It’s unlike me to settle on a candidate for President so early in the primary season, but I’ve made my choice. It’s this guy.
Those of you outside the Washington, DC area may not know who Anthony Williams is, and you might be confused by the fact that he doesn’t appear on the ballot in any of the 50 states. Anthony Williams was the mayor of Washington, DC from 1999 to 2007, and he did a heckuva job cleaning up after a heckuva mess.
How? After the disastrous administration of the grandstanding (and coke-snorting) Marion Barry, Tony Williams came into the mayor’s office with his nasally voice and his dorky little bow tie. He didn’t spew forth a lot of bullshit about the audacity of hope and the firmness of character. Williams simply rolled up his sleeves, set the dial for Maximum Wonkiness, and turned out budget surplus after budget surplus. You could see him on TV in press conferences for years, discussing the minutiae of fiscal policy with the authority of someone who stayed up half the night digging through stacks of government reports. Nobody was inspired to write a song about how they had a crush on Tony Williams.
Before Williams, the city was in such dire shape that Congress had to step in and effectively wrest control out of Mayor Barry’s hands, setting up a control board to manage the city’s affairs. Before Williams, a good chunk of DC’s parking meters were permanently busted, because a bunch of punks discovered that you could easily decapitate them with a baseball bat. Seriously. The city was full of smashed-up parking meters that the city didn’t bother to fix, losing out on millions of dollars of revenue.
In my view, Anthony Williams is the model of what a president should be. A sober, staid manager who keeps his head, who knows the facts better than anyone else, who arbitrates disputes by getting people to sit down at a table and discuss things calmly like grown-ups. Presidents do not need to be soaring masters of inspirational rhetoric. They don’t need to promise you the moon. You can have your presidents who promise you get-rich-quick schemes; I want a president who consistently delivers prime plus two.
It’s obvious who I’m taking aim at here. Hint: his name begins with a “B” and ends with “arack Obama.” I’ve been watching the hype surrounding this guy for months now and shaking my head in amazement. It’s amazing how many people fall for this stuff every two years. We’re going to restore civility to Washington, DC! We’re going to cut through the partisan gridlock! We’re going to change the tone! Right, sure. President Howard Dean said that too, as did President Wesley Clarke, President Ross Perot, President Colin Powell, President Gary Hart, and President Jerry Brown. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she was going to end the partisan bickering in Congress, right before she started threatening other Democrats with retaliation if they didn’t support the fiercely partisan Jack Murtha for House Majority Leader.
Every time I hear the rhetoric about courage and audacity of hope, I roll my eyes. What the hell does that even mean? Courage and audacity to hope for what? It’s meaningless blather. It doesn’t tell you anything. It’s kind of like those people who tell you that they don’t follow any particular religion, but they’re “spiritual.” To quote the late Chris Farley — well, la-dee-frickin’-da!
Memo to Senator Barack Obama: It wasn’t particularly noteworthy that Martin Luther King had a dream, it was noteworthy what he was dreaming about. I mean, Osama bin Laden has a dream too. He’s inspired radical Muslims with the courage and audacity to hope and dream better than any sorry-ass American politician is likely to do in our lifetimes. The problem is that bin Laden’s dream is about a new caliphate slicing off the heads of infidels.
We don’t need new dreams. George Washington, Patrick Henry, Ben Franklin, et al had a pretty damn good dream (though they could have done better in terms of extending that dream beyond the walls of white male landowners). What we need are good administrators and competent executors of that old dream.
Which is kind of what makes me shake my head at all this disparaging talk of the “Clinton machine.” What’s wrong with machines? I don’t know about you, but I drive a machine to work every day, and I use a machine to wash my clothes. Despite the audacity of hope that using a ballpoint pen and notebook paper to write this blog post would inspire, I think I’m better off typing it on a machine. Machines are efficient. They work. And by definition they have no moral agency of their own; they’re just tools to help achieve the ambitions of human beings.
It’s not that I don’t like Obama. (And I’m not trying to write this in a backhanded attempt to boost Hillary Clinton.) I suspect Obama’d be a pretty good president, and he’d do a decent job of restoring respectability to the United States on the global Whuffie exchange. His rhetoric is good, but his ideas are hardly revolutionary. I think he’s got as good a plan as any candidate for dealing with the Iraq mess. He couldn’t possibly do much worse of a job than our current president — but then again, he shares that distinction with everyone from Al Roker to Bobcat Goldthwaite to, hell, maybe even Marion Barry. I’m sure if Obama wins the Democratic nomination, I’ll vote for him over whichever nut job wins the GOP nod. (Although I’m prepared to listen to John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, if either of them get the bid.)
But this “inspiration to change the world” stuff is just a shtick. That’s all it is. It’s a good shtick, and to some extent a president needs to be able to do a good shtick. But in the end, it’s not the capacity to love and heal and embrace change that is going to help this country. It’s the ability to be a boring policy wonk who stays up half the night burying one’s nose in stacks of government reports.
Like Tony Williams.