No, "Anyone" Can Not Be President
Anonymous Liberal has a great takedown of Ross Douthat's ridiculous claim that Sarah Palin represents the "Democratic ideal."
This last line from Ross's column also bothers me:Sarah Palin is beloved by millions because her rise suggested, however temporarily, that the old American aphorism about how anyone can grow up to be president might actually be true.
This is a ridiculous statement. If you want evidence that anyone can grow up to be president, how about looking at the current President. It's hard to imagine a more unlikely future president than the biracial son of a teenage mother in Hawaii who was given the name of his absentee Muslim father. But Obama did well in school, worked hard, impressed everyone he met with his intellect and managed to put himself in a position to become president.
Others have said the same, but AL's last graf makes what to me is the more important point:
Palin stands for a very different proposition, that if you have the right backers, anyone, no matter how unqualified or unsuited for the job, can potentially become president. That's scary. While I very much want to believe that a smart kid who works hard and plays her cards right can become president someday, no matter where she comes from, I don't want to believe that any random schmuck can become president. The president shouldn't be an average person. The president should be someone who is most decidedly above average in most respects. Pedigree doesn't matter to me, but capability does. And it should to all Americans.
"Anyone can grow up to be president" does not mean any semi-literate, arrested-development, narcissistic psychopath with a cute smile can be president. It means for anyone willing to work her ass off studying, questioning, learning, gaining skills and improving herself, no disadvantages of birth or poverty can stop her.
Or as I believe Jon Stewart put it, I don't want a president I want to have a beer with; I want a president who is light years smarter than me.
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3 comments:
As for the "semi-literate". etc., what did we have for the last 8 years? That run-on sentence exactly describes the Bushman. Except I never thought his smile was "cute". Vapid was the word that came to mind most often in that regard.
Rich is correct. We have seen what having the friends in the right places can do to ruin the country.
Few know how close this country came - and, still is, for that matter - to turning out the lights on our government and culture.
We are still in a banking crisis. As long as the Open Market Committee allows banks the latitude to mark the value of assets whimsically instead of at their realistic market value.
This 'Mark to imagination' instead of mark to market is how the banks have magically recovered ahead of the recession curve.
The smart guys on Wall Street had a semi-literate dunce in the drivers' seat and fellow travellers in the regulatory agencies.
Yellow Dog, you are right on the money with this post. We cannot have a female George W. Bush in the White House. The male version was bad enough, and the country cannot afford his carbon copy in our lifetime. It would be nice, though, to have Sarah Palin become a modern-day Harold Stassen: a perrenial candidate who never gets elected but consistently draws votes away from her party.
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