Who I Want for President

[jmondine]

There's been a healthy and effective reaction lately to the last two elections' cliche of "I want a President I can have a beer with". More and more pundits, talk show hosts and guests have been saying, "I want a smart President, someone who's smarter than I am".

I will go a step further. I want a President who is one of the smartest, wisest, insightful, cunning and brilliant human beings on the planet. I want a President whose compassion, fairness, and vision will make such a positive change to the country and the world that historians will be talking about him or her for centuries.

I'm not looking for perfection. Even my favorite Presidents have had supremely dark moments: Jefferson used racism to justify not freeing his own slaves. Lincoln approved Sherman's march, which devastated thousands of innocent civilians throughout the South. FDR approved the internment of Japanese Americans.

But each of them, in their own way, pushed forward the evolution of humankind to a more noble, just, and truly Democratic destiny. It should be the ambition of everyone who succeeds them to do the same, and the duty of every voter to look for that ambition, and the talent to achieve it, in their candidates.