This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.

In that great movie Citizen Kane, Orson Welles makes it big as a newspaper owner-publisher and then runs for governor of New York. He fails because of hanky-panky with a singer, and we all know the rest. In John O’Hara’s novel Ten North Frederick, the protagonist has aspirations to be president but he, too, falls short.