Why They Want to be President

One thing I've heard several people say over the last few months goes about like this: "Why would anybody even want to be president? Bush has so thoroughly screwed the pooch, everything is fucked, why take the job?"

Other than "because they have gigantic egos," there is a reason why someone would take the job. It is because in the next presidency lies the raw materials for greatness.

There are three presidents who are almost always considered to be the "great" ones: Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Let's look at Lincoln and FDR. Both presidents confronted serious challenges to the nation during their presidencies, challenges that were largely left to them by their predecessors. Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan backed the nation into a Civil War, which was already underway when Lincoln took office. FDR was handed the Great Depression by Hoover, a president who was as hamstrung by political ideology as the current one. To be fair to Hoover, the underpinnings for the Depression were set in place by the Harding and Coolidge, but it was Hoover who turned what could have been a nasty recession into bad times worthy of song, story and legend.

Washington does not fit the mold precisely on first blush, but it can be argued that he does. One of the reasons for the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was that the Confederation of the United States had proven itself to be ineffective. The currency was worthless and the national government was broke. As both the president of the Convention and as the first president of the Republic, it fell to Washington to address those problems and he largely did.

So it would seem that in order to become a great president, your predecessor has to really fuck things up. George W. Bush has been nothing if not a national fuckup and if the next president can get a handle on reversing the Bush Disasters, he or she may truly be one of the great presidents.

That may be why they want the job.