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Has it occurred to anyone that the process of running for the presidency pretty well guarantees that the winner will be ineffective in office?
For instance, a candidate must denounce the federal bureaucracy as a pack of blood-sucking leeches that prey on hard-working American taxpayers, wasting money while issuing burdensome and moronic nit-picking regulations.
A typical speech will proclaim that The Lord's Prayer
has but 72 words, and the Gettysburg Address only 271. So
why does it take the federal bureaucracy 26,911 words to
issue a regulation on the sale of cabbages? It's long past
time we put an end to this oppressive nonsense.
Forget that there never was such a regulation, despite what you may have heard. The important thing is that throughout the campaign, the candidate lambastes all federal employees.
If he is sufficiently skilled at denouncing the very people who operate the government that he wants to lead, the candidate takes office. And then who's supposed to implement the new president's policies?
Those very same bureaucrats in the district ranger stations, Social Security offices and VA clinics of America. Just how enthusiastic would you be about serving your new boss if he got his job by telling the world how much he despised you and your work? How willing would you be to serve the public that elected the boss that hates you?
Similarly, most presidential candidates like to blame the undisciplined spendthrift U.S. Congress for most of the woes of America.
Is the deficit getting worse? It's those congressmen who keep getting things that their constituents want, like jobs building dams and working on military bases. Is our foreign policy a shambles? Blame the senators and representatives for meddling, even if they were just doing what they were supposed to be doing.
Then the new president tries to get Congress to act on his proposals. The president needs their cooperation, but he got into office by convincing Americans that their representatives and senators are a pack of short-sighted scoundrels. It's easy to understand why the House and Senate display something less than eagerness. It's also easy to see why very little ever gets done.
Another good target for a candidate, but a foolish one
for a president, is the news media.
If a candidate denounces his competitors from time to time, as Robert
Dole has, then he acquires a reputation for meanness. But George Bush can
fight constantly with the press and still have to worry about the wimp
factor.
Pat Robertson can question the veracity of the press at the same
time he revises his résumé so that he was never a
television evangelist
-- and his followers still see him as a man of
truth.
In short, the news media are a convenient target during the campaign. The candidate can easily persuade himself that he's much more popular than all those newspapers and television stations.
The facts are quite different. In the last presidential election, the winning candidate got about 54 million of the 92 million votes cast. Contrast that number, which comes on one day every four years, to the 120 million Americans who read a newspaper every day. Note that the average American spends more than 30 hours a week watching television, which is at least 29 hours more than most Americans devote to politics.
To get elected, a candidate feels compelled to berate the bureaucrats that will implement his platform, to chastise the Congress that must enact his legislation, to maul the media that Americans apparently trust and enjoy.
And then once he's in office, he complains that he can't get anything done. But they never seem to figure out why that might be so.
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