The most revealing and in some ways the most poignant moment to come out of the series of “debates” among the presidential candidates that took place in November, December, and January, before the voting actually started, came during the Republican affair—with the best will in the world it cannot be called a debate in any recognizable sense of the term—in Manchester, New Hampshire on December 2. This was the occasion on which Gary Bauer, reaching for something vaguely inspirational to say, sought to encourage the allegedly “cynical” youth of America by noting as evidence for the greatness of their country the fact that he, G. Bauer, the son of a janitor, could have risen so high as to be numbered among the last six candidates for the Republican nomination to the presidency.

Now I happen to agree with Gary Bauer about many, if not most things, but in this answer he summed up the postmodern politics of the Clinton era—politics, that is, as a subcategory of celebrity worship. Like those of Alan Keyes and Steve Forbes, two others who presented themselves to primary voters without ever having managed to get themselves elected to anything, let alone to the sort of office that might plausibly be considered a springboard to the presidency, and like that of Orrin Hatch, whose electability to anything outside of Utah is almost equally doubtful, Bauer’s was essentially a vanity candidacy. In a way, its entire raison d’êtrewas fulfilled that night in Manchester when