Ambition: Past and Present

John McCain’s recent campaign strategy has been to accuse Barack Obama of being “ambitious.” Inherent within this accusation is that Obama is only concerned about his own self-interest and fame, while McCain’s pursuit of the presidency is rooted in a selfless desire to serve his country.

I wonder if it is possible to pursue the highest political office in the land and NOT be ambitious. Over at the Huffington Post, Mark Nickolas reminds us that McCain has ambitions of his own.

In his 2oo2 memoir, Worth Fighting For, McCain wrote:

I didn’t decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president. . . . In truth, I’d had the ambition for a long time.

Very revealing.

As I argue in The Way of Improvement Leads Home, ambition is a quintessential American virtue. It has a long history. As I have written before on this blog, Philip Vickers Fithian struggled to reconcile his own ambitions with what he believed to be a call from God. The opportunities afforded to him by a revolutionary-era clashed with Christian and classical republican ideals that viewed ambition as a selfish, unprincipled pursuit of personal glory and fame.

By the early nineteenth-century, much of the scandal associated with the pursuit of ambition had faded. In his new book, Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England, Jason Opal argues that young men in the early republic deliberately chose to break from tradition and family values in order to pursue cosmopolitan lives in the burgeoning marketplace and world of politics. Johan Neem’s review of Beyond the Farm was published today at the H-SHEAR with a response from Opal.

The Way of Improvement Leads Home and Beyond the Farm might be a good place to start for those wanting some historical context for this McCain-Obama debate.