Townhall...
Why
We Don’t Have Better Presidential
Candidates
by Bill Murchison
November 9, 2011
The
sagacious editorial page of the
Wall Street Journal raised this question the other day of a
too-little-noticed
point concerning the long-running Herman Cain affair.
The
Journal addressed the
much-discussed question of “why we don’t have ‘better candidates.’”
Take a
guess. “Because no normal person would risk it.”
On
the nose! No “normal” person, for
the privilege of leading the United States of America, would subject
himself, I
hereby suggest, to:
--
Constant exposure to the public
eye.
--
Relentless and regularly unfair
criticism by opponents.
--
Minute analysis of philosophy,
background, campaign strategy, family relationships, friends, personal
finances, religious affiliations, birth certificates, etc.
--
Unceasing pressure to beg for money
over the telephone.
--
Daily life in motels and hotels.
--
Uninterrupted conversation with
people whom only care and think about politics.
--
Lack of access to normal people,
save under abnormal circumstances.
But
those are enough reasons, aren’t
they? Enough, certainly, to affirm the Journal’s point with loud
acclamations.
Normal people don’t behave this way.
“We
have no idea,” says the Journal
editorial, “if this is why so many prominent Republicans -- Jeb Bush,
Chris
Christie, Mitch Daniels -- decided not to run despite a vulnerable
incumbent
and a weak GOP field. But we understand if it were the reason.”
The
presidential selection process is
out of whack -- as, to be sure, are many things relating to politics
and
government, both at the national and the state level. That the 2012
presidential campaign has gone on throughout 2011 and has another year
to run,
is one vital piece of the evidence. You don’t need this long to pick a
president. Unless, the picking of the president has become somehow the
most
important thing Americans do: more important than forming families,
looking for
work, buying homes, getting through school and college and/or saving
for
retirement.
Which
may be the case. If indeed this
is the case, it shows what really is wrong with America -- to wit, our
common
dependence on presidents and Congresses for satisfaction of needs and
performance of duties once thought to lie generally beyond the scope of
government.
No
more. The federal government, with
its laws and programs and mega-spending, touches everything in daily
life,
without exception. This is why the presidency matters even more than
when
Franklin Roosevelt goosed up its power to levels previously unexplored.
It
is too bad -- for reasons abutting
freedom, personal responsibility and, yes, the endlessness of
presidential
campaigns. If the president of the United States has become the most
important
guy in every room he inhabits, it figures that to get there -- to rule
the
whole American roost -- a certain kind of person puts aside scruples
about
constant exposure to the public eye, daily life in motels and hotels,
etc. Some
do so, one presumes, from love of country or sense of duty. The voter’s
task is
sorting out which hounds these are amid the great yapping pack.
Is
government too big and pervasive?
It sure looks that way when you consider the excesses attendant on
trying to
grab government by the reins and slow the runaway horses. You get --
well --
the 2011-12 presidential campaign. You get endless polls,
bumper-sticker
philosophy, sound-bite debates -- and breathless stories about who did
what and
with whom years and years ago. The latter are the stories that actually
matter,
as Herman Cain has come to find out, when it comes to picking which
candidate
we want to run our lives for four years.
Again,
is government too big and
pervasive? A question of that order would seem to matter more, in the
great
scheme of things, than the hardly insignificant question of how Herman
Cain
conducted himself at the National Restaurant Association.
The
endless campaign is part, and
hardly the meanest part, of our long acquiescence in the government
boom -- the
steady, sometimes heady, handover of decisions and competencies to the
control
of people promising to do “more” for us.
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this and other columns at
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