The Enemy of Better

My last post took a cynical turn. Sorry. One of the pitfalls of commenting on something as flawed as our election process is one will encounter a great deal of disappointment. It’s hard not to get overwhelmed occasionally. But the pity party is over now. Time to light a candle.

Becoming the President of the United States shouldn’t be easy. It should be hard. It should demand every last ounce of you to get there. On election night, our candidates should be wrung out. The election process should strip away any loose piece of shielding. We are trusting them with our lives, we want to see what they’ve got hiding behind their campaign button. However, this is typically where the campaign process fails us. Too often, the election process mutates from finding a leader to finding faults.

It’s not hard at all to find faults, just look in the mirror. Let’s be honest, we’re not fit to run the country either. But I defy you to find anyone with an empty closet. Some of us have a chorus line of skeletons in there. Some, like my dear beloved grandma, have just enough for a game of solitaire, or so I’m told. Hopefully, the next guy we swear in doesn’t have enough to fill the stands at a NASCAR event.

I’m not looking for a spotless lamb, and you shouldn’t be either. We shouldn’t let the campaign directors divert attention away from the important to stare at the juicy. We are looking for a Political Leader who understands his role and has the skill to do it well. We are not looking for someone to raise our kids, lead us in prayer, or fix our lives. Their job will be to use all the resources that our tax money buys to keep us safe at night and free during the day. I don’t want him or her meddling in things they don’t understand.

But brace yourself, that’s where the campaign is headed. At some point, the campaign will direct our attention away from the Diplomas on the wall to what’s floating in the bowl. Instead of focusing on their credentials we’ll hear a lot of talk about where they have failed to be perfect. So the ideal becomes the enemy of the better.

When we demand perfection from our candidates, we are only setting ourselves up for disappointment. Worse than that, what we create are candidates who become better at concealing their flaws. So what we end up with is someone who has just done the best job of fooling us. Not exactly the kind of thing I WANT my President to be good at. You?

Our next President, will have some warts. We’ll learn something about them that makes us feel superior momentarily. We would be fools to let their personal flaws outweigh their professional qualifications. He or she will have some baggage and I would be happy to carry it into the Residence in about 18 months.