The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
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Wouldn’t it be splendid to hear this come out of the mouth of a credible candidate for president:
“My fellow Americans, I’m running for President on a platform of ‘I seek to be President to reduce my own power.’
I seek to be your President for a time to reduce my own power and then retreat to the privacy of being an ordinary citizen in my own backyard with my family.
Gerald Farrington
I use the phrase ‘my fellow Americans’, as many Presidents have, because the status of an American President was intended to be as a ‘Citizen President’. An ordinary citizen, no matter his economic station, is merely elevated for a time to become ‘first among citizens’ to lead the nation. To be an American president, I think a candidate needs previously to have demonstrated the qualities of “good citizenship” in visible ways that are not just fabricated in exaggeration and lies to be packaged and sold.
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Stated in this way, I believe that in seeking power on your behalf, I hope to try to infect the presidency with a strain of the “humility-restraint” that being ‘citizen president’ requires. Humility is not weakness. It is the strength that comes with a recognition of human limitations and flaws. ‘Humility’, if understood and practiced, absorbs the values of honesty, integrity, decency, responsibility, and respect.
Humility requires a respect for other people and things that are not the ‘self’. That respect seeks to share things, including power.
So, I would say that if my party nominates me and then my fellow citizens elect me, I will try to bring a measure of humility back to the White House and restore that effort at humility to American global leadership.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m running for President to reduce and limit the power of the President and the executive branch of government. If elected, I will reduce my own power with reforms designed to permanently restore the constitutional limits and oversight over the president and the executive branch of government that the Founding Fathers intended.
I believe to the very core of my being that we as a people have the best chance of repudiating our flirtation with autocracy over the past dozen years by electing a president who will use his substantial power to limit his own power,
In seeking the nomination of my party, I seek party endorsement and commitment to a thorough house-cleaning of the presidential house, top to bottom. With me at the top, I will clean my own house first by restoring transparent oversight and accountability. I’m seeking the presidency to restore the “balance of power” envisioned by the Framers of the Constitution.
To do that, I will seek the opinions and assistance of experts to restore the proper balance of power, oversight, and accountability among the 3 branches of the federal government — all to ensure that each branch retreats to its own constitutional lane and stays there by each branch exercising its oversight and accountability function over the other two.
I believe that some version of this is what leadership might look like in this pivotal moment of our 250-year journey as an experiment in democracy, one that began in an age of monarchy. The experiment is not sustainable as a democratic one without a measure of autocratic leadership to take America away from autocratic leadership and governance.
What is needed at this moment in our new flirtation with autocracy, a Trump-style autocracy, is a leader who embodies both strength of purpose and humility—humility sufficient to understand at his or her core that human beings are flawed in pursuit of their own self-interest.
The so-called great presidents all possessed strength and resilience laced with an admirable dose of humility. Washington set the tone by humbly declining a third term. Lincoln was humbled by his simple origins, and by having to manage personal illness and loss while trying to win the Civil War. FDR was humbled throughout most of his adult life with physical disability from polio.
But it’s the example of Harry Truman’s humility that also speaks to what a little “leadership-humility” looks like. As the story goes, when the “give-them-hell-Harry” presidency ended, he bought train tickets for himself and Bess, arrived at their original home in Independence, and late at night unpacked their bags and went to bed—the bed of an ordinary citizen.
America dominated the 20th century by exercising the “soft power” of diplomacy at home and abroad. Soft power is leadership, not autocracy. Real leadership is strengthened with demonstrable “citizenship humility”.
Senator Kelly, are you listening?
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Gerald Farrington is a retired professor of history, political science, and retired from the the practice of law. