How to Stop Kanye West from Becoming President
Would you be able to get anywhere in your career if you:
- Categorized an entire immigrant group as “rapists” in a public statement;
- Described a senior former colleague as “dumb as a rock”;
- Routinely insulted anybody with whom you happen to share a disagreement;
- Told a journalist she’s a “nasty person” simply for asking a benign question;
- Regularly called women names and commented on people’s physical appearance.
I don’t know about your line of work, but in my chosen career, any of those actions would lead very quickly to a rapid exit.
Yet none of these statements has stopped Donald Trump.
In almost all alternate careers, such a state of affairs would be cause for disqualification. This would be well before we even get to the area of reasonable job performance: hours spent on the job (not on Twitter or the golf course); effort spent on providing reliable fact-based information to your audience; creating unity and reaching for consensus within your organization; consulting the right people when it comes to issues of collective importance; and building trust with colleagues and the public/clients/etc.
In the United States, work standards are usually pretty high in many vocations and fields, across a range of institutions (not all institutions, to be sure, but many).
The U.S. Constitution requires that a candidate has to meet three requirements to run for the office of President of the United States: be a natural born citizen; be at least 35 years of age and be a U.S. resident for at least 14 years.
We all know the process afterwards involving the major political parties, competition in primaries, and the election.
For arguably the most powerful political office in the world, these requirements are strikingly thin.
The founding logic behind this very low standard was presumably to allow ordinary men to run for the presidency.
As the challenges of the modern world become more complex, this logic has become antiquated. The president must be a man or woman able to rise up to enormous challenges and has to be anything but ordinary.
Because every word uttered by the president and every action undertaken by him/her is of such import, having someone take office who is particularly capable and of the right temperament is all the more imperative.
Maybe it is time to introduce aptitude tests for anybody desiring to run for the office of president of the United States. For a position which can directly and indirectly affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people (if not more), it is odd that there aren’t more strict requirements and standards for running.
That the current system of eligibility is failing is belied by the fact that of the last three presidents (Trump, Obama and Bush Jr), two of them (Trump and Bush Jr.) are ranked by presidential scholars as among the worst US presidents of all time.
Bush started a destructive war in Iraq on false pretenses and oversaw the dissolution of the U.S. economy. Trump has abrogated all standards of common decency toward fellow citizens, has sowed division, and has seriously harmed the dignity of the office. And perhaps even more importantly, he failed to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic in any laudable manner in a country which has enormous scientific and technological capabilities to do so.
The fact that Kanye West, a man with zero policy training, is now running for President, after the horrors visited upon the office by Trump, is the last straw in robbing the office of the dignity it so desperately deserves and needs.
So why not have aptitude tests (and even psychological screenings and trainings) for the office of US president? After all, if you want a career in the State Department, you have to take the Foreign Service Officer Test. If you want to be a doctor and practice medicine, you have to pass your board exams. A lawyer has to pass the bar exam. A professor has to be a Ph.D. An accountant has to pass the CBA exam. And many government security positions have their own tests.
I understand that the presidency is an elected office and therefore necessarily different from a profession. But it still is, at the end of the day, a job that requires enormous skill and knowledge in many areas. The president has to have a basic command of geography, English, history, science, mathematics, law, public policy. He/she has to be able to communicate with people every day without causing grave offense every single time. And finally the president has to be socialized in the world of politics and diplomacy. You can’t have somebody running his or her mouth at whatever time in the day and under whatever passing whim.
Perhaps a comparison with parliamentary systems over the last 25 years is apt here.
While those systems also occasionally produce the wrong leaders, there is one protective measure built into their edifice that makes them less likely to do so: a prime minister, say in the UK, is the leader of a political party. He/she has usually already served in parliament and in political office before. Therefore, by the time the prime minister takes office, that person can draw on a significant number of policy experiences to shape their tenure.
It is not enough to just be a celebrity and have money. The president makes life or death decisions every day. Neither the United States, nor the world for that matter, can afford the wrong leadership, especially during a horrific global pandemic. Perhaps having more requirements can lead to better choices.
