DONALD WHO?:

The people speculating about Youngkin's national future don't much care what he has done or not done for transportation infrastructure in Northern Virginia. They think the 55-year-old former investment banker may have found a formula to make the last six years just fade away--to return to the GOP leadership style we associate with names like Bush and Romney.

Trump is also a reflection of a broader phenomenon that makes it possible for Youngkin to be taken seriously. This is the concept of virality as a dominant factor in presidential politics. In a media-saturated environment, the thinking goes, a public figure has certain electric moments when she or he can arouse public curiosity and support. But those moments must be seized quickly or dissipate. By these lights, politics is not a mechanical process -- organization, endorsements, issue platforms -- but a chemical one in which personality and national mood interact in explosive ways. Nothing demonstrated the power of chemistry over mechanics like Trump's brutal demolition of Jeb Bush in the 2016 primaries. Now, Youngkin evidently wants to harness chemistry again to reverse the process.

Two different precedents, pointing different directions, are relevant to Youngkin's circumstances.

Obama is the patron saint for all those who don't believe in the old rules of waiting one's turn. He had only been in the Senate for two years when he announced what looked at first like a longshot candidacy for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. In his memoir, he recalled the advice given to him by Ted Kennedy: "You think you may not be ready, that you'll do it a more convenient time. But you don't choose the time. The time chooses you. Either you seize what may turn out to be the only chance you have, or you decide you're willing to live with the knowledge that the chance has passed you by."

But there is another case study closer to home for Youngkin. Doug Wilder, a Virginia governor I covered as a young reporter, drew national attention when in 1989 he became the nation's first Black elected governor. With a dazzling personality, 20 years in state politics and a historic achievement winning in the capital of the Confederacy, his credentials seemed more self-evidently plausible than Youngkin's for a presidential candidacy. Within a year or so of taking office, he was running. In an interview Wednesday, Wilder recalled the reaction of former supporters: "How dare you!" He said the loudest applause he ever got was when he later announced he was ending his candidacy to devote full time to Virginia.

Wilder said he thinks Youngkin "has gotten off to a good start" as governor, but that what he needs to do now is obvious. Answer every presidential inquiry by saying flatly that, "Every last ounce of my energy and time is going to the people of Virginia." National politics, Wilder said, might well be in Youngkin's future. But he said Youngkin should build a longer record, and heed advice Wilder learned early in a career of political horse-trading: "You have to put something on the table besides your elbows."

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