On my 35th Birthday, an old friend reminded me with a Facebook post, that I was now, finally, eligible to run for the U.S. Presidency. Since anybody can grow up to be President, and the Primaries were revealing a profound lack of compelling candidates, I decided to throw my hat in the ring, and announced my exploratory committee with a status update a few days later.
That short-lived campaign taught me two lessons about why good people don't to run for office. First, within hours, my cousins were calling in favors. One wanted three day weekends by presidential fiat. I forget what the other wanted, but clearly, they weren't on the same page with me--saving the country from the communist scourge and such.
The second finding was more subtle. On the issues that I believe are most important to the country, I'm more than willing to state my belief, argue it best I can, and trust that in good faith, my family and friends will respect me as much after a good discussion as before. The challenge is the contentious issues. Politicians have to stand up in front of crowds of people and pretend that deep social issues have black and white solutions. They don't. Politicians have to stand up and claim that their ideas, whatever side they happen to be on, are absolutely right. They're not.
These issues are personal. They're emotional. They're messy. There are underlying absolutes that are clear--that we treat all people fairly, that we favor freedom over tyranny--but it's rare when the issues of the day concern themselves with these absolutes. Most of the time, we're glad that 13-year old isn't having a baby, hurt that a 33-year old isn't able to have her baby, and asking God to explain why some black kid got shot by some Hispanic man. Messy. I don't want to fit our hardest questions into the smallest soundbites and I don't want to have to pretend that messy isn't messy. Moral cowardice, perhaps, but I think there's greater moral courage is saying "I don't know." Few of us do, and those who think they do, are usually wrong.
One final observation from my week on the campaign trail: my brother campaigned for me around his office. The consensus among voters there was that "a trained monkey could do better" than the people running in the primary. I can't argue that point, but I still feel obliged to prove it, such as I can. I'm going to take this opportunity of my 35th year, and the wisdom that our Founding Fathers seemed to think 35 years imparts, to write about what I would do if I were President. For the most part, I'll write on five priorities--items I believe trump the rest of the clutter in a typical election cycle: Taxes & the Economy, Healthcare, National Security, Education, Energy & the Environment. Then, I'd like to write a bit on moral courage--how we might get past soundbites and pretending the answers come easily. Should be a fun ride.
