Imagine the White House with Broken Kitchen Appliances Rusting on a Dead Lawn

If memory serves, Chester Arthur was customs collector for the port of New York City before he ascended to the vice presidency under James Garfield.  A few months later, he became president after Garfield was assassinated by a deranged office seeker.  Arthur was and is regarded as an inconsequential president who did nothing remarkable aside from sign into law the Pendleton Act, which reformed the civil service - but there was really no way that wasn’t going to happen, since the previous president had just been killed because of it.  That he was able to run the country isn’t all that surprising to me; he certainly had advisers, and anyway, in those days presidents tended to hew closer to their constitutional (read: weaker) roles with regard to foreign policy, state’s rights, the economy (except when those naughty unions went on strike, as they often did in this period) and most else.  Beyond that, though, he didn’t screw up things too badly because it actually would have taken a significant amount of effort to do that.  This, I think, has gotten less true over the years as the office of the presidency has accrued ever more agencies and bureaucracies.  Today, the issues that the executive branch is expected to be responsible for encompass a great deal more than they did in Arthur’s day.  The result: a do nothing president of an Arthurian or Garfieldian vintage can be just as destructive to the United States by not understanding or properly legislating on issues as one who does understand them in profoundly fucked up ways, like our current president.  But I digress. 

The whole Arthur episode was over 100 years ago.  So unqualified people finding their way into high office is nothing new.  Nor are sleazy, fact-free campaigns of the variety that John McCain is currently running.  If anything, those stretch back even farther – William Henry Harrison more or less won on a campaign of portraying himself as a salt of the earth country boy and Washington outsider and attacking Martin van Buren as an effete, out of touch northeasterner (sound familiar?).  It’s a long road that our democracy has traveled, and it doesn’t look like it has progressed very far towards good clean campaigns and the best person for the job, if at all.  Not to say that we’ve been regressing, either; American presidential campaigns have had the same idiotic tenor basically since the generation after the founders.  I’ve heard more than one person this season say that given where we are now, we should be better than this.  True enough.  But we also should be better than teaching fairy tales (creationism) instead of science (evolution) in schools.  Unfortunately, we’re not.  So I’ll reserve judgment about when we should be better than a sleazy political campaign and a grotesquely unqualified candidate.  Those two things are as American as apple pie. 

Yet, I can’t celebrate either of those things.  Not because I’m a patriot, because I’m not.  Because really, deep down, I think not that we should be better than mud slinging and celebrity based politics, but that democracies in general should be better than them.  Since this is the one that I happen to live in, I should take advantage of the machinery that affords me the privilege of affecting some kind of change, too.  Short of enormous institutional restructuring, all that really can be done is to complain and appeal from whatever pulpit one commands.  So at bottom, this post is something of an idealistic appeal to the baker’s dozen or so of people who read this blog to not condemn intellectualism as a bad thing.  Our public servants, the vice president and president included, are just that – our servants.  We are hiring them for a job, and in the case of the presidency, an extremely complex one fraught with myriad responsibilities.  Just as I wouldn’t hire a guy who builds dog houses out of plywood to be the architect that designs my house, I wouldn’t want someone who has been governor for a little over a year and previously was the mayor of a town of 5,000 to be my vice president, much less have a shot at being my president.  I want someone with a sophisticated understanding of the economy, of foreign policy, and of all the assorted etcetera currently associated with the presidency.  That doesn’t make me an elitist, it makes me a good boss who actually cares whether or not the person I’m hiring to run the company isn’t a total dumb fuck.  After all, in a democracy I am supposed to be the boss.  Or, at least, 1/300,000,000th of it.

Yes, I know all 300,000,000 people in the U.S. don’t vote.  But doesn’t it just sound better than 220,000,000?