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In the long preliminary stages, the '88 campaign seemed depressing, a drama in wan search of heroes and meanings. Such diminutive choices must mean that the nation itself has grown diminished. The Old Testament, that thunderous text inhabited by nothing less than the gravitas of God, recorded, "There were giants in the earth in those days." Americans now alive remember Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy -- not all giants in any consensus but men of weight and consequence. But history is full of optical illusions.
In 1861 President-elect Abraham Lincoln made his way East from Illinois. Much of the world regarded him as a coarse and faintly ridiculous country lawyer. Lincoln proved to be a complex historical surprise.
Something of the same error of premature judgment occurred with Franklin Roosevelt. As he took office in 1933, F.D.R. hardly seemed a savior to anyone. Edmund Wilson wrote at the time that Roosevelt was a decent man, but "was there anything durable?"
When Roosevelt died, the nation watched in horror as a depthless little haberdasher from Missouri, a seeming nullity out of the old Pendergast machine in Kansas City, moved into the White House. Over the years, however, Harry Truman acquired historical size and force.
George Washington invented the form of American presidential gravitas. His political successors lived with a perception of decline, of a falling off from the golden age. When Warren G. Harding (a falling off indeed) expressed doubt that he had the size to be President, an Ohio political boss named Harry Daugherty told him, "Don't make me laugh . . . The days of the giants in the presidential chair is passed . . . Greatness in the presidential chair is largely an illusion of the people."
Americans every four years have to talk themselves into something. They need to see a kind of plausibility in a candidate. The Nobel Prize committees go through the same exercise: the candidates have to be elevated to the general vicinity of the mythic in order to be worthy. But it may be a law of the drama that the presidential choices almost always seem inadequate. People feel an underlying anxiety, not necessarily because the candidates are no good, but because at a moment of such change, an entire society is suspended, awaiting the next act.
In a campaign with no incumbent running, a candidate's presidential gravitas is hypothetical. Only the enactment of a presidency can make a President. Now, all is faith, or hope, or dispirited guessing.