Can an effective president emerge from this pack?

Can an effective president emerge from this pack?

By

LeRoy Goldman GUEST COLUMNIST

Citizen-Times 7-31-2015

Surely the American people agree that it’s better to have an effective president. Effective is the key word. It’s not the same as experienced, brilliant, campaign savvy, conservative, Republican, liberal or Democrat.

To put a name on it, Harry Truman was an effective president. He did not seek either the vice presidency or the presidency. He had to be talked in to accepting the vice presidential nomination from FDR in 1944. He didn’t graduate from college. He didn’t seek wealth or fame. But Harry Truman was a hell of an effective president. And he had to deal with an oppositional Republican Congress leading up to his stunning election in 1948.

This nation has had too few superbly effective presidents. There are numerous rankings of America’s 43 presidents. My own take in analyzing those rankings leads me to the conclusion that we’ve had 13 highly effective presidents, 14 adequate presidents, and 16 who stunk up the White House. Think of them as “A” students, “C’ students, and “F” students.

Thirteen out of 43 leaves way too much to be desired. This is especially the case, given the fact that since Lincoln, there have only been six highly effective presidents. The last one, Eisenhower, was elected 63 years ago. Sixty-three years isn’t a dry spell, it’s a drought.

The question is whether the 2016 election will provide the American people with an opportunity to break that drought. There are sixteen Republicans and five Democrats seeking the presidency.

Fifteen of the GOP contenders are gasping for air as they scramble to cope with the narcissistic bloviator, Donald Trump, who has surged into the lead and who commands virtually all of the media’s attention. For the Democrats it’s the ever clever, ever secretive, Hillary Clinton, versus the four dwarfs who have relegated themselves to nipping at her heels.

Let’s look at each group and see if in either of them there lurks anyone who could win, and who could break that 63-year drought. A word of warning, given the extreme polarization of the American electorate over the past 20 years, the pickings are slim — mighty slim.

If we allow history to be our guide, the GOP should win the White House next year. After two terms in office the voters usually give the White House back to the opposing party. It happened in 1960, 1968, 1976, 2000 and 2008. But the dramatic polarization of the electorate has worked to the disadvantage of the GOP in the way in which electoral votes for president are amassed. The Democrats have a virtual lock on 247 of the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the election. The Republicans have a virtual lock on only 191 electoral votes.

That means that the nominee of the Democratic Party only needs 23 of the remaining 100 electoral votes in the 8 swing states to win.

Alternatively, the GOP nominee needs to sweep virtually all the swing states. Doing that requires winning the moderate and independent voters in those states. And that’s the GOP’s Achilles heel. A hard right-wing conservative Republican can’t win those voters in Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, New Hampshire, Ohio, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada. For them, those crucial voters are a bridge too far.

And that lets out most of the 16 Republicans seeking the nomination. The three it does not let out are Ohio Gov. John Kasich, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, also of Florida. If elected, each of them has the potential to be an effective president.

Hillary Clinton’s nomination appears inevitable. Assuming she wins both the nomination and the White House, might she too be an effective president? Forget it, not a chance.

Whether anyone likes it or not the Republicans will continue to control the House of Representatives until at least 2022 when House districts are redrawn. So 2022 would be the 6th year of Hillary’s presidency. That fact guarantees gridlock. Clinton knows that. She doesn’t care. For her the quest is to win, and then to be re-elected. The rest of it, the governing, is basically background noise.

One final point. Although it’s counterintuitive, the surge in popular support for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump largely comes from the same wellspring. Both men, their dramatic philosophical differences to the contrary notwithstanding, are blunt spoken, truth tellers. Voters get that, and they like it.

They hate the duplicity of most of the others. If Kasich, Bush or Rubio could tap that energy, they would have lightning in a bottle.

LeRoy Goldman lives in Flat Rock. He was a member of the federal government’s senior executive service for many years. 

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