Out of My Mind

by Andy Rooney

  The single biggest opportunity a president has to make a difference in our basic process of government is in his appointments of people to positions of power. Franklin Roosevelt appointed half a dozen Supreme Court justices whose decisions consistently pushed the country in what would be considered a liberal direction.

  President Bush has led us to the right. That seems to be what most Americans want. It is not clear yet whether President Bush’s political philosophy will have a permanent effect on such important matters as the separation we previously maintained between religion and government. He seems to approve of a merger.

  President Bush has already had an effect on the direction many of our scientific programs are taking. In April, for example, he urged the Senate to forbid the cloning of human embryos for either research or reproductive purposes. The National Academy of Sciences had said it should be allowed. The people doing the most important work in health, science and technology are often dependent for their enormously expensive research equipment, on government money. If the government controls the money with which scientific equipment is purchased, it can control the people who use it. This takes technology in the direction most favored by a president.

  President Bush’s refusal to go along with 178 other countries in Kyoto when they agreed on the reduction of the release of gases that produce global warming doesn’t have much sex appeal as a news story but it was as important for the world’s future as any decision our President has made. And not good.

  The U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, the appointment of ultra-conservative judges and Bush’s appointment of John Ashcroft as attorney general may have permanently changed the course of this nation. While it does not seem now as though history will consider him one of our great presidents, George W. Bush may have more of a lasting effect on the country than any president since Franklin Roosevelt.

  SCHWARZENEGGER FOR PRESIDENT

  The words we use for political leaders are in some jobs as unsatisfactory as the leaders themselves. “President” isn’t the right word for our most important position. It ought to be reserved for the head of a company. “President” of the United States doesn’t really make much sense. The word “mayor” has no roots as a word meaning the chief executive of a city. The word “Congress” confuses us because of the way it includes both senators and representatives. All senators are congressmen or women, but not all congressmen or women are senators. The word “senator” has some historical background that makes it useful, but “representative” is a weak word for an important person in our political hierarchy.

  Of all the words we use for our political leaders, “governor” seems most appropriate. It’s too late to change, but our president probably ought to have been called governor.

  Being governor of a state is the best path to The White House. Nineteen governors have become president of the United States. Before spending a lot of time looking that up, I guessed there were seven. The nineteen were George W. Bush, Texas; Bill Clinton, Arkansas; Ronald Reagan, California; Jimmy Carter, Georgia; Franklin D. Roosevelt, New York; Calvin Coolidge, Massachusetts; Woodrow Wilson, New Jersey; Theodore Roosevelt, New York; William McKinley, Ohio; Grover Cleveland, New York; Rutherford B. Hayes, Ohio; Andrew Johnson, Tennessee; James Polk, Tennessee; John Tyler, Virginia; William Henry Harrison, Indiana; Martin Van Buren, New York; Andrew Jackson, Florida; James Monroe, Virginia; Thomas Jefferson, Virginia.

  More governors than senators have become president of the United States. I suspect that’s because governors don’t have to reveal their political opinions quite so openly on every issue as senators do. A senator has to vote on issues, revealing his or her opinion. We know exactly where he or she stands and it makes it more difficult to run for the next higher office. A governor is not so encumbered.

  I brought up the names of governors who later in their careers became president of the United States because there is no chance Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger will ever be president. He’s old enough, maybe smart enough, and he’s lived here since 1968 but he isn’t qualified for our highest office. “No person except a natural born citizen or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President,” reads Article II. This is all clear to me except the phrase “natural born citizen.” Would that exclude someone who was born unnaturally?

  THE PERSON YOU ELECTED

  One of the few things about our elections that’s always made me feel good is that once they’re over, Americans pretty much accept the results. We may not like the outcome, but no one throws rocks. Whether our candidate wins or loses, we live with the one who got the most votes—or at least that was true until California decided it made a mistake electing Gray Davis and ousted him from office in 2003.

  Gray Davis seemed grossly inadequate from what I saw of him on television but the recall was wrong and contrary to our established practice of taking what we get. Davis was a dull disaster, but Californians should have stuck with what they got when they voted. We simply cannot start overturning an honest election. Arnold Schwarzenegger is certainly a better governor than Davis was, but under our system, voters don’t have a second chance to get it right.

  I was surprised when Maria Shriver, Schwarzenegger’s wife, wore a cross around her neck at his inauguration ceremony. As a Kennedy, Maria would be Catholic, I suppose. I never heard anything about whether Arnold shared her religious convictions, or whether he was religious at all.

  I don’t believe as many Baptists, Presbyterians or Methodists wear crosses as jewelry as Catholics do. It strikes me as wrong for anyone to press their beliefs on the rest of us in public with symbols of their affiliations affixed to their clothing or body. I even feel that way about men who wear the American flag as jewelry in their buttonholes. President Bush wears an American flag button in his lapel even though he’s no more patriotic than I am and his patriotism would not be suspect without it.

  WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

  What makes one of us liberal and the other conservative is a mystery. It’s a mystery why we’re both so damn sure we’re right, too. It surprises me that Americans are so evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals.

  The 2000 presidential election, when George Bush and Al Gore each got about 49 percent of the popular vote, made it clear that there are as many of one group as the other. This is evidence of parity, although I’ve never seen a poll that indicated whether conservatives or liberals were most apt to vote in an election. If more of one group than the other voted, that would skew the numbers.

  The recent surge in the popularity of conservative talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly and conservative TV news like you see on Fox, indicates conservatives may be the majority.

  I’d like to see a cumulative I.Q. of each group and compare the totals to determine whether liberals or conservatives were smarter. Liberalism probably attracts more intellectuals than conservatism does. Conservatives would be more apt to describe them as dreamers than intellectuals.

  Some people—and I think of myself as one of them—are part both. We’re liberal about some things, conservative about others. We think of ourselves as sensible and open-minded. Others think of us as indecisive and stupid.

  The biggest problem with liberals is that while they’re often concerned with social issues that conservatives ignore, they’re more apt to make decisions about what should be done based on an overly optimistic opinion of human nature. Considering that there are more working-class people, whose interests you’d think would be best served by liberal officeholders, it’s surprising that Democratic candidates don’t win every election. The curious fact is, though, there are a great number of working-class conservatives. The coalition between conservative businessmen and -women and right-wing hourly wage-earners is an interesting political phenomenon. Even when their union supports the Democratic candidate in an election, a lot of individual workers with minds of their own vote for the conservative candida
te.

  The reason may be a bitter anomaly for professional Democrats to face: The successful efforts of previous Democratic administrations on labor’s behalf eliminated a lot of reasons working people had to vote Democratic. There was a time when all union members were Democrats because Republican politicians who favored big business were less apt to approve of union demands.

  These days, unions have won their point. They are entrenched and union members don’t have much to win from Democrats that they can’t win as easily from Republicans. They have minimum wage laws, Social Security, unemployment insurance, a range of health benefits and other goodies Democrats got for them.

  They may still be striking for more money but their right to exist has been long since established.

  THE GOOD LOSERS

  Many good men never got to be president. Ben Franklin was brilliant but he never ran for the presidency because he was too busy doing more important things. Franklin was a serious scientist and I don’t think anyone who is serious about something serious would want to be president.

  Thomas Jefferson lost to John Adams in 1796 and must have thought he was an also-ran but four years later, he won.

  Several modern politicians, other than the Democratic candidates, would be good. I think of the bright and principled Republican, John McCain.

  I went into a restaurant last week and spotted a friend of mine, the historian Arthur Schlesinger. He motioned me to come over and introduced me to the man he was sitting with, George McGovern. McGovern lost to Richard Nixon. What confidence does that give you in our democratic system?

  Herbert Hoover beat Al Smith in 1928. Smith was governor of New York, very capable and a real character. He probably would have been a better president than Hoover but he was Catholic and that mattered more then than it does now. Thirty-plus years later, John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism wasn’t much of an issue.

  When I was in college, a lot of my friends were trying to get Wendell Willkie elected. Willkie may have been the most capable of all the losers in modern history but he never had a prayer running against Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940.

  FDR, our only four-term president, beat Herbert Hoover, Alf Landon, Willkie and Tom Dewey. Roosevelt is the kind of legend who gets his picture on our dimes. Dewey, governor of New York, was humorless but would have made a good president, too. He never got his picture on a penny.

  Adlai Stevenson might have been a great president. He lost to an American hero, Dwight Eisenhower. In one of the great moments in television history, Stevenson appeared on TV to concede and quoted Abraham Lincoln on the occasion of his loss of his seat in Congress:

  “I’m too old to cry,” Stevenson said, “and yet it hurts too much to laugh.”

  It’s fun for me to consider that I can drop the names of five presidents I’ve actually met. As a reporter for the Stars and Stripes, I met FDR in 1945. I wouldn’t say we were close friends, but I shook hands with both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Reagan was more fun to shake hands with than Nixon. I met Ike a dozen times, and several months ago I was eating in a New York restaurant when Bill Clinton came in. He saw me sitting there and slid into the banquette next to me and chatted for twenty-five minutes. He was hard to hate.

  The loser I knew best was Barry Goldwater and I didn’t vote for him. I did a one-hour documentary called “Barry Goldwater’s Arizona” and got to like Barry better than I liked his politics. He was a good guy but not a president. At Barry’s retirement party, his unlikely friend, Teddy Kennedy, got a big laugh when he said Barry’s motto was, “Ready! Shoot! Aim!”

  Strom Thurmund ran for president in 1948 and was, fortunately, a big loser. We’ve had other potentially bad presidents but no one that bad.

