AH, TO BE!
It must be that those men and women who aspire to run for public office are born, basically, of the same stuff of which explorers and adventurous souls are made. They don't need a reason for doing what the what they intend to do. They are a lot like Hillary, who,when asked why he climbed Mt. Everest said because it was there.?
When you see two grown up men seeking to become President of the United States with all of its many built-in headaches and body pains beyond telling, you wonder what reason each of them might give for wanting to do so. I mean the deep down, real-stuff, sequestered reason for doing so, not the formal press conference recitation.
Bush should have good reason. After all his Daddy was President and the kid must have seen or heard something that impressed him about the job. Kerry in his youth concentrated on what was wrong with however it was being done at the time. Ill bet you even money neither one of them ever thought seriously trying to do what they are both doing today. Bill Clinton blamed it all flat out on JFK whom he met once when he was a kid - Clinton, the kid, not Kennedy ...then he had a sharp set of reasons why he wanted to be President.
The stated reasons are not, I dare say, the real ones.
All say in one form or another that they even as youngsters they felt driven to perform public service projects and not to expect compensation, or that the country had been good to them, and to their parents, and they felt a deep obligation to return the favors, or that their ?pioneering predecessors worshiped here in absolute freedom on these beautiful shores and that they had a duty to see to it that the opportunities might exist for our descendants as well. It was the endless sort of sweet sentiments which made post cards enduring favorites for half a century or better.
What drives a man or woman to desire to be president of this nation? Pride... genuine or false? Greed, of some sort? A longing for power and dominion over others?
Or , could it be a subtle combination of those things and others, perhaps? I have long had the feeling that such persons are adventurers at heart and truly want to find if they can do whatever it is they strive to do ? to get to whatever heights they must climb against often unknowable odds under critical handicaps.
Look at them one-by-one, if you like.
What common traits can we possibly find in such diverse personalities as, let's say? George Washington and Calvin Coolidge? Or, compare Theodore Roosevelt with Jimmy Carter, perhaps Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant - picking more or less at random. The simple truth of the matter seems to be that, in spite of all the intimate details of political campaigns and the goldfish bowl awareness of the president's life we commonly have, we never truly get to know what a man is, or will be, until history tells us what he turned out to be... that which he really was.
A.L.M. June 20, 2004 [c662wds]
