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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Showing posts with label Bachmann. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bachmann. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Monday, November 28, 2011
Tebow-Mania Part 2
Asked if, when he was praying during a San Diego field goal attempt in overtime of last night’s game, he had asked for a miss, Denver quarterback Tim Tebow, widely maligned for both his throwing motion and his open Christianity, laughed. "I might have said that. Or maybe a block. Maybe all of it."
The kick missed, Tebow and the Denver offense got another chance, and he marched them down the field, the Broncos scored a field goal and won the game.
Personally, I doubt there was any kind of “divine intervention” in San Diego’s missed field goal attempt, which was a longish one anyway--I suspect God has more on his mind than the outcome of a particular professional football game, at any given moment. I also doubt that Tim Tebow truly believes God cares which team wins in any given game. Times like that, I suspect that Tebow, and probably most Christians--and anyone else in the habit of praying to a “higher power”--in a similar situation, use prayer more as a way to focus and achieve some kind of inner calm than to try to influence God to influence the outcome.
That’s only a guess, though.
Come tomorrow, I predict that 98% of sportswriters, and closer to 100% of commenters on stories about the Denver-San Diego game, will be dismissing Tebow’s efforts (and, in fairness, he had a solid, but definitely not spectacular game), talking up the Denver defense (which deserves it), and probably dissecting the San Diego coach’s many failures (probably also deserved).
However Tebow’s career eventually plays out, I predict the same post-game outcome every week throughout every regular season and every postseason game in which he plays.
I’m also going to go out on a limb, here, and predict that he will have a longer and much more successful career than most “experts” are forecasting for him. Beyond the fact that he works at it, he apparently is a “born leader”--he makes the people around him better, and they believe in him. Never discount the “confidence factor,” both when it comes to self-confidence--not arrogance--and the confidence someone inspires in those around him/her.
As a lot of people who know more about Tebow than I do, which actually isn’t much, have said since his Florida college days, “he just wins.”
Wouldn’t it be SOOOO cool to get somebody with that quality in a position of national leadership? (One caveat: He/she had better NOT say “God told him/her to run;” count my vote immediately for the other guy/gal in that case.)
But “born leaders” no longer run for president or even congressperson or senator. Only “born followers,” people who will go where the “money” tells them to go, throw their hats in the ring (because that’s where the money is), in a tradeoff for the “power” they crave. They don’t even seem to recognize their essential powerlessness when they sell themselves to whomever lines their pockets most luxuriously.
In a time when we desperately need leaders with what sportswriters call “intangibles,” the kind of natural leadership ability that someone like Tim Tebow virtually exudes, instead we get people like Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain and that nut from Texas and Baseball Glove from Massachusetts and on and on and on. Huntsman has potential, but he is a Mormon (Christians will never vote for him. There goes the GOP “base”). Salamander guy, Newt, would look a whole lot better if he didn’t want 9-year-olds cleaning school toilets, and if he did have any kind of “moral” leg to stand on, and if he hadn’t gone to grade school with God‘s grandmother. Have I forgotten anyone? Oh yeah, the older-than-dirt guy, Ron Paul. Pass. (This is not “age-ism;” even my staunchly conservative 79-year-old father thinks we need younger blood in the presidency, as long as it isn’t, um, you know, what we have now. It‘s a tough job that requires a lot of strength and energy that a septuagenarian, or whatever Paul is, may simply lack) Sarah Pales-in-Comparison-to-virtually-anyone is still hanging in the wings, waiting for the GOP to draft her--which it sounds like they might be thinking about.
On the other side we have Mr. Obama, whom I actually like in a lot of ways, but who also seems to lack “traditional” leadership qualities. He is not the “my-way-or-the-highway” kind of guy that, say, Shrub (thank you, Molly Ivins, and may you rest in peace) Bush was, which is not a bad thing--except when it comes to inspiring the majority of the electorate (middle-aged and older folks, more accustomed to and comfortable with the Shrub style, are neither accustomed to nor willing to be comfortable with a more conciliatory, more inclusive approach to governance).
But hell, Obama takes flak for continuing a tradition, started by a Republican, Bush-wayyy-senior I think, of pardoning a pair of turkeys on Thanksgiving--just a lighthearted, fun Republican tradition, and he gets hammered for it. He, his wife and daughters serve up food to homeless people on Thanksgiving day, and it is derided as a “mere photo op”--never mind that everything they DO is a photo op, it’s the nature of the beast, but they were STILL standing there on that serving line, helping other people when they could have been home watching football games or something.
