by Chris James
Well, the King Donald didn't need my vote
after all. I took a lot of flak from fellow Republicans - including the
wife - because of my stand-offish position on his candidacy. And I've
already received several nyah-nyahs stemming from Trump's success, which
happened despite the lack of my benediction. On the other side of the
coin, I haven't been awarded any credit for stopping Hilary in her tracks when
I withheld my vote from her too. I didn't waste my vote. I used it
for Gary Johnson because I felt sorry for him. Anyone who thinks that
Aleppo is an exotic dog breed needs all the help that they can get.
So, what am I, and perhaps many others in the
same position, going to do now? Thus, while it is widely recognized that
all is fair in love and war, I am going to introduce a soupcon of fairness into
the land of politics where, culturally, it is a totally alien concept. I
will do this by giving Trump the same opportunity that I gave Obama. At
the start of Obama's first term, I withheld any judgement of him in order to
see what he could actually do in the real world. After all, he was, to
me, a demonstrably unknown quantity; he didn't seem to have done anything in
his life of any note up to that point. Of course, after about six months,
I knew that we had been sold a pig in a poke - in fact, a porker the size of
Godzilla. It is only fair that I give the Big D that same opportunity to
prove himself.
In contrast, we know a great deal about
Donald. His business antics, his private-life antics, his T.V. antics
and, God forbid, his campaign antics. The reason to hold off on judgments
is to allow him time to reveal to us which Donald will gestate and emerge as
leader of the free world. Compounding the mystery, is that, here is a man
who won the presidency against all odds. Not just because his blather and
his junior high school bully attitude were against him. So were the
Democrat majority electoral vote, 80% or so of the Mighty Media, women, blacks,
Latinos, many Silicon Valley ultra-rich moguls and a plump vein of show-biz
celebs. Clearly, there is something else going on here. We can
speculate about push-back, rebellion, anti-establishmentarianism, whatever. But
please do not attribute this driving force to mindlessly simplistic
"change." That was the clarion call of Obama's first campaign,
and we all know where that particular hopey-changey thingy led.
The trouble with "leadership" is
that it is defined by a complex mish-mash of variables. Not all of these
variables are valid in all situations; they vary from situation to situation.
Because of this, so-called experts have cooked up an impressive and
diverse menu of definitions of leadership. While some variables may
indeed be universally applicable, they can still differ quantitatively in the
degree to which they are applied, i.e. their relative importance to the
various, different fields of endeavor. So, from this messy potpourri, I
randomly select just two criteria that generally help define, in part,
presidential leadership.
The first is statesmanship. The ability
to rise above any occasion, via the strength and confidence in one's knowledge
and awareness of all dimensions of any issue, to listen calmly and acutely to
the other side, and to translate the information received into a dialogue that
paves the way to a satisfactory compromise. My personal best role model
for these attributes in recent years is Ronald Reagan.
Second is who the
President surrounds himself with as his closest advisers, and to what extent
does he listen to them. Over to you, Donnie.
Not to be patronizing, but I feel sorry for
Donald Trump. He will inherit a political mess of inconceivable
dimensions after eight years of catastrophic mismanagement by the Obama
administration. To gauge the size of this disaster, imagine that all 350
million or so residents of these United States vomit onto the floor
simultaneously - an indisputably apt metaphor for the debilitating size and
character of the Obama legacy. Trump is then given a garden hose and is
expected to clean it all up.
Addressing a few of the sweet nuances left
behind by the outgoing President, let's start with Trump's promise to jettison
the magnificent Obamacare program. Donald, my boy, you'd better have an
impeccable replacement plan ready - well thought out, pragmatic - and an even
more impeccable plan to seamlessly smooth the alchemistic transition from
Barak's garbage to your gold ingot.
Although there are many
other areas of domestic policy that require surgery, Trump, for the sake of
world peace, will have to intensively focus on a now destitute and deranged
foreign policy. Having to deal with our Allies, the Mid-East, China and Russia,
doesn't leave a heck of a lot of time or space for much else. Think about
it. Allies needing to be reassured that there's something there there: At
minimum, most of Europe and about half of Asia. The vasty deep cauldron
of the Middle East: Supporting Israel, bringing devious Iran into line, calming
things in Syria, Libya, Egypt, and Iraq.
And these are only the "whats" - the
easy part of strategy. The "hows" of how he is going to
achieve any meaningful progress in his global CPR strategy are a complete
mystery to me and, I suspect, to him too. Yet, I would suggest to him
that while shows of force - and I mean real shows, not the detumescent
line-in-the-sand variety - are probably acceptable in situations that could
justify it, serious saber-rattling (e.g. the Cuban crisis) should be a
dedicated last resort. And why am I, Mr. Admittedly Ignorant, so certain
of that suggestion? Because I have watched every episode of "Madam
Secretary" since its T.V. birth. I urge Trump to do the same, as a
vital learning experience. If he's really smart, then he should hire the
writers of the show to work on his foreign policy. The pinnacle of smarts
would be to make Tea Leoni his Secretary of State.
Even while trying to keep an open mind on the
President-elect, there are at the back of my brain a couple of nagging issues.
First, Obama unconstitutionally shifted a great deal of power away from
Congress and knighted himself with it. Will Trump give it back? Or,
with the precedent firmly established, will he be tempted to retain, or even
expand, that power for himself? Second, for the time being, I am going to
have to trust a man who was elected - as he so vociferously proclaimed on a
number of occasions - by a rigged system. Geez!
