Back in my pre-teen years, when I first started paying attention to politics, I thought I might want to become the first woman president of the United States.
That was about the time when my parents started encouraging me to consider law school. I remember traveling through Texas on vacation at one point and asking my father who he knew in the county we were in who could help me get elected governor (governor being a stepping stone to the White House).
When I got out of law school, the state representative seat for my parents’ district was open and they wanted me to move back home and run. I thought about it, but in the end decided against it.
While it was a labor-liberal district in those days, I would have had to ignore racism while soliciting the (mostly white) union vote and would also have had to pretend I loved the appalling development going on as Houston continued to sprawl.
Which is to say, if you want to be elected to public office in this or many other countries, you’ve got to compromise on something. And while I’m actually pretty good at working together with other people in good faith to come up with something we can all live with, the kind of compromises that involve my basic values are much harder for me to do.
I am very glad I made that call back then. I was still lurching around, trying to figure out my way in the world. Politics would have been a path, but I don’t think it would have made me happy.
And I don’t want to be President of the United States.
Presidents are the front person, and while they do their best to put people they can work with in key positions, they really have to trust that the people doing the core work are approaching it in a way similar to what they would do in that job.
Also, they inherit decisions made in the past, particularly on foreign policy. A new president has to tread with care around relationships with other countries and their advisors may well be telling them to do things they don’t personally agree with, but don’t see any way to change.
If I were in that job, I would never get a decent night’s sleep because I’d wake up at 3 a.m. every morning second guessing myself or cursing the fact that I had to do something I really didn’t want to do because of a lot of decisions made twenty years ago.
What gets me are all the people who do want to be president. I don’t mean the actual politicians with a shot at the job, the people who have spent their lives in various elected offices and see the chance to advance once again. Those are the people who really like the political life, the ones who don’t wake up second-guessing themselves, who don’t mind asking people for money, who really like political games.
No, I’m thinking about the people who run as third party candidates, not to mention the individuals with no organization who just decide to run.
Now of course, those people have no chance of being elected and I assume they know this. Even the ones in the recent past who had some money and support (Ross Perot and George Wallace come to mind) had no chance to be anything but spoilers.
I mean, Teddy Roosevelt couldn’t even pull it off and he was a former president.
Of course, what all those failures have in common is that they didn’t build a party base all the way down before running for president. Their campaigns were built around the individuals, and while people get excited about individuals, you need a lot more than excitement to be elected.
I suppose some of these people run because they have things they want to say and see it as a platform, but most of them sound like fools.
What we actually need in the United States is not independent or third party presidential candidates but rather a real third party. Maybe even a real fourth or fifth party.
But no one seems to be building that.
The Green Party claims to be creating one, but all it really seems to do is run the same failed candidate for president every election. It doesn’t seem to do anything to build the party into a strong organization that can field viable candidates for school board or city council or state representative.
Jill Stein has many shortcomings, but perhaps the largest one is that she does nothing to build a party.
How do I know the Green Party is doing nothing? I live in one of the most progressive places in the United States and the only thing the Greens do every election is put out a voter guide. (I find the guide very useful.) They decide who to support, and usually they more or less support a progressive Democrat, though occasionally they choose an independent who is unlikely to win because they don’t have a party behind them.
There aren’t any official Green Party candidates on the ballot here that I can see (except for president). And if there aren’t any in Oakland, I bet there aren’t many anywhere else.
All those independents and the so-called candidates of the Greens (and I imagine the Libertarians, though I rarely pay them any mind) are people who want to be president without doing all the compromising and party building it takes to get there.
I don’t think anyone can really be a decent president who hasn’t done all that work and made all those connections. We really don’t need presidents who just want the power and the pomp and not the whole network of systems that underlie the office.
I mean, the felonious grifter already proved that by the way he ran the country before. Of course, he took over what used to be a legitimate political party. He didn’t do the coalition building, but he used the work others had done.
You have to have a big ego to want the job, but you need more than that to actually get it and do it.
I wish all those people who are out running to boost their egos with their meaningless candidacies would instead work to build some constructive third parties.
Our country needs a lot more options. Right now we only have one.
Of course I support Vice President Kamala Harris. But I think the country would be a lot healthier if we had more real choices.