It was easy to know how Barack Obama would govern because he was a committed ideologue. In my view his radical roots were underreported by the media who simply wanted to put the first black man in the Oval Office. But we could make out who Barack Obama was with surprisingly little research.
What kind of a man is Donald Trump? What is his ideology? What values does he hold dear besides the advancement of Donald Trump and his ego? These questions are unanswerable but the smart money says he will govern lurching from issue to issue coming down on an issue as it strikes his immediate fancy. In short, he will govern without reference to a coherent philosophy. It will be an ad hoc affair and the end result will be confusion or even chaos.
In our history we have had politicians who have fooled us. In fact we had two in a row, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. But we have also been blessed with men who have held consistent to an enlightened view their entire lives such as Washington, Lincoln, Coolidge and Reagan after his conversion to conservatism. Each man upon leaving office could say, what you see is what you got.
There is a deplorable tendency in the electorate to whore after the next Messiah as though the answer to our problems are held on the hands of one man. Yes, it unquestionably requires a charismatic individual, either on the left or on the right, to seize the historical moment and bring the country along to his point of view. But after we establish to our satisfaction that the candidate is of good character (after all if a man has had three wives it is relevant when his finger will be but inches away from the red button) we must ask, what is his ideology, is he consistent in an ideology that is wholesome? Barack Obama was perfectly consistent in his ideology which is bringing the country to ruin. Yet at the time of his election, thanks partly to the media and partly to the gullibility of a yearning electorate, he was nearly universally regarded as the next coming. He has not governed as the Messiah he has rather governed as a Bolshevik straining at a rubber leash.
Thus are the wages of exalting personality over policy.
