Peaceful Transfer of Power
At least every eight years, and sometimes after only four, our nation will see one man peacefully hand over the responsibility for being President to another. While we are not the only nation on earth to do so, we are certainly the most consistent.
Dispite my lack of faith in the incoming Current Occupant (to twit Garrison Kellior) it is a beautiful thing to see the most powerful man in the world pretty much just pack up his sh*t, hand the keys over to the next guy, and motor off into the sunset.
President Bush, unlike some former presidents, will not be a thorn in Obama’s side, holding forth on how he would have handled it and giving the new President heartburn. This sort of behavior is what most disgusts me about President Clinton and Carter. Both these men cold expect Reagan and George H.W. Bush to stay out of their hair, but were unable to muster the same class and courtesy.
Being President is hard business. George Bush has aged more than eight yeas, it seems to me. He is entitled to a clear conscience from what I can tell, his mistakes were not of malice or a lack of concern. Nevertheless the brow is heavy for the man who carries the weight of decisions that effect so many.
I think it is a beautiful thing that a man can show up in Washington D.C. on the appointed day, pretty much just unpack his sh*t and start running the country. Unlike the new Junior Senator from Illinois, Obama won’t have a bunch of Democrats telling him he can’t be seated because his election was “tainted” by unsavory associations no matter how many he has. He won the election, and I doubt that outgoing GOP staffers will be prying all the “O”s from office equipment keyboards. Obama does not have to have a reserve of thugs ready to “take to the streets” so he can have his rightful place in the Oval Office.
Given human history, people give up power with devilish rarity. Fidel Castro was convinced his whole life that nobody in the whole of Cuba could run things better than he, and he filled prisons with those who said otherwise. The nations are filled with Princes, Sultans, Kings, Dear Leaders and other power-mad filth whose heads occupy rarefied heights because their jackboots rest on a mountain of oppressed folk.
I don’t care for Obama’ policies, prescriptions or politics, but he was a man not of the manor born and now he will be the most powerful man in the world. He did not rise on a wave of killers, but through plain old democratic action (with all its contretemps). Nobody died, nobody is in the hospital, at least not as a matter of course. In four years or eight, he too will pack up and ride home to Chicago and Democracy will continue on. May it ever be so.