And I’ve wandered far afield of wherever I meant to go, here.
The kick missed, Tebow and the Denver offense got another chance, and he marched them down the field, the Broncos scored a field goal and won the game.
Personally, I doubt there was any kind of “divine intervention” in San Diego’s missed field goal attempt, which was a longish one anyway--I suspect God has more on his mind than the outcome of a particular professional football game, at any given moment. I also doubt that Tim Tebow truly believes God cares which team wins in any given game. Times like that, I suspect that Tebow, and probably most Christians--and anyone else in the habit of praying to a “higher power”--in a similar situation, use prayer more as a way to focus and achieve some kind of inner calm than to try to influence God to influence the outcome.
That’s only a guess, though.
Come tomorrow, I predict that 98% of sportswriters, and closer to 100% of commenters on stories about the Denver-San Diego game, will be dismissing Tebow’s efforts (and, in fairness, he had a solid, but definitely not spectacular game), talking up the Denver defense (which deserves it), and probably dissecting the San Diego coach’s many failures (probably also deserved).
However Tebow’s career eventually plays out, I predict the same post-game outcome every week throughout every regular season and every postseason game in which he plays.
I’m also going to go out on a limb, here, and predict that he will have a longer and much more successful career than most “experts” are forecasting for him. Beyond the fact that he works at it, he apparently is a “born leader”--he makes the people around him better, and they believe in him. Never discount the “confidence factor,” both when it comes to self-confidence--not arrogance--and the confidence someone inspires in those around him/her.
As a lot of people who know more about Tebow than I do, which actually isn’t much, have said since his Florida college days, “he just wins.”
Wouldn’t it be SOOOO cool to get somebody with that quality in a position of national leadership? (One caveat: He/she had better NOT say “God told him/her to run;” count my vote immediately for the other guy/gal in that case.)
But “born leaders” no longer run for president or even congressperson or senator. Only “born followers,” people who will go where the “money” tells them to go, throw their hats in the ring (because that’s where the money is), in a tradeoff for the “power” they crave. They don’t even seem to recognize their essential powerlessness when they sell themselves to whomever lines their pockets most luxuriously.
In a time when we desperately need leaders with what sportswriters call “intangibles,” the kind of natural leadership ability that someone like Tim Tebow virtually exudes, instead we get people like Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain and that nut from Texas and Baseball Glove from Massachusetts and on and on and on. Huntsman has potential, but he is a Mormon (Christians will never vote for him. There goes the GOP “base”). Salamander guy, Newt, would look a whole lot better if he didn’t want 9-year-olds cleaning school toilets, and if he did have any kind of “moral” leg to stand on, and if he hadn’t gone to grade school with God‘s grandmother. Have I forgotten anyone? Oh yeah, the older-than-dirt guy, Ron Paul. Pass. (This is not “age-ism;” even my staunchly conservative 79-year-old father thinks we need younger blood in the presidency, as long as it isn’t, um, you know, what we have now. It‘s a tough job that requires a lot of strength and energy that a septuagenarian, or whatever Paul is, may simply lack) Sarah Pales-in-Comparison-to-virtually-anyone is still hanging in the wings, waiting for the GOP to draft her--which it sounds like they might be thinking about.
On the other side we have Mr. Obama, whom I actually like in a lot of ways, but who also seems to lack “traditional” leadership qualities. He is not the “my-way-or-the-highway” kind of guy that, say, Shrub (thank you, Molly Ivins, and may you rest in peace) Bush was, which is not a bad thing--except when it comes to inspiring the majority of the electorate (middle-aged and older folks, more accustomed to and comfortable with the Shrub style, are neither accustomed to nor willing to be comfortable with a more conciliatory, more inclusive approach to governance).
But hell, Obama takes flak for continuing a tradition, started by a Republican, Bush-wayyy-senior I think, of pardoning a pair of turkeys on Thanksgiving--just a lighthearted, fun Republican tradition, and he gets hammered for it. He, his wife and daughters serve up food to homeless people on Thanksgiving day, and it is derided as a “mere photo op”--never mind that everything they DO is a photo op, it’s the nature of the beast, but they were STILL standing there on that serving line, helping other people when they could have been home watching football games or something.
And I’ve wandered far afield of wherever I meant to go, here.
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