How to Get Someone Elected President

This is not the subject I wanted to write about, but if I spend too much time thinking about the perfect title, I won’t get started in time to finish the post.

First, you have to select a candidate.  If you have a particular favorite in mind, then you’re that much further ahead than if you don’t.  But what if the reports you get of which candidate is trending to win the nomination make you change your mind?  It seems to me that it’s better to keep an open mind until the party convention makes an irreversible decision to select the party nominee.  (Otherwise you get mad, emotion rears its ugly head, and you waste a lot of energy adjusting to the nominee.)

What do we look for in a nominee?  As our friends and fellow party-members get their knickers in a knot trying to figure which candidate to support, let’s try and get our criteria lined up.  (A lot of this is stuff I have been posting for more than a year, so be patient with stale information.)

Criteria for a Candidate.  These are in no particular order.  In addition, some of these items only make sense in special circumstances; for instance, this time around, because we’re more dissatisfied with how Trump is doing than we were with how George W. Bush was doing in 2008, some of our criteria* are going to be specific to this election.  But it is quite possible that, from now on, every election is going to have special problems.  Once again, these are in no particular order, at least not intentionally.

Presentability.  I mean, how the candidate conducts him- or herself.  I suppose my thinking about the charisma and the conduct of a candidate or nominee could be quite different from those of others.  I would like a candidate/nominee who tends to understate matters rather than exaggerate.  I would like a candidate who doesn’t carry on like a maniac, though honestly there are matters that would drive anyone insane.  And remember: a lot of foreign friends (and, I suppose, enemies) are watching reports and video of our candidate, and our nominees, and our president; and though they ought not to influence who wins the vote, their attitude towards our leader is an important consideration.

Rhetoric.  The manner of speech—something hinted at in the previous item—is important.  Perhaps the cautious, learned, measured speech of presidents through the years have struck the Alt-Right as the speech of an insider.  But when you come right down to it, there are big problems with a figurehead who talks like a child with a vocabulary of a Labrador Retriever, repeats themselves, and has no concern for veracity.

Intelligence.  I’m not suggesting that our president needs to be a genius; in most matters that need careful thinking, there will be people who can help figure things out.  But the president needs to have the intelligence to spot (a) which problems are important, (b) realize that they actually are problems, (c) see at least some of the implications of those problems, and (d) accept possible solutions from among those that are presented.  And, it remains true that at least a part of Intelligence is the ability to gather round them advisors and specialists that can really help to put good and imaginative solutions together, and the wisdom to sequence them in the most effective order.

Prejudice-Free.  This is a matter both for us, and for our candidate.  We cannot ask that our candidate (or nominee or our president) adopt all of our prejudices.  Obviously, we would prefer him or her to have our prejudices than some other prejudices; and there are some attitudes that we would like our candidate / nominee / president to have that we would consider to rise above mere prejudice.  For instance, we would not consider a candidate who took a stand against fossil fuels to be ‘prejudiced against fossil fuels.’  There are reasons why we would like our administration to take a strong stand against fossil fuels in the long run, even if they allowed limited use of particularly clean fossil fuels in the short term.  Fareed Zakaria has a video on this.  It is appropriate for a candidate to have strong feelings about certain things: justice, equality, fairness, decency, etc.  Hostility to a particular industry, e.g. Exxon Mobil, or Amazon, or Coal, or Verizon, is less attractive in a president.  He or she could be critical, but not hostile.  Bernie Sanders has had it in for Medical Insurance.  So have I.  But I don't think it is seemly to bring up that hostility onto the podium.

Ethical.  I don’t think a lot needs to be said on this issue; not that it is unimportant.  Anyone who thinks that ethics need not be a big deal in this election, or any future election, is obviously not on my wavelength, and may stop reading right now.

Attitude to Fellow Candidates.  This is one thing I liked about various of the younger candidates, and even Elizabeth Warren: they seldom lashed out at their fellows.  The candidates have coaches, who instruct them on what to say, and when to say it.  I’m not sure which of these have done this, but some of them are encouraging their candidates to attack their fellow candidates with a little more edge.  They believe, apparently, that the voters like to see a little blood. I for one do not.  I hope that Andrew Yang, and Eric Swalwell, and Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker, did not need to drop out for not having attacked their opponents strongly enough.

A sense of Humor.  Honestly, all our candidates have a sense of humor.  The best of them apply their sense of humor to their speeches.  (Deplorably, some of the moderators appear to need to take their humor vitamins a bit more regularly.)

Perhaps the most important attribute of any leader in US politics for the next decade or two is a sense of urgency about the climate.  But there are other things that are just as important, because, among other things, they could delay or derail climate action.  The chief among these is the problem of corruption, or money in politics.  It is the power of the Fossil Fuel Lobby and the Automobile Lobby that together have destroyed past plans to curtail the destruction of the environment, and the Greenhouse Effect**.  As soon as these lobbies are de-fanged, climate legislation can proceed with all deliberate speed.  To the extent that these lobbies have the power to influence weak-minded congressmen, Congress will find itself powerless to make laws that are unpopular with the Fossil Fuel Industry. Even worse, these lobbies will undertake to write legislation on the behalf of Congress, which will end up with Congress enacting legislation that will be actually ineffective.  There are a myriad laws that exist to make the job of gas exploration as painless for the Fossil Fuel Companies as possible, and these must be unraveled decisively and completely.  But it is folly to expect these lobbyists to do it on our behalf.

Arch
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* "Criteria" = Standards.

** "Greenhouse Effect" = A tendency for certain gases in the air (e.g. Carbon Dioxide, which is what is released when we burn paper, gasoline, wood, etc) to send back heat down to the surface.  The earth maintains a steady average temperature only if the extra heat is allowed to escape out to space.  If the heat is reflected back due to the Greenhouse Effect, the earth will continue to heat up.