John Feehery: Can a senator win in 2016?

For 44 years, being a senator wasn’t a sufficient qualification for winning the White House. 

Before Barack Obama used his brief tenure in the upper chamber to catapult to the Oval Office, Jack Kennedy was the last senator to move straight to the nation’s highest elective office. 

{mosads}There are roughly 100 folks in the Senate now who believe that they are qualified to be president, so I guess it shouldn’t be that surprising that, over the last couple of weeks, three senators and one former senator have announced they are running for the White House. 

This happens in the context of a Senate that is slowly but surely getting its mojo back under the leadership of Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

It passed a budget that balanced without raising taxes. It is working on a bipartisan rebuke of the president’s Iran deal. It is going to move forward on an aggressive strategy to mark up and then consider the appropriations process over the summer. 

It hasn’t resolved a glitch in an anti-human-trafficking bill, which has held up the confirmation of Loretta Lynch for attorney general, and it hasn’t completed work on a Medicare reform bill passed overwhelmingly by the House, so all is not smooth sailing. But the signs all point to the Senate working again, which creates an interesting dynamic for the presidential candidates. 

Obama used his inexperience as a campaign asset in his run for the White House. Sure, he was a senator, but he wasn’t a senator long enough to be tagged with its dysfunction. He was a breath of fresh air. 

Hillary Clinton is certainly not a breath of fresh air and wasn’t what the Democratic primary voters wanted six years ago, when she lost to Obama. Back then, she used her status as a one-term senator and former first lady to try to win over voters. It’s not clear how much her time as secretary of State will help or hurt her with primary voters today, but it is clear she believes that her would-be status as the first female president will be her strongest selling point. 

If Clinton would be the first female president, Rand Paul would be the first libertarian president, Ted Cruz would be the first Canadian and Marco Rubio would be the first Cuban (though Cruz would qualify for that, too, I guess).

They announced their campaigns in different ways.

Cruz gave a speech at Liberty University — an interesting choice, to say the least. The Texas senator has no personal connection to the place founded by Jerry Falwell, other than liking its student body as a potential source of campaign volunteers. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that Liberty graduates would have been allowed to participate in Cruz’s study group at Harvard Law School.

Paul chose a more traditional venue to make his claim for the throne: a hotel in the biggest city in his home state of Kentucky. “It’s time to take our country back,” he proclaimed, not spelling out for whom or from whom. 

Clinton had her pal John Podesta publicly alert her friends via the Twitter that she was running and then released a campaign video, where she briefly appears at the end. It was kind of a weird — and very low-key — way to announce that you are campaigning for the most important elected office in the world, but I guess that she is trying anything to be fresh. 

Showing his disdain for the Senate, on the exact same day that it returns for work, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio announced that he too is running for the White House. And from the headlines, it is clear that he is up or out. 

The American people share Rubio’s disdain, not only for the Senate but also for the Congress as a whole. 

The question remains: If the American people dislike the Senate so much, why would they elect another senator to the White House? 

Feehery is president of QGA Public Affairs and blogs at www.thefeeherytheory.com. He served as spokesman to former Speaker of the House Denny Hastert (R-Ill.), as communications director to former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) when he was majority whip, and as speechwriter to former Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.).