Before you start firing off rude, biting comments hoping to make me cry, just put yourself in his shoes for a minute. He's broken the United States of America. He was given the most powerful nation the world has ever known and driven it right into the ground. I mean, how would you feel? Especially if you came from a high-achieving family. Like most guys he tried to follow in the footsteps of his dad. But what if your dad was a decorated WW II fighter pilot, college baseball star, Ambassador to the U.N., C.I.A. Director and President of the United-States? You might not even try to amount to anything for, say, the first forty-seven-years of your life.
But you watch your little brother Jeb get the good grades and the praise from the 'rents. You can't just sit back and watch him rise and rise without making one last stab at success. Like two kids playing Risk, you divide up the nation. You run for governor in Texas, little Jeb takes Florida.
This time your the one who wins. Jeb has to try again.
Now everything's changed. You're on your way to showing that hardass dad of yours that he was wrong about you all these years. And by the way, he might have been a great war hero but he was only a mediocre President. You'll get to the White House and laugh last and so loud they'll hear you all the way back in Midland.
No mediocre Presidency for this son. No. You're swinging for the fence.
And it sort of works for a while. Big ideas and big opportunities. Your advisors assure you that you can play war and cakewalk to a win. Then it goes bad. And worse. The damn war never ends. Poll numbers crater. Nobody's comparing you to Lincoln or Roosevelt. Now they're comparing you to Joseph Hazelwood, captain of the Exxon Valdez.
First veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas calls you the "Worst President in American History." You laugh it off. She's an old crank anyway. Then professor Sean Wilentz writes a cover story for Rolling Stone calling you, again, the worst President ever. Not only that, but 81% of his fellow history professors have already declared your reign a failure. It's finally starting to sink in that Iraq is officially a defeat, the strongest military in the world dispirited and on its way to breaking, you've run up more debt than a drunken sailor before payday, your seemingly bulletproof political party looks headed back out of favor, Latin America is slipping out of your nation's sphere of influence for the first time in over a century, North Korea has acquired The Bomb. All on your watch.
What does he say to his mom and dad when they come over for dinner? Oops?
I can't help feeling sorry for him. I'm a Democrat. I always root for the underdog.
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