Given the huge thumb the media has on the scales it seems that most non-liberals to take public office outside of Congress have been fighters: certainly Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump immediately come to mind.
Clarence Thomas wouldn’t be on the Court now if he hadn’t subtly played the race card - which must’ve been hard for him. In a fiery speech he said the hearing was like a “lynching”, drawing the image in our heads of other black men strung up for offenses they were not guilty of.
Similarly, Justice Kavanaugh singlehandedly changed his nomination fortunes by a fighting speech defending himself. In fact, the media painted it as too over-the-top hysteric and thus disqualifying himself on the grounds of temperament.
And there’s Trump, of course.
It’s likely there was some democratic (small ‘d’) wisdom in 2016 Republican primary voters in intuiting that a major problem with the GOP was a tendency to court public opinion rather than to really, really want the job. You can’t have media respectability and the presidency, like you can’t love God and mammon, at least not in the age of complete journalistic failure and our cultural milieu.
Kavanaugh and Thomas REALLY wanted to be on the Court. Trump REALLY wanted to win the White House (not for the presidency itself but for the adulation, which is why the lack of a press honeymoon surprised and enraged him).
Did McCain REALLY want to be president? No, not more than he wanted the respect of the reporters he loved to dish with. Reputation mattered too much to him, which is understandable in that he was rich in reputation and it’s very hard to give up what you are rich in.
Did Romney REALLY want to be president? Yes but Romney is the quintessential “both/and” kind of guy, as in “I want to be both president and admired by the media”. He couldn’t choose, much like he couldn’t choose between being pro-abortion and pro-life, a Rockefeller republican and a “severe conservative”. So he tried to skate just below the threshold of media disfavor, a threshold that becomes increasingly tighter over time.
Trump is certainly a fighter but unfortunately not one to choose his battles wisely, or to limit himself to using the truth, or to spice his fights with more humor rather than rancor.
All of which is to say that an ambitious, happy, truthful warrior is hard to come by -- understandably given the fierce demands that makes on character.
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