Bleeding Edge

Kennedy famously took more holiday time than anyone else — but almost all of this was his medical leave and recovery time needed for the injuries that he had received during his service in the Pacific and his heroic rescue of his ship’s crew from the Japanese.

In 1955, when President Eisenhower went on vacation during a harsh hurricane season — nobody complained.

As a matter of fact, Eisenhower’s complete absence, or even the lack of a televised address, about the unfolding scenes of American devastation was never the subject of a single newspaper article, of a TV station’s commentary, or fo the endless punditry that we see today in the 24hr news cycle.

Similarly, John F. Kennedy requested that his morning intelligence briefing be small enough to fit in folding pages in his pocket.

Yet, since 2005, the morning intelligence briefing alternatively called “PDB” has been produced by an entirely new entity in the executive branch: Now it is called the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which itself includes several intelligence agencies founded since Kennedy’s era, among them the vast Department of Homeland Security.

The brevity of the PDB message is necessary because attempting to monitor every terrorist and even every smaller threat, can take up far more than the entire day of the President.

Jeh Johnson, who served Obama as homeland-security secretary, had this to say: “My definition of a good day was when more than half of the things on my schedule were things I planned versus things that were forced on me.”

Here is a further acute example from when in June 2016, Jeh Johnson planned to travel to China to discuss the long-term threat from cyberattacks, and yet mere hour before takeoff, he was forced to cancel the trip so he could monitor the national scene developments after the islamic terrorist shooting at the Pulse gaynightclub in Orlando Florida.

The urgent should not crowd out the important, but sometimes you don’t get to the important. Your day is spent just trying to prioritize the urgent. Which urgent first?

After weighing matters of life and death at the appointed hour, the president can expect to be interrupted later in the day by unanticipated chaos. When Lisa Monaco was new on the job, she got a taste of the pace of things: One Monday in April 2013, the Boston Marathon was interrupted by horrific bombings, setting off a manhunt that paralyzed the entire metropolitan area. The next day, an envelope addressed to a member of Congress containing the toxin ricin was discovered. On Wednesday, an explosion destroyed a fertilizer plant in West, Texas.

One national-security official, describing the pace of events during the Obama years, said it was a relief when healthcare.gov crashed, in 2013. It meant that a different kind of crisis had interrupted the permanent cycle of security management in the age of terror. The threat of attack still loomed, but with attention elsewhere the requirement to participate in homeland-security theater for a nervous public was, momentarily, diminished.

When disaster does strike—whether the work of an enemy or an act of God—the theatrical role presidents play is amplified. It’s not enough to monitor or even manage the federal government’s response. He has to dash to the scene. We now expect the president to be a first responder, too.

So ingrained is this expectation that we forget how recently it took hold. In 1955, a number of strong storms battered the United States, but Eisenhower was barely mentioned in the newspaper stories about Hurricanes Connie, Diane, or Ione. That hurricane season was then the costliest on record, but there are no pictures of the former Allied Commander pointing at maps or receiving furrowed-brow briefings from meteorologists. When some of the storms hit, Ike was on vacation. His absence was not the subject of endless concerned punditry, as it would be today. “We get a little more sleep around Washington,” Vice President Richard Nixon told a reporter writing a whimsical piece about the president’s time off during one of the storms. “He has the ungodly habit of getting up early.”

Eisenhower wasn’t callous.

He knew well enough that the Army Corps of Engineers, the local governments, the civil-defense forces, the Red Cross, and the predecessor to FEMA, would mount the ramparts and along with the indomitable American spirit, the ever green giving armies of philanthropy, and the personal “rising-up-to-the-challenge” DIY American ingenuity, were supposed to all gather together, man the pumps, rebuilt the levies, stack the sandbags, and distribute relief aid, when a storm hit and the flood tides started surging.

Ike wanted to stay out of it, because “President Ike” thought, and truly believed that upsetting that division of duties — would jeopardize core American values, would disable strong individuals from being able to care for themselves, and in turn would make many Americans to become reliant on the nanny-state, thereby making America’s children, and the future generations, same as today’s adults, pessimistic, soft, and unreliable.

