Ezra Klein (among others that I’ve seen) goes after Tim Pawlenty for his apparently weak response to the ‘why are you running for president?’ question.
In one sense this is fair. It’s a stupid question, but it’s one of those necessary hoops you just have to jump through. Everyone asks it, and your willingness to take it seriously as a question is a sign of your willingness to take the whole process seriously.
On the other hand, it’s a REALLY stupid question. People want to be president because they are ambitious, and they want to be the most powerful person on the planet. It’s not complicated. Clearly there are MANY people who don’t want to be president. And those people aren’t running, or even considering it. But I bet there are millions who, if they thought they had a serious chance, would run.
By the way, I don’t really believe Pawlenty’s answer – that he seriously considered not doing it. He seems like he’s been running for years at this point. And given the way the field is shaping up, he’s got every reason to want to. At this point he’s probably got something like a 15% chance of being the next president of the United States.
Am I missing something, or shouldn’t this question be a slam dunk for Republicans? They are in the enviable position of running for President at a time when they think there are things that are fundamentally wrong with the way the country is being run.
I can imagine Al Gore in 2000 flubbing this. “Because the status quo is pretty awesome” is not the most inspiring answer voters have ever heard (even if it is true).
I guess “why do you think you’d be a better President than Mitt Romney?” could be treacherous (if you’re a Republican). But then you should just be able to make the question about all of the Republicans who are not Mitt Romney.
Odd.
Sure, I mean, it’s an easy question to have a fake answer to.
It just irritates me that people who should know better (like E. Klein) act like anything he said to this question offers the slightest bit of genuine insight.
There are answers that are so wrong that they’re a problem. “I’m running because someone needs to unseat the Kenyan” or “I’m running by my Zarg overlords say it’s either run for president or run on the treadmill” or “I’m running for president? Since when?” But “it was a tough call. It’s tempting to just slouch off and relax, but I felt some responsibility” – that’s a perfectly cromulent answer to a dumb question.
Ask him about cap and trade or abortion or how he’s been advantaged over his life because he’s a tall white guy. Those are meaningful questions. “Why do you want to be president?” seems much closer to “why do you like to breathe oxygen?”
I know almost nothing about Pawlenty. But I kind of like what he said. I can totally understand someone thinking about the enormous emotional and financial personal cost of running, especially when you’re tired and your family is kind of tired of having to do the politics thing for a long time. Thing is, there’s lots of people who consider running for political office and even come close, but end up not doing it because the effort just seems too high — but it’s not like it’s just two groups of people, one of which always knew it’d run and the other which never would. More a spectrum, with a lot of people who come close but there’s sudden family issues or they just get tired. Obvi the people who do run have ambition that outweighs those costs, but that doesn’t mean the cost doesn’t exist. I’d much rather have someone super-ambitious that acknowledges that cost rather (as self-righteous as it is) than someone who just continues spouting non-sense (I was inspired by [insert made up story about some 90 year old great-grandmother who wants conservative values to be protected from onslaught of liberal fascism so she can bake cookies for her great grandchildren without being taxed for it]) or is so blinded by ambition that they don’t care about the personal cost to their family (which obviously is every politician with a zipper problem).
David, that’s pretty much exactly my thoughts, phrased far better than I was putting them.
Of course, what I know about Pawlenty leads me to believe he’s pretty far down the spectrum of pure ‘I want power.’ But even so, in a republic with firmly engrained mechanisms of accountability (which, despite all of our problems, we do have), even politicians who are purely ambitious know that they have to represent the people in order to stay in power. To some extent, at least.
There is a West Wing episode that features a Republican challenger flubbing this question. However, after the staff is done making fun of his answer they say, “wait, we have an answer right?” and try to script a response. Epic fail. Bartlett says its basically not a useful question. Here’s the quote about their opponent’s flub:
C.J. Cregg: He got the question.
Toby Ziegler: Who?
C.J. Cregg: The Majority Leader.
Toby Ziegler: When?
C.J. Cregg: Last night. Local news, Cleveland, Ohio – oh me-o, oh my-o, oh Cleveland, Ohio! He got the question.
Bonnie: What’s the question?
Toby Ziegler: “Why do you want to be president?”
Bonnie: And what did he say?
C.J. Cregg: [reading from a transcript of the interview] “The reason I would run, were I to run, is I have a great belief in this country as a country and in this people as a people that go into making this country a nation with the greatest natural resources and population of people, educated people.”
C.J. Cregg: [makes a shotgun motion with her arms] Chk-chk, boom!
Toby Ziegler: I’ll spread it around.
C.J. Cregg: [singing her way out of the room] I’m too sexy for my shoes, too sexy for the blues, too sexy…
C.J. Cregg: The majority leader got the question last night.
Josh Lyman: Yeah?
[reads]
Josh Lyman: … and just kept on diggin’.
Josh Lyman: [reading from transcript] “with the greatest technology of any people of any country in the world, along with the greatest, not the greatest, but very serious problems confronting our people, and I want to be President in order to focus on these problems in a way that uses the energy of our people to move us forward, basically.”
C.J. Cregg: Yes.
Josh Lyman: It’s the “basically” that makes it art.
If you link from Charles to Ezra Klein and from Ezra Klein to CBS, you get archival footage of Ted Kennedy failing this question. When I watched that, his answer sounded vaguely familiar, though it was before I was alive, let alone politically conscious. The reason, of course, is that the West Wing ripped off Kennedy’s answer for the Majority Leader.
So it goes from me to Ezra Klein to Ted Kennedy to the West Wing – which starred Rob Lowe, who was in the Outsiders with Tom Cruise, who was in A Few Good Men with Kevin Bacon!
Turns out he could have saved everyone some time by saying, “I’m not.”
That was fast.
Am I the only one who suspects that the bad old days when the party elite gathered in a back room, drank, and told us who they were going to nominate might have been a better way to ensure an intelligent discourse?