Splicetoday

Politics & Media
May 08, 2008, 12:19PM

Screw Our Unique Experiment; Let's Get A King

Maybe we expect too much for our Presidents. We want them to be super smart, tough, and driven. We also want them to be charismatic enough to make us feel good and drink beer with them. Those don't exactly match up well, which is why it might make sense to split power and establish an American monarch.

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"Americans are starved for royalty, and it shows in the treatment of our presidential candidates. Sure, we want someone who can run the country well and solve the myriad crises that face this nation. But we also want someone who looks good, makes pretty speeches, provides us with entertainment and projects an image of American might to the rest of the world. Our problem is that we try to compress all these things into one person.

That’s why the legal troubles of the Bush twins get reported on the front page of the Times of India, and there are villagers in Mongolia who know that Bill Clinton had sex with Monica Lewinsky— — the symbolic role of the president is important. If we elect someone that we wouldn’t want to have a beer with, then, by extension, the rest of the world won’t want to have a beer with us.

Usually, however, attractive, friendly people with nice voices have developed those traits at the expense of other qualities that are more useful in governing, like aggressiveness, intelligence and wonkish attention to detail. That’s why we so often have to choose between a genial incompetent and an uncharismatic egghead, like George W. Bush vs. Al Gore.

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