There you stood on the edge of your feather, Expecting to fly.

-Neil Young

The recent drop outs on the R side of the ledger got me thinking about Neil Young's song, "Expecting to Fly." As one who admires the seeming sloth of Calvin Coolidge over the micromanaging ways of Jimmy Carter, it pains me to say: Even if you are lazy, it pays to look like you're not. Think of the George Costanza character on Seinfeld, feigning overwork and stress whenever a colleague or superior was in earshot. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

Rudy Giuliani – once angling to be the nation's first Italo-American president (HT to fellow pizanne Nick Gillespie) – has puzzled me for over a year. How could he possibly appeal to the social conservatives? He seemed to pull it off, for a while, making them forget their prudish tendencies for an even bigger fear: 9/11, or more properly, a repeat of 9/11. Still, I was shocked that he held the #1 spot in national polls for as long as he did.

But then came the actual primaries and caucuses. Rudy was a no-show. Did he not learn of the import of the Big Mo from Bush the Elder? To be a leader, you've got to look like one, act like one, win the early skirmishes, or at least artfully play the expectations game. Giuliani did none of this that I can detect.

Fred Thompson seemed relatively benign to me personally, compared with the rest of the "top tier" candidates. He all but yawned in the debates. It's one thing to strike a stately, dignified, above-the-fray pose when running for prez, another to seem numb and uninterested. It even started to appear that his young, comely wife had pushed him into running.

Seems like we Americans don't want hen-pecked, lazy dudes in the Oval Office (although I can think of far more inappropriate qualities). But the lesson learned is: If you want to fly Air Force One, you've got to at least flap your wings.

-RC