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Chief

What kind of right thinking person would ever in their right mind come to the conclusion that they want to be President?

From the very first day that you announce your intention to seek the office of President, you put you life through the worst kind of humiliating proctological exam by the press who while acting as the worlds “opposition research” division starts to examine your entire life history without the slightest respect for your privacy or for the privacy of anyone you might have so much as stood next to you on the elevator. Your whole life history, every person you ever dated, every little thing you might have said throughout your entire life is examined and analyzed by your political enemies. Newspapers assign reporters and allocate thousands of man hours to track down your 5th grade teacher to see if your alleged statement that “girls have cooties” is really true and thus show what an incredible misogynistic pig you really are. (Oh, how could you!)

Then you have to go raise money from other people who want you to be their friend. You make endless tiresome speeches that are created with precision and great care and repeated over and over only to be cut into bite sized pieces that will fit nicely in the evening news. You hate the taste of rubber chicken; the whole sad spectacle just embarrasses you.

Then you have to go knock off the other political hacks that got to the show before you, the ones that feel that: ” they are due” for the job of President because they “served as the undersecretary of food additives during the great red dye #6 controversy”. The tricky part is that after you run them off the political road, you have to go back and make them your friend, or even worse, your running mate.

Then you get to run for office. Wow! What fun that is. The Secret Service invades your house; your kids get their lives disrupted and god help you if they are teenagers. And just to make sure that shes the “right kind of woman” the press then examines your wife and her life, all the while failing to recognize that her life has been brought to a stand still because of your new career choice. To you, she’s your wife, your girlfriend, the best part of you and the center of your life. To the press, shes “Open Game”.

As you run for office, everything you say as well as the way you say it is put under the microscope. You cant have a bad day, you cant be cranky, you cant slap the crap out of some moron reporter, you have to sit there and take it, smile back politely and hope like hell you don’t mistakenly misspell a word forget to zip your fly or “forget to shake”, or come out of the bathroom with toilet tissue streaming behind the heel of your shoe.

If you act human, you are a boob; if you don’t, you’re a stiff. It’s a fine line. You walk it with all the confidence of a Wallenda with a hangover.

To top it all off, your campaign staff is made up people that are equal parts paid mercenary, true believer, rank amateur and some of them are even outright paid agents for the other side. Out of that soup sandwich of humanity, you have to make a team that will help you get elected. This is a challenge as the average campaign worker can’t type, can’t talk and usually can’t bathe.

Now you go from town to town first by bus and if things go well, by plane. The Press that follows in herd fashion capturing every moment and creating their own “reality distortion field” which envelops you and your campaign and it serves as a lens by which everyone views you as a person. You no longer control your image, people who hate you do.

Then it happens. Disaster occurs and you get elected.

What you’ve won is a change to repay those political debts you rang up during your campaign. Those campaign workers put those long hours in not just because they believed in you, it was also so they could get a great job to improve their resumes, now they come to you expecting to be rewarded for their service in the snows of Iowa, when they stood and fought while others left.

Only there’s too many of them for the number of jobs you can help with. Sure enough, someone loses and has to go home empty handed. You’re not even President yet and you’ve already disappointed someone.

Then there’s the heavy hitters; the guys who funded your campaign and helped get things moving when it was just an idea one day “way back when”. They want cabinet jobs; if not for themselves, for a sympathetic surrogate. You cant tell them no, but you cant tell them yes. How do you tell them maybe without making them angry? How do you give them what they want without losing control over the resource? But you now must also consider the members of your party in the Senate. They too will want what they can get from you. People think that because you are in the same party that they will work with you but the truth is they will make your life hell. They say things like “help me get that bridge/factory/base in my state or ill sink your candidate on his the first day in committee”. You wonder if your friends work like this, how will your enemies treat you? The answer is that your enemies treat you the same your friends; its just that your enemies stab you in the back with more honesty and feeling than your friends.

Then you get about 90 days from your inaugural of relative peace. Unfortunately, its not peace, it’s a time where the press circles you like wolves do around a flock of sheep, all smiles and quick light steps while waiting for just the right moment to rip out your throat.

And rip they shall, at every turn. Every single day.

Now that you are President, you awaken every day to the sight of protests outside your home. Every time you shake a hand, you check to see if the hand has a gun in it. Before you were President you could get in your truck and go to the hardware store. Now, you are lucky if you get to watch TV for an hour by yourself. Every family event becomes a chance for some person desperate for headlines to crash the party, and yet you come across as the big mean man because you had someone arrested for their rude behavior by crashing your kids party. Every vacation becomes a chance to make it sound as if you are slacking off. As if the President of the United States doesn’t deserve a day off considering that you work every single day, every day of your administration. You are never “off duty”, you are never on vacation; you never get away from the job. You and the job are one in the same.

