Posted on 04/17/2015 5:10:56 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Rick Perry may run for president again, and he made the case at a Republican dinner last night that Americans are ready to move past a “young, very attractive” President Obama.
According to NBCDFW, Perry made the case for a Republican president (not necessarily him) who’s more than just a “critic-in-chief,” but also a “tested, results-oriented executive who has a record of accomplishment.”
And just like in past years, Perry brought up the critique of Obama that he lacked any executive experience before he became president. Perry told the Republican crowd the country is ready to move past “eight years of this years of this young, very attractive, amazing orator, junior U.S. senator.”
The question was simply meant to point out that executive experience is not necessary to be a good president. Sure it’s a plus; be in itself is not required.
A bumpkin with love of country and fealty to the Constitution would be a far better president than a knave with decades of executive experience.
By the way, Obama is actually a very effective chief executive. He’s gotten entire bureaucracies to willing violate the Constitution and the law: IRS persecuting political opponents, ICE ignoring immigration laws duly passed by Congress, DoJ ignoring the IRS’s civil rights abuses....
People who write him off is dumb, naive or incompetent simply don’t understand his motives.
What matters to me this time around, is that we have a man who can grasp Conservatism.
I would love to inform Mr. Christie and anyone else who can’t grasp the concept, that George Bush is the prime example of why just having someone with executive experience isn’t the answer to our problems.
George Bush made things exponentially worse. He did so because he didn’t have a grasp of Conservatism.
Man, do we really need to go there again to learn what we already know?
To me it is just a cheap 'gimmick' that the people that want one of the governors to be the next POTUS (and the governors themselves) are using to further their cause, and disparage some of their competition.
To me it is on par with saying the following: Barry is left-handed, I think that we've all seen how bad a left-handed POTUS can be, this time we will surely want to elect a right-handed POTUS.
Thanks Zzeeman. I’m glad we agree.
People who write him off is dumb, naive or incompetent simply don’t understand his motives.
I wouldn't disagree with much of that.
What I was trying to say was that Bill Clinton or George Bush "learned" how to "deal" with Congress. That is to say, they adapted and compromised when they realized that they couldn't get their own way. One could say that they became better presidents for learning how to cooperate. They got better at working with Congress at least.
Barack Obama didn't want to do that. He didn't want to be like Bill Clinton. He wanted to rely on what he could do on his own (the metaphorical "brute force" approach), rather than on compromising, cooperating, or adapting to changed circumstances. That's why he doesn't show a record of "improvement" in office, why things haven't gotten smoother for him.
Does that mean he's "a very effective chief executive"? Well, if that implies that he gets the results he wants, maybe it does. If it implies that he's an admirable model for effective governance, it's harder to say that he's been very effective. Too much "poisoning the wells" and burning the bridges" -- too much creation of ill-will.
Consider that not everybody you don't like is a "failure." By their own lights, they may have succeeded. Carter surely not, but the other two did manage to stay in office and win high approval ratings.
How would you factor in that many Presidents did not have "Executive" experience before becoming POTUS and actually did a good job?
Tricky question. Most of them had been governors, generals, or heads of government departments -- all executive positions. The three who went directly from the Senate to the White House -- Harding, Kennedy, Obama -- certainly weren't the best bunch.
Garfield and Pierce also weren't great. Pierce was downright awful. Maybe Truman and Lincoln, neither of whom had been governors, did alright. It's not an easy question to answer. They succeeded I guess, but made a lot of mistakes along the way (bear in mind though, that the judge's position Truman had before the Senate is supposed to have been an executive, rather than a judicial position).
If “success” just means “I agree with” then you’re better off not using the word.
FDR and Clinton are considered very successful by most standards. Clinton had a 66% approval rating when he left office, he currently stands at 60% approve 32% disapprove and 8% undecided. It would be a very different race if he were running instead of his wife! FDR was ranked this year by the American Political Science Association as our 3rd greatest president, Clinton was ranked our 8th.
I averaged the ratings for presidents who were governors (20.17%) and presidents who were senators (26.625%). All of our biggest stinkers were senators, including the guy who so loved the sound of his own voice that he gave an hours long inauguration speech, caught pneumonia, and died a month later.
Love that!
Political leanings never make it out of the box if you cannot get elected.
Not a GOPe political consultant, but I have seen what happens when libertarians come goose-stepping in proclaiming themselves to be the only “true Conservatives”. They drive off all the volunteers with their b.s. and lose elections owing to the fact that few want to have their untested hippy tripe inflicted on the country.
Conservative means that you stick with the tried and the true best practices for solving problems. It isn’t exciting and new and there is no unified theory. Instead there is carefully culled pragmatism.
Some of us do have a life off-line and things to do and places to be.
Nobody expects Ted Cruz to be a left-wing president or Hillary Clinton to be a right-wing president. Nobody asks whether Cruz will turn out to be like FDR in his politics or Clinton will turn out to be like Reagan because everybody knows the answer.
What's harder to answer -- what's not a trivial question -- is whether Cruz would turn out to be one-term failure like Carter or whether he'd manage to win reelection and strengthen his party, as Clinton more or less did. Or whether Cruz would be able to fundamentally change American politics and government as FDR did or whether he'd be remembered as a mixture of achievement and disastrous failure as LBJ is. Or whether Hillary Clinton would be a transformative president like Reagan, a one-termer like Ford or the first Bush, or something somewhere in between like the second Bush.
The game of rating presidents gets pretty silly. On the one hand you have people who only give passing ratings to those they agree with ideologically. On the other side you have people who think that getting reelected makes any president a success. That's obviously wrong. A president can do a lot of damage and still manage to get reelected. But it's also wrong when people say that the greatest president was Van Buren or Tyler or Buchanan because they agree with their policies (or because they kept out of the way the most).
You have to combine the value side with the objective performance-based side. If you're not acknowledging that somebody can perform well even doing things you may not agree with you're missing something. If you're not, say, recognizing that we did win WWII with Roosevelt at the helm (while admitting all his other faults), you're not taking some very important factors into account.
So in answer to your question, I'd say that Roosevelt, Carter, and Clinton weren't successes in conservative terms (Did they really try to be?), but they weren't all failures by their own standards. Objectively, they weren't all failures in the same way or on the same scale. Carter definitely failed and failed miserably, but if FDR had been a failure on that scale the United States might not even exist today. Clinton was somewhere in between -- that is, if you're honest and not just condemning him for emotional reasons.
If you want an ideologically pure president, you'd do well to stay away from governors (or mayors, who don't get elected president in any case). They have to make compromises and concessions to balance budgets and keep cops on the street. Rarely can they make the kind of ideological statements that representatives, or junior senators, or people outside politics can (though Scott Walker may be an exception).
But the governors have already "pre-disappointed" us. We don't expect ideological purity from them. We may get competence in return, and may not have to sacrifice some ideological resolve to get it. Congressmen, Senators (especially first termers), and political novices will disappoint you if they manage to get elected. They will disappoint you when you find out they can't deliver on everything they've promised. They'll disappoint you when they compromise or make concessions. They'll also disappoint you if it turns out that they don't have the administrative skills or executive experience to do the job successfully.
Here are the list of Presidents that did not have Executive experience(Being Governor).
First, the job has changed a lot since the 19th century. Consequently, experience has become all the more important since then. Secondly, running an executive department or being vice president are ways of learning more about how the executive branch works. Third, we can distinguish between somebody like Lyndon Johnson, who in a real sense was running the Senate, and backbenchers like Harding or Obama, who did as they were told.
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