Those who lose close primaries, teach
At Harvard's Kennedy School, you can learn at the feet of some of the most brilliant politicians the nation has produced politicians who are licking their wounds, having lost high-profile races.
The New Republic provides the evidence in a photographic slideshow. It features both current (or soon-to-be) fellows, including Minnesota's Norm Coleman, recently defeated by Al Franken in a notoriously protracted Senate race, and Terry McAuliffe, who recently failed in a bid to run as the Democratic nominee for governor of Virginia, as well as past "Fellow Failures" (TNR's term). The latter include Louisiana's Bobby Jindal (who lost the governor's race there in 2003), Jesse Ventura, John Edwards, and Geraldine Ferraro. (To be fair, Ventura was not defeated; he decided not to run for a second term as Minnesota's governor.) Such is the Kennedy School's reputation as a halfway house for the politically vanquished that politicians from abroad seek it out, too. This year, the former Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik will be joining Coleman and McAuliffe in Cambridge, constituting a sort of parallel universe of politicos who, but for a few votes here and there, might be actually leading rather than tutoring future leaders.
Of course, as the example of Jindal demonstrates (he's the current governor of Louisiana), to be a Fellow Failure once is not to be doomed to be a Fellow Failure forever.
(Image via StarkSilverCreek )
