Lots of wannabes with no political experience are running for office these days.
Matthew McConaughey — yes, the actor — is considering a campaign for governor of Texas. Former decathlete and Wheaties spokesperson Caitlyn Jenner just ran in California’s gubernatorial recall. Andrew Giuliani, a former professional golfer whose only apparent political credential is that he’s Rudy’s son, has entered the race for governor of New York.
These candidates are manifestly unqualified for public office and, for the most part, they haven’t been taken very seriously by the news media. Thank heavens.
But there are two political novices currently running for high elective office who are receiving far more respectful treatment, perhaps because they’re neither actors nor athletes nor reality TV stars. They’re serious people. They’re writers.
I’m referring to “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance, who is running for U.S. Senate from Ohio as a Republican, and opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof, who just quit his job at the New York Times to run for governor as a Democrat in his home state of Oregon.
Both are first-time candidates. Both have a dollop of celebrity. Both are getting lots of ink.
But history suggests that, despite the splash they’re making, they might want to temper their expectations. Not because they have nothing to offer. But because writers who run for office usually lose.
There are a few exceptions to this rule. One — if you go back nearly a century and a half and cross the ocean — is British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. He had published nine novels and almost as many books of nonfiction before he was elected to the House of Commons in 1837. He continued churning them out as he “climbed the greasy pole” of politics, as he put it.
Chalk one up for the scribblers.
But after Disraeli, success stories become hard to find.
William Randolph Hearst served two terms in Congress in the early 1900s, but he was a press baron and zillionaire, not a writer himself. (Besides, he lost races for mayor, governor and president.)
Three decades later, the left-wing novelist and muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California in 1934. “You have written enough,” he remembered saying to himself. “What the world needs is a deed.”
He ran a Capraesque campaign to repair the state’s Depression-ravaged economy and put hundreds of thousands of unemployed Californians back to work. His “End Poverty in California” platform promised cooperative farms and factories, pensions for the elderly and the state’s first income tax.
Ultimately, Sinclair was defeated by two things: his writing and the right-wing business interests who hated him, including the Los Angeles Times. This newspaper ran an attack on Sinclair each day in a box on Page One, calling him an “apostle of hatred,” denigrating his supporters as “maggots” and “termites” and turning his own words against him. Given the many powerful forces he’d attacked over the years, that wasn’t too difficult.
Then there was novelist Norman Mailer, who ran for mayor of New York on a ticket with newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, who was running for City Council president.
