Presidential Elections and other Stories in the Meat Market
Some casual thoughts about the election a year and a half away:
- A citizen should be able to account for every penny of the resource.
- Can government respond to crisis?
- Is consensus possible?
- For every ladder on which a candidate is climbing, there are half a dozen puppet masters at the top.
When thinking about the President you can't depend so much on the broad, general policies since that is formulated elsewhere than the character of the President. What is necessary to discover is the quality of attributes necessary to run a govt. Among these are the ability to see impending problems, listen and synthesize points of view, inspire leadership, and bring the best out of people.
We always raise the simplest questions: What is the state of the nation? Some say that the American era is over and that we have crossed the threshold between problems and the resiliency needed in the body politic to solve problems. There must be a ratio between the available stress applied on the resources of a nation and the ability of the nation to renew itself, to renovate its institutions and so forth.
If it were easy it would have been done long ago.
Some indicators to reveal whether it is in a decline:
- Are the major decisions for the United States made within its boundaries?
- Is the Constitution still adhered to?
- Can one go over the document paragraph by paragraph and recognize the nation as something born from its spirit?
- Is America a slug-a-bug?
- Has it slowed because of economic and/or technological decline?
- Are enough people getting the right education and adventuresome enough to deepen the resources of the United States?
- Are citizens, journalists, politicians and all resourceful and interested people identifying the major problems and attempting to solve these problems?
No one likes the size of the nation because the demands to understand it exhausts people. And exhausted people do not want to learn or to think or to be bothered one way or the other.
The federal government, in my lifetime, will never become the sugar daddy again.
After awhile it becomes obvious that the politicians and their advisors are aiming their messages at a fairly low to middling area, much like TV and other popular arts. Those who are vain enough to think they are intelligent must discover for themselves the purposes and the substance of the politicking.
On one side of the equation is a huge bureaucracy; an enormous fund of resources, a great variety of powers and responsibilities, all duly constituted and upheld by the will of the people. On the other side of the equation are the men and women who want control, temporary control, of those powers and responsibilities.
History says that it occurs in the face of overwhelming evidence that the word and the deed are two completely different things. The word is simply a cheap counter in a game played by skilled technicians. The deed is always watered down by compromise and the counter-deed that arises in political reality.