Mercurius
Legend
I don't know if he is held up as something to aspire to, as far as our own behavior, but possibly in terms of his acting and combination of humor and badassery. Meaning, I can see why Bond candidates will always be measured against Connery, because he was the first Bond and established the character and, of course, he's Sean Connery. But I don't think anyone is thinking he's to be aspired to in terms of his early 60s style misogyny. But in terms of the way he inhabited the character? Absolutely.Sean Connery's Bond is held up as something to aspire to. He's the good guy. He still is held up as a good guy. If we were insisting on "canon" the way some folks do, he'd be seen in far, far different light. Yet, heck, we're seeing all sorts of resistance to later era Bonds specifically because of the differences to earlier Bonds.
Bond is a fictional character, larger than life. He doesn't have to embody every quality that we might want kids to aspire to, otherwise we'd be left with...Levar Burton as James Bond! I love Levar Burton, but he'd make a terrible Bond.
Now the brilliance of Daniel Craig's Bond is that he kind of brought the character to completion. He wasn't as sleezy as past Bonds (especially Connery and Moore), but in a way he was more flawed, more conflicted, and far more complex. In a way, there was a sense that he wasn't happy with who he was, while self-assuredness has always been unassailable in past Bonds. Though he also always stayed the course for what he believed to be true. I mean, that's the brilliance of Craig's Bond: he was, in some sense, an "anti-Bond" but still very much Bond. I do love Connery and Moore for what they were, but Craig's Bond was far more interesting, if you just look at them purely as film characters.
But more to the point: The Bond franchise is richer for having all three, and even the other actors, the "lesser trio," if you will. In a way, Craig finished what Timothy Dalton started, after the Brosnan run showed us just how outdated and vapid a by-the-book Bond was in the modern era (That great Judi Dench line about him being a dinosaur of the Cold War still echoes). It will be interesting to see where they go from here. They can't go back to Connery or Moore; they did Dalton-to-Craig and hopefully won't try to remake that; and they tried a central casting approach with Brosnan, which proved to be flat and added nothing to the Bond legacy. So where to go with the character, while still keeping James Bond Bondsian? Should be interesting to see how it unfolds.