Presidential TV ads. Are these REALLY catering to what The American People (think they) want?!
Based on what they chose to emphasize in the ads they bought during Olympic coverage, one major-party candidate intends to "create 5 million jobs" by pursuing alternate energy sources, while the other intends to "stand up to Big Tobacco and Big Oil."
Yeah, that's exactly what a president should do: "Create" jobs by force of will (hell, if that were the goal in and of itself, we could hire 10 million people to dig holes, and 10 million more to replace the dirt, and just print an arbitrary amount of currency to pay them all -- what could possibly go wrong?), or better yet pointedly stoke an adversarial relationship with whichever industry happens to be least popular at the time.
(The part about pursuing alternate energy sources is plausibly laudable, but on the other hand is this really something that requires top-of-the-agenda presidential leadership? Are we really to believe that alternate energy has to be a U.S. government thing because somehow nobody else would ever be interested in it?)
The last time I checked our constitution (no, I've never been one of those guys who carried a pocket-sized constitution everywhere, though such people are underrated), the president is in no particular order:
*- Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. armed forces
*- someone who signs some bills into law and vetoes others
...and less officially someone who gives stirring orations. (On that note I actually quite liked Obama's recent Bill Cosby routine.)
Posted by Matt Bruce at August 18, 2008 12:21 PMOne thing we've seen is the President is also the guy to decide which several thousand people get put into positions of great power to make decisions on a million issues, including energy policy, and that matters a great deal no matter what the President himself says. (See the recent DOJ report about Monica Goodling for an example.)
Posted by: M.S. at August 18, 2008 06:30 PMI suppose one answer to that issue would be let them only select hundreds of people to make thousands of decisions.
Posted by: Kubi at August 18, 2008 07:24 PM