Understanding the 2020 Dem presidential contenders

What do Democratic presidential primary voters want? There’s no one answer, of course. But the entry of all these candidates — Beto O’Rourke is the latest, and Joe Biden looks ready to jump in any day now — makes one wonder what we expect a president to know, to be, and to have done on the day they walk into the Oval Office.

It’s the unlikeliest candidacies who bring that question into relief.

Let’s begin with a taxonomy of the contenders. In one group we have those with the traditional set of qualifications, service as governor, senator or vice president. This is what, until a few years ago, it was assumed you had to have on your résumé to even consider running for president. The candidates who qualify are Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, Jay Inslee and John Hickenlooper.

Then you have what we might call the reachers, people with some federal government experience (especially in the House) but who in a previous era would have been told to move up a bit before making a run. This group includes O’Rourke, John Delaney, Julian Castro and Tulsi Gabbard.

Then we have the leapers, those without federal experience or a governorship who are jumping a few steps like governor or senator to seek the presidency. These include Pete Buttigieg, Marianne Williamson, Andrew Yang and Wayne Messam. Of these only Buttigieg is getting substantial media attention.

You probably haven’t heard of a couple of people on that last list, and they’re surely jealous of Buttigieg right now. Williamson is a self-help guru and Yang is an entrepreneur and leader of a nonprofit, so many dismiss them out of hand since they’ve never held public office before. Messam, on the other hand, is the mayor of Miramar, Fla., which at 140,000 residents is somewhat larger than Buttigieg’s home of South Bend, Ind., which has about 100,000.

What makes the mayor of a small city think his next job should be running the country? You’d have to ask them (and wade through a bunch of pablum in response), but if you want to blame someone you could start with Barack Obama. When he ran in 2008, Obama had only a few years of experience in the Senate and everyone thought it was way too soon, but he proved that with enough talent and some good timing, experience didn’t matter. And though he was a once-in-ageneration politician, every politician thinks they’re just dynamite and there’s no limit to the support they can get if they only have the opportunity to talk to people.

Right now Buttigieg is getting attention not only because he’s a genuinely impressive guy, but because he did something very shrewd when he ran to be chair of the Democratic National Committee in 2017. Even though he didn’t win, it put him in front of a bunch of influential people in the party and the media, and because many were taken with him, they were ready two years later to see his presidential candidacy as something worth considering.

There’s another factor that makes voters more likely to consider a young person like Buttigieg, who’s only 37. In the 2018 election we saw a wave of new Democrats elected to the House (and to state offices), many of whom were quite young. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the most visible example; at just 29, she’s the star of the freshman House class, not just because she’s media-savvy but because she’s offering ideas meant to challenge the status quo in ambitious ways.

Any candidate jumping a few levels to seek the White House has an extra responsibility to demonstrate that they’re ready to be president. If you’ve been a governor, you’ve managed a large government, dealt with a legislature and confronted an array of problems large and small. If you’re a senator, you’ve had to understand foreign and domestic issues and learned about how government works. In both cases, you’ll have a record we can investigate.

That goes for someone like O’Rourke, too. He was a relatively undistinguished congressman before he ran an exciting Senate campaign, but he should be able to explain why despite his limited experience he can do the job better than a candidate with more time in government and pretty much the same policy agenda.

So while my general position is that anyone who wants to run for president should go right ahead, I would argue that candidates like Buttigieg and O’Rourke ought to have some extra convincing to do. They need to show that they’re conversant with the problems the federal government confronts, and that they have clear ideas about how to govern from the White House.

Of course, the other candidates

should do that, too.