The Wrong Résumé (Really?)
2nd June 2012
Timothy Egan purportedly writes for the New York Times purportedly ‘from the West’ (I think they mean ‘the Upper West Side’).
His nominal thesis is that it would not be a good thing to require that a President have business experience.
Well, there goes Teddy Roosevelt, the writer, rancher and police commissioner, not to mention his distant cousin Franklin Roosevelt, the assistant naval secretary and politician, or Dwight Eisenhower, the career soldier. Ike’s résumé, which includes defeating the world’s most concentrated form of evil in Nazi Germany, would not be not enough to qualify him for the presidency.
I don’t know about you, but it wouldn’t bring a tear to my eye to have had any of those three miss the Presidency. Teddy Roosevelt was the living icon of Progressivism, and laid the groundwork for the explicit fascism of Woodrow Wilson; Franklin Roosevelt took a Depression and, by his policies, stretched it out as long as he could; and Eisenhower not only sat on his hands during the Polish and Hungarian revolts against Soviet hegemony in 1956, but jerked the rug out from under the British and French when they attempted to respond to that poster child for third-world-dictator confiscation, the theft of the Suez Canal by Nasser. Not one of them had any more business experience than Barack Obama, and not one of them was a positive influence on world history. So that dog won’t hunt.
The less experience in business, the better the president.
So much for George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and all those old Dead White Males. By this standard, the election of Barack Obama (who has less business experience than any kid who has run a corner lemonade stand) ought to have brought in Utopia. How’s that hope and change thing working out for you?