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Our Presidential Dilemma Looking back over the past half century, the quality of leadership in the executive branch of the U.S. government has been a "mixed bag,” at best.
Jack Kennedy’s father bought the 1960 election for him, paying Chicago organized crime figures to deliver the Democratic vote, and hence, the Illinois electoral vote. And once in office, the Kennedy family wealth underwrote an endless public relations tour de force that was more fairy tale than reality, but which captured the hearts and minds of liberals and Democrats hungry for something or someone to look up to. They called it "Camelot.”
Lyndon Johnson was exactly what one might expect in a corrupt, rough-and-tumble, populist politician from the Texas hill country. In Johnson’s world, much as in Bill Clinton’s, winning was the only alternative… losing was not an option, no matter what it took to win. Johnson was the consummate Democrat. He didn’t care what agenda a special interest might pursue, if they came to the table with enough cash or enough votes… they were "golden.”
Richard Nixon was one of the great presidents of the twentieth century. His greatest fault was the personal insecurities that governed many of his political and personnel decisions, and it was those insecurities that got him into trouble.
The men that Nixon chose for his inner circle were not Republican partisans; most were former ad executives from the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, the agency that had managed his campaigns going back to his earliest days in Congress. But that would not have been a fatal flaw had those around him had their priorities in order. The priorities of those closest to the president, any president, must be: God, first; country, second; party, third; and the president himself, fourth. The people in Nixon’s inner circle had those priorities exactly upside down.
Jerry Ford was our only "accidental” president. He did not run for the office; he was appointed to the vice presidency when Spiro Agnew resigned and he ascended to the presidency when Nixon resigned. He was not seen as being presidential caliber by Republican professionals and would never have been nominated had he sought the Republican nomination in his own right.
Jimmy Carter was a "bean counter.” If we were to learn that Carter personally kept an inventory of pencils, pens, and paper clips in the White House supply cabinet we would not be surprised. He was not a "big picture” president, as Nixon was, he worried about the details of the fine print and he left us with 20% interest rates, double-digit inflation, and double-digit unemployment… the worst economy since the Great Depression. He was the worst president of the 20th century.
Ronald Reagan was the best president of the 20th century. He knew what he stood for, he stood by his principles, and he made us all feel proud of ourselves and our country. He brought an end to the Cold War and he left office with a pent-up economic expansion that did not achieve its full potential until the mid-1990s, when Bill Clinton happily took credit for it. His greatest failing was that, in selecting George H.W. Bush as his running mate, he made it possible for Republican moderates to regain control of the GOP.
Many expected the Bush presidency to be a continuation of the Reagan presidency, but it wasn’t. Most GOP professionals expected him to be a one-term president… and he was. When he ran for a second term, former U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick was asked if she was not disappointed in his performance in his first term. She replied, "Disappointed? No, how could I be? In order for one to be disappointed, one must have had some expectation in the first place.”
After just four years in office, George H.W. Bush left us with a much-weakened Republican Party, the most liberal Supreme Court since Earl Warren, and… Dan Quayle. He also made it possible for the worst elements of Arkansas Democratic politics to move into the White House.
In two terms in the Oval Office, Bill Clinton single-handedly destroyed the sanctity of the oath in the U.S. justice system, destroyed the credibility of the Department of Justice and the FBI, sold the security interests of the American people to foreign governments in exchange for cash, turned the White House into just another Motel 6, made a mockery of the president’s pardon and clemency powers, and taught all of our children and grandchildren that it was okay to engage in oral sex and then lie about it… even under oath. Nevertheless, he is popular among Democrats.
In 2001, George W. Bush entered the White House. What did we know about him? We knew that’s he’d attended Yale as a "legacy” student; that he’d had a drinking problem as a young man; that he refused to say whether or not he had ever used cocaine; that he’d been a successful managing general partner of a professional baseball team; that he’d worked well with Democrats while Governor of Texas; that he was not well read; that he was not a student of government, history, or politics; that he had a below average command of the English language; and that he spoke, extemporaneously, in four and five word bursts.
We also learned that he was not a fighter. While he kept the country safe after the 9/11 attacks and made two excellent appointments to the Supreme Court, he was an absolute patsy in the face of attacks by Democrats and their friends in the mainstream media. He refused to use the veto pen to curb a runaway Republican Congress, he refused to enforce our immigration laws and our election laws, and he allowed Wall Street swindlers and gamblers to bring our nation to the brink of economic collapse.
He created socialist boondoggles – a prescription drug program and a banking industry bailout – that would have made Lenin and Stalin green with envy, and, in cooperation with Republican congressional leaders Trent Lott, Bill Frist, Dennis Hastert, and Tom Delay, he accomplished a feat that Democrats have been unable to accomplish in 155 years: he left behind a Republican Party that not even its most ardent partisans can defend.
Now he turns the reins of government over to Barack Hussein Obama, the least qualified man ever to seek the presidency, a total unknown who was elected in large part because of the color of his skin and his ability to read a speech from a teleprompter.
For twenty years he listened to the weekly rants of a racial bigot and a true America-hater; he launched his political career in the home of a man who once participated in the bombing of the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, and New York Police Headquarters, and who now says he wishes he’d done more; he purchased his Chicago home with the assistance of a man who is a convicted felon and a Chicago slumlord; he served as a principal advisor and strategist for an impeached Governor of Illinois; and he financed his presidential campaign with $300-400 million donated illegally by contributors he refuses to identify. If it is true that we are known by the company we keep, he is the most unsavory character ever to set foot in the White House.
And now that he resides in the White House we find that he is not the silver-tongued wunderkind he was made out to be during the campaign. Without his teleprompter and without his radical left speechwriters, he is less capable as a public speaker than George W. Bush. Fearful that he might offend his radical left constituencies, he speaks haltingly in two and three word phrases. And when he represents our country abroad he is an embarrassment. He gives inappropriate gifts to foreign leaders, he disparages his own country, he lays all of the world’s ills at the feet of his predecessor, and he bows in humble obeisance to the King of Saudi Arabia, the official custodian of the holiest shrines of Islam.
To oppose him, Republicans nominated a man who was not trusted by his own party’s base and who had little or no chance of winning. Why would Republicans make such a decision? If we were to assess blame we might start with the decision by the party to select our presidential candidates through the primary system, wherein those who are the least knowledgeable and the most susceptible to 30-second sound bytes get to make that decision.
In the past two decades we’ve had twelve years of Bush incompetence and eight years of Clinton corruption, forcing one to wonder what is least damaging in the executive branch of government: corruption or incompetence. And now, because of twenty years of feckless leadership by Republicans in Congress and in the White House who seemed unaware that Americans are more in sync with conservative Republican values than with liberal Democrat values, we find ourselves burdened with a Democratic administration that more closely resembles Germany’s Third Reich than anything we’ve ever experienced in our own country.
The smoke-filled room may have earned a bad reputation, but we don’t have to return to that system; there is a middle ground: the caucus and convention system, wherein party activists, the most knowledgeable and representative partisans from the precincts to the statehouse, get to make that decision. In the past 20 years Democrats have nominated Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, and Obama, while Republicans have nominated Bush 1, Dole, Bush 2, and McCain. That’s not a very good record and it remains to be seen whether or not the country will survive it. If we were to assess blame for our dilemma we might start with the decision by the Republican Party to select its presidential candidates through the primary system, wherein those who are the least knowledgeable and the most susceptible to 30-second sound bytes, get to decide the party’s candidates. |
