Another variation on the Presidential theme

Press, 8 November 1980, Page 8

Another variation on the Presidential theme

By Mike Royko of the “Chicago Sun-Times’’ I was raised from childhood to be a good loser. My father always said: “Son when you are beaten, get up, brush the dust off your clothes and congratulate the fellow who beat you. Because if you. don’t, he’s liable to knock you down again.” Therefore, as someone who voted for Jimmy Carter, I now congratulate all of those triumphant people who voted for Ronald Reagan. 1 have no hard feelings. As the old Chicago saying goes: “Only suckers beef.” If the majority of Americans from almost every comer of this country want to give it a try with possibly the most limited, dumbest man ever elected, to This great office, why not? : .

It’s an interesting experiment. In this country’s history, we have had many presidents who were wellbred, brilliant, sophisticated, well-rounded men. The most notable of these was Thomas Jefferson, who knew everything there was to know about almost any subject. Then there were the Adapts boys. The most recent man of this mould was John F. Kennedy. We’ve had humble-born men whose brilliance shone through their rough-hewn backgrounds — Jackson, Lincoln, Truman, and, some would say, Lyndon Johnson, if he hadn’t become obsessed with a pointless war. We’ve had some legendary military men, such as Grant and Ike: 'Shrewd courthouse politicians 5 like Truman. We’ve had data-lovihg engineers like Hoover and Carter.

| We’ve had those adequate i forgettables, the ones our history teachers glossed over, such as Andrew Johnson, Rutherford Hayes and Warren Harding. We had a brilliant but self-destructive wierdo in Richard Nixon. And a congenial Gerald Ford. We’ve had a remarkable variety, really. We had Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who seemed bigger than life. And Calvin Coolidge, who brought a sense of smallness to the job. But whatever one might say about the men who held this office — all of them in one way or another were natural-bom public men. They were men who at an early age were drawn to public life, gome might have been disappointments as President. But there is no arguing with the fact that

fall showed promise of success at public men when they were young. Now we have a genuine first among our presidents. We have a man who spent most of his adult life kind of floundering around, struggling to be just a mediocrity in the field of show biz. By the time he was 50, he had achieved little more than being classed with such' bumpkins as a Sunny Tufts, but not achieving the critical acclaim of a Dana Andrews. We now will have a President who found himself a failure in middle-age, while working in a field that didn't demand brains so| much as it did good looks j and a full head of hair. He; didn’t really make it big asj an- actor,’ and he wasn’t! going to make it. So he: drifted, by chance more than, anything else, into politics.!

■ ' Because of TV and the oopii ness of the people of California, he was able to realsi ise the kind of success as a .(politician that he couldn't t achieve as a movie aetc.. 1 And because we’ve had a -117-year string of bad luck ■ I with Presidents, ranging ’(from an assassination to a ; | resignation, we found ourselves in a position of choosing between a highly intel- : ligent bumbler and a barely intelligent movie actor. Well, why not? We've tried ’ almost everything in recent J i years, and nothing worked, i Our Presidents have either jbeen shot, hounded out of . | office, or quickly discarded by the voters. None of them will admit [that the real problem in being ..president is that it’s become almost an impossible 5 ! job. I Th* world has become too

-‘complex. The United States} -lean no longer say: “You do -Ithis, you do that” to other i:countries. Americans, while 11 praising -that old-time John i 1 Wayne self-reliance on one i hand, .want the Government < to take care of theto on the < 3 other hand. a They want every conceiv- , •. able Government service, and , . they want taxes slashed at- . the same time. They yearn for ; the old' pioneer spirit. And i they want the Government to i I build them a six-lane hightiway to the promised land. 1 J Being intelligent men, most J r! modem presidents knew f deep down in their bones ‘ -,that they couldn’t possibly ■provide the kind of leader- ; t'ship that this ' split-' { personality country demands. ’ •!So they pretended that they 1 .’could, and they tried to >1 pleas* everybody and wound ’

[up pleasing almost nobody. Poor Jimmy Carter. Even his fellow bom-agains decided he was a loser. Now we have a President who doesn’t realise what he’s up against because he’s managed to avoid trying to understand what he’s up against. During his 20 years of stumbling around in pub>lic life, he’s proved time after time through his own words that he doesn’t know what the hell is going on. He ran for President while telling the farmers he didn’t know what “parity” was. But the farmers voted for him. You can’t beat results. He’s the Ted Baxter of American politics. And, like Ted Baxter, not knowing what’s going on hasn't hurl him at all. Maybe that’s what this country needs— a Presidetit

who isn’t very smart and isn’t going to spend a lot of time agonising over this decision and that decision: a President who will come to work at nine, check out at five, and isn’t going to worry, about what’s left in his inbasket: a President who isn’t going to be afraid to make a mistake, because he probably won’t realise it And if he does, he’ll just grin and: say: “Doggone—well, better, luck next time, folks.” • I see it as an Like the time a friend took me for a ride in his new speed boat and,, as we were acrQ3S waves at 80km/h turned and shouted to me: “Am I supposed to 1