Bloggers have done a good job of listing the reasons the David Petraeus for president boomlet is silly and unlikely to succeed. The central problem is that potential biography candidates like Colin Powell in 1996, Wes Clark in 2004, or Petraeus haven’t ever run for political office. I don’t think most people realize how difficult it is to be a presidential candidate. Doing it successfully for the first time in the TV/YouTube age is almost impossible, particularly since you now have to win a major party nomination against candidates with stronger partisan credentials than you. (Watch one of Clark’s debate performances if you don’t believe me.) And even if one of these candidates turned out to be competent, they would be less formidable than most people think. As Jason Zengerle points out, the reason these people are so widely respected is that they are seen as being above politics. That aura disappears very quickly once you become just another politician.

Update 10/15 12:40 PM: Ryan Lizza’s 2004 TNR blog post on the failure of Clark’s presidential campaign does a nice job of summing up what can go wrong in one of these candidacies.