’s legislature to a Republican majority in the November general election, which would be a notable accomplishment in a state that had been generally blue, or purple with a bluish hue, for much of the past decade.
That statement was prompted in part by a very good piece in The Washington Post by CBS political correspondent Robert Costa that surveyed the current state of YoungkinMania among billionaire Republican donors and avowed reformed Trump toadies like former attorney general William Barr and ex-national security adviser John Bolton — two men desperately working to rewrite the first sentences of their obituaries.
As Costa noted, we have been down this road before, specifically in December 1991, when New York Gov. Mario Cuomo famously kept two chartered planes gassed and ready to fly him to New Hampshire to file for the Granite State’s Democratic primary, only to relent and insist in a news conference that negotiating the state budget took precedence over any other considerations.
But it also put me in mind of another New York governor who was perpetually put forward — often by himself — as an ideal establishment candidate, only to see the party slide away from him: Nelson Rockefeller.
Rockefeller first considered seeking the presidency in 1959 and staged a rather lurching primary challenge to Vice President Richard Nixon the following year. In an email on Friday, his biographer Richard Norton Smith, whose excellent “On His Own Terms” came out in 2014, described the 1960 gambit as “the single most perplexing act of a career filled with brilliant accomplishment on the home front (in New York) and stunning misjudgments on the road.”
In 1964, Rockefeller’s early front-runner status bled away in the face of the Goldwater revolution; the governor’s decision to end his campaign was likely less of a wound than the abuse he received at the GOP convention in San Francisco when what was supposed to be a five-minute platform amendment speech turned into an orgy of abuse from the crowd that prefigured today’s unruly library board meetings, but on a far
grander scale. Rockefeller warned of the “extremist threat” the GOP faced from elements within, a warning that was decidedly not appreciated by Barry Goldwater’s supporters.
In 1968, Rockefeller hung back and hoped against all the evidence that the party would wake up one day and realize that Nixon couldn’t win, and draft him at the GOP convention in Miami. Nixon was nominated on the first ballot.
Smith — whose acclaimed biography of President Gerald Ford was released earlier this year — said that while he understood the surface similarities between the draftYoungkin movement and Rockefeller’s draft-me hopes in ‘68, the differences are far more stark: Rockefeller by that point had been governor of New York for almost a decade and a public figure — scion of one of the nation’s wealthiest families — for almost his entire life; Youngkin is just a few years separated from work at the global investment management firm The Carlyle Group, a gig that allowed him to selffund his gubernatorial primary campaign.
“Youngkin would be a firsttime candidate in the national arena, encouraged presumably by the Murdochs, to rescue the party from You-KnowWho,” Smith wrote. “He has none of Nelson’s baggage, but also none of Nelson’s vetting.”
But isn’t that part of his appeal? Youngkin — whose very name suggests youth and fellowship, like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown — seems less a presidential candidate than a Rorschach inkblot on which Trump-averse Republicans can project their ideas of a worthy winning candidate.
Youngkin has only a few weeks to file for the most important early primaries. Doing so would oblige him to join the rest of the fractious Republican primary field in the next one of these godawful debates that Fox News seems likely to spring on us every few weeks, where his current image as the smiling face of the Trump-agnostic wing of the party would face abuse from all sides.
Indeed, it often seems that the only path for Youngkin might be as the result of some sort of herd-culling among the current slate of candidates — the political or perhaps even actual equivalent of the fiery prom scene from the horror film “Carrie,” which definitely cleared the field of future class presidents at fictional Bates High School.
No one wants to see that sort of thing broadcast live in prime time. Except maybe Fox News.