Opinion - Why Marco Rubio probably won’t ever be president
Moving from the Senate to the secretary of state’s office seems like a step up for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and perhaps a way to position himself for a presidential run in 2028. Rubio may have good reasons for moving into the Cabinet, but improving his prospects in four years is not one of them. Indeed, the Cabinet has long been a graveyard for presidential contenders.
This sounds surprising, as some of the most notable names in American history — Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren — led the State Department. But that was all during the early days of the republic. The last president to have previously held that position was James Buchanan, right before the Civil War.
And Cabinet membership is not just bad luck in the presidential race. While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee in 2016, she was better known for her other roles, including First Lady and senator. Before her, the last nominee to have held the job was James Blaine, the failed Republican nominee in 1884.
It is not just the secretary of state position that is cursed. Though plenty of former Cabinet members have tried for the White House, there have been only two presidents since Buchanan who previously served as Cabinet members — former Secretary of War William Howard Taft and former Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Perhaps it is revealing that the last five men who went from Cabinet member to president were one-termers.
Cabinet members aren’t even popular choices for the vice presidency — there have been only two such selections in the last 84 years. Those include former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Bob Dole’s running mate, former Housing Secretary Jack Kemp. Before that, the last Cabinet member to be nominated as a running mate was Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace in 1940, who was dumped four years later by Franklin D. Roosevelt in favor of Harry Truman.
Why have Cabinet members failed at climbing the ultimate ladder to the presidency? One obvious point is that there are not as many Cabinet secretaries as other high profile positions, such as senators or governors.
More important is how the vice presidents have come to dominate the nomination process. Since 1948, 10 sitting or former vice presidents have won their party’s nomination for the presidency. In all of American history before that, only five vice presidents got their party’s nomination. This development is particularly bad for Cabinet members, as their campaigns would, to a good degree, be based on the success of the president that they served under. As the second-in-command, the vice president is better able to capture that reflected glory in the eye of primary voters, who are interested in ratifying their earlier choice for president. The Cabinet member, no matter how central a role they played in the administration, has a harder time proving that they are the president’s choice.
Cabinet members are also unable to gain full credit for their achievements — that goes to the president. But an unpopular president will certainly weigh down their own chances.
The limited field of focus of a Cabinet member is also a negative, especially compared to the other likely candidates, governors and senators. Politicians in those jobs are able to take high-profile positions on a full range of policy issues with an independent action that opposes the current president (if from the same party). Cabinet members do not have that luxury and if their own issue is not seen as critical to the election — and foreign policy rarely dominates — then they may be relegated to the backwaters of a presidential discussion.
Rather than being a stepping stone, the Cabinet is usually the capstone of one’s career. Past heavyweight politicians — including former presidential nominees like John Kerry — have used a Cabinet appointment to close out their careers, while still feeling like important players in the political scene.
Rubio, at only 53 years old and with a significant presidential run in his past, seems to have accepted the secretary of state position with a look to the future. But the track record suggests that there is a good chance that heading a Cabinet department is actually an end to a political career.
Joshua Spivak is a senior research fellow at Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center and a senior fellow at Hugh L. Carey Institute of Government Reform at Wagner College. He is the author of “Recall Elections: From Alexander Hamilton to Gavin Newsom.”
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