Burn of the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
I think as a group, many of the people that run for office do it for personal power reasons and not to be a “public servant.” Those that have the public service mindset often get frustrated by the rest which leaves only the others in charge. One of the deacons at our Parish was on the school board of a large city. I don’t know all the reasons why he stopped being that, and he is the poster child for good and faithful servant, but he did stop. If they had listened to him, I think the city would be a very different place today. Obviously, the characteristics of the politician only get heightened when they are elected, for good or bad. And while Abraham Lincoln was certainly a politician before he was elected to be president, he had no real administrative experience. His performance in the office is nothing less than requesting and receiving divine guidance.
IMO, you don’t need superior men. You benefit from men who (1) aren’t making a career of it, (2) have a baseline of integrity, (3) are not particularly vain, (4) are willing and able to mix with their constituents, (5) have sufficient smarts and savvy to avoid being conned by lobbyists and members of the permanent government, and (6) have a set of principles and are willing to say ‘no’ to people on the basis of those principles. People in executive positions should have had previous experience as administrators. No categorical objection to superior people, but now and again such people forget what their role is. See Rex Tillerson for an example.
One thing that gets you about presidential elections (and you can see this in spades in Canadian elections) is how little voters seem to value accomplishment, extraordinary or mundane. See the Democratic primaries in 2020. You had three men among them who had built lucrative businesses from the ground up, two men who had had experience in corporate management and in state government, and a state governor who had a history of appealing to red state electorates. Democratic voters weren’t the least bit interested in any of them. They took an interest in Biden, Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar. They eventually nominate Biden, the grossest of the bunch. You want to hack off a partisan Democrat, offer a precis of the actual work histories of Barack and Michelle Obama.