By David K. Shipler
If only we could
Photoshop politicians, taking a keen and honest eye from one, a civil and
courteous tongue from another, a brain from one who happened to have one, and a
heart from another to place into the one whose vacant soul echoes with
unfeeling arrogance. If we could just move parts around with a cursor to
combine into the ideal presidential candidate, we could relax instead of
grinding our teeth until November. Imagine what a relief it would be if we
didn’t have to wish that Bernie were more sensible and Hillary more credible,
that Ted had learned something beneficial at Princeton, and that The Donald’s
mouth didn’t have to be washed out with soap.
So just for
fun, permit me to irritate almost everybody who reads this by finding in each
candidate some quality that would be suitable in a president, then assembling
the array of characteristics into a composite.
First, let’s
combine the populist appeals of Trump and Sanders, but without their simplistic
rhetoric. We leave behind Sanders’s one-note scapegoating of “Wall Street” so
our perfect candidate has room for nuance and sophistication, which will come
later in the construction process. Of course we lose Trump’s bigotry, misogyny,
bullying, incitement to violence, and ignorance about the American system’s inconvenient
obstacles to ruling by fiat.
Absent
those undesirable qualities, you might ask, what’s left? Good question. What’s
left is both men’s instinctive talent for touching the legitimate frustrations
and disaffections of large numbers of citizens who have suffered a raw deal or
have seen others getting kicked. What’s left is both men’s knack for voicing
the resentments about a government and an economy that have failed to protect
those who have lost their homes, their reliable employment, and their sense of
security and well-being.
