Maybe It’s Time to Limit Presidential Terms

Being president of the United States is a lot like being the neighborhood used car salesman. You may be very good at what you do; you may have graduated from the Senate or the State house with all kinds of experience and knowledge and friends; you may be wildly popular at the time of the election.

But it’s that rare president who manages to keep the allegiance of the voters after the first 365 days in office. There’s something inherently rotten in the set up. Let’s face it, even the most accomplished of men and women seem to be no match for the  kind of work that demands the right decision one hundred per cent of the time. They don’t call it the World’s Toughest Job for no reason. It’s not just tough, it’s incomprehensibly impossible to pull off with any real measure of success.

Name the two or three best presidents in the last fifty years, then look closely at their records and their poll numbers. Reagan suffered in office, Bush suffered in office, Clinton suffered in office–they all did; they all had wide swings in popularity and long, drawn-out, awful periods of challenge they just didn’t seem up to. Iran-Contra, Monicagate, Iraq. Yet all of these presidents were around for eight years, two terms, an eternity in political years. And maybe that’s the problem.

We let our Chief Execs hangs around long past their sell-by dates and that’s no one’s fault but our own, because we could change the law that lets them do that. It wouldn’t be an easy process but maybe its time to consider the efficacy of just such a sweeping modification to our Constitution.

Four years in the kind of high-pressure cooker that is the White House is more than enough for any reasonable, solid citizen. You can only ask so much of your public servants and four years is about right. If you have any doubts about that, take a look at the second terms of even our most accomplished presidents. Second terms are infamous for the toll they take on our leaders, the psychological and emotional tax. In the recent past, there no longer seems to be any such thing as a successful second act in the president business. It’s just a fact.

Maybe it’s time to give out those mandatory fifth year vacations. We’d all probably feel refreshed. That is, if we can figure out a way to stop those three year presidential campaigns...

Campaign 2016 is Off and Running!

Is it me or has the political world gone off it’s axis? It used to be that presidential campaign began about six months before the national elections and before you were really exhausted by all the political blather, it was time to inaugurate the new Chief Executive. Americans had other preoccupations and presidential campaigns were a once-in-four-years Constitutional requirement to keep the ship of state afloat.

The good, old days.

Then came the advent of twenty-four hour cable television news and twenty-four-hour social media and twenty-four-hour talk radio. And before anyone knew what had happened, the subject of the day–of every day–became the next presidential election. It made no difference that the ink was barely dried on the present election. The gears were greased and the names were already being floated, even as the new president was taking the oath of office.

And every election cycle has gotten worse than the one that came before it. Now we are faced with three years–three years–of non-stop presidential campaigning (mostly by candidates that refuse to acknowledge that they are running for president, even while they make sure to make these assertions in the most public venues).

It used to be that running for president required a candidate to actually get out and meet the voters. He or she had to trek endlessly across the fifty states and spend truckloads of cash to get the word out. Now, with social media and CNN, FOX and MSNBC, all they have to do is make an announcement and–presto!-three hundred million people know about the decision.

Which brings it all back to the American electorate, to our patience and weariness with the manufactured sound bites that have taken over our political conversation.

Get ready, America, the 2016 Presidential election has officially begun. It may seem like Spring of 2014 but the next three years are going to fly by in a flash. Unless you turn off your computers and televisions and radios and stop reading newspapers and magazines, if you still know what those are.

Where is that Malaysia Airlines Plane? But first a word from our sponsors

Turn on the television lately and all you’re going to hear is a lot of speculation about that missing Malaysian jetliner. Of course I am in full support mode for the potential victims of the crash…or whatever happened with the plane. But America’s twenty-four hour a day media blab machine just can’t seem to get enough of this story. Isn’t it reassuring that Fox and CNN and all those talk radio folks are so concerned with the safety of the passengers? The outcome of their terrible ordeal?

No, actually they’re not and it’s more than just a disgrace. It’s an embarrassment for American. Every time something like this happens, the media machine revs up for what it hopes will be a long, drawn out crisis. Nothing stirs the pot or gets the media-mogul adrenalin flowing like a good, juicy story with the possibility of lots of blood and terror.

Let’s be frank about the media’s love of this kind of thing: stories like this get the coffers filled, and in the long run, these stories pay the salaries for the weather girls and feed the year-end bonuses for all those “executives” who are just too busy to divvy out airtime to subjects that have real importance to the citizens of America.

You know something odd is afoot when even crusty old Bill O’Reilly sides with us. The other night he opined that the media should hang their collective heads in shame...or something along those lines (it’s sometimes hard to figure out what Bill is really getting at).

At a time when American troops are still engaged in foreign countries where there lives are put in daily danger, and at a time when unemployment is still a major issue for millions of Americans, isn’t it time to put away all the useless speculation about “the mystery” of the Malaysian jet’s disappearance. The answers to that mystery may never be known or they may be known tomorrow morning. That will be a story.

Will the media be as interested in the end of the story as they are in the beginning and middle of it?

Probably not.

Who Owns Congress?

That was the title of a bestselling book written decades ago by Mark Green, a former “Nader’s Raider.” Green raised a number of pertinent questions in that book about the viability of a Congress that seemed hopelessly beholden and, in too many ways, prisoner, to special interests of every variety, right and left.

A few decades later.

The title of that book seems more prescient than ever. With the popularity of both political parties and the Congress they pretend to serve at all time lows, it is a good time to look again at that Mark Green question.

Why is it that candidates spend so much money every two years (these numbers are no longer measured in millions, but billions with a B) to gain access to a job that pays so much less than most executive positions at middle-level corporations? Why do these candidates spend every hour of their lives for long months on end to win brutal campaigns that lead to such low paying, thankless employment? (Sure, Congresspeople make more than most of us but compared to their high-living associates, colleagues, and pals, Congressional pay equals volunteer work.)

Can you spell S-p-e-c-i-a-l i-n-t-e-r-e-s-t-s?

Special interests come in all sizes and influence and we all know how they have polluted the work of Congress with an alarming success, most especially, over the past fifty years. Nearly every major national and multi-national industry spends hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars every year maintaining high-profile (and some definitely NOT so high profile) lobbyists that do nothing but prowl the corridors of power, like voracious snakes, seeking influence and favors from the men and women who were supposedly elected to represent “the little guy.” Right. Remember him? That would be you and me.

Once we’ve “elected” this grateful Congress, those special interests get down to the serious work of the people, and believe it, they are equal opportunity all the way. Party affiliation means a lot less to the paid lobbyists of Capitol Hill than it does to the voters who put these guys and gals in office.

Which raises a question that Mark Green might have been interested in all those years ago: does it really matter which party is in charge of those not-so-brightly-lit corridors of Congress at any given time? It might surprise a lot of partisan voters who spend every hour debating the certain points of their political beliefs, to find out how truly even handed the lobbyists are. You have the cash? We have the beliefs.

The next time you’re arguing the benefits of voting for your favorite Republican or Democratic candidate and wondering why nothing ever moves past the discussion stage in Congress, think about that great bi-partisan political social gathering known as the Washington Lobby Party.

They’re the party you’re most likely voting for.