See the world, get elected - Los Angeles Times
I suggest the Constitution be amended to require that candidates for the presidency (and vice presidential selections as well) have visited a minimum of 20 countries. The amendment would require that each visit would have been made more than four years before the candidate’s possible inauguration and that it would have lasted at least 48 hours. This serves as proof that a candidate is genuinely interested in, and possibly even knowledgeable about, the world around him or her.
Once again we are being treated to the opinion of yet another intellectual that people running for office should be more like them and less like the rest of us.
Peter Guttman thinks that candidates should be more widely traveled. Something like the 19th Century “tour” that every well brought up youth of a certain class was provided with. It is not surprising to find out that Mr. Guttman writes travel books and has a degree in Geography.
So much for the conceit that in American anyone can grow up to be President.
Maybe once upon a time. Under Mr. Guttman’s formula Abraham Lincoln would have been disqualified. But now? The fact is that one one should be running for President that doesn’t have the time and funds to take a trip around the world. How else is there to meet the ‘right” people?
The number of countries visited is not a number that was just plucked out of the air. A serious candidate must have visited at least 20 countries for no less than 48 hrs for a simple reason. There are a great many people, such as myself, who have spent far longer than 48 hrs in foreign countries. The problem is that most of those countries had names like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Germany, Korea or Japan. That is, they visited there while performing military service. But no one who Mr. Guttman would consider enough like him to qualify for office would serve in the military. It’s just so…common and it is peopled mostly by the kind of people that you wouldn’t want to associate with on a normal basis.
But doesn’t it seem curious that a travel writer wants someone running for office to be more like him? In fact, it seems to be a common trope. Hollywood celebrities want the President to be like them, academics want him to be like them, pundits want him to conform to their ideas. It seems that wanting the President to be more like them and less like us is very common, and simply by its normalcy unattainable.
When I was young it was accepted that anyone had the chance of becoming President. In the 50 some years since that time things seem to have changed from the President being the leader of the people to the President being the ruler of the people. That is a big distinction. Leaders are developed from within. Rulers are imposed from without. A leader can be anyone with the right talent. A ruler has to have the right family, the right schools and the right friends. A leader is first among equals, a ruler is a class apart.
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