I’d like a boring president

“The President of the United States is our employee. The services he and his legislative cohorts contract for us are not gifts or benefices, We have to pay for every one of them, sometimes with our money, sometimes with our skins.

If we can remember this, we’ll get a good, dull Cincinnatus like Eisenhower or Coolidge. Our governance will be managed with quiet and economy.” – P.J. O’Rourke, Give War a Chance

Yes. Here we are in 2016, raving at each other and ourselves about which strong-man/strong-woman will destroy the things (and people) we hate and “make great” the things we claim to love. All the while hardly considering how any one of the current front-runners can serve up, in reality, the red-meat they are feeding us rhetorically while working in good faith within our constitutional framework. Many of the supporters of the front-runners – at the moment Sanders

, Clinton and Trump – almost seem to think running roughshod over the separation of powers and ruling via executive fiat and “deals” is a feature, not a bug.

I’d like someone who is boring, humble, competent, respectful of his/her place in the constitutional order and our nation’s place in the world order, and who understands that cults of personality and savior-complexes, while fun for the moment, are ultimately destructive.

I don’t expect to be satisfied on any of these wants this time around, and perhaps never.

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