I will admit that I pay less attention to the quadrennial presidential frenzy than I probably should. While I can name most (probably not all--how many of them ARE there?) of the GOP candidates and all one of the Democratic candidates, and while I’ve read countless news accounts and editorial discussions in the aftermath of the endless debates among the former, I still cannot pin down exactly why any of them chose to throw their hats into the proverbial ring. Why does Michele Bachmann want to be president, for instance, aside from “God told me to do it”? What does Rick Perry see himself as offering the country? Or baseball-glove out of Massachusetts, or the now nearly forgotten pizza guy, or salamander-serial-adulterer, or Ron “Methuselah was a KID” Paul. I admit I kind of like the Utah Mormon, Huntsman, but that may be as much because his daughters are a hoot as anything else.
I would love to ask every one of them, in a quiet, non-photo-op moment (if there were such a thing), WHY they, personally, not only want the job, but deem themselves qualified for it. Like that moment in the movie, “Blind Side,” when Michael turns the tables on the NCAA investigator, telling her that they want to know why everybody else wants him to go to Ole Miss, but not why HE wants to go there.
Why whatever percent of voters want Paul or Bachmann or Romney or Perry or Cain or Huntsman or whomever to become president (which mostly boils down to “anybody but the black guy” anyway) doesn’t interest me nearly as much as why that handful of people each individually want to become president.
Frankly, I sense that none of them really want the job.
Running for president has become less about becoming president, than merely the lucrative game of running itself. Heck, just tagging along as the vice-presidential candidate four years ago made Sarah Palin rich. She didn’t even have to bother going back to her original day job as Alaska governor. She has demonstrated that there are almost as many perks to being a presidential candidate, in however teasing a way, as to the job itself--plus none of the headaches.
Ron Paul apparently gave up his medical career to become a career politician and then a career presidential candidate. Near as I can tell, he “consistently” stakes out positions that will keep him “interesting” and “attractive” to just large enough a portion of the electorate to make him seem viable as a candidate, but not to large enough portion of same to make him actually likely to be elected.
It’s not the job, it’s the adventure, and the money and publicity that flow along with it.
As my own job seems threatened and my “career,” such as it is, in doubt, I’ve begun thinking about other lines of work. Running for president is starting to look like a pretty cool opportunity, and it’s not like I haven’t thought about it before. Back in the 1970s, here in Missouri, we had a guy run for governor, “Walkin Joe Teasdale,” who got the name because he actually perambulated on foot around the state, and eventually managed to beat the incumbent governor, Kit Bond, who came back to beat Walkin Joe four years later. I was in high school at the time, given to daydreams (always better than algebra or geometry), and one day I wondered what would happen if an 18-year-old Midwestern kid started walking across the country, announcing himself as a presidential candidate for the election 17 years hence. He could work odd jobs, talk to people, generally spend 17 years getting his name out. People would KNOW him, or think they did, and he would know people, his eventual constituency.
I never got much further with the story than that, but now I wonder.
Could there BE a better job than running for an office you know (and hope and pray) you’ll never win?
Guess you’ll have to ask Ron Paul or Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich or . . . Whomever. Don’t ask B. H. Obama, though--he tried to pull off this “running” thing and actually won, much to his apparent chagrin and dismay.
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