Presidential Fathers and Sons

For the seventh consecutive election, the next president will either be a privileged son or a man with no relationship with his biological father.

By MICHAEL MEDVED

Voters this year look set to continue an odd pattern that's prevailed in presidential politics for a quarter century. They will elect either a candidate with a famous father or with no father.
The surviving serious contenders—Barack Obama, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney—all exemplify one of these two categories. For the seventh consecutive election, the winning candidate will be either a privileged prince with an adored, powerful patriarch, or an up-from-nothing scrapper with no relationship with his biological dad.


Mitt Romney is a classic example of a candidate with a famous father. George Romney achieved distinction as an auto-company executive, three-term governor of Michigan, serious presidential candidate, and secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, enjoyed no meaningful connection with his birth father. Newton Leroy McPherson was an abusive, hard-drinking auto mechanic who abandoned his 17-year-old wife within days of young Newt's birth. The boy later took the last name of his stepfather, Bob Gingrich, a career army officer who moved his family around the world with the demands of his service.
The young Bill Clinton experienced related challenges: His father, hard-drinking traveling salesman William Jefferson Blythe Jr., fatally crashed his car three months before the future president's birth. The boy later endured the drinking and battering of Roger Clinton, second of his mother's four husbands.
Barack Obama fits snugly into the no-father tradition: Barack Sr. separated from his teenage wife and infant son before the boy's first birthday, eventually returning to Kenya where he succumbed to chronic alcoholism at age 46.

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Associated Press

Republican presidential candidates, Newt Gingrich, left, listens to Mitt Romney at a Republican presidential candidates debate in Jacksonville, Fla.

Curiously, this means that if Mr. Gingrich becomes president, three of the last five chief executives of the United States will have grown up with minimal or no contact with their alcoholic, self-destructive birth fathers. And if Mr. Romney wins, three of the last five presidents will have emerged from the shadow of charismatic, widely admired political leaders.
The latter category obviously includes George W. Bush, who still worships his father, the war hero and president, who in turn profoundly admires his father, Prescott Bush—the 6-foot 4-inch World War I artillery captain, Wall Street titan and two-term U.S. senator from Connecticut.
Other would-be presidents of recent years similarly struggled to live up to legacies of famous fathers. Al Gore grew up in Washington, D.C., as the progeny of three-term U.S. Sen. Albert Sr., while John McCain spent his early life trying to replicate the heroics of his father and grandfather, both celebrated four-star admirals in the Navy.
No recent presidents can boast paternity that seems ordinary or normal, finding middle ground between the intense expectations of a powerful, prominent parent and the disasters of badly broken families with absent birth fathers.
In one sense, these extreme backgrounds now dominate the presidential process because that process itself has become so extreme. A rising politico can no longer wait for colleagues to push or pull him toward a White House race, or dream of sudden success at some brokered convention. A serious candidacy currently requires obsessive pursuit of power over the course of several years, with expenditure of tens of millions in campaign cash.
What sort of person willingly undergoes such an ordeal? More and more, it seems, either a privileged individual with a profound sense of entitlement, or an unlikely upstart whose status as miraculous survivor amounts to his own anointing. But despite a shared sense of determination and destiny, famous-father candidates tend to run dramatically different campaigns than do their no-father counterparts.
Sons of famous fathers work tirelessly to burnish family traditions and complete the unfinished business of prior generations. George W. Bush focused on winning the second term cruelly denied to his father, and Mitt Romney still hopes to claim the Republican nomination that his father lost to Richard Nixon in 1968.
Children of dominant dads display a natural tendency to run such "Restoration" campaigns—complete with pledges to bring back the nobility of some prior moment in history. At times, the promise becomes explicit: In 2000, George W. Bush repeatedly declared he would "return honor and dignity to the White House." This line alluded not only to the scandals of the Clinton years, but harked back to his father, the straight-arrow incumbent who occupied the Oval Office before Slick Willy sullied it.
Restoration campaigns succeed or fail depending on historical context and the nature of the opposition. In 1980, Sen. Ted Kennedy (son of a world-renowned and dominant father) launched such a candidacy against incumbent Jimmy Carter, much as big brother Bobby conducted a prior Restoration campaign in 1968 against another sitting president, Lyndon Johnson. In both instances, the Kennedy brothers offered a recreation of the magical Camelot aura associated with their fallen brother, deploying two inevitable advantages of Restoration campaigns: a sense of legitimacy combined with nostalgia.
Unfortunately for Teddy, his Restoration campaign occurred at a turbulent, angry moment in history much better suited to a very different sort of candidacy: the "Peasant Rebellion" campaign most comfortably associated with no-father candidates who fit naturally into upstart, outsider roles.
When rage at the establishment prevails, Peasant Rebellions like Barack Obama's hope-and-change campaign enjoy an undeniable edge over Restoration campaigns like Hillary Clinton's primary run. She promised a return to the glory days of her popular husband, but the public mood in 2008 favored something more daring.
Barack Obama's challenge in 2012 involves the uncomfortable incongruity of an incumbent president leading a Peasant Rebellion against the powers-that-be. It's an embarrassing stretch to threaten to upend the establishment when you're at the center of that very establishment. Nevertheless, the president seems determined to play out his role as born outsider: insistently blaming Republicans (who have controlled a single house of Congress for barely a year) for all dysfunctional government of the last three years.
An Obama-Romney contest might offer an incumbent president attempting to employ his innate outsider's perspective to obscure the brute fact of his incumbency, while Mr. Romney must mount an underdog, insurgent campaign that reshapes his cautious, Restorationist temperament. The outcome may well turn on which of the rivals most deftly adjusts to playing an uncomfortable but unavoidable role.