Just 14 months ago, the U.S. midterm elections were interpreted to mean voters were in an anti-incumbent mood. We wanted change. We wanted fresh faces in Washington. If that was true, we're pretty much over it.

Since 1900, only two U.S. senators have been elected president of the United States, and the most recent of these succeeded almost 50 years ago. These long odds don't stop senators from running for president; in the 2008 campaign, six senators out of 100 declared for the office.  And, one way or another, the next president is going to be a U.S. senator.

I presume the difficulty for senators running for higher office has a lot to do with how we choose presidents, and how we view senators. We don't vote for parties or coalitions, as parliamentary democracies do; we vote for candidates who seek our endorsements based on their proposals, and their personalities.

The successful candidates exhibit various common traits, one of which is their ability to seem "common," not elitist. We want them to share some basic patriotic values, and we want them to seem fresh, untainted by the Washington experience.

We elect senators for different reasons, and to serve a different role. Senators gain their experience, their expertise, if any, and their influence by being part of an elite institution. When they try to display the so-called common touch, they seem hypocritical, which is an undesirable trait in anyone. As for seeming fresh, untainted - with all their detailed insights to legislation, rulings, treaties, budgets, and so forth, senators virtually advertise their insider-ness.

We expect them to be insiders, the same way corporations want their directors to have a certain sober influence over the direction of the company. Still, it’s the CEO that they want speaking to employees, the media, and the public. The CEO is the engaging face of the organization.

Being a governor is a much surer route to the White House, because it allows a candidate to demonstrate executive experience without being overexposed to public scrutiny.

Among the presidential candidates still in contention there is nearly 30 years of service in "the world's greatest deliberative body." They're concealing their insider status with plausible excuses: one has been in the Senate just two years, and his inexperience is said to indicate "freshness," not callowness, or opportunism. Another can't be "in the club" because she's a woman, never mind that nearly all her experience in public life has come from a tangential relationship, making her mostly invulnerable to democratic opposition.

The last candidate has three terms in the Senate, yet he's the "maverick" who challenges every convention, or at least every convention that displeases the editorial class.  All three of them make profound declarations about "changing the way Washington works," "reaching out across party lines," "transforming politics," and other claims against cynicism in public service.

Well, all of us should reconsider why there is cynicism, and whether or not we would be better off without it.

Cynicism is portrayed as the opposite of hope, but it's really the opposite of naiveté. We're no fools; we know when someone is being evasive. If cynicism exists in public life, it's not without causes, and properly understood it can be a useful.

In the cause of modern politics, cynicism may be the enemy of the insiders but it is the advantage of the ordinary people. Our cynicism grows from the fact that we can distinguish issues from agendas, and judge for ourselves who is to be trusted, and who is plotting a career across the hopes of voters. Without a bit of cynicism, we may have "solutions" to every "problem," but it's worth wondering how much that "hope" would cost in terms of freedom.

Is freedom in danger? Have we become so cynical that our cynicism has overtaken our aspirations? I seriously doubt either of those is true, but I suspect the triumph of the senators has something to do with information overload: the problems of our time, or rather the fixation on these problems, have overtaken (momentarily) our ability to imagine alternatives. We’re so fixed on certain messages, we can’t hear new ones.
 
So, the senators have outlasted the outsiders, and one of them will become president. Maybe it's a good idea to alter our pattern once or twice every century, but I'm hopeful enough to believe that the trend will reassert itself and cynicism will be restored - just around the time the two losing senators are sworn in for their new terms, next January.