Don’t you think it’s time to look past the last presidential election and ahead to the next one? Me, too.
As history has taught us, presidencies are subject to the pendulum effect. The public tries someone, quickly sickens of him, and then swings in the opposite direction. Consider the election of John Quincy Adams, a member of the early American aristocracy, scion of the nation’s founding family, a Harvard-educated fop who saw no reason not to use his prissy middle name. After him, the public turned to Andrew Jackson, a garrulous hick whose first White House reception — it became known as his “inaugural brawl” — quickly devolved into mayhem as his backwoods supporters got drunk, broke furniture and crockery, and stood on chairs with their muddy boots, which they also used to grind cheese into the White House rugs.
After electing a president with the richest professional résumé of all — James Buchanan had been a state assemblyman, a congressman, secretary of state, an ambassador to Russia and Britain, and a U.S. senator — Americans went for Abe Lincoln, whose résumé was thinner than a soup made from boiling the shadow of a chicken that had starved to death. (The zinger is Lincoln’s, about an argument made by Stephen Douglas. That Abe fellow definitely hadn’t done much by 1860, but he could write.)
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Woodrow Wilson, the erudite president of Princeton with a doctorate in political science, was followed into office by Warren Harding, who was just smart enough to know he was a dimwit. “I am not fit for this office and never should have been here,” he said. He once considered buying a book to figure out how taxes worked, but didn’t because he knew he would not understand it.
At the time he left office, Dwight Eisenhower was the oldest president. He was succeeded by John Kennedy, the youngest to be elected. After choosing Richard Nixon, a shifty-eyedparanoiac with an enemies list, America opted for the avuncular Jimmy Carter, who wore Mr. Rogers sweaters, counseled prudence and moderation in all things, and whose most memorable conflict in office was fending off an attack by an enraged rabbit.
And then, of course, most recently, the American electorate decided to give the black guy a chance, and then, when that was done, opted for the racist.
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The question for today is what comes next? I’m basing my predictions on the pendulum effect.
Share this articleShareFirst of all, obviously, she will be a transgender Muslim of black and Mexican descent, but that’s the easy call. We have to go deeper. She will be homeless, and rely for her subsistence on Meals on Wheels. She will have really low self-esteem, to the point of paralyzing shyness and self-deprecation, yet she will be absolutely brilliant, trained in climate science and an expert in public education. She will be polite and genteel and speak fluent French, Latin, Swahili, Greek and one language that is mostly clicks and glottal stops. Post-debate analysis will reveal that all of her answers will have been composed as perfect Petrarchan sonnets.
Oh, and one more thing, to complete the arc. She will be the best president we ever had.
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