  It’s surprising, when you think of all the people who want to be president that we’ve had two sons of presidents who became president themselves. John Quincy Adams, our sixth president, was the son of John Adams, our second president. George W. Bush, of course, is George Bush’s son. When it comes to being president, it doesn’t hurt if Daddy gives you a head start.

  EINSTEIN FOR PRESIDENT

  One of the difficult things to determine in life is how much authority to give to someone who is smart about one thing, in an area about which he or she has no experience.

  If I had my choice, I’d take the smartest person over the most experienced anytime. Once you’ve learned something, “experience” isn’t anything but repetition. It has amused me over my years, because so many of my friends are in the news business, to note how quickly someone smart can get to know almost everything about someone else’s business. A good reporter can do some research and then interview his subject and in a few days get to know 90 percent of everything he needs to know about his subject and his life’s work. If a good reporter can do that, there’s no reason why a good lawyer, businessman or doctor can’t get to know a lot about government in a few weeks. As far as having enough experience to be president, it’s a foolish idea. There is no experience a person could have that would familiarize him with being president of the United States.

  When Howard Dean ran for governor of Vermont, opponents asked what a doctor knew about running a state government. Dean was elected and then re-elected four times. It obviously didn’t take him long to get the hang of switching from medicine and healing to politics and government. (It seems like a step down to me, but that’s another matter.)

  You often read about some huge corporation appointing a new president. If the corporation makes widgets, the new executive is hardly ever an expert on widgets. He’s an expert on running a corporation no matter what it makes.

  Albert Einstein had one of the great brains ever born to man, and he used it to the tangible advantage of civilization. It was Einstein who told President Roosevelt in 1939 of the possibility of our making an atomic bomb with the research he had done cracking atoms in the laboratory. He spent his life working on the relativity and quantum theories, which are too complex for any but a handful of us to understand. He also produced a delightful little book of essays about life that are direct and simple enough for anyone who can read to understand. We humans have amazing breadth. We can be stupid and brilliant. We can be good. We can be bad—angels one minute, devils the next.

  What often occurs to me about our elections is that we get too many experienced politicians and not enough people like Einstein, who are brilliant in some other form of endeavor. We ought to find some way of embarrassing more of our capable, even brilliant, non-political citizens to get into politics and run for office. We should not exclude our scientists, and they should not exclude themselves.

  Einstein, although ineligible because of being born in Germany, would have made a great American president. If he had run, someone surely would have said, “He doesn’t have enough political experience.” What I want for my president is the smartest person in America. Forget whether that person is experienced in politics.

  HOORAY FOR POLITICIANS

  It’s good fun to criticize our politicians and we all do a lot of that. It’s hard not to, but I often feel sorry for them. Most people who are successful in any field have one special talent for doing something well. They aren’t successful because of their overall ability. A politician can’t specialize like that. He or she (see footnote) has to know a lot about everything.

  Believing that you’re smart enough to take a public job that involves making decisions that will influence thousands or even millions of lives takes more chutzpah than most of us have. Imagine really thinking that you’re smart enough to be President of the United States. Or even a congressman. Such jobs take men and women with self-confidence and I’m glad we have so many of them to lead wimps like us.

  Of course, we’re always being disappointed by our politicians, even the ones we voted for or plan to vote for. Sooner or later, our favorite says something we hate. The trouble is, politicians have to do and say some terrible things to get elected. They have to say things they don’t believe and do things they do
n’t like doing. They even have to pretend they like some things. Shaking hands with 2,000 enthusiastic jerks every day must be a pain. We practically force them to lie to us, or at least force them to be evasive and then accuse them of not being honest.

  Plain dealing is impossible for a politician. How do you come out clearly and unequivocally for or against abortion, tax cuts, the war in Iraq or school prayer without alienating about half of the people who were inclined to vote for you? The politician has to find a way to avoid saying what he really thinks as often as possible. John Kerry, for instance, is burdened now with the fact that he voted in favor of the war on Iraq. He has to find a way to squirm out of it every time it comes up. I’d hate to be a politician and have to announce publicly every opinion I’ve had about Iraq. I’d get run out of the country. Most of us are puzzled and unsure about major issues. We can be persuaded in one direction or the other. A politician doesn’t have the luxury of rethinking something, hedging or changing his mind. Voters, on the other hand, can usually avoid taking any firm position. We aren’t dead sure what we think.

  The philosophy of democracy assumes that the people of a country know what they want and make intelligent decisions about whom they vote for to get it. The trouble is that we’re too evenly divided and if one group gets what it wants in the next election, it’s certain that almost half of us will be dissatisfied. It won’t be “the will of the people,” but only the will of about half the people. This makes democracy seem less like a perfect system. It’s just that there isn’t any other as good.

  Footnote: Every time I write I’m faced with the problem of those damn third-person pronouns “he” or “she.” We are in desperate need of a gender-neutral word that would include men and women. You used to be able to use the masculine he as if it was universal. That’s no longer acceptable, but I’m not willing to write “he” or “she” every time it seems necessary.