Will voters elect a non-politician for president?
Political parties out of power almost always campaign on change. But the party that in the 1946 midtermcongressional elections campaigned on the slogan “Had enough?” this year is seeking not only to change the political persuasion of the person in the WhiteHouse, but also is flirting with transforming the kind of people nominated for national office. That is the irresistible conclusion prompted by the stunning finding in the latest NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll showing that three candidates who have never served a single hour in political office— billionaire businessmanDonald J. Trump, retiredneurosurgeon Ben Carson and former high-tech executive Carly Fiorina -- now attract the support ofmore than half of likely Republican primary voters.
This represents a wholesale rejection of important elements of the classic Republican outlook— and of classical conservative political thought. It suggests, moreover, thatamajor political party and an established political creedmay be parting ways with the past— and may be blazing a brave but risky new future.
Both traditional Republicanism and classic conservatism — and though atmany times in American politics they have converged, they are not the same thing — customarily extol the virtue of experience and the prudence that comes from personal exposure to historical precedent. It was Edmund Burke, revered as one of the founding fathers of conservatism, who argued that the duty of political figures is to “consult and follow your experience.”
But this new departure — not only the preference for new faces, but also the revulsion for the familiar and the experienced -- is especially stark when you contrast the complete lack of experience of the three candidates whose Republican poll ratings are a cumulative 52 percentage points in comparison with the rivals who trail them. Their opponents have a cumulative 49 years as governor, 35 in the Senate, 34 in the House and 22 in state legislatures. Together these experienced politicians, who also have held many municipal positions, have collected only 39 percentage points.
Democrats have long embraced the new face; the best example may beWoodrow Wilson, who with only two years of experience as governor of New Jersey, was the party’s 1912 nominee. He defeated two established political figures with a cumulative 11 years in the presidency, four in the Cabinet, eight on the federal bench, two as governor, two in the state legislature and experience as colonial governor of both Cuba and the Philippines.
But traditionally Republicans have favored experience and a peculiar form of political primogeniture that delivers their presidential nomination to figures such as Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bob Dole— men who ran for national office a cumulative 10 times and who first held important positions: Senate majority leader, vice president, governor.
Only once in the last three-quarters of a century did Republicans stray fromthis practice that they transformed into a dogma. (The nomination of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 doesn’t count, as he was among a dozen generals, beginning with GeorgeWashington, who became president.)
This departure occurred in 1940, when, froma field that included, among others, two leading senators (Robert A. Taft of Ohio and ArthurH. Vandenberg of Michigan) and a prominent governor (Harold E. Stassen of Minnesota), the Republicans nominated the president of the Commonwealthand SouthernCorp., then as now an important electric utility holding company. His name was Wendell Willkie.
Thisflashonthe national stage of amateur candidates now is being repeated, perhaps as tragedy, perhaps as farce, perhaps as a way to redeemthe Founders’ faith, honored in the breach over two dozen decades, in the virtue of citizenpoliticians.
The experts believe that Trump, Carson and Fiorina will fade as political forces. But the whole basis of the three candidates’ campaigns is that political expertise, like political experience, is a remnant of a time swiftly passing. If so, then one of these threemay possess the face of the future, and the change they personifymay represent a profound transformation of our politics.