There is something uniquely depressing about the speed with which the political class pivots from one bacchanal of self-importance to the next. The dust from the last cycle has barely settled on the Capitol steps, yet Jim Messina, the grand vizier of Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election, has cheerfully informed the world that more than two dozen Democrats are already laying the groundwork for a 2028 presidential bid. Some, he notes, have already begun the sacred ritual of hiring campaign staff. We are four full calendar years away, and yet twenty-four separate egos have already looked in the bathroom mirror and whispered, "Yes, the republic simply cannot function without my hand firmly on the regulatory spigot."
It is the political equivalent of planning your fourth wedding while the current spouse is still clearing their throat to give the reception toast. The state, in its modern iteration, behaves less like a constitutional referee and more like that deeply embarrassing relative who not only overstays their welcome at Thanksgiving, but insists on reorganizing your kitchen drawers, inspecting your trash, and lecturing you on the proper caloric intake of your children. And here we have two dozen aspiring patriarchs and matriarchs squabbling over who gets to wear the bib and hold the carving knife four holidays from now.
One has to wonder what these prospective candidates imagine the presidency actually entails. In the romanticized literature of modern governance, the executive is a philosopher-king, gently guiding a wayward flock toward economic equity and moral enlightenment. In cold reality, the modern American presidency is essentially the executive directorship of an unaccountable, four-trillion-dollar administrative apparatus—a lumbering behemoth whose primary output is paperwork, compliance costs, and unintended consequences. To seek this office with such frantic, premature desperation suggests an alarming psychological condition: the sincere belief that an economy of three hundred and thirty million free individuals is a machine simply waiting for the right mechanic.
Friedrich Hayek diagnosed this affliction decades ago when he observed that the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. But political consultants do not read Hayek; they read fundraising spreadsheets. The sheer hubris required to assemble a payroll four years in advance, with the explicit goal of directing industrial policy, managing the energy grid, and micromanaging the labor market, is breathtaking. It is the Fatal Conceit dressed up in rolled-up sleeves and donor-dinner chicken breasts. Not one of these two dozen contenders is running on the radical, deeply humane platform of simply leaving people alone.
Instead, we will be treated to four years of bespoke policy white papers, each promising a new panoply of subsidies, credits, and agency directives. The political consulting cartel, of which Messina is an elder statesman, feeds voraciously on this perpetual motion machine. Every prospective campaign requires pollsters to divine what the public thinks about matters the public has no business voting on, communications directors to sanitize every spontaneous thought into focus-grouped mush, and compliance lawyers to navigate the very campaign finance labyrinths these politicians enacted in the first place. It is a closed-loop economy of rent-seeking elites, producing nothing of tangible value while consuming vast reservoirs of capital that might have otherwise funded actual innovations.
The most galling aspect of this early maneuvering is the underlying assumption of helplessness on the part of the governed. The implicit message broadcast by every exploratory committee is that without their visionary leadership from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the American experiment will simply stall out on the side of the highway. Prices will not balance, technology will not advance, and neighbors will forget how to cooperate unless a duly anointed federal executive descends from on high with an emergency decree and an executive order. The modern candidate does not offer constitutional guardianship; they offer protective custody.
If history is any guide, the two dozen aspirants will spend the next four years posturing about existential threats, promising to cure everything from global climate patterns to the price of milk, and proposing an endless parade of new federal offices to oversee it all. We will be told that this next contest is the most important election of our lifetimes, just as we were told last time, and just as we will be told when 2032 begins its auditions around Thanksgiving of 2028. It is a grueling, exhausting theater of the absurd, sustained entirely by the delusion that human prosperity is something manufactured in a committee room rather than generated through voluntary exchange.
A genuinely healthy civilization would view someone declaring their intent to run the country four years ahead of schedule with profound suspicion, if not outright ridicule. We might gently suggest they take up gardening, learn a trade, or try their hand at running a lemonade stand where they would actually be forced to please a customer rather than coerce a taxpayer. But our political culture does not reward modesty. It rewards the people who push their way to the front of the line, eager to inherit the administrative state's clipboard and red pen. The circus has already pitched its tents for 2028, the clowns are already on retainer, and the rest of us are once again expected to applaud while paying for the tickets.