Lawyers as Presidential Candidates

I'm certainly not the first to point out that there are (and were) a bevy of lawyers as Presidential candidates this election season.  But has anyone else noticed that although the Democrats have embraced their legal Presidential hopefuls, the Republicans have pushed them away?  Thompson and Giuliani, the only two true attorneys in the Republican race  were out before they had barely begun, and Romney, a J.D./M.B.A., never really got much support.  Contrast that to the Yale-Harvard death match of Clinton and Obama, which until recently included everyone's favorite trial attorney, John Edwards.

This apparent Republican distaste for lawyers as Presidential candidates--and Presidents--seems to have held true since Nixon, the last attorney-President (though Ford was a lawyer, he was never elected).  What is it that makes Republicans so wary of lawyers as candidates? Is it the low position the attorney now holds in the popular imagination?  Fears of elitism?  Frustration over the lack of tort reform?

Republicans should note that our Republic got off to a fine start with a series of lawyers: after Washington, five of the next six presidents were such, culminating in Martin Van Buren (yes, populist supreme Andrew Jackson was actually a "frontier law" lawyer, a much diminished area of practice today).  And the Republican party itself began with one of the greatest lawyers and Presidents of all times, Abraham Lincoln.

Anecdotally, one of my favorite Republican lawyer-Presidents is William Howard Taft; not so much for anything he did while in office, but for his impressive hat trick of serving as President, teaching law at Yale, and then serving as a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, about which he famously said:  "I don't remember that I ever was President."

Comments

[Casebook Sherpa]

I'm not so sure the trend is as strong as it might first appear. The '96 nomineee, Bob Dole, was a J.D. who worked in private practice and as a County Attorney in Kansas.

Plus it's really been more the absence of a J.D. to choose rather than an affirmative choice away from lawyers for the GOP. Working with your timeframe: no one was going to challenge Reagan, same for George H.W. Bush, Dole was trained as a lawyer, and there wasn't really a lawyer to choose in 2000.

I'd also argue that Giuliani and Thompson were not good candidates.

[Casebook Sherpa]

I'm not so sure the trend is as strong as it might first appear. The '96 nomineee, Bob Dole, was a J.D. who worked in private practice and as a County Attorney in Kansas.

Plus it's really been more the absence of a J.D. to choose rather than an affirmative choice away from lawyers for the GOP. Working with your timeframe: no one was going to challenge Reagan, same for George H.W. Bush, Dole was trained as a lawyer, and there wasn't really a lawyer to choose in 2000.

I'd also argue that Giuliani and Thompson were not good candidates.

[Casebook Sherpa]

I'm not so sure the trend is as strong as it might first appear. The '96 nomineee, Bob Dole, was a J.D. who worked in private practice and as a County Attorney in Kansas.

Plus it's really been more the absence of a J.D. to choose rather than an affirmative choice away from lawyers for the GOP. Working with your timeframe: no one was going to challenge Reagan, same for George H.W. Bush, Dole was trained as a lawyer, and there wasn't really a lawyer to choose in 2000.

I'd also argue that Giuliani and Thompson were not good candidates.

[Roger Dennis]

More on Taft: he was a professor and the first dean of the University of Cincinnati School of Law, where there is a large statue matching the large man. For contemporary analogies: he was Govenor General of the Philippines running the "surge" and had a wife who very much wanted him to be president.

[Adam C]

Question seems backwards to me. Lawyers are a small portion of the total population. Isn't the question why do Democrats seem so drawn to lawyers (as opposed to businessmen, veterans, union workers, or teachers)?