THE IDEAL PRESIDENT

By Edwin Cooney

Throughout American history, leaders of business and commerce, military leaders, and political party leaders have sought every four years to create a consensus as to who might be the best President of the United States of America! Thus, the immediate and easiest answer to the above question, that it depends on the mood of the strongest and most resourceful decision makers, is null and void as a response to this commentary.

There have been three types of presidential leadership, as I see it. They are consensus builders, ideologues, and commander types.

Consensus builders include Washington (who was elected because he was a successful military commander, but ultimately governed through consensus building), Lincoln, Taft, Eisenhower, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama, and, I'm predicting, President Biden. They generally seek to please a broad section of voters large enough to sustain their leadership. (Remember that Abraham Lincoln was neither an abolitionist nor was he aggressive toward the South. Thus the Emancipation Proclamation was practical rather than ideological.)  Presidents such as Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Reagan were both a combination of ideologues and consensus builders. (Note: Jefferson campaigned as a strict constitutional constructionist, but he departed from the Constitution when he purchased Louisiana because there is no prevision in the Constitution for the president to purchase territory from a foreign nation except through treaty — which the Louisiana Purchase was not.)

Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland, Richard Nixon, Donald Trump and, to some extent, Harry Truman were commander-types. That means they had a plan or idea (or thought they had) from the very outset of their administrations and tried to direct America to their ideal via coercion if necessary, especially in the cases of Jackson, Cleveland, Nixon, and President Trump. As I see it, President Donald J. Trump is the most virulent of the “commander type” of president.

President Trump didn't lose to Joe Biden because he was a conservative or because he sought to protect us from abortionists, illegal immigrants, secular humanists, or even socialists or communists. He lost because from the very outset of his administration, President Trump was clearly more about himself than he was about any particular interest group unless a group's agenda clearly enhanced his personal reputation. Consensus to President Trump was a sign of political and individual weakness! Additionally, long before November 3rd, 2020, it was clear that the president was tone deaf to people’s reaction to what he both said and did, be they Democrats or men and women he'd appointed to his own cabinet and sub-cabinet.

Even more telling was his lack of a sense of what worked and what didn't work for him. From early March 2020, he hovered over the Covid-19 briefings by Dr. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, continuously modifying their assessments of the severity of the pandemic to suit his own political reputation versus the public welfare. Even his tweets which had considerable effect in 2017, 2018, and well into 2019, lost steam due to their overuse and predictable flavor.

For me, the ideal president is a consensus builder. A consensus builder doesn't go into office without an idea of what he (or someday she) wants to achieve. For all his deliberately established reputation as a conservative, Ronald Reagan was ultimately a consensus builder which is actually part consensus building and partly idealistic leadership. Someone once wrote that President Reagan, like FDR and JFK, mastered "the art of the presidency” more than either their predecessors or their successors. Even those who master the art of the presidency don't escape ridicule. FDR was charged with believing himself to be indispensable in the presidency. It was claimed by some that FDR had "grilled millionaire” everyday for breakfast when, as he asserted during a fireside chat, “I’m a devotee of scrambled eggs!”  (According to her sons James and Elliot, scrambled eggs was the only dish Eleanor Roosevelt knew how to make. It was standard Sunday night cuisine at the White House.) Then there were two delightful criticisms about President Reagan's mastery of the presidency. Remember Colorado Congress Lady Patricia Schroeder's label of President Reagan as the “Teflon President” or the observation by one observer that "if President Reagan drove through a car wash with the top rolled down, Jimmy Carter, even in his absence, would get wet!"

The Smithsonian Institute, the close of "reconstruction" after the Civil War, the Peace Corps, the first nuclear test ban treaty, and the homeland security administration were all created by presidents whose election was questionable. That includes Presidents John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, John Kennedy, and George W Bush.

Yes, indeed! Give me a good-natured consensus builder, preferably with a plan more rational than his or her essential ego, and that's the president for me!

Let every future president's ideas, agenda and authority be subject to the ultimate scrutiny of a well-informed people and hopefully the last four years will have been a necessary but merely temporary nightmare!

Since the days of Lyndon Baines Johnson, I've carried in my pocket a small medallion of the sitting president of the United States whether or not I voted for him. Two of these presidents I've loved. The third one I originally loved, but later felt obligated to abandon in the wake of scandal. Two others I've admired, but with whom I felt politically incompatible. Still another, I voted for twice, but in the end I felt indifferent toward. Although I carried President Trump's medallion throughout his term, I was glad to put it aside last Wednesday noon.

The President of the United States has been for me the symbol of all that's beneficially possible because he or she is in a unique place to ensure the best outcome in national matters foreign or domestic. Observing how they do what they do, for better or worse, is both instructive and even entertaining. No president ought to be worshipped, but to deplore a president must never be a worthy goal intellectually, politically, or spiritually!

In the final analysis, we have an imperfect president occupying an imperfect office leading a free but imperfect people who, for the past 231 years, have only been able to  strive to be "...a more perfect union!"     

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY