Skip to main content

What Exactly Are You Looking For in a President?

Like it or not, the 2012 Presidential election season is just about upon us. Although I hate to hear the most vocal blowhards deriding candidates that have already announced, some of the criticisms are making me laugh in ways that were not intended. Some people are so married to their political party that a considerable effort is being spent on their part telling anyone who will listen how the recession is either Obama's or Bush's fault, how Bachmann is crazy, how Kucinich is funny-looking, how Palin is a ditz, how Obama blew his chance today (just after the stock markets spiraled downhill in response to the S&P downgrade) in his speech which was to have reassured Americans that the economy isn't tanking.

From what I hear, his speech fell short. Or it was well-received. Again, it depends on who you listen to. Pretty much anyone these days is delivering their evaluation of our President, and of those who want to be President, based on the personal agenda of the one doing the evaluating. Many Republicans do not want to admit that Clinton might have been good, or that Palin isn't presidential material. And many Democrats are still hanging our nation's ills on Bush.

The thing is, I am not sure what people want in a President. Is it about good speeches? Is it about  the performance of the stock market? The unemployment rate? The ability to work with Congress to get a budget passed? The number of bible verses he is willing to use publicly? How photogenic he is? How he represents the US to other nations?

ESPN/Grantland columnist Bill Simmons did a poll a few weeks ago of the best movie presidents ever, and the top two vote-getters were Harrison Ford in Air Force One, and Bill Pullman in Independence Day. In the latter one, the character who is the current president is a former fighter pilot who joins in the effort to ward off the aliens. While he's still our president. In Air Force One, Ford's character fights off the kidnappers the old-fashioned way: with his fists and feet.

I can't imagine anyone who was a real president in my lifetime doing that. Can you picture Jimmy Carter doing that? How about Richard Nixon? Clinton? Bush?

It's true that Simmons' poll is massively unscientific, but thousands of readers did chime in. When facing a choice among presidents who did statesman-like political things (think Michael Douglas in "The American President") vs. the ones who fought bad guys, the voters proved that what we really want in our presidents is a guy who kicks behinds. That fact alone, set against the backdrop of what we have running for president this time around and what they promise us (budget-balancing, healthcare, fairer taxes), is worth examining. Thing is, I have thought about it for two weeks, and still don't know what it tells us.

Human nature being the unchanging thing that it is, we shouldn't be surprised when we read

1 Samuel chapter 18: "It happened as they were coming, when David returned from killing the Philistine, that the women came out of all the cities of Israel, singing and dancing, to meet King Saul, with tambourines, with joy and with musical instruments. The women sang as they played, and said, "Saul has slain his thousands, And David his ten thousands."

Are we any different from the Israelites saying they like David as king because he killed ten times more people than King Saul did?

I'm still thinking this one through.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Saying goodbye to one set of twins, and hello to another

"It's been ten whole years already? Wow! Hard to believe." Many a father will say something like that while shaking his head in disbelief, when his oldest approaches the 10th birthday. It's a milestone, not just for the kid, but for the parents. It's a head-shaker because I am reminded that on that day, 10 years ago, my life changed forever. In some ways, it has passed very quickly.  In other ways, it seems like it's been every bit of ten years. There are two distinct things, though, about the ten-year anniversary of my dadhood. The first is that I became a father of not one, but two little bundles of joy that Tuesday morning. Abby was born at 8:48, followed by her brother Jacob at 8:50. The second is that their birth marked some rare joy in the midst of the darkest day in our nation's history.  As my wife was in labor, a nurse came in and told us that an airplane had crashed into a skyscraper in New York. I turned on the labor room
6 comments
Read more

Embarrassing video clip--John Cougar

I recently stumbled across some Youtube gold: a live performance by John Mellencamp when he was Johnny Cougar. He appears to be have been about 23, and he's singing "Ain't even Done With The Night", in front of a fairly unresponsive crowd with Bobby Bare (?!) in the front seat. Cougar/Mellencamp is dressed in a nerdy sweater and generally bears no resemblance to the singer as we knew him just 5 years later. He looks a lot more like Potsie from Happy Days than the guy who sang "Pink Houses". Certainly, there is no way to watch this and make a connection to the guy whose song "This is Our Country" beat us to death by overuse in pickup truck commercials. But the real entertainment value from this clip comes from the guys behind Cougar. In hot-pink tuxedos, there are 5 Pips-like backup dancers/singers who don't sing, but clap their hands real well. They essentially spend the entire song performing cheerleader dance routines not unlike those
14 comments
Read more

The Two Christmases

As I walked through the front door of the Post Office to make my stamp purchase, I was faced with a choice. On my left was a vending machine, and to my right was the customer service desk, where I could make the purchase from actual human beings. Because there was no line at the moment, I chose the human interaction. I strolled up to the middle-aged, slightly balding postal employee, read that his name was "Rex", and I asked for two books of stamps. As it was mid-December, Rex asked me "would you like Christmas stamps, or...". Once I realized he wasn't about to complete the sentence, I looked down and saw that he was holding some very un-Christmas-like stamps bearing images of the Liberty Bell and the word "Forever." Knowing that my wife had planned to mail several Christmas cards, I told him "One of each." To my surprise, the decision-making did not stop there. Rex hit me with a follow-up: he held up two types of stamps: one had a pi
Post a Comment
Read more