Harvard's Election 2008 Blog

I don't get it - I hate arugula anyway.

I am writing because a friend told me I should. I do not know whether this means that he thought I was an intelligent person with strong political opinions and something to say that people would find worth hearing, or if he meant that the website would look more impressive if more people wrote, making my words just filler. If I find out it is the latter, you can be sure my future entries will constitute my position on the heated AL East pennant race. But for now, I will try to start serious.

I am not sure how to feel when I look at this website, and see a bunch of young, brilliant, and inspired minds tearing each other to pieces. Part of me is excited, knowing that our political climate is in good hands, with people like this viewing politics as the route to changing the world. Part of me is depressed, because it almost seems like they are taking the elections much more seriously and more maturely than the candidates.

Recently, I have been absolutely dumbfounded by the approach that is being taken to the race, for what is still widely considered the most influential office in the world. Barack Obama eats arugula. John McCain eats cous-cous. On his ranch. He has so many houses he cannot even count. But Obama behaves like Paris Hilton (even if the Obama sex tape was less interesting and received altogether fewer views).

This has rapidly become a game of who is the more pretentious snob, and to me it seems pointless. What do they hope to achieve? So that is a poor way of phrasing it - I know exactly what they hope to achieve. The purpose is to show who is more in touch with the needs of the common man, by showing whose life shares the most dimensions with the common man. The problem for me is that this approach seems fundamentally flawed. Neither of them has much in common with whatever they believe the common man to be. We do not have ranches or book deals, even if some of us may have cous-cous. I do not believe that either candidate will ever be more similar to me than to the other one.

The only reason this does not bother me is because of a subtle distinction I make. I do not want them to try to prove they are like their voters, because they cannot. But this does not mean it would be similarly impossible for them to prove they understand their voters. I believe that even if they are not me, they can still understand me. All they have to do to win my support and respect is to prove that to me, something neither of the candidates is doing right now because, in order to do that, they have to talk about the issues. They have to show that they understand my views and that, even if their seven houses make them safe from an economic crash, they feel a real responsibility to make sure their prerogative is to keep me safe as well.

I do not want a human president. We are talking about the person that controls the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. This individual is responsible for decisions so vast in their importance that I cannot even begin to comprehend them. Every day, they might do something that could change the future (a note to anyone reading: for me, please stop using the phrase "change history." You cannot "change history" unless you work for the government in the novel 1984).

I want a superhuman president. Someone capable of understanding my views, and empathizing with my position so that they can and feel obliged to do what is in my best interest, and what I would try to do were I in charge. But I want them to be able to do it. And also to be able to empathize with the millions of other voters who are not like me, and thus make a decision to the benefit of our nation. So please, Obama and McCain, do not show me you are like me. Show me you are better than me. Show me you can do what I could never do. And if you have to eat arugula to do it, please go ahead. Even Popeye had his spinach.

I would urge all these bright minds (the ones who have stuck with me so far) to go out and keep searching out the issues, but also to convince your friends that this prying into personal lives is not going to get us anywhere. The entire situation, in my mind, recalls Bill Clinton. You have encountered this opinion before: little William should not have been cavorting with presidential aides while in office. When I discussed this with a friend of mine, he said he believed the reason this upset people was because they felt that if Bill was untrustworthy and corrupt in his personal life, he should not be trusted as a suitable president. How could we trust him? But personal trust and political trust are different things; what offended me was not that he lied to his wife - that is his business, and if Machiavelli taught us nothing else (sadly, he taught us too much, but that is another matter) it was that what character our leader has in the political sphere is more important and frequently different to his private character - it was that he tried so hard to hide the truth from the public when we asked for it. Had he come clean, that would have been fine with me. And if you find this view offensive, remember that if asked to choose between a non-smoking, light drinker who is a decorated war hero, and a alcoholic, lazy, offensive politician who had been kicked out of office twice, choose the latter. Otherwise, you might be choosing Adolph Hitler. The latter is, of course, Winston Churchill.

Personally, politics has never interested me that much - political theory I find endlessly fascinating, but I find that the practical application becomes almost insufferably dull. So if you find this theoretical approach boring, I recommend you not read anything else I may choose to write (should I ever again).