Paul Ryan, David Petraeus and the ‘White Knight’ Problem
Why we love to talk about would-be saviors who can't win the presidency.
By Jack Shafer
Politico
April 14, 2016
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan dashed a million political journalists’ dreams yesterday when he implied that short of being sewn into a leather sack with a wolverine, a diseased howler monkey and a litter of ferrets, and tossed into Lake Michigan, he will not, absolutely not serve as the Republican Party’s “white knight,” and save the party from a convention meltdown by running a unity candidacy for president.
“I do not want, nor will I accept, the Republican nomination,” Ryan told the TV camera, essentially painting a dozen coats of flat black on his knighthood and skulking back to his office.
This wasn’t the first time Ryan had announced his non candidacy. In January 2015, he all but invoked the leather death-sack when he told NBC News he would forgo the encouragement of friends and supporters who wanted him to run for president this cycle.
The dream of Ryan as white knight might have ended, but the dream in political and journalistic circles for some other white knight to emerge is alive and well. Ryan’s categorical refusal has only created media crawlspace for other would-be white knights to polish their armor. Writing in today’sWashington Post, columnist David Ignatius decants the Pentagon alumni society for three retired generals and one retired admiral—David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal, James Mattis and Mike Mullen—he thinks could rescue the Republican Party from collapse by running for president. (The Daily Beast reported on a prospective “Draft Mattis” third-party run last week.) Ignatius also floats the name of Army vet, former FBI agent and former Rep. Mike Rogers, perhaps to indemnify himself against the charge that he’s plotting a real-life Seven Days in May sequel.
To mix metaphors, white knights are a lot like unicorns. Everybody keeps waiting for one to reveal itself, but nobody can recall actually having seen one. The last person to arrive on the scene and win the nomination of his party without running a real campaign was Adlai Stevenson, whose dithering didn't end until he gave a successful welcoming speech at the 1952 Democratic National Convention and was finally talked into becoming a candidate. Stevenson won on the third ballot over Estes Kefauver—and was then buried in the general election by Dwight D. Eisenhower.
It’s not hard to understand why voters indulge in this exercise: Yearning for a white knight gives them a way to express buyer’s remorse once they’re stuck with two or three finalists. It’s bit like a last fling, or the dream of one, before the commitment of marriage.
There’s also an element of idealism, though it tends to be misapplied. The white knight candidate evokes the spirit of 1800s, when political etiquette dictated that politicians should not lust for the presidency until the machines that ran the party asked them to run. False modesty was the accepted practice. Back then the only person considered worthy of the presidency was the one who pretended he wasn’t worthy. Today, the politicians cast in the role of white knight generally know very well why they’re unworthy—or at least why they’re unelectable. It’s often the same reason they’re on the sidelines in the first place, and most likely should stay there. In Ryan’s case, he probably steered clear of the 2016 contest because he intuited that he would have been slaughtered alongside Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal and the other future Republican stars whom Trump casually wiped out.
The news media encourage the voters’ white-knight yearnings for their own craven reasons: Politicians who aren’t running are almost always a better story than the politicians who are. For one thing, their personal histories haven’t been picked apart the way the declared candidates’ personal stories have. For another, the tension and confusion generated by their indecision adds nuance to their profiles, giving reporters more to write about. (There’s a reason Hamlet remains relevant 400 years later.) That’s also why John Kasich can’t be considered a white knight: He announced long ago and the press has written far too much about him. He’s more of a dark horse than a white knight.
Only in his dithering does a white knight become even semi attractive. Had Chris Christie not announced last summer, the news media would be counting his positives now and touting him as a sensible white knight to Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. They’d mostly ignore Christie’s downside until he finally declared and then fill the news hole with disparagement. Likewise, Joe Biden never looked better as a presidential candidate than last fall when he agonized over the decision to run for the White House and then didn’t.
Here’s the fact: The longer a presidential candidate waits to announce or organize—i.e., the longer he remains a potential white knight—the less likely he is to win his party’s nomination. That's what a 2011 survey of recent presidential contests by FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver showed. The only recent late entry to come close to winning the nomination was Sen. Ted Kennedy in 1980. In a 2015 update to the piece, Silver cited these basic rules to conclude that Biden made a wise decision not to enter. For one thing, all the best donors had been corralled by Hillary Clinton. For another, he couldn’t possibly match her organization for depth and skill. And finally, to be a proper white knight, you have to bring something to the campaign the other candidates aren’t bringing. Biden is nothing but Clinton with a jacket and tie over a pantsuit.
The last white knight to take a convention, Stevenson, had several advantages going for him that none of 2016’s hypothetical share. President Harry Truman and much of the Democratic establishment had wanted him to run in the first place. They were hostile to Kefauver, and once Stevenson agreed to run, it was practically a done deal. Stevenson might have become president, too, had Truman not previously urged Eisenhower—also regarded in many quarters as a white knight—to run as a Democrat in 1948 with Eisenhower on the top of the ticket! You could say that Truman was responsible for starting the process that ultimately pitted the two white knights against each other in 1952.
The disadvantages late entrants face in winning the nomination become only magnified in a general election slugfest. As Jennifer Rubin wrote in the Washington Post recently, it is not inconceivable that a fresh face might surface at the Republican convention after multiple ballots fail to select Trump, Cruz or Kasich. But then the winning Republicans would be running a candidate with “no campaign operation, no advisers, no money beyond what he gets from the Republican National Committee, and no active super PAC. How exactly would this work out against a fully staffed, fully funded Hillary Clinton campaign?” The Republicans might be better off shopping for a unicorn to run for president.
There’s something seasonal about the passion for white knight candidates, usually arriving with winter's thaw when donors, voters and the news media have tired of the candidates they have and yearn for the ones they don’t have. In early 2012, much ink was wasted on possible white knight candidacies by Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie when it looked as though Mitt Romney was faltering. But then he righted his course and 2012’s white knights vanished. We’ve largely been thinking about Republican white knights lately, but depending on the outcome of the New York primary, we might see the dream flourish on the Democratic side next. It’s not hard to imagine Elizabeth Warren or John Kerry temporarily elevated to white knighthood, but that party’s orthodoxy isn’t likely to bolt for Warren or Kerry just because the race has tightened.
Just because real white knights appear so infrequently, and with so little success, doesn’t mean it’s a meaningless exercise to consider them. They recharge our interest in the political process after a long and miserable season of caucuses and primaries. They provide voters with fresh information about candidates who might be running four or eight years later. They help stock the waters with potential vice presidential candidates. Can’t you just see Trump selecting a general to run with him the way George Wallace did with Curtis LeMay? Finally, the practice of casting for white knights reminds us, corny as it sounds, that the best person to run for president should be noble and pure of spirit. That’s not too much to wish for, is it?
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