I presume by now you have all seen the video of Herman Cain trying, and failing, to answer a simple question about the president’s policy towards Libya. He actually upstaged Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric and Rick Perry’s meltdown at a recent debate. It appeared from the video that Mr. Cain was struggling to remember whether Libya was the country where the United States had intervened to protect civilians and to drive Gaddafi from power. Palin, Perry, and Cain are all examples of candidates who know nothing about the world who think they should run our government.
Thinking about it, I am reminded that Ronald Reagan didn’t choose an ignoramus as a running mate. Even though he didn’t much care for him, he chose George H.W. Bush to be his vice-president. Poppy Bush’s résumé included a stint in the Pacific during the war, a successful business career, two terms in Congress, serving as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and as (essentially) our ambassador to Red China, and directing the Central Intelligence Agency. As vice-president, Bush basically ran Reagan’s National Security Council. When Bush succeeded Reagan in the Oval Office, he was well-prepared to deal with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union. He also knew that Gaddhafi ruled over Libya.
Maybe it was his confidence in his own foreign policy expertise that led him to pick a foolish neophyte as his vice-president. Dan Quayle was a ridiculous pick and totally unprepared to be president if the need had arose. Similarly, President Nixon chose a partisan buffoon, Spiro Agnew, to be his vice-president. Nixon never asked Agnew’s advice about anything. But if Agnew hadn’t been forced to resign over corruption charges arising from his time as the governor of Maryland, he would have been our 38th president. Think about that.
There is a strain of know-nothingness that has run through the Republican Party in the post-war years. We’ve had competent, but flawed, presidents like Eisenhower, Nixon, and Poppy Bush. We muddled through with Reagan, who was able to lean on Bush in many circumstances. But we’ve also flirted with Agnew and Quayle and Palin. And we had the absolute disaster of George W. Bush’s two-term presidency.
And look at the field of candidates the Republicans are providing to us this time around. It’s really an insult that they want us to seriously consider Herman Cain or Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann as potential presidents. They literally know nothing about anything, and what they think they know is wrong. We have Gingrich prattling on about the dangers of Shariah Law. He have Romney wanting to stay in Iraq, double the size of Gitmo, and zero out all our foreign aid commitments. The only candidate in the field who resembles a real presidential candidate is Jon Huntsman, who (campaign rhetoric aside) is at least worldly enough to have some clue how to behave on the international stage.
I know Dennis Kucinich has a quirky idea or two, but you can go back to JFK and not find any Democratic presidential candidates who were one-tenth as unprepared to be president as the majority of the current Republican candidates. I’m not talking about ideology. I’m talking about being able to find foreign countries on a map. You have Michele Bachmann decrying democratic governments in the Arab world and asking us to emulate communist China in our social policies. Nothing like that ever happened on the Democratic side.
I just think it is dangerous that we have one party in our two-party system that puts absolutely no premium on knowledge. These candidates should know better than to run. And the people should know better than to support them.
