Is It Possible?

The first title I thought of for this post was “Return to Normalcy?” If that doesn’t ring any bells for you, it was Warren G. Harding’s campaign slogan in 1920. After World War I, the first Red Scare, and the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918, Americans wanted a feeling of stability and more comfortable circumstances, all of which may sound familiar to you. It isn’t a compliment. He often makes lists of the worst presidents. On the occasion of his death the poet E. E. Cummings wrote, “The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.” That, too, may remind you of the present.

The second title I thought of was “Return to Competency?”, taking as my point of departure this passage from Jason L. Riley’s most recent Wall Street Journal column:

Joe Biden was supposed to deliver a return to presidential normalcy, and that may be all he thinks is necessary to satisfy the 81 million voters who elected him. Sooner or later, however, the country will start pining for a return to competency as well, and it’s far from clear that this administration is up to the task.

That is followed by a litany of the promises made and outright whoppers told by President Biden along with notable policy failures by the administration since he was inaugurated, concluded by a lament for what is actually transpiring under the Biden presidency:

In July the black unemployment rate fell by a full percentage point to 8.2%, which is further than it fell for whites, Hispanics or Asian-Americans. However, the decline was not due to more blacks finding work. Instead, it resulted from some 250,000 blacks leaving the labor force and thus reversing a previous trend. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, labor participation rates in July ticked upward for the other groups but declined for blacks. Mr. Biden likes to talk about “equity,” but that’s not what his policies are producing. Growing the welfare state is unlikely to help.

From my perspective we have suffered from twenty years of less than competent presidents. Maybe more. I’m beginning to think that today’s political climate lends itself not only to presidents who are less than competent but moves them to lie incessantly and transparently. I believe that activists in both parties are much more extreme than most of the parties’ members and maintaining the support of donors, party activists, and the media impels both incompetence and incessant lying.

I don’t believe it has always been this way. I think that Eisenhower was competent. I didn’t agree with him on much but I think that Johnson was competent. I never voted for the man and disagreed on practically everything with him but I think that Nixon was competent. After that it begins to get sketchy. Reagan in his first term but probably not in his second. George H. W. Bush was far too much of an apparatchik for my taste but I think he was competent. I have my doubts about Clinton (appointing his wife to head his health care reform initiative?). And I have more than doubts about the presidents that followed Clinton.

Is it even possible to be a competent, broadly truth-telling president today?