This just in: Presidential job description doesn’t include hand-holding, cuddling

  • I’ve grown used to the fact that an aver­age news­pa­per story on Pres­i­dent Bush goes some­thing like this:

    Adolph Hitler Pres­i­dent Bush goose-stepped his lying, chimp-like lit­tle self to the press­room today to announce another of his com­pletely idi­otic ideas…

    Whereas the aver­age Obama story goes some­thing like this:

    Pres­i­dent John F. Kennedy President-elect Obama and his lovely wife Jackie Michelle graced the press corps with their pres­ence today, caus­ing even hard­ened jour­nal­ists to break spon­ta­neously into song …

    So I wasn’t sur­prised to read a story in the paper that breath­lessly pre­dicts that “Obama may use exec­u­tive pow­ers to undo some Bush poli­cies.” But I was sur­prised to see this lit­tle para­graph hid­ing halfway through:

    Obama was elected on a promise of change, but the nature of the job makes it dif­fi­cult for pres­i­dents to do much that has an imme­di­ate impact on the lives of aver­age people.

    AIEEEE! Where in the world has THAT lit­tle bit of com­mon sense been hid­ing for the past eight years? I thought maybe I was the only one who had to attend Social Stud­ies classes in junior high school and learn that the pres­i­dent has lim­its to what he can do. All we’ve been hear­ing since 2000 is: “Gas prices up — what is Bush going to do?” “Global warm­ing threat­ens polar bears — Con­gress calls on Bush to respond” “Brad Pitt dumps Jen­nifer Anis­ton — when is Bush going to take action??” But now that His Barack-ness is ascend­ing, we all have to be reasonable.

    Well, what­ever. It’s just human nature, I sup­pose. We see the one main guy and instantly want him to be our Chief Exec­u­tive Offi­cer, Head But­ler and All-around Rock Star. A president’s actual duties aren’t all that com­pli­cated (cast­ing our mind over this page in Wikipedia): He appoints fed­eral judges, ambas­sadors and Cab­i­net mem­bers; he can’t directly intro­duce leg­is­la­tion, but he can steer things a lit­tle bit, and he has the power of veto; he can nego­ti­ate treaties; he’s the com­man­der in chief of the mil­i­tary, but he can’t declare war.

    So even if it’s a lit­tle bit late to recall that a pres­i­dent isn’t a king or a demi-god, bet­ter late than never. One of the crit­i­cisms that con­ser­v­a­tives had of Bush was that he  over­stepped the bounds of the office. So in spite of all the yelling from the media, Bush was actu­ally doing MORE than he should’ve been doing, com­ing darn close to redefin­ing the office. For good­ness’ sake let’s not tempt Obama to go even fur­ther with a lot of unprin­ci­pled whin­ing. Most likely he’d never know — another lim­i­ta­tion of the job is that you’re not equipped with omni­science — but it will make a dif­fer­ence in our per­sonal abil­ity to expe­ri­ence hap­pi­ness. Unreal expec­ta­tions always do. In that way, a pres­i­dent does affect the aver­age man imme­di­ately, but then, no more so than any other aver­age man you pin your hopes on.


    Related posts:

    1. Pres­i­den­tial wanna-be’s and the great national debate
    2. Pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates for A Great Awakening
    3. More on Miers
    4. Mean­while, back in France …
    5. “Yes, we can” what? Ruin the country?

    November 13th, 2008 | Grace | 3 Comments |

3 Responses and Counting...

  • Anam Cara 11.13.2008

    What I haven’t fig­ured out yet is how exec­u­tive orders fit into the big pic­ture. It seems to me that there are no checks or bal­ances on them. Why didn’t I notice this before? Prob­a­bly because I didn’t see any that I thought were so very out of line.…. Won­der how much slipped past me before.
    I worry about exec­u­tive orders (which Obama has said he will use) to order mil­i­tary hos­pi­tals to do abor­tions, etc.

  • Grace

    I’m vague on all this (should’ve been pay­ing atten­tion in Social Stud­ies, rather than pass­ing notes). But I can imag­ine that it would occur to those in the halls of power that they really are a lit­tle unstop­pable right now. If it turns out that Obama is abus­ing his power, WHO is going to narc him out? Con­gress? The press? Those are *sup­posed* to be checks on pres­i­den­tial power, but in the cur­rent cli­mate, I can’t see them step­ping up to the plate. Espe­cially if Obama is fur­ther­ing the lib­eral agenda — the way things are right now, there are a LOT of very devout lib­er­als who would say that that end jus­ti­fies the means.

    That’s not to say he’ll do it, but it’s a lit­tle sober­ing to real­ize that he could.

    Inter­est­ing, by the way, to even think that Obama would want to exceed his job descrip­tion as pres­i­dent, con­sid­er­ing that he said that deter­min­ing when life begins was above his pay grade. Maybe when he decides he’s smart enough to leg­is­late from the White House, he can spend a cou­ple min­utes and try to fig­ure out if abor­tion is murder.

  • s-p

    I think what makes this coun­try great is that the pres­i­dent CAN’T do what­ever he damn well pleases, or what he promised to do to get into the office. :)

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