Eugene McCarthy, from Harper’s 1975 question “When did you stop wanting to be president?”:

The electorate should be suspicious of Presidential candidates who want the Presidency too much or too soon. No one who says that he or she has wanted to be President of the United States since the age of ten or twelve should be elected. At that age, a more proper and becoming ambition is to be a firefighter, a figure-skating champion, or a major-league baseball player.

Voters should also be wary of candidates who, on first seeing the White House, said, “That is the house in which I want to live.”

This appears, unfortunately, to describe our entire range of presidential candidates. Hillary Clinton has effectively centered her strategy that she really wants to be president and will fight like hell to do it. Thus unabashed ambition is recuperated into the stuff of grit and determination. As far as I can tell, John McCain’s entire platform is based on the premise that he deserves to be president, having waited since the mid-18th century to hold the position. And Barack Obama, who is running for president after less than one term in the Senate, seems to be certainly guilty of wanting the position ‘too soon.’