On the day in 1984 when Ronald Reagan was re-elected president, an exit pollster asked a woman who she’d voted for. “Reagan,” she smiled. “I disagree with all of his policies – but I just like him.”
Well, liking the president is better than having to lunge for the mute button every time he (or she) appears on the screen. But still.
The folksy ways of a Ronald Reagan or the soaring rhetoric of a Barack Obama are like the chocolate coating on a bonbon. It makes them all look good. But sometimes when you bite, you discover that you got a raspberry jelly instead of the caramel cream you thought it was.
We know that presidencies are, at root, more about policies than personalities. Grandfatherly smiles and stirring words melt away; what remains are the laws encoded, the treaties ratified or rejected, the judges enthroned on the Supreme Court.
But, as they say, sometimes the heart wants what the heart wants.
So to avoid another disappointing presidential yum-yum, we need a new constitutional office: the National Mascot.
After the Watergate scandal and the tragedy of Vietnam, we elected as president a Sunday school teacher with a calming smile beaming moral clarity, neglecting the fact that his experience in administering a government was minimal and in foreign policy nil.
After the hapless Carter administration, we elected a grandpa who preached optimism, faith and fiscal discipline. But we found ourselves chomping on policies that tripled the national debt and dismissed those who didn’t worship at the altar of Darwinist “Christian capitalism.”
Now we’ve made a president of someone who decried corruption and pledged to “drain the swamp,” then hired Klan sympathizers and acceded to charges that his “university” was a fraud – and now has publicly admitted that his charitable foundation was more generous to him than to the deserving.
Instead, what if we’d elected each of these folks to a four-year term as our National Mascot? The job would be to vent our passions, not make policy.
Jimmy Carter could have traveled the country as a healer, deftly ministering to our sense of betrayal and moral emptiness.
Ronald Reagan could have had his own TV story hour, calming and invigorating the country the way FDR did with his fireside chats. Donald Trump could roam the Rust Belt on a flatbed truck with a loudspeaker, assuring those whom the automation economy has abandoned that regulators, immigrants and the Chinese have caused their pain, not an irreversible technological transformation.
Then, while the National Mascot pits our angels against our demons, we could go about hiring the nation’s chief executive the way that any decently run company would: by testing experience, knowledge, judgment and references.
No experience in foreign policy? Bye. Ideological correctness above all? Beat feet. Endorsed by the Radio Ranters of America? Ew. Next applicant, please.
We could elect our National Mascot in even-numbered years when there isn’t a presidential vote – the next one in 2018, for example, so White House candidates in 2020 could know which issues are rattling our nerves and need to be addressed with serious policy proposals instead of by blathering absurdities.
The never-ending sideshow of the National Mascot would give us a safe, enclosed space where our political passions could endlessly spend themselves – and, at the same time, let us leave our presidential raspberry jellies in the box.
(Bennett Daviss lives in Walpole.)