Unqualified For President

California will hold a strange Presidential primary election Tuesday. Strange because the nominee is not already a foregone conclusion. We registered Democrats get to decide between Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards. You registered Republicans choose between Mitt Romney, John McCain and Mike Huckabee.


Here's a quote from the radio version of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (Secondary Phase, part 6, starting at about 18 minutes 40 seconds) spoken by The Book (the voice of Peter Jones):

The major problem -- one of the major problems, for there are several -- one of the MANY major problems with governing people is that of who you get to do it. Or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

To summarize, it is a well known and much lamented fact that those people who most want to rule people are ipso facto those least suited to do it.

To summarize the summary, anyone who is capable of getting themselves made president should on no account be allowed to do the job.

I was reminded of Douglas Adams' monumentally and hysterically accurate observation by an equally accurate but deadly un-funny editorial entitled "Why They Really Run" by Michael Kinsley. Here's a quote:

When you hear the presidential candidates carrying on about democracy and freedom, do you ever wonder what they would be saying if they had been born into societies with different values?

What if Mitt Romney had come to adulthood in Nazi Germany?

What if Hillary Clinton had gone to Moscow State University and married a promising young apparatchik?

What if Barack Obama had been born in Kenya, like his father, where even now people are slaughtering one another over a crooked election?

Which of them would be the courageous dissidents, risking their lives for the values they talk about freely—in every sense—on the campaign trail? And which would be playing the universal human power game under the local rules, whatever they happened to be?

Without naming names, I believe that most of them would be playing the game. What motivates most politicians, especially those running for President, is closer to your classic will-to-power than to a deep desire to reform the health-care system.

In my opinion no candidate, Clinton or Obama or Romney or McCain or Huckabee, is really qualified to become President. I'm sure that having served in the U.S. Senate is helpful to a President. But if that is the only real entry in your resume you're not ready yet.

Likewise, if you've been a state Governor but never worked a top-level government job in Washington, you're equally unqualified.

Please, no more presidents who learn on the job.


Here is the list of qualifications I look for in a President:

1. legislative experience on both the state and national levels: (get elected senator and representative a few times)
2. executive experience on both state and national levels:( get elected governor or mayor of some megalopolis and also get yourself appointed cabinet secretary of something or other)
   
3. be the Vice-President (a nice touch to your resume but not absolutely necessary because so few people get to be Vice.)
   
4. real experience in international relations (hold a major ambassadorship and negotiate a trade treaty or two)
5. run a business (this is NOT a sufficient qualification. Anyone who thinks they can run the country with a background only in corporate America is a darn fool. Ross Perot and Steve Forbes were spectacularly unqualified presidential candidates)
6. run your political party (know how to manipulate the system, make deals, scratch backs and hide scandals)
7. a good liar (Presidents must convince the citizens, our allies and our enemies that everything is under control - even when we know it isn't - and that we will damn well do what we say - even when we know we won't)
   
8. be a good media-savvy speaker (yep, being a movie star is exceptionally good training for a future President)
   
9. be capable of changing your mind (apparently there's an unwritten law which requires politicians to adhere to immutable principals of behavior. This is called "knee jerk" - like "no new taxes". These are usually derived from unprovable tenets of religious faith and economics. The President is free to privately believe anything he or she wants - but like the rest of us she or he should leave those ideas at home before going to work.)
   
10. learn to apologize for mistakes (another unwritten law prevents Presidents from admitting they were wrong. There is no doctrine of infallibility for Presidents like there is for Popes. You're just this guy, you know.)

Some things are NOT qualifications, no matter what.


Being married to a former President is NOT a qualification.

Going to church, intense religious faith and straight-jacket morality are bad qualities for presidents. I want a President who could have an extra-marital affiar whether they choose to cheat on their spouse or not I want a President who will cheat and lie and steal - for the benefit of the entire country of course - and not get caught.

No one will have ALL of this preparation but can't we find someone who scores higher than 1 or 2?


Having someone who agrees with me on a few issues would be nice icing on the candidate.

Using these standards the most qualified candidate in 2008 recently dropped out of the race. His name was Bill Richardson.

I'm not the least bit surprised by Richardson's lack of success. Most people want a tall handsome President who makes us feel good. A movie star or talk show host. That's no way to run a country.


In my continuing effort to throw my votes away on principle, I'm going to vote for Richardson anyway on Tuesday. He might have a chance at being picked for Vice. If Dick Cheney can be the devil incarnate just a heartbeat from the Presidency, maybe Richardson can have some angelic positive effects.

