The Hardest Job in the World by John Dickerson

Author:John Dickerson [Dickerson, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

HAIL TO THE SELFIE

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THE FAST REWARD WE WANT is available to us in the antics of presidential candidates groomed since Kennedy on providing an appealing and immediate message for the audience.

In 2019, Congressman Beto O’Rourke launched his presidential campaign on a feeling. A cover story in Vanity Fair that accompanied the former three-term congressman’s entrance into the contest described a “near-mystical experience” at a campaign rally during O’Rourke’s failed Senate run in 2018.60 It was the moment when his wife “first witnessed the power of O’Rourke’s gift” that represented the rationale for his presidential candidacy. The candidate felt this gift too. “I don’t know if it’s a speech or not, but it felt amazing,” O’Rourke said. “Because every word was pulled out of me. Like, by some greater force, which was just the people there. Everything that I said, I was, like, watching myself, being like, How am I saying this stuff? Where is this coming from?”

This mystical feeling of connection convinced the candidate he should make a go for the most powerful job in the world. “I just knew it. I just felt it,” O’Rourke said about his failed run for the Senate. In what the magazine writer, without disparagement, describes as “a politics not readily accessible by reason,” O’Rourke was propelled by this feeling into a presidential campaign. “It’s probably not the most professional thing you’ve ever heard about this, but I just feel it.”

In case anyone missed the ambition of the launch, O’Rourke was photographed on the cover of the magazine wearing a blue shirt, blue jeans, and brown belt with his hands in his back pockets, a real-life duplicate of the well-known painting of Ronald Reagan in which the former two-term governor and two-term president was dressed the same way and stood in the identical posture. As the piece concludes, the candidate describes being inspired by the power of his own performance. “The more he talks, the more he likes the sound of what he’s saying,” read the closing lines. “I want to be in it,” he says, now leaning forward. “Man, I’m just born to be in it.”

The image and article made a false equivalency between Reagan, a two-term governor and three-time presidential candidate who had considerable leadership skills built over time, with a three-time congressman hooked on a feeling. O’Rourke’s candidacy did not last long, but it was a candidacy based upon the spirit of his age, a candidacy elevated by self-realization and self-expression, quickened by social media. Before announcing, O’Rourke published diaries of his travels across the country and posted video of his teeth cleaning on Instagram. Far from being laughed off the stage, O’Rourke was encouraged to be on it by pundits who predicted he could go all the way and who prophesied that if he didn’t, he would at least be a top finisher.

This political shift to the immediate and personal has been under way for decades. The generation raised during the Great Depression valued shared sacrifice, modesty, and self-discipline.

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