The first part of your day is the hardest. You awaken to a briefing by the national security adviser who proceeds to tell you how many ways the world tried to kill you and the millions of people you are now responsible for while we all slept. You see, this is why every president leaves office with white hair, no matter how good they looked when they come into office; they always leave as a wisp of the man they were when they went into office. We don’t know what they hear in these briefings, but my guess is, that the information they receive is pretty staggering.

Day after day, you awake to the news that we once again, dodged a bullet. But one day the bullet finds a home and you as President find yourself at the front of a Nation at war. You send men to their deaths. You make decisions you will go over again and again for the rest of your life. Did you do the right thing? Should you have waited, did you wait too long? Did you get the right people for the job? What do you say to the families who didn’t come back? You are haunted both by success and failure.

Every moment of every day, a man follows you everywhere with a small case. That case contains the codes for launching nuclear weapons. You have at your command the most destructive power ever known to man. It follows you everywhere but it also haunts you. You cant afford the luxury of second guessing yourself but you do anyway. You wonder what you will do, and what the circumstances might be to cause you to use that power. You wonder if the day will ever come, and you pray every day that it doesn’t, and at the start of every day, you find out if today will be the day.

You send our troops to feed people in other countries, only to see them killed and dragged through the streets by lawless warlords for their efforts. And yet the world calls you a terrorist.

In addition to the joy of discovering just how many people want to kill you and attack your country, you also have to deal with just surviving nature. Tornadoes, Volcanoes, Hurricanes, Earthquakes, Flood, Drought. They all “acts of God” and yet somehow they are all your fault. You can’t stop any of them, but you should have done something just the same.

They say that you didn’t move fast enough, you didn’t anticipate, you cut funding you should have known, you should have come sooner, you should have stayed away, you didn’t shake the right hand, you should have rebuilt faster, you shouldn’t rebuild at all. You should raise taxes; you should have cut taxes. You don’t have the right people on your team. You let those people die.

You let people die? The last one gets you the most.

When you see a disaster, all you see is people in need. What your political enemies see is one more chance to make you into a political piñata. Nu matter how hard they whack, you still have to get up and do the job and you have do it flawlessly. You want to snap, you want to call in sick, but you cant. You suck it up, you do the best you can, you shake hands with people you would just as soon kick the crap out of and you help people you’d rather have shot.

Credit? You say want credit for the good that you did? Oh you get credit, just as soon as you are dead. Then you’re a big hero and a statesman but as long as you are close to power, you are considered a threat to civilization.

This is a Democracy and you are just the President. Just one man responsible for one branch of the government, and even in that part of it, you have to share and compromise. You can propose a budget, but you cant approve it, you can sign treaties but the Senate must approve. You can appoint, but again the Senate controls just how far you can go.

So what do you do? Of course, you come back for more and run for office again. Another four years of people you hate hitting you with political sticks in hopes that candy and dollars will fly out of your entrails.

Why would any thinking person take that job? Why would anyone with any sense at all spend millions of dollars on the last job they will ever have? Why would anyone even think of taking a job where they are a target for every whackjob assassin in the world?

Can you be on the job every day for 4 years? 24 hours a day? Never get sick; never get away from the job. Can you use the best that your upbringing and training and life experience has given you to make the correct decisions of life and death for millions of people?

Oh, and can you make it look easy? Can you make perfect decisions that are fault free every day? I hope so, because that’s what we expect of the President. Zero tolerance for any display of human failure. Zero tolerance for your inability to see into the future. Zero tolerance for any failure of any member of your administration.

Zero tolerance. That’s what it means to be President of a Democracy. What’s a Democracy? It’s 350 million chiefs and no Indians.

And why would you want to be President? So you can get your name in the history books? So you can get your face on a piece of shiny metal currency? So you can get an office building, an airport or an Aircraft Carrier named after you someday? So your name can go down in pop culture as a synonym for “Hitler”?

Seriously, what drives anyone to give up everything just to be the President?

Everyone in a Democracy wants a combination Santa Claus and Superman for President. What we get instead is a mortal human being with frailty, failings, fears and anxieties, a mortal human being with the weight of the world on his shoulders who lives with half his country giving prayer for his good health and the other half tying a noose.

We don’t elect the President to their term in office; we sentence them.

Posted @ September 03, 2005 12:59 AM | Current Affairs

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