Sign up for a free recipe e-book →

Clarissa's Blog

Daddy President

Published by

Clarissa

on

I can never figure out if this guy is really that stupid or if he’s pretending in order to get likes from the clinically childish:

Obviously, not even in the most totalitarian of dictatorships in the tiniest of Caribbean states does the president personally run the government completely alone. It’s actually fantastic that the president isn’t all that relevant or necessary. It spares us a personality cult or a dictatorship. It saves us from one person having an outsize influence on all of us.

As an elected leader of a tiny collective, I can report that I had to leave work early today for personal reasons. And guess what? Nobody noticed. Everything continued rolling happily along. Everything worked just great. I would be a shitty leader if, several years in, I needed to hover around constantly, micromanaging everybody into the ground.

I’ve noticed that these complaints that “the president golfs too much instead of taking care of us” crop up about every president in existence. People perceive presidents as substitute dads and feel deprived if the dad du jour proves to be as inattentive and distant as their actual dad.

God only knows what unprocessed family drama will awaken in them when we get a female president, which at this point seems unavoidable. And which will make us all happy that there is a big impersonal machine keeping her from doing much.

If your dad is still living, call him, make peace, and stop looking for him in weird places. 

4 responses to “Daddy President”

  1. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    I don’t quite agree with this interpretation of that tweet. Nobody expects a president to work day and night “running” the entire system of government in the literal sense. But there’s this very palpable sense that we don’t even know if the decisions that are being made in his name are actually his. And this this feeling has persisted with me for a long time, even before his debate debacle. When a president needs to sundown by 2pm every day, how can we know that he is being given the right information to make decisions (say about Ukraine or Israel or tons of domestic issues), or that he’s even capable of making decisions anymore? It’s an incredibly stressful job (just look at pictures of Obama before and after his presidency, he aged like two decades), and if even his supporters now admit that he’s incapable of doing it, isn’t it natural to ask who exactly is doing this job?

    Unless one has really drunk the Koolaid of managerialism and believes that you don’t need leaders anymore, just armies of bureaucrats and technocrats to run complex systems, it is absolutely a cause for concern that the president seems to be AWOL. This is more serious than the ‘gone golfing’ allegations that are lobbed at every president.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
  2. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    You’ve talked about civil rights overreach and disparate impact multiple times on this blog. Isn’t that a concrete example of the “permanent unelected machine that runs the government”? It doesn’t matter which party is in power; the work of this machine carries on uninterrupted.

    Like

    Reply
    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Imagine if all these people who actually make the machinery of the state run were to leave every 4 years and new people were to come in. It would take them forever to learn and who’d train them anyway?

      Like

      Reply
      1. oldcowboy3 Avatar
        oldcowboy3

        Hmmm, exactly whom do you imagine actually creates, builds, and maintains your country and my own? Both countries are essentially bankrupt, what do you suggest?

        Like

        Reply

Leave a comment

A conservative literary critic and college professor

Recent posts