The school of life’s hard knocks is still the best school in the world is what Ike knew to be true having just gone through the experiences of the second world war.

This is what Ike said on the subject in 1957: “I regard this as one of the great real disasters that threatens to engulf us. The disaster of when we are unready as a a society, as a nation, and as a people, to meet personal disaster, by our own cheerful doing & giving.”

He went on to state clearly the same essential Ike’s American “Can-Do” doctrine of personal salvation by saying this: “Part of the reason of thus disaster threatening to engulf us, is this misunderstanding that government is supposed to be taking the place even of rescuing the person, the individual, and the family from the natural disasters.”

And that was the high water mark of American exceptionalism.

Because soon after that, the Democrats tried to make America safe for idiots and morons by trying to regulate everything and provide for every eventuality thereby enacting laws that make people unable to care for themselves, and expand the role of the government to such an extent that it becomes problematic to save yourself from drawing and instead you have to wait around for the “experts” to come and save you.

As a prime example of that sea change, we have the Democrat Lyndon Johnson who killed the Space Program lest any astronauts die in space … trying his damndest to kill all the male first born children of America, in Vietnam.

Indeed Lyndon Jonson the mighty cowboy Texas Democrat, was unafraid to send the American children to Vietnam by the boatload, but he did not want any American astronauts dying in space, because that would look bad for him, and for his re-election campaign on national television as he often stated.

So after the Moon landing — LBJ quietly ordered the whole Kennedy idea of going to the Moon and to other places outside of Earth to be shut down permanently and forever.

And this is another far reaching effect of the all too “American Regicide” of JFK in the hands of LBJ, inside his own state of Texas. LBJ, who carved out a war agenda for himself ahead of the killing of the President, he had also discussed on how he was going to be killing the Space program. And he wanted to kill NASA with glee, not only because that Moonshot achievement, was the defining moment of the previous President the incredibly handsome planet seeking seeking John F Kennedy — but because he couldn’t stomach anything that reminded him of his terrible deed against the President Kennedy.

And thus in the pivotal moment of President Kennedy’s assassination, the history of a Space faring nation of people, and their journey to the stars, was cut prematurely. It was severely cut with the same bullet that cut short the life of the President Kennedy and his Moonshot ideas.

Indeed through Lyndon Johnson’s assassination plot, a few bullets escaping the muzzles of a few Texan assassins weapons’ hurrying away in a flash from a grassy knoll — we got a dead President, his lovely wife covered in blood on her pinkish clothes, scurrying away form the hail of bullets, and a soon to be dead American Space program.

And thus in a moment’s time, we went from the Moonshot, and the Space Faring Presidency to the land lubber in chief preferring war-war to jaw-jaw as Kennedy had demonstrated through his peaceful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis.

And as a People, we went from the Moonshot generation of Americans, led by a charismatic President who wanted to export Human Civilization into Space, to a generation of Americans led by an ugly Texan warmonger, who decimated the finest youth, through the drugs of war, and he left them for dead, face down in the super wet mud of the rice paddies in the killing jungles of South Vietnam, Laos, and Kampuchia.

Soon enough the horrid black chickens of LBJ, of papa Bush, and of the deep state military industrial complex machine, and of the CIA-FBI (playing evilcop-badcop), and of the swamp creatures of DC and of the shadow side of America — all had just now, returned home to roost.

The horrible regicide, brought these “chicken” to come home to roost, but it was also this regicide in which LBJ was the leading plotter and greatest beneficiary — that ushered a new era for America that not only stopped Space exploration and the search for intelligent life outside of this Earth, where it seemed that all “intelligence” had been lost, but it also stopped our Technological progress that Space Exploration brings.

And it can all be placed at the feet of LBJ, because he planned the planned the regicide of the President whom he had sworn to serve and protect, as Brutus planned the assassination of Julius Caesar. Except that LBJ distributed the responsibility for the “Regicide” amongst his Texas assassin buddies and the hired guns of the Texas Democratic party, who along with the then head of CIA and later president Bush (senior) conspired, found a patsy “Oswald,” coached him and taught him what to do and what to say when caught, organized the decoy operation at the school depository, placed the real assassins marksmen at the grassy knoll and then … after the dirty deed was done, — cynically and perhaps understandably enough, LBJ said: that “he believed in a stronger connection between the people and their president.”