MUSICAL QUALIFICATIONS FOR PRESIDENT


Someone named Joe Queenan (described as a "New York-based writer") wrote an editorial pronouncing Mike Huckabee unfit to be President because of his choice of musical instrument - the electric bass. Here's a quote:

The president of the United States is the most powerful man in the world, just as the conductor is the most important person in the orchestra, just as the lead guitarist is the most important musician in the band. The bass guitarist, I'm afraid, is more like the Commerce secretary or Uncle Fred, a solid, dependable fellow but definitely not the guy you want with his finger on the red button. Bass players are too bland and dull to run a society as classy as this one.

Joe Queenan has got it completely backwards. In my opinion, a bass player has an awful lot of qualities that we should expect from our President.

• bass players must know the structure of the tune
• bass players play the entire show, every tune, non-stop
• bass players need to be solid; they "lay it down" and then "keep it together"
• bass players help the other musicians sound good
• bass players don't demand the spotlight

Having a Pres with some of these qualities would be a wonderful change for the better. The President is a Suit not a Star. A functionary. A servant of the people. If the President can keep the inner workings of the country solid, the stuff on top ought to come out okay.


Fortunately, musical talent is not a qualification that anyone should consider in picking a candidate. But if it were, Mike Huckabee would be the man for the job. That's the only way I would ever possibly consider supporting him.


A previous MM post, including this picture of Dick Nixon, discusses Artistic Politicians. The world would have been a better place of Nixon had stayed a second violin.

The Huckabee picture came from here.

President Jimmy Carter once "sang" Salt Peanuts at a White House jazz concert. Here and here and here are articles which mention this event in no detail whatsoever. But I heard the broadcast. Carter sucked as a singer. The last link also mentions that President Richard Nixon once played Happy Birthday on the piano for Duke Ellington.

Mixed Meters predicts the winner in November: John McCain or Mitt Romney. The Democratic candidate is going to get swift-boated into a historical footnote (unless some 3rd party right wing candidate siphons off votes Perot-sytle.)

Addendum: the current White House chief-of-staff (quick, can you name him?) also plays bass guitar in a rock band. Click here or here.

Swiftboat Tags: California Primary. . . Super Tuesday. . . Hillary Clinton. . . Barack Obama. . . John McCain. . . Mitt Romney. . . Mike Huckabee. . . Bill Clinton. . . electric bass. . . tenor sax. . . musical president. . . Michael Kinsley. . . Joe Queenan. . . Zaphod Beeblebrox. . . Jimmy Carter. . . Salt Peanuts. . . 2008 presidential election. . . Joshua Bolten

Out To Lunch (aka Ben Watson)

I'm cleaning my office to promote good work habits. To that end I'm trying to throw out no-longer-needed clutter, including printouts of online articles which I find easier to read on paper than on monitor.

Other than this introduction this post will have no original writing by me (and no photographs). What it will have is several quotes which I highlighted in a scholarly paper given by Out To Lunch (aka Ben Watson), author of The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play and master of Zappa talk and double talk, to the International Conference of Esemplastic Zappology.

Surrounding these little bits of wisdom his paper/speech contains some fine opportunities to reflect on the differences between

• England and America
• musicians and academics
• a bunch of isms and a bunch of other isms
• the common language that divides the United States and Great Britain.

That having been said, I give you Ben Watson:

... Zappa's work is exciting because his art is not the product of an ideology or theory, it wrinkles and overlaps and concentrates bits of the material world so that the whole universe may be viewed in it upside down, tiny, like the image inside the convex mirror in the parlour of your great aunt in Chingford ...

... Zappa's albums present such an outlandish splice of complete madness and cutting sanity that he forces the listener to speculate about the relativity of madness and sanity, the dialectical involvement of opposites like order and chaos, rationality and irrationality. ...

... Zappa wanted to make an art consisting entirely of "sin" - of unabstracted, specific, personal expressions unrepressed by any generalised archetypes. That's why the records he produced are so delightfully knotty, gnarly and pleasing, even when you can't understand a word - and once you've worked out all the ingredients of "Debra Kedabara", all the stuff about B movies, Mexican rubber masks and dental flossers, you're really no wiser. Why did he put all that junk in there? Because it resists the abstract concept! ...

Esemplastic Tags: Ben Watson. . . Frank Zappa. . . abstraction

Snow in Places

We're having what we call "winter" in Southern California - a period of steady heavy rainstorms. This is remarkable because we've skipped winter for the last several years. Last year was the driest on record.

Here's a newspaper pummeled by rain on a bed of greens.



When it rains down in our valley (the San Gabriel Valley not the birthplace of Valley Girls), it often snows at higher elevations. However, we can see higher elevations including Mount Wilson which towers above us. It's 5710 feet above wherever they measure from.

The clouds broke briefly this afternoon, suns shone, patches of blue sky were visible and, indeed, there was snow on high ground. You'll have to click and scroll this picture as it is quite wide.