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New faces of 2008, that is. Well, they’re new all right. One is a black man, one is a woman, one is a preacher, one is an actor, one is a flier, one is a doctor, one is a business person and all are gainfully employed. The other contenders are all lawyers, something which is also true of some of those whose better-known occupations I’ve just listed. Twenty-six of the forty-two presidents we’ve had up to now were lawyers. would you believe? No wonder we’ve got the world’s fattest law books, stuffed to bursting with statutes, ordinances, codes, enactments, provisions, decisions, amendments and God knows what. The only times when we’ve gotten a break from all this lawmaking were the times when we elected soldiers (five), writers (twice), a tailor (once), a farmer (once), teachers (twice), an actor (once), an engineer (once), and some others.
We need more diversity, clearly. As yet we’ve haven’t had a professional athlete, an acrobat, a scientist, a professor, a movie director, a dance instructor, an inventor, an astronaut, a beautician, a detective, and, oh, many and many other occupations. In a big country like this we should be reaching out more to groups that have been overlooked when it comes to the filling of offices and the guidance of government. Lawyers aren’t the only people who are capable of this. In fact a large number of lawyers should be excluded from the field because their professional habits make them unfit to hold a public trust. Anyone who remembers the O.J. Simpson trial knows this. Some of the top lawyers in America were involved and all they succeeded in doing was to convince the country that they were unworthy of belief whenever they opened their mouths.
The diversity of this year’s candidates may indicate a trend in the direction I’ve been talking about. Entertainers and athletes are two classes who have been showing more and more interest in running for office. Chuck Norris is both of these and Governor Huckabee had him standing next to him when he made his Iowa victory speech Tuesday. He had been a big help in the race. This is reminiscent of how Ronald Reagan got his start in politics working for Barry Goldwater in 1964.
There have been a couple of doctors in the Senate in the last few years, and some in the House. I think Senator Bunning of Kentucky will shoot for the White House one of these years. Just about every long-service Senator gives it a try sooner or later. They’re often ignored, but then none have been in the baseball Hall of Fame like Bunning. From the media, Lou Dobbs of CNN is supposed to be warming up for a run. Who knows, even a cop might come out of nowhere sometime. In the 90’s there were two men in the House whom I knew well from working with them in the police department. Lightning didn’t strike and turn them into presidential candidates but once you’re in Congress you never know.
I’ve now been through thirteen presidents and maybe thirteen hundred candidates and I can’t say that I’ve ever seen one that made a difference in my life. But that’s only a way of saying I didn’t notice the difference when they were making it. I know darn well that Harry Truman drafted me into his army, but after all I expected it sooner or later. Somebody before him did the things that made it inevitable that I should be conscripted. I suspect it was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who took us into World War II, to which the Korean War was the inevitable sequel which provoked the confrontation between me and Truman. What confrontation? Well he wanted me to go and I didn’t want to and that’s what I mean. The draft board saw it his way and not mine and the confrontation was over. But I made it close.
Did all this start with Roosevelt? Not necessarily. It could have been Woodrow Wilson, who took us into World War I, which led us to WWII. Then there was Teddy Roosevelt, who hounded Wilson to get us into it. He himself had become president by promoting intervention in the Hispano-Cuban war which became the Spanish-American one. There’s three presidents besides Truman who may very well have been responsible for my army career. I guess they do make a difference in our lives.
All the same I don’t see why it’s necessary for them to use up the best part of two years
running for the job and debating and berating and orating all over the networks without let or hindrance for all that time. It didn’t use to be that way. All the contention was confined to the election year itself. In the spring there were some primaries and a lot of state party conventions where the states’ delegations to the national party convention in the summer were chosen. Some of these delegations were pledged to one presidential candidate, some were split among the candidates and some were unpledged. Some of the pledged ones were committed to favorite sons, i. e., local heroes who served as placeholders until the delegation chose its actual candidate. In this way the stage was set for horsetrading when the convention finally got going.
The convention didn’t resemble in any way the meetings that will be held this year for the purpose of anointing the candidates already chosen in the primaries. There’s no more action and no more suspense as there was when every delegation was up for grabs and every organization went in swinging to put its candidate over the top no matter what had to be done in the way of persuading delegates to betray their trusts or to live up to them or what promises had to be made to win the game. In 1924 a hundred and twenty-four ballots had to be taken to choose the Democratic nominee and in 1976 things had not changed that much, but afterwards they did, as the number of primaries increased and became decisive in choosing the candidate.
Things are tamer now, not that the primaries aren’t hard fought, but that the old conventions were more dramatic, with thousands of participants gathered under one roof in blazing summer weather, liquor flowing freely and rhetoric likewise, all to the tune of bands playing and the chairman’s gavel pounding when some impassioned orator had to be cut off in the full flow of his eloquence. It was disorderly as hell, but more entertaining. Today there’s none of that inside the hall because the outcome of the voting is known in advance, but there still will be noisemaking by demonstrators outside trying to get inside. But since they’re more of a nuisance than anything else and since the people inside are no fun anymore, there’ll be nothing to see on TV and in fact there may very well be no TV. The conventions just don’t pull the ratings anymore. | |
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