By Edwin Cooney
As of this writing, fifteen
Republicans, four Democrats, seventeen men and two women, have made it clear
that they would like to be president of the United States come Friday, January
20th, 2017. Each of them (note: I don’t
say all of them but rather each of them!) believes that he or she could do a
better job than has President Obama.
Well, maybe, just maybe, they’re right, but why, except for their
ideological bents, might they be right?
Of course, no presidential candidate in
history has owned a crystal ball assuring them success, but usually the reason
a president is successful has to do with how they and their inclinations and
actions have fit the social, economic, and political foreign and domestic
landscape of the time.
George Washington, who was after all the
daddy of all our Founding Fathers, had the advantage of being allowed to put
together the executive branch of the government. Additionally, he possessed sufficient respect
that enabled him to set certain precedents proscribing socio/political
executive behaviors such as only two presidential terms and the wisdom of
picking from outside the Supreme Court even for chief justices. Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s first presidential
“strict constructionist” of the constitution, had the advantage of being so
linked to constitutional strict interpretation that he could blatantly violate
the constitution when he made that famous treaty with Napoleon to purchase
Louisiana. (Note: no provision in the U.S. Constitution authorized the
president on his own to sign a treaty with a foreign power. Jefferson would
never have allowed John Adams or even President Washington to get away with
such behavior!) Audacious Andy Jackson got away with Indian genocide because
otherwise church-going federal, state and local officials and speculators
regarded themselves (like Andy himself) as so moral that their greed for land
and money wouldn’t really hurt their prospects on judgment day. President Lincoln, who really was a cut above
most of us but didn’t quite realize it, succeeded because most of the time
during that terrible war he dared to make decisions with which he was himself
often uncomfortable but were strategically crucial. An example of that was when he was forced to
order the military commander of the Union army in Missouri John C. Fremont to
withdraw his slave emancipation proclamation in September of 1861. Fremont’s emancipation was the moral path to
follow, but Lincoln had evidence that if freeing the slaves rather than
preservation of the union was the stated purpose of the war, he’d lose
Kentucky. “I must have Kentucky,” he
asserted again and again. Thus he
surrendered morality to practicality and won the future for morality.
Theodore Roosevelt was successful
because he, for the most part, accurately assessed when his and Congress’s
sense of well being matched. Franklin D.
Roosevelt took office at a time when everyone was out of ideas as to how to
halt the creeping depression and looked solely to him to open the banks,
provide employment, and relieve the private sector of responsibility for the
economy it was incapable of providing.
Ronald Reagan succeeded because he
eloquently, and largely without malice, articulated America’s anxieties. Bill Clinton succeeded because he was more in
tune with people’s aspirations while his opponents were more interested in
destroying him rather than cooperating with him. The same is largely true with President
Obama. The question is: what will it take for the next president to
responsibly master the future at home and abroad?
Earlier in this commentary, I referred
to each rather than all of the candidates because “mastering” the future rather
than merely managing a successful presidential campaign is what ultimately
really matters. Even more, anyone who
offers him or herself to national service owes the public the courtesy of his
or her educated understanding as to what the drawbacks as well as the
advantages would be as a result of their problem-solving proposals. In other words, each person’s candidacy
constitutes his or her promissory note of accountability to the American voter.
What we hear too little of on the campaign trail is how each candidate
perceives the results of actions he or she proposes to take. Our failure in Vietnam was due to
Eisenhower’s, Kennedy’s, Johnson’s, and Nixon’s preoccupation with global
perceptions and politics, thus they never adequately understood that the
motives of the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong weren’t ideological but
nationalistic. Our failure in Iraq was
largely due to assumptions George W. Bush made about the reaction of the Iraqis
once Saddam Hussein was eliminated.
There apparently was little appreciation of the various religious and
political forces that would struggle to fill the vacuum created by his
ouster. Hussein, to a much greater
degree than we knew, actually was keeping the lid on a dangerously bubbling
Middle Eastern caldron. Political
candidates who would replace “Obamacare” with “Cruz, Trump, Fiorina, Bush, or
even single payer care” should describe to the American people, as precisely as
possible, what drawbacks as well as gains will occur by the adoption of such
proposals.
Too often successful presidential
candidates win by demonization rather than by constructive clarification,
education or information. What a
candidate believes may be a reasonable path to what he or she will do, but how
they perceive the risks and rewards of their proposals for absolutely everyone
is what really and truly counts.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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