Now, you can easily connect the dots, and thus see, how LBJ’s secrets, assassinations, conspiracies, and his personal autocratic and totalitarian socialist beliefs nature, along with the regicide of his predecessor, went a long way towards building the imperial and undemocratic Presidency he created, he lived, and he led — as it later came to be enjoyed by the Democrats yet to come, like Clinton, & Obama’s Executive Order Presidency.

Ahhh, the irony of the Democrats building an undemocratic and totalitarian presidency is rich fodder for jokes, but it is also the most dangerous “sliding slope” of our Republic, towards the erection of guillotines, in all the public squares of American metropolises, cities and towns.

Maybe now is the time to recall Dr Benjamin Franklin’s admonition: “A Republic — if you can keep it.”

Instead LBJ’s totalitarian presidency would get it’s greatest expression, through the last Democratic president, who same as LBJ thought — he would expand the role of the presidency, for all the presidents to come, and that will invariably replace “The Republic” with a “Democracy of the Guillotines, the Bullets, and the Drones” as the Obama Clinton doctrine appears to be.

And maybe Ms Clinton in her all too obvious lust for Power, madcap alcoholic fury, and her having sold her soul to the Devil — she might have had something to do with the elimination of the frontrunner of the New York senatorial race, that she rigged to “win” after the “accidental” death of the son of President John Fitzerald Kennedy, the charismatic JFK junior.

It appears that his airplane went into the bottom of the ocean during a jaunt from New York towers Hyannis port, on a perfectly sunny & clear day — due to fog and lack of visibility towards the horizon.

It was all called operator’s error — like Vince Foster’s assassination   suicide with multiple bullets, and multiple entry-exit points in multiple parts of the body.

Of course Ms Hillary Clinton who succeeded in her senatorial candidacy to defeat the dead man — had nothing to do with making JFK junior “dead”

Same as he had nothing to do with the Gaddafi assassination, or the many other accidental “drone” and bullet victims and forced suicides.

We have come a long way from Kansa my dear …

And that is nowhere more evident today, than in our America that is in the midst of the shambles of division and hate, after the Clinton-Obama tenure in the White House expired.

I am saying this only because today’s America resembles Rome after Nero left the Palatine Hill and the Senate and resorted to assisted suicide first for his people and then for himself…

Tellingly, LBJ, also left America in shambles when driven by the eternal furies that drive the unjust mad — he went back to his home Texas, to use alcohol to assist him in his own slow suicide through drowning in strong drink.

But before he had to leave the White House again driven by the awful furies of murder that he had committed, and under a veil of shame and infamy over the continuously expanding Vietnam war — he had a lucid moment and an opportunity to force his ideas about the nanny state on the American people. This he did right after Hurricane Betsy had hit New Orleans in September of 1965. Because that is the historical moment of the ushering of the nanny state in America — when Lyndon Johnson visited the few people who were huddled in the city’s George Washington Elementary School, and exclaimed to them like another Nero minus the fiddle:

“This is your president. I am here to help you rebuild your lives.”

First he burned down the city and then he hoped to help them rebuilt it.

Famously empty words but they sound nice… and that sums up what all the Democrats are famous for: Evil, corruption, and nice sounding words to cover it all up…

Yet, back then, and once Lyndon Johnson got started with the BS — he went on, and spoke on and on, about something strange, probably a drunken rhetoric of the duties of the national family, by throwing to the huddled masses this old chestnut about a “sick mother” and then he went on about how he was really the God ordained physician, that helped heal the sick mother…

We don’t know if Lyndon followed his drunken rhetoric with laying on of the hands or if the a job exclusively reserved for the likes of Bill Clinton, but I wouldn’t put it past the old Texan dog…

This is exactly what LBJ said about your Mother: “In times of distress, it’s necessary that all the members of the family get together and lay aside any individual problems they have or any personal grievances and try to take care of the sick mother, and we’ve got a sick mother on our hands.”

