Picking Presidents

Several weeks ago I saw a message board thread titled Americans, who are you voted for President? I debated about whether to read it, as online conflict and vitriol tends to affect my mood in the real world, but for some reason decided to go ahead with it. Luckily it stayed civil throughout. But, anyway, the original poster asked whether Americans chose their president based on who would be best for the country or who would be best for the world. One of the posters responded by saying, "Time and again, people here in the U.S. of A. vote against their own interests, never mind the rest of the world."

Now, that could be a very insightful and accurate comment - after all, it can be hard enough to know what is best for yourself sometimes, let alone the whole nation. But that sort of comment is usually followed by an example - as I think it was in this case - of "After all, we elected Obama" or "We re-elected Bush". Implying, of course, that the commenter does know what would have been best for the nation.

A few years ago I mentioned social scientist John Gottman and his book 7 Principle for Making Marriage Work. At one point in Gottman's book he quotes another book, After the Honeymoon by Dane Wile.

Paul married Alice and Alice gets loud at parties and Paul, who is shy, hates that. But if Paul had married Susan, he and Susan would have gotten into a fight before they even got to the party. That's because Paul is always late and Susan hates to be kept waiting. She would feel taken for granted, which she is very sensitive about. Paul would see her complaining about this as her attempt to dominate him, which he is sensitive about. If Paul had married Gail, they wouldn't have even gone to the party because they would still be upset about an argument they had the day before about Paul's not helping with the housework. To Gail, when Paul does not help, she feels abandoned, which she is sensitive about, and to Paul, Gail's complaining is an attempt at domination, which he is sensitive about.

So, basically what this passage is showing is that whoever you choose to marry, there will be problems. The same with presidents - nobody could be perfect at every aspect of running a country. We see what's wrong with the country now, but how do we know what things would be like if we'd elected Gore or McCain? Of course, I'm not saying that it doesn't matter who we marry or elect. We do need to think carefully about those decisions. But once we make our choice, it's made and for now are stuck with it. If things are really bad we can change, but good reasons for divorce and for ousting a president are not incredibly common.

But electing presidents is very different than choosing who to marry in many ways, one of which is that we have a scheduled time to choose a president again. If did that all the time with marriage it could lead to stress and unhappiness for just about everybody who mattered in our lives. So now we are making the president decision again. And I think that for this election you don't need to think about who we should have picked 4 or 8 or 12 years ago- think in the situation we are in now, and with the knowledge we have now, who do I think is the best choice for the next 4 years?