Thursday, November 07, 2013

Some ideas about changing the kind of person we get as President

Victor Davis Hanson is advocating a constitutional change to one term presidencies.

One-term presidencies -- or a constitutional change to a single six-year presidential term -- make better sense. A single presidential tenure might curtail an incumbent's customary exaggerations about supposed past achievements and the phony promises about great things to come that are both apparently necessary for re-election. Much of wasteful federal spending and general bad policy derives from the re-election efforts of an incumbent desperate to appease or buy off the electorate.

Hanson also asks,

When Obama finishes his term, we will have had 28 consecutive years of presidents with either an undergraduate or graduate degree from Harvard or Yale. We should have learned from chronic deficits, massive debt and Obamacare that the Ivy League's best and brightest are not always either. Truman's higher education came from the school of hard knocks. Ike graduated from West Point and helped win World War II.

Reagan slogged it out for years in the cutthroat worlds of Hollywood and television -- after graduating from tiny Eureka College.

Hanson concludes with one final request:

Finally, can our next president have done something for a while other than nonstop politicking? The press caricatured Ike's garbled speeches and Reagan's B-movie reruns. But at least they did not go uninterruptedly from one political office to the next until being elected president.

Youthful charisma, the Ivy League, career politicians and two presidential terms in theory may be fine, but next time around can we take a needed break in 2016 from what have become our presidents-as-usual?

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