After visiting other hapless victims of the storm and victims of his own speaking incoherence — Johnson leaped into action, coordinating local forces and pushing Congress to fund relief aid through his network of Democrats thus enriching his own operatives and Democratic corruption machine, because he was building his personal treasury, his wallet, and his own war chest with a 5% – 10% commission of everything that was collected or sold or given for the relief effort.

Does that remind you of the Clinton Foundation collecting a whopping five Billion dollars, in donations for Haiti earthquake, and then making it all disappear like an act of the magician Houdini, or the even more magical New Yorker David Copperfield?

But at least we have to give credit to LBJ, because he skimmed a little off the top — whereas the Clintons took the whole lot and gave nothing to the people. Nada, zip, nothing, not a dollar was left over from the Clinton Initiative’s Complete Theft of $5 Billion dollars of donation money that was supposed to be helping the victim son the Earthquake and the orphans of Haiti.

Back in the day — at least there was some freedom of press as we see when knowingly and jokingly, the Washington Post rewarded Lyndon Johnson’s accumulation of relief money, with the headline “LBJ Sees Betsy Toll in Hundreds: Assumes Charge of Day and Night Relief Operations.”

Today no press person even talked about the greatest theft of the Haiti refugee donations by the Clinton administration during secretary Clinton’s and Obama’s tenure.

One would think that the President loves and lives for that kind of press coverage, and it seems that what limited intelligence LBJ understood is that he only gets this good press, when he wakes-up, man-up, and takes control of the job.

But the headline “LBJ Sees Betsy Toll in Hundreds: Assumes Charge of Day and Night Relief Operations.” is important in so far as to what all the other (more intelligent people than LBJ) understood. And that was that LBJ was caught with his hands in the cookie jar, and what the Washington Post — of course being a Democratic newspaper would never expose him — instead made a crude joke about him, about his petty theft, and about his self-serving “involvement” in the Hurricane relief operations.

It was a shot across his bow, but LBJ didn’t even hear it. Instead he thought that rushing to the people’s perceived aid — still suited his own politics and that made him happy in a Texas sort of way. He smiled shyly as the cat that ate the canary, with a few yellow feathers sticking out of his overlarge mouth. On the way and during LBJ’s trip to New Orleans he phrased this LBJ doctrine, as “A Great Society house call” and as a dose of attention that mirrored the president’s legislative agenda aimed at helping the needy, while he sent their children to die in the South Vietnamese jungles and swamps full of VCs.

It was also a bit of Texas sized self-promotion — well suited to the man and to his unfettered Democratic Presidency times.

And while families across the country were watching the drama of the storm unfold on the news during the dinner hour, and the networks binged on images of Americans waist-deep in water, fishing their heirlooms from ruined living rooms — LBJ expanded the draft of war to include first and foremost all the black males, all the minorities along with all the undesirables and deplorables of the American heartland.

According to Gareth Davies, an American-history professor at Oxford University who has studied the evolution of the president as “First Responder” it was the role of television and it’s huge audiences, that greatly accelerated the demand for the president to appear front and center of all camera driven news.

From then on, LBJ would only go where the TV cameras would be rolling, and thus when Johnson visited Indiana to tour tornado damage, a skeptical columnist writing for the South Bend Tribune wondered and asked this:

“Should a president interrupt people trying to put their lives back together?”

The author then had an apparent revelation, and he went on praising Johnson for his demonstration of personal Presidential concern, as he continued:

“The Presidential visit briefly transforms the institution into a symbol, a person to be seen and spoken to, providing evidence to victims that somebody cares, thereby raising their distressed spirits.”

But it was Kennedy that defined courage and heroism when he addressed the issues that brought us to the brink of nuclear war with the old arch-enemy, the Soviet Union, over Cuba.

Contrast that typical and muscular performance, with the wimpy kid, George W. Bush junior’s performance on the moment he was informed about 9-11. It was telling as little George looked cluelessly on the camera still seated on a baby chair, that his manhood, his personage, and his presidency, were toast. Indeed he looked like sad little man and he never recovered from that image — as people who saw his reaction and his handling of the 911 from the first hour, deduced about his immature character.

