A fall in the fall

Author's Note: This post was inspired by President Obama's performance in the first debate he had with Mitt Romney. I didn't think he was that bad; people were mostly criticizing him for looking uninterested while Romney was speaking which made no sense to me because I judge people in a debate on what they say, not how they look when they aren't talking. Still, so many commentators blasted Obama for looking down at his notes a lot that I wondered if he did it on purpose because he must have known how the pundits would react and even practiced acting that way in preparing for the debate.


I wonder if Presidents (or other incumbent politicians) ever throw their re-election bids. I mean, what if you work so hard to be President and you find you don’t like the job? People are disappointed with their chosen profession all the time.

On top of the fact that you might find you just do not like being President like you might grow to hate any other job, there are good reasons to not want to have the job of President in particular:

1. The job doesn’t pay as well as the lecture circuit awaiting an ex-President;
2. You are responsible in everyone's eyes for so many things out of your direct control (everything from the performance of the economy to -- literally -- world peace) which must be very stressful;
3. It is impossible to have a normal personal life when you're always in the spotlight; and,
4. All politicians, but Presidents in particular, have to work very long hours. Like "6am to midnight with 1 week of vacation every other year" long hours.*

In other words, Presidents might want to quit their job because of 1) low-pay, 2) stress, and 3) work-life balance. Those are the same reasons most people want to leave their jobs. But it would be really hard to get people to understand that you don't want to be President so you couldn't just quit like most people.

 

You might think that if a President grew to hate his (or her!) job that much then he (or she!) would just decline to pursue their re-election and play the "More time with my family" card. You'd think wrong. If they refused to go back out on the campaign trail then they would be pilloried by their supporters for opening the door to whichever nominee the opposing party selected who now got to go against a non-incumbent, which is always easier. Presumably there would be anger over the fact that certain promises made in the first campaign were not yet fulfilled. Plus, a quitting President would get much less money on the lecture circuit and from their memoirs because his (or her!) supporters wouldn't want to spend as much dough to hear the speeches and read the books of an ex-President that let them down as they would of an ex-President that went down fighting.

And that's just talking about the mass of your supporters that you don't know personally. There are inevitably thousands of good friends, bag-men, and political interns who gave up a lot of their money and professional ambition to support your ascendancy. The best example of this would be the President's wife who has to sacrifice in all kinds of ways so that her husband can be President. What if you can't find the words to explain to her and other people why you don't want to this thing that you spent so much to get in the first place? In that case, you'd have to take a dive.

The trick would be to throw the presidential campaign without alienating your “fanbase”. You'd only have to do poorly enough to lose 2 or 3% of the vote in a few key counties since most Presidential elections are so close now.** This would be very feasible in modern politics because political machines and surveying are so sophisticated that you could get terrific information from headquarters about how to "accidentally on purpose" sabotage your campaign with a key "blunder" here or there. You would still appear to be working hard the rest of the time, like a boxer who moves around a lot in the ring but is careful not to land any strong blows before he falls to the mat at the key time. Or you could be leader of the free world. Half of one, six dozen of the other.

 *: May not apply to Presidents named George W. Bush.

**: I think this is because as soon as one issue delivers a clear majority of the voters then both parties will agree on it.