Presidents and the polling booth

Don’t like Donald Trump? Blame the 22nd Amendment, which limits the presidency to two terms.

Would President Obama have been elected to a third term if he could’ve run? Probably. Is this a good thing?

Our answer will depend on our politics and how far above it we can look. Lots of voters, in 1947, when the 22nd Amendment was passed, didn’t like FDR and his policies and many others, in 2008, would have been loath to elect George W. Bush to a third term.

And yet, we are now deposing, legally, a fit and accomplished president, immeasurably better in temperament and experience than his successor. And values? That is always the American people’s prerogative, to choose whose vision they want for America. But we are learning, the hard way, that the presidency is more than values — it is about character, and judgment, maturity and integrity.

And the American people — can we trust their judgment? Did too many of them, when they left the voting booth, put bile and a quick nose-thumbing above citizenship and country? Are we getting the president we deserve?

Ask the Electoral College. It was meant, in part, to protect America and its governance from the ignorance and prejudice of the mob. And yet, in 2016, it gave that very mob the club it needed to bludgeon Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and to subvert, by 3 million votes, the will of the majority of Americans.

Can we rise above party and politics to see what is best for America? No Democrat wanted Mitt Romney as presiden and he won the popular vote, too. So what is a country to do?

Look more deeply and two answers emerge: education and information. Anyone, Republican or Democrat, would agree that an educated and informed electorate makes better choices and that fascism likes neither. How do we measure up to the citizen voters of 1960? Or 1860?

Are our schools preparing us to act as citizen voters, to appreciate and exercise the importance of that role? Not well enough. Does that understanding need to exist beyond the classroom to enter more fully the public square, especially the “digital” one? Yes and yes.

And our media — we used to call that news and journalism — how are they doing? Abysmally, if you count diligence and fidelity to truth and facts, to serving the judgment of the American people. We are a nation driving with a windshield foggy with half-news and opinion, unable to tell the road from the ditch.

Should there be a test to allow us to vote, like the one new citizens must pass before they are sworn in? How many of us would pass it?

Winston Churchill said, “the best argument against democracy is spending 10 minutes with the average voter.” We should work on this.

Is it time to look at whether we want, every eight years, a gladiator contest that decides, by only hundreds — as in Florida 2000, or by 70,000, as in 2016 — the fate of 300 million Americans? Or is this just how the American cookie crumbles?

Teddy Roosevelt referred to the American presidency as a “bully pulpit,” a place for leaders to lead, to bring us forward as a nation, to push the dialogue of America and who we are a little further.

We are also, as Ronald Reagan put it, “a shining city on a hill” and who we put at the top of that hill matters — to us and to the world. We model progress, or its opposite, every time we vote and that takes judgment and character, too.

Perhaps we should listen to Pogo, that wisest of Americans, who said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Those are both words to take to heart and bring into the next polling booth we enter.