With Barack Obama’s election as President of the United States, a recent trend among American politicians has been broken: the election of “average joes” to the presidency, and that’s a good thing. Do you really want an average American running our country? I know I don’t.
Average often has a negative connotation, but it really shouldn’t. Average means right in the middle: better than one half, worse than the other. The Oxford American Dictionary defines average as being of the usual or ordinary standard, level, or quantity. Being average is respectable, decent—even admirable.
The average American is white, protestant, and lives for 78.14 years. He or she speaks English and has an income of $32,000 a year. Average Americans graduated from high school, but did not finish college.
These are all fine things—the average American is certainly better off than the average person from most other countries. But that doesn’t mean we should have an average person as our president. For president we want a competent, brilliant, highly educated, charismatic leader who is fit to direct the most powerful nation on earth. These intelligent, competent, and—most importantly—willing individuals aren’t exactly easy to come by, though.
A big turn off of the Presidency is that it is so public. Most people understandably do not want their entire lives to be dissected on a national stage. Those with the biggest egos generally make it to the top—you have to have a big ego to take the constant mud-slinging. Despite the sweet perks (Air Force One, Secret Service), the spotlight associated with the presidency turns off a lot of very able and intelligent people from the job.
Another problem in American politics is that electoral contests are increasingly image driven. Anyone who says John McCain chose Sarah Palin for her political expertise has been living under a rock—or possibly on top of one, in Alaska. McCain picked her because she is young, has nice legs, and most importantly because she comes off as the epitome of average. Political strategists aren’t stupid—they know who their audiences are. The vast majority of the population is not composed of intellectuals and philosopher kings. Just average Joes, like you and me—right?
Not so much. The fact that you are reading this newspaper means you have at least a cursory interest in knowledge and learning. That puts you above “average” on an intelligence basis, at least in my opinion. For example, during one of the primary debates between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, a woman in the audience asked Obama why he did not wear an American flag pin on his lapel during a past speech. Does whether or not Obama is wearing a certain colored piece of metal really matter? Of course not. But apparently issues like pin choices matter to the average person.
Recently, Presidential candidates have struggled in earnest to try to appear average. George W. Bush, the chain-saw wielding Texan, pulls this off particularly well. Despite having attended Yale and Harvard Business School, his verbal gaffes and macho policy revealed that he is not so far from the perception of average. While Bush can’t be a complete dunce to have made it through HBS, he doesn’t seem to be a raging intellectual either. Bill Clinton is supposedly very bright, but he used his southern ways to charm the American people (and a White House intern) into choosing him. Unfortunately for John Kerry, his image as an intellectual snob married to a billionaire did not get him in the White House, despite going up against the unpopular W.
The problems outlined above are not easily fixable: the presidency will and should always be an extremely public office. The transparency of government lies at the heart of our democratic principles. To all the future presidents out there, get over your fears of spotlight. Image-driven politics will continue to dominate, until the “average” person becomes a little less lazy and decides to read something the candidates are actually proposing. To improve the situation, candidates need to up their intellectual game, and the public needs to be more accepting of candidates who don’t operate at the lowest common denominator of discourse.
Unfortunately, intelligent and intellectual presidents do not have a performance any better than others. Jimmy Carter, a former nuclear engineer, had a terrible presidency. Moreover, George Washington was supposedly no genius—go figure. But I don’t think we should punish people, especially important people (such as the leader of the free world) for their brains. Rather, we should embrace them.
We aren’t living in a communist or Orwellian society. As much as we sometimes like to think the opposite, certain people are simply better than others at certain things—gifted athletes, prolific writers, exceptional investors. Those men and women are not chided for their talents—why should our President be? The best and the brightest need to be running the country. Hopefully Obama will end the recent trend of regressing to the mean for elected officials. There is no shame in being average, but we can do better when picking our number one leader.
