FOCUS: Nobody on Stage Tonight Will Be President

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

16 December 15

Even if one of them wins, they won't do what the job really requires.

hen Abraham Lincoln took actions based on military considerations, he gave himself the proper title, "commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States." That title is rarely—more like never—heard today. It is just "commander in chief," or even "commander in chief of the United States." This reflects the increasing militarization of our politics. The citizenry at large is now thought of as under military discipline. In wartime, it is true, people submit to the national leadership more than in peacetime. The executive branch takes actions in secret, unaccountable to the electorate, to hide its moves from the enemy and protect national secrets. Constitutional shortcuts are taken "for the duration." But those impositions are removed when normal life returns. But we have not seen normal life in 66 years. The wartime discipline imposed in 1941 has never been lifted, and "the duration" has become the norm. World War II melded into the cold war, with greater secrecy than ever—more classified information, tougher security clearances. And now the cold war has modulated into the war on terrorism.

—Garry Wills, 2007.

I needed to put that on the record because its basic truth was completely lost in a dark land of fear and amid the waving poison ferns in Wolf Blitzer's amygdala. First of all, none of these people will be my commander in chief. None of these people will have the job of keeping me "safe." The first priority of a president is not keeping the country safe. The first priority of a president—indeed, the only priority of a president—is to preserve, protect and defend not me, but the Constitution of the United States. So sitting there, listening to a bunch of people who never served a day in combat talk about how they're going to turn the Middle East into obsidian glass and how they will keep me safe, it was hard not to fall off my chair. Frankly, I wouldn't hire any of these people to watch my car in a valet parking lot, let alone lead the country into what they never miss a chance to call, "the Third World War." Chris Christie? Ted Cruz? Marco Rubio?

Trump?

You see where I'm going here.

When he was a "federal prosecutor," Chris Christie made more ferocious war on his expense account than he did against the "people who want to kill us." (His big trophy case, the Fort Dix Six, is one of those strange half-entrapment cases.) He also doesn't seem to like the Senate very much. Marco Rubio, continuing his ongoing effort to fill out a grown-up person's suit, postured and promised us (again) a 500-ship Navy to keep us safe from the people who drive their pick-up trucks across the ocean to attack us. He also puffed himself up and declined to talk about classified information on national television. (This assumes, of course, that he even knows any, given the fact that he seems to have developed a severe allergy to something in the  room where the Senate Intelligence Committee meets.) Ben Carson said something very weird about being a neurosurgeon in connection with carpet-bombing Syria. (I'm not kidding.) It's a very good thing that we really are not electing a commander-in-chief for the whole country because none of these guys is up to the job.

There's a serious lightweight problem among even the Republican first-teamers. Trump's proposals are a couple dozen sheets to the wind, but they're just more vulgar expressions of things all of the other candidates are proposing. (Both Cruz and Dr. Ben—The Blade—Carson blamed "political correctness" for killing people.) Most conspicuously, Rubio is glued to his notion of being a geopolitical sage, especially on the subject of raising a Sunni army to fight Daesh on the ground. Blitzer asked him, quite logically, precisely how he was going to do that, since nobody over there seems to be too enthusiastic about the prospect. "Well," Rubio replied, "They're going to have to be worked on."

Gotcha.