Long ago, I heard Richard Brookhiser say something: “The presidency is not an entry-level political job, unless you’ve won a world war.” (He was thinking of Eisenhower, of course.) Then came Trump — and the American people gave it to him. (The job, I mean.)

Vivek Ramaswamy is now running for president. Sort of as Trump’s wingman, it seems to many. He too has never held office. And he is trying to start — if he is sincere in his campaign — with the presidency.

Big and interesting subject. I once wrote an essay called “The Question of Experience: On presidential candidates and what they’ve done.” Go here, if you like.

• I am a great admirer of American democracy. I am probably more admiring of it than most. I would not welcome any other system, for us. At the same time, I’m not naïve, I hope. Gadfly billionaires can run for president, and they sometimes win. That is an aspect of our system. Whether it is a great one, I’m not sure.

• Chris Stirewalt wrote a piece called “The Law Is No Substitute for Public Virtue.” That is so true. The subheading reads, “Only voters can break the spell of corruption.” True again.

Paper protections can only go so far. Without men and women of character in office, we are done for.

I think of the chestnut from John Adams. He warned that “avarice, ambition,” and the like “would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.” (Adams was a New Englander. The simile must have come naturally to him.) “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Uh-oh.

• Did you happen to see this? “Ramaswamy Says He’d Run the Government Like Elon Musk Runs Twitter.” I think I believe him.

• It’s hard to know whether Ramaswamy believes the things he says — about Russia, Ukraine, 9/11, and so on. Are they genuine beliefs? Or is he telling Republican primary voters what he thinks they want to hear?

Recently, I’ve been reading James Fenimore Cooper, as one does. Not a novel, but his 1838 book, The American Democrat. Here is a pertinent excerpt:

The constant appeals to public opinion in a democracy, though excellent as a corrective of public vices, induce private hypocrisy, causing men to conceal their own convictions when opposed to those of the mass, the latter being seldom wholly right, or wholly wrong. A want of national manliness is a vice to be guarded against, for the man who would dare to resist a monarch, shrinks from opposing an entire community.

Heavens yes. Very human.

• Missing from the Republicans’ debate stage on Wednesday night was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Yes, he’s running for the other party’s nomination. But wouldn’t he be at home in the GOP? He’s anti-vax, anti-Ukraine, devoted to all sorts of conspiracy theories. He’s a populist par excellence. He just might out-Ramaswamy Ramaswamy.

A report from the Wall Street Journal is headed “Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Unsubstantiated Bioweapon Claims Find Big Audience in China.” Oh, sure. “Beijing uses statements from long-shot presidential candidate known for advancing conspiracy theories to bolster its own talking points.”

We have seen a lot of that.

• Some of the Republican candidates seem uninterested in running against Donald Trump, the frontrunner. Ramaswamy. Ron DeSantis. Others. They are rather protective of him. It was Asa Hutchinson who pointed out that members of Trump’s own cabinet are more critical of him than his presidential-primary opponents.

I think of Egypt, and its “presidential” “election” in 2018. General Sisi had an opponent, nominally. The opponent endorsed him.

Really.

I also think of the Washington Generals, who were assigned to lose to the Harlem Globetrotters in their exhibition games.

• Have a dose of Fox News:

Those three p’s remind me of the three a’s from the 1972 campaign. Can you recite them along with me? “Acid, amnesty, and abortion.”

(In the 1880s, we had “Rum, Romanism, and rebellion.”)

• I’m not sure whether they still do it, but the Wall Street Journal had a tradition of running editorials headed “Who Is [So-and-So]?” What is he, or she, really about? What makes him tick? What is the there there?

I wonder: Who is Ron DeSantis? He seems to adopt a new persona every couple of weeks or so. Is there a there there? Does he have a “core”? Is he a “conviction politician” (to borrow a Thatcher term)? A weathervane?

You and I may not like Joe Biden or Donald Trump — but we know who they are. Pre-2016, DeSantis was a conservative who argued for entitlement reform and knocked President Obama as soft on Putin’s aggression. Then came Trumpification.

These days, DeSantis seems . . . unsettled. Casting about.

A person should decide who he is. What he believes. What he stands for in life. It must be so wearying, calculating all the time, shifting with the wind.

• Chris Christie is one fellow who is not afraid to campaign against Trump — on the contrary. In an interview, Christie said, “Trump wants to be Putin in America.” This seems to me obviously true, and long has. I’m not even sure Trump would deny it. Or consider it uncomplimentary.

The other day, Trump said of his relationship with Putin, “I was the apple of his eye.”

How sweet.

• Alex Nowrasteh is a scholar at the Cato Institute. He jotted a tweet — a lighthearted tweet — that could really be the subject of a whole doctoral dissertation or tract. I thought he really captured something.

• You may have heard about the controversy over the coming movie about Leonard Bernstein. The actor playing Bernstein, Bradley Cooper, wears a false nose — a bigger nose than his own, a nose meant to look more like Bernstein’s.

Many people object to this, finding such an “enhancement” offensive. I understand them. When I was a kid, I heard a joke: “Why do Jews have big noses? Because the air is free.” I didn’t get it. When I got it, I was disgusted.

Again, I understand the objectors, or think I do. But I also think this: If the director of a biopic wants his actor to look more like the subject — fine.

What about opera? Otello in blackface, or Aida darkened — stuff like that? Interesting subject, not black and white (no pun intended). I have written about this from time to time. For a 2015 article — “Made up” — go here.

• Let’s have a little language. If what follows a colon is a complete sentence, you can capitalize the first word, if you like. Or you can leave it down. Different publications have one style or the other. What is not permissible is to capitalize the first word after a colon if what follows the colon is a fragment, not a complete sentence.

And I see this all the time. I mean, in publications. And it’s just wrong.

So . . .

Billy likes Margaret a lot: He stares at her all day.

Or,

Billy likes Margaret a lot: he stares at her all day.

But never,

Billy, liking Margaret a lot, gives her one thing all day: A stare.

Grr.

• In New York a few days ago, I passed Madison Square Park, and snapped a photo of Seward — William H. Seward, who was governor of New York, a U.S. senator, and secretary of state:

I asked Rick Brookhiser, “Do you think well of him?” I find his answer both interesting and, so help me, moving. I may even have felt a lump in my throat. I’ve been that way recently, especially about the preservation of American greatness (true greatness, not the chest-thumping, boobish stuff).

“Yes,” said Rick.

An easygoing man of principle, a hard combo. His faction of the Whig Party was called the Burr-heads because they were thought by their critics to be too concerned about “burr-heads,” i.e., Negroes. He served Lincoln loyally and well, all the more praiseworthy after having to swallow his own defeat at the 1860 convention.

He was slated for assassination by Booth’s gang, and the chosen assassin got into his house and stabbed him in bed (he was laid up from a carriage accident). They didn’t tell him Lincoln had been killed for fear of derailing his recovery. But he saw out a window a flag at half mast, and guessed what had happened. Plus, as he put it, “Lincoln would have come to see me.”

Also he bought Alaska and claimed Midway, both useful things. (One senator said of Alaska that he would approve the purchase only if Seward agreed to go live there.)

Don’t you love that phrase “an easygoing man of principle”? May we all aspire to that!

Moreover, Carl Schurz — one of my favorite men of the 19th century — said that Seward was “one of those spirits who sometimes will go ahead of public opinion instead of tamely following its footprints.”

And don’t we need such men, and women?

Thank you for joining me today, my friends. Have a good weekend. Catch you soon.

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