In 1984, the classic comic strip “Bloom County” featured a presidential campaign by Bill the Cat, a scraggly and ill-tempered feline whose sole utterance was “Ack!,” and his penguin running mate, the hapless Opus. Their slogan was “This Time, Why Not the Worst?”
Opinion
Why Republicans love candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy
We’ve seen this scenario in every recent Republican nominating contest: Voters suddenly become taken with a candidate who has never held office, might have had only the barest contact with the political world, and, when it comes to the office they’re running for, has little or no idea what they’re talking about.
At this time eight years ago, Ben Carson — a neurosurgeon whose thoughts about politics and many other things were quite bonkers — was on a rapid upward trajectory; he even led the race for a hot minute. Four years before that, voters were briefly enamored of Herman Cain, who had been the chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza. Like Carson’s, Cain’s campaign sank in the quicksand of his own ignorance. Less recently, “outsider” candidates such as Steve Forbes were able to briefly capture the imagination of the GOP primary electorate.
And, of course, there’s Trump himself.
Ramaswamy is hardly threatening Trump’s dominance of the race, but with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis plunging rapidly in the polls — his support is now half what it was five months ago — Ramaswamy could be in second place before long. And at the first candidate debate, he was the focus of more attention than anyone else, probably because his rivals hoped to gain by knocking him down.
As with his predecessors, Ramaswamy’s understanding of issues never goes deeper than the most glib sloganeering. In the debate, he said that “family, faith, patriotism, hard work have all disappeared,” so the country requires “a tonal reset from the top,” which apparently involves eliminating the IRS, the FBI, the Education Department and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Asked what he would have done in Mike Pence’s place on Jan. 6, 2021, Ramaswamy suggested that Pence could have wielded powers the vice president does not possess to reform the entire U.S. system of elections in a single day.
Why do candidates offering this kind of drivel find such a receptive audience? The roots of the attraction might lie in people’s disgust with politics. A huckster such as Ramaswamy implicitly suggests you can sweep away whatever you don’t like about politics by electing a leader with sufficient confidence and a willingness to break things. Everything that is dull or infuriating about governing — sordid deal-making, endless maneuvering over legislation, promises that never come to fruition, compromises that disappoint, special interests that stop reform — will crumble before the visionary who brings an unsullied perspective to Washington. In the place of the old politics will be something inspiring, brimming with new thinking and common sense.
The belief in the candidate who claims they can bring about that transformation is naive, even childlike. And while Democrats sometimes become briefly enamored of “outsiders,” they’ve usually been figures with ample political experience (such as Howard Dean), or never got support to match their media profiles. Andrew Yang, who resembled Ramaswamy in his lack of political experience, received a good bit of attention in 2020 but never garnered more than a few points in polls.
Were it not for Trump, the Republican electorate might look at Ramaswamy and say they’ve heard this before. But Trump convinced them that, in fact, you don’t need to know anything about politics or policy to be president. Many of his failures — including his inability to achieve much of what conservatives wanted — did stem directly from his ignorance and inexperience, as well as his titanic character flaws. But all those primary voters believe is that he won, he stuck it to the libs and he had an election stolen from him.
Eventually, even they will probably grow tired of Ramaswamy’s shtick. But four years from now, yet another candidate with zero political experience is likely to enter the Republican primaries, and chances are, GOP voters will be fascinated and intrigued all over again. Mercifully, candidates such as Ramaswamy are usually discarded sooner or later. But the years between 2016 and 2020 taught us what can happen if they aren’t.
Opinion by Paul Waldman