The White Knight Candidates of 2016 (Ron Paul, house of representatives, votes, Congress)

[Unsettomati]

I’d like to discuss the interesting phenomenon of what the following article from the 2012 election cycle calls a type of white knight candidate. My first experience with a white knight was in the 1980s, when there was a movement to draft Lee Iacocca as a Democratic nominee for President. Sounded good to me! After all, he turned around Chrysler and so something as simple as Presidenting should be child’s play for such a man! At least, that’s how my juvenile brain worked at the time. I was, as juveniles usually are, naïve and idealistic and clueless and prone to mistake personality for useful talents in a leader. Happily, I grew up and disabused myself of such childish notions.

ONE more note on the Herman Cain campaign: obviously, the campaign is the latest example of the recurrent temptation in American politics to turn to non-politicians, usually businessmen, to fix the political mess, clean up Washington, and so forth.

But to me, the interesting historical question here is whether turning to non-politicians to fix political messes has ever, in fact, worked. The only non-politician candidate I can think of who became a successful president was Eisenhower, and he was drafted not to clean up a mess in Washington but to end the war in Korea. Few non-politicians have been elected; in relatively modern history, only Herbert Hoover had no electoral experience, though he was hardly a Washington novice, having served two terms as commerce secretary. In any case, we all know how well he turned out.

Most recently, we have examples like General Wesley Clark, who failed to go anywhere in the 2004 Democratic primaries; Ralph Nader, who got 2% of the vote in 2000; and Ross Perot, who won 19% in 1992 and 8% in 1996. In perhaps the purest white-knight candidacy in American history, Horace Greeley got creamed in 1872, went insane, and died before the votes were counted.

The Cain campaign: Save us from the white knights | The Economist

Let’s look at the hallmarks of white knight candidates.

First, they’re outsiders. They’ve never held political office, so their followers deem them pure and untainted by the foul political process. This very simplistic, almost child-like idolization of them, is from where the ‘white knight’ label derives – they’re seen, literally, as the white-hatted good guys from corny westerns of old, doing battle against the bad guys in the black hats. They never draw first, their honor and bravery know no bounds, and they’re always there for the damsel in distress – in this case, the damsel is America, waiting to be rescued.

Second, they’re usually businesspeople. This speaks to the fact that they’re usually on the right of modern politics (there are exceptions - Ralph Nader is one on the left), where the knack for turning a buck is widely considered a supreme virtue. The article I cite includes entertainers, scions and generals as white knights, but I do not. Pure entertainers don’t ride into the American Presidency (though some ride into statehouses, such as Reagan and Ventura and Schwarzenegger, and some ride into Congress, as have numerous professional athletes, such as Jack Kemp and Bill Bradley and Jim Bunning, and even musicians such as Sono Bono). And scions work their way up through offices in statehouses of Congress (Clinton, the Bushes, Romney, etc.), while military leaders, as I mentioned above, tend to be insiders well-versed in negotiating the political corridors of Washington.

Finally, they tend to have cults of personality form around them. This is abundantly evident in the present case of Donald Trump, and the adoration of Ben Carson is fairly clear as well. To a lesser extent it was a part of the Herman Cain phenomenon in last 2011 before his campaign imploded.

Oh, white knight candidacies also have one final thing in common – virtually no chance of every winning a major party nomination.

As I noted in this thread from last year, in the era of the modern primary and caucus system (which took full shape beginning in 1976) there have been precisely 1000 state primaries and caucuses. Of those 1000 primaries:
426 were won by an incumbent President seeking another term in office or by a sitting or former Vice President.
531 were won by a sitting or former Governor or Senator – ie, a major statewide officeholder

This accounts for 95.7% of all primary and caucus winners since 1976. That right there should tell you all you need to know about the chances that someone who has never held federal or statewide office of winning a major-party nomination.

Of the remaining 43 primaries and caucuses, 14 were won by a sitting or former member of the House of Representatives, while in 7 instances there was no winner – the option of ‘unpledged’ received the most votes.

Now were up to 97.8% of all primary and caucus winners.

Of the still-remaining 22 primaries and caucuses, precisely half – 11 of them – were won by one man, Jesse Jackson, a political activist. The other 11 were won by a former White House aide, speechwriter, and commentator (4, Pat Buchanan), a televangelist (4, Pat Robertson), a publisher (2, Steve Forbes) and a general (1, Wesley Clark).

Really, only two of these fit the white knight profile, and they’re Robertson and to a lesser extent, Forbes. Buchanan was an insider, albeit a very minor one, and Clark was a four-star general and former NATO head – that’s pretty inside the beltway.

Forty years. One thousand primaries and caucuses. And only six of them – less than one in every 160 – has been won by a white knight. The aforementioned thread is here:

Who The 2016 Presidential Nominees Will & Won't Be

And that brings us back around to the white knights of this campaign cycle – Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina. Trump, of course, is a billionaire, having made his money in various business ventures (mostly real estate, as well as decades of creating a cultish following for the profoundly tacky Trump brand). Carson made his name bashing President Obama, and the right gets positively giddy over any black person willing to criticize the President (it's no coincidence that the GOP made Michael Steele the first black head of the RNC a mere 10 days after President Obama first took office). Plus, he’s a renowned physician, and people tend to fawn over doctor-politicos (as manifested in the weird tendency of fans of both Ron Paul and Howard Dean to refer to them as ‘Dr. Paul’ and ‘Dr. Dean’, respectively). Fiorina? Well, she was a CEO. And she made gobs of money as the HP brand faltered and shareholders lost half their value during her tenure before she was forced out. But all of that that matters is the ‘made gobs of money’ part. Well, that and the fact that she’s a woman, and as with Carson and Obama, the GOP is desperate for at least one female voice in the room otherwise full of men – particularly in light of the fact that Hillary Clinton is going to be the Democratic nominee.

The white knights – they range from amazing if weird spectacles (Trump) to curious (Carson) to yawners (Fiorina). And despite the fact that they never come close to winning a nomination, they never fail to get legions of fans who are absolutely convinced that they’re looking at the next President of the United States.