We have a myth in this country that anyone can grow up to be president. Not true.
For one thing, voters prefer to elect governors rather than senators, which is why the last senator elected to the presidency was John Kennedy, forty-eight years ago. Since then, we have elected three candidates who had served as vice presidents, and four who were governors. For some reason, many voters are suspicious of Washington insiders, and think lawmakers are not good choices for the presidency. Therefore, they often prefer to bring in an "outsider," no matter how incompetenet or inexperienced that outsider is.
Yet in this primary campaign, we have many senators running for office, all of them the most qualified candidates for the job.
In the Republican field, John McCain is the only senator running, and he is by far the most experienced and qualified of the Republican candidates running for president. Mitt Romney has experience as governor, as does Huckabee, but neither seems very knowledgeable in foreign policy, which is essential at this time in history. Besides, they seem more interested in fighting with each other over religion right now. Rudy Giuliani's best experience seems to be with finding new wives and assigning police officers to protect them from imaginary threats, and Tancredo and Hunter like to act tough on their respective issues - immigration and the war – but don't have much to say about anything else. Ron Paul has apparently figured out how to raise money, but he wants to shut down so much of the government that he really can't be considered a serious candidate for the presidency.
On the democratic side, one former senator and four current senators are vying for the nomination: John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Chris Dodd, and Joe Biden. Dodd and Biden probably have the most experience and would make wise presidents, but Clinton and Obama have the most money and the most media attention. Edwards is an attractive candidate, but many believe him to be unelectable as he was on the losing ticket last time. Kucinich is right on most of the issues, but he can't get traction with the media, while Richardson just doesn't seem to connect with the voters. The democratic voters are in the mood for dramatic change this year so they will probably go with the first female nominee or the first African American.
It is definitely time to change the pattern and put a senator in the White House. Electing only governors, with experience only as chief executives, has only led to massive increases in the power of the president with a decrease in congressional power, which is not what the founders intended. And presidents who have never served in the legislative branch tend to have bad relationships with Congress, unless the president and Congress are of the same party. Few of the nation's problems are addressed when there is gridlock or open hostility in Washington between these two branches of government.
If the electorate holds to their previous forty-eight year pattern, however, and the republicans nominate Huckabee or Romney, both white male governors, and then manage to effectively "swift boat" Hillary or Obama with ugly misogynist or racist attacks, which they surely plan to do, we might have four more years of republican hell.
We can hope, though, that the electorate has finally woken up. Maybe the incompetent, power mad, and secretive presidency of George W. Bush will finally have cured them of their longstanding pattern of putting only governors in the White House.