Sadly, the “W” stood petrified in a tiny baby’s chair, appearing stunned while simultaneously pretending to be reading to the children from an upside down children’s cartoon book. How can he manage to be the President, from a baby chair, confined in an elementary school, and sitting there for hours stunned into submission and idiotic silence, while his fellow Americans were being killed by the thousands from islamic jihad terrorist hijacking airplanes and then dropping them onto the skyscrapers of Manhattan in New York.

Still the “W” wasn’t done yet. He replayed the same wimpy-kid performance when Hurricane Katrina struck the New Orleans coast with deadening impact in 2005…

This gives us a view of two completely different Presidents, and their reaction which were of two different men, who had a completely different reaction to the same forces of nature that were unleashed when their stupidity and their criminality or personal addiction of alcoholism, made a horrible mess of their own and of other people’s lives. And although on the face of it, the reaction, of these President, and their personalities, couldn’t be any different, or their attitudes about life and work — their alcoholism made them both, useless bags of putrid and fetid excrement. At least as far as history and the American patriots, and ordinary people, are concerned.

Still, we need to wait another fifty to a hundred years, for that observation to sink in, and to become gospel — because that is when all the secret histories are going to be revealed, when the archives will be allowed to be opened and then, you’ll see the truth of all this.

Meanwhile, the lesson from all this, is the notion that the “man” defines the “job” and that couldn’t be clearer than during the currently past Presidential years of Clinton/Obama who droned more innocent men, women, and children, than anyone thought possible… Other than that — they were lily white social justice and democracy advocates for the well being of all, while starting wars all over the world. These stunningly fake people who worked for the big fat bankers of Wall Street that lined their pockets and placed them there in the first place, were complicit criminals and advocates of governing America, through division and hate.

Because this is how the Evil Democrats seek to rule: “Divide and Conquer”

As for the stupid Republicans — they seek to rule by always choosing weak non entities as Presidents, except when providence from up above as given by the Good God — brings us a dose of Grace and Deliverance as we are now no doubt, coursing through.

And of course, over the years, the popular expectations of the presidency were always changing, and not just when the storms hit. Because the bigger the federal government became, the more a president had to act as the leviathan, or as that warm face of the distant father, the benevolent ruler, or the angry parent, through his avatar playing on American TV.

During the ’60s, expectations exploded, because we’ve become a presidency obsessed Democracy, instead of a beneficial Republic, amongst other hallucinogenic illusions foisted upon the LSD experimental generation and it’s subsequent marijuana & alcohol stupid generations to crest the Millennial divide. And the new people now are fully indoctrinated into the smoke and mirrors of their pipe induced dreams — accepting all fakery of virtue signaling and demonization of conservatives, as real.

A key question, should be though this: Whether 300 million people can expect so much from one individual and still consider themselves involved in something that can be described as self government ?

The buck stops here was not supposed to mean the president is responsible for everything that happens in the executive branch.

Disaster response is by now such a prerequisite that if a president doesn’t act—and isn’t seen acting—it can wreck his presidency. “It used to be that presidents were advised to let the fema director and governor handle disaster response,” says Andy Card, who managed the Hurricane Andrew response for George H. W. Bush, in August 1992, and served as George W. Bush’s chief of staff during Hurricane Katrina, in 2005. “Now the expectation is that if a president is not talking about it all the time, he is asleep at the switch, or Marie Antoinette.”

George W. Bush’s presidency never really recovered from the photograph of him looking down from Air Force One on the vast area harmed by Hurricane Katrina.

Similarly, when an explosion at the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling platform led to monhhts of huge oil belching into the Gulf of Mexico, critics labeled it “Obama’s Katrina.”

The typical critique was summed up by the headline on a Peggy Noonan column in The Wall Street Journal: “Obama Was Supposed to Be Competent.”

Playing golf in the manicured greens like Eisenhower’s style of remote managerial detachment, was no longer a viable option for president Obama to practice in 2010. And amidst crushing polls, and downwards crashing favorability ratings, Obama had to interrupt his own golf vacation, and instead had to tour New Orleans’ sad & abandoned, oil-slicked beaches.

Belatedly Obama said: “I ultimately take responsibility for solving this crisis. I am the president, and the buck stops with me.”

That phrase, is a succinct expression of presidential obligations. Yet, like the presidency itself, it has spilled out of its original container.

Because when Harry Truman placed a sign on his desk reading the buck stops here, it meant that some decisions — it was only up to the president to make. It did not mean that the president is responsible, and therefore to blame for everything that happens in the executive branch, in the America he loved much, and the nation of his people, let alone the whole world.

Whereas Kennedy, a young senator and candidate for president, back in 1960, filmed television ads that showed him shaking hands with miners in West Virginia before they dropped down 500 feet to start their eight-hour shift — LBJ chose to film his helicopter rides, instead of focusing on his own comparatively ugly mask of a face.

LBJ, was a crass & cunning animal like politician, and yet Johnson made the most of the new televised presidency, because he had seen how the co-dependency with the cameras that was started by his predecessor, JFK worked well for a relaxed and easy n his skin President. John F. Kennedy used television to his advantage because he was a handsome man, with a coquettish stunningly pretty wife, and a great looking family…

But LBJ was also just a plain ugly man. A trained liar from the Texan panhandle, and this ugliness, was eternally stamped on his mug. His power hungry false character, and his flattened face, exuded his incoherent and yet obvious lies, his mistrust of anything human, and his criminal conspiracy, and regicide.

LBJ’s obvious criminality and complicity in the Kennedy assassination, couldn’t have been hidden by make-up powder applied on the TV studio, by his assistants and ladies in waiting, and this shortcoming was becoming more obvious by the day, when people looked at him speaking about anything, through the black & white TV glass front.

People couldn’t stand him and soon enough, all honest American knew that LBJ, had personally ordered the “killing” of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, when he was traveling down the streets of Dallas, in LBJ’s own state of Texas. LBJ did it as the world now knows after the release of the secret Warren commission testimonies this year from the order of President Trump who wants to finally show the people what kind of evil the Democrats are usually engaged into to further their own interests. Indeed we now know that the Kennedy family knew that LBJ had ordered the assassination of one of the most beloved American President, JFK.

It is now widely known as Jacki Kennedy-Onnassis, always said that: “Lyndon Johnson’s finger was on the assassin’s trigger” or that “The Texan did it”
Indeed, Jackie O, always said, again and again, and to all who would listen, that “the Texan VP was the one who did it.”

And as natural retribution would have it, Lyndon Johnson ended up looking like the very ugly face that took the life of a hugely loved President, a loved man, and a national hero. He took the life of his predecessor through crooked means because he couldn’t wait for his turn, and because as all alcoholics — didn’t trust his own future.

In due time LBJ came to embody the role of the hired killer, the dirty assassin, and the person that didn’t belong in the oval office because he was a usurper. And thus throughout the rest of his alcoholic life, he suffered the nightmares of fear of being discovered and his crimes being exposed and that is whats called divine judgement in this lifetime.

And although LBJ was assisted in his assassination of the President, by many others, starting from the CIA-FBI dirty cops, and the Secret Service, and going through his own special-ops Texas people — it was all done largely for his own advancement in order to cover up the expansion of the war in Vietnam.

Because — make no mistake — the Democrats wanted Johnson at the wheel, since he was a war monger, and that was necessary for the benefit of the deep state and of the military-industrial-complex who were afraid of experiencing an economic slump after the glorious SE Asia illusion of a communist domino war would have ended — should President Kennedy had been allowed to finish his term of office in the White House by leading the nation towards Peace.

He had to be gotten rid of, because the deep state knew all too well, that JFK — the Moonshot President — wanted Americans to achieve loftier goals, than just continue killing dark people in Vietnam’s jungles and endless swamps with constantly improving greater efficiency.

JFK, didn’t want people killing each other right here in our own ghettoes either. He did not want to see people getting killed everywhere on God’s good green earth anymore, and he wanted that indiscriminate killing to stop. He simply did not want people dying all over the world, and getting killed all the time, here & abroad, just for the benefit of the “Mass Profit & Mass Murder Inc” deep state and power hungry mass of career criminal leaders.

President Kennedy wasn’t just cutting a dashing figure to be beamed into living rooms; he was making a really well reasoned argument about the Great Christian Life. He said as much in his presidential campaign: “I believe that any Democratic aspirant to this important nomination should be willing to submit to the higher calling just as much as to the voters his views, his record, and his competence in a series of primary contests, because only after such a primary contest, could the candidate, can come to understand the concerns of the people, and prove his readiness to act on them.”

A campaign advert that JFK placed in a West Virginia newspaper, showed Kennedy’s proposition even clearer: Votes for his opponent, Hubert Humphrey, were shown landing in a garbage can, whereas, Votes for Kennedy were shown dropping from the ballot box through the roof of the White House.

Kennedy’s view that candidates should make their case directly to the people may hardly seem controversial by contemporary standards, but it was part of a radical change in the path to the presidency.

Back in the day when designing the office of the President, the Founders worried that the executive would be whipsawed by the passions of the people rather than driven by reason and good character. Because of this fear, the Founders did not want candidates to campaign for the office, believing that stumping for votes would warp their priorities. The electoral process might elevate men who had simply played to the crowd; once in office, such a president might pander to the people rather than instituting sound policy. Without a constant need to court voters, the Founders reasoned, presidents could calmly pursue the best interests of the country.

For a century, the system worked as intended. Candidates “stood” for election, but did not deign to stump for votes at rallies. Men such as Andrew Jackson argued for a closer connection between the people and the president, but the taboo against campaigning was durable. The parties still picked their presidential candidate in the smoke-filled rooms of legend. In the early 20th century, reformers such as Woodrow Wilson asserted that the modern age required presidents to be more responsive to the voters. A president shaped by an election system with voters at the center would not abandon them once in office and would know how to summon what Wilson called “the common meaning of the common voice.”

Kennedy’s successful use of the previously obscure primary system helped to make state-by-state barnstorming the established road to a party nomination and eventually the White House. And just as the Founders had surmised, prolonged exposure to the people had a powerful effect. Kennedy’s first executive order increased the amount of food distributed to needy Americans in economically distressed areas, a direct result of his time spent in West Virginia. The votes had gone right to the White House.

If the president thinks too much about the widows he’s making, he might not be able to perform the role of commander in chief.
Looking out for the interests of the poor may sound like an unalloyed good. But party reforms in the last quarter of the 20th century pushed the nominating process further toward the direct election of delegates. This encouraged candidates to make ever more lavish promises and to tout their singular power to deliver on them. “Longer and longer campaigns have contributed to a prolonged bidding war of candidates making more and more promises as to what government will do if they are elected,” says Roger Porter, who served in the Reagan and Ford administrations and now teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Primaries encourage candidates to do whatever keeps the crowd in a roar, as Howard Dean explained when looking back on his infamous “scream” after the 2004 Iowa caucuses. “I’d get out there and I would talk about policy and there was no adrenaline rush,” he told FiveThirtyEight. “People kind of went ‘uh-huh, uh-huh,’ and I really wanted that huge charge of being able to crank them all up and to believe in themselves again and get enthusiastic, and I would succumb to that.” Trump took this trend to its logical conclusion, promising voters every beneficial outcome and proclaiming at his convention about the problems that America faced: “I alone can fix it.”

The present Presidential Executive system elevates the crowd-pleasing aspect off the AmericanPresident’s qualifications above all others, and sets expectations for what a president can do well beyond what is actually possible for a person to be able to accomplish in office, given the prerogative that the president is not the Lawgiver. That job is reserved for the lawmakers of the House. Legislative branch is independent of the President and largely inimical to his office and towards any overreach by the Executive holder of the White House.

Yet, the Newspapers, all the pundits & journalists, and all of the assorted TV and Internet Media, keep the always-on show going, by maintaining the focus on the President as the Law-Giver in Chief. with God like powers to make Congress do things and jump at his beck and call.

All of it is of course hooey and old stinking baloney.

And as we see the news networks promote presidential debates with zooming lights and “voice of God” announcers, as if the candidates are boxers, who are now preparing backstage getting their hands wrapped in tape and loosening up with the punching bag, as they get ready for the pugilistic match of their careers.

Politics is now not akin to blood sport, but it the sportthey have become the Big Sports event. Political debate is now a Big Business Sports event, and the recent presidential debate coverage shows what was a boxing match show, followed by endless ratings, polls, replays, reviews, and constant review and revenge commentary form the partisan pundits.

And in fact the boxing show starts well before the curtain has come down.

In the age of internet trolls’s shitstorm, fast response social media, and twitter speed actions and reactions — the voter impressions during debates are formed within the first minutes of the Presidential boxing match.

Candidates play to the snap judgments, practicing set-piece outbursts, and pacing the floor. In 2012, when Obama was perceived to have lost the first debate, his team emphasized that he needed to be a better performer. He was to be “fast and hammy.” When he would give a long and dry answer in practice sessions, he would be reminded: Be “Fast and hammy” please.

As campaigning has become more about the Boxer’s performance, the skills required to be president have become more defined by talent on the stump, an almost perfect reversal of what the Founders intended.

And maybe the current presidential system is so focused on persuasion over policy, argues Jeffrey K. Tulis, the author of “The Rhetorical Presidency” that he sees the country as governed by a second Constitution, one that is in tension with the original.

This imaginative, unseen, and certainly unwritten, “Second Constitution” puts a premium on active and continuous presidential courtship of the public, & the popular opinion, on Presidential re-action over cool deliberation. “How could a president not be an actor?,” Ronald Reagan asked.

I now have to ask: “How could a US President not be a reality TV star?”

President Wilson, wanted candidates to be in touch with the public, but he viewed campaigning as “a great interruption to the rational consideration of public questions.”

We are now in an age of permanent campaigning, in which rhetorical talent is seen as a proxy for governing ability.

In 1992, after Bill Clinton beat George H. W. Bush, Vice President Dan Quayle said, “If he governs as well as he campaigned, the country will be all right.” In light of his own ticket’s defeat, Quayle was simply articulating the common modern view of the US electorate as was also “ratified” by recent votes, that being a gifted campaigner is the most important quality the President of the United States must possess.

Yet soon thereafter all of the Republicans including Quayle, had argued that Clinton’s character faults and his smoking his cigars moistened and wetted by his intern’s vagina — disqualified him from the oval office.

What did they expect?

Once you raise a lion — you can’t just then go ahead and dress him in girls’ clothes stick him in the nunnery and expect no cigars to get wet, and no nuns to go the matrimonial way and become preggers…

Yours,

Dr Churchill

PS:

Still today, with the line between campaigning and governing being constantly blurred — the newly elected US presidents are presenting an overconfident veneer about their ability to tackle the job.

Everywhere there is a sense of page turning, a new chapter in the country’s history, a new chance too. And with it, irresistibly, there comes the sense, “they” couldn’t, wouldn’t, didn’t, but “we” will. We just have done the hardest thing there is to do in politics. Governing has got to be a pleasure by comparison: We won — so we can…

Modern presidents who have just come to office on the strength of their rhetoric and showmanship are encouraged to continue relying on those skills. They have been talking for two years, and that’s nearly all they’ve been doing, so when they win, they conclude that they can convince people of anything, because the feedback is pretty strong, and the echo chamber they occupy is soundproof, so no adverse noises, can penetrate from the outside.

And then they have the internet, instead of the interns, moistening the cigars for those that smoke them…

Yet to be a Good President one has to be savvy about governing which is a hell more than talking, because the first thing a president needs to understand, is that in order to run a government, they are going to need capabilities different than the ones they utilized in order to win the right to run the government.

And because of that — the Best Presidents ever were those generalists that were well rounded personalities and singularly driven to reach the pinnacle of knowledge in all things they sought tom apply themselves to…

This Abraham Lincoln — and his voracious appetite for reading and writing, that helped him become the very best President to ever grace this land…