THE PRESIDENTS WE ELECT

By Edwin Cooney

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a commentary on why we have elected some of our most effective presidents.  This week, I propose to focus on the brands of presidents we’ve elected.  The question is: does Donald J. Trump fit in?

Under the United States Constitution, the President is the head of the Executive Branch of the government as well as Commander-In-Chief of our armed forces.  The establishment of the presidency, its offices and its prerogatives, was the primary business of every president between George Washington and Theodore Roosevelt from 1789 through 1901.  To that end, we elected two types -- or brands -- of presidents. The general or war hero presidents I call Brand One. The lawyer or legislator presidents were Brand Two.  Washington, Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Taylor, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Benjamin Harrison and even William McKinley were regarded as war heroes.  The two Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Van Buren, Pierce, Buchanan and Lincoln were lawyer/legislator presidents.  These two traditional “presidential types” were generally administrative with the general mission to expand our national domain and maintain our national safety, stability, and prosperity.

Suddenly, there came a bolt out of the blue: Theodore Roosevelt.  Like four previous vice presidents, John Tyler of Virginia, Millard Fillmore of New York, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, and Chester A. Arthur of New York, Roosevelt merely succeeded to the presidency.  In the nomenclature of the day, he was our fifth accidental president or “…another version of his accidency!”

It was September 1902 when the Anthracite coal miners union went out on strike.  They threatened that if their demands consisting of a wage increase and national recognition of their union weren’t met, millions of people, especially in the northeast, would feel the chill of Jack Frost right around Election Day of 1902.  Republicans who were adamantly anti-union needed to be re-elected. Teddy Roosevelt needed them to be re-elected in order to be electable in his own right as president in 1904.  His four previous “accidental” predecessors had failed to be elected in their own right.  TR would change all that by involving the traditional prestige of his presidential office in an issue that had social, economic, and political repercussions.  Having suffered a severe leg injury in a recent carriage accident that had resulted in one death, TR dramatically appeared in a wheelchair to publicly recognize the legitimacy of the strike.  The office of the president would no longer be a mere administrative office from that time on.  Thereafter, in one way or another, the President of the United States of America had to be a problem solver.  The immediate strike emergency would go to arbitration during which the anthracite coal miners would return to work.  Even if the legitimacy of the union movement was three decades away, the nation had a new phenomenon — expected presidential activism.

In the wake of the unpredictable Teddy Roosevelt, we elected an attorney without legislative experience named William Howard Taft, and a college professor (Woodrow Wilson). We also elected Warren Harding (a newspaper man), Calvin Coolidge (a lawyer and a governor), Herbert Hoover (a mining engineer and philanthropic businessman), Franklin Roosevelt (an aristocratic political experimentalist), and Harry Truman, the first president since Andrew Johnson to lack a college education. Then we elected still another war hero and general we simply called Ike.  Ike’s successors, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, G. H. W. Bush, Clinton, G. W. Bush, and Obama attained the presidency by the inspirational light of one or more predecessors.

As I see it, what makes the Trump candidacy unique and ensures its potential demise is its apparent total lack of connection with or even respect for the experiences and forces that compelled the sum and substance of both our past and present.  So far, Mr. Trump appears to believe that he can solve all problems by merely ordering them to be solved.  His candidacy, so far at least, glorifies fear, nurtures frustration, and feeds political activism with little more than suspicion.  The energy of his candidacy is indignation.  Still, that may indeed be enough to secure the nomination of the 21st Century Republican Party which has been venting its spleen since the night Barack Obama became president-elect and addressed that jubilant celebration in Chicago’s Lincoln Park. I’m convinced that Mr. Trump will have to rise above his own sense of self and his own reckless willfulness in order to actually achieve the presidency.

As of this writing, most people agree that Hillary Rodham Clinton has had a terrible summer.  If Mr. Trump doesn’t change course in some spectacular way, come Tuesday, November 8th, 2016, he’s going to make Hillary’s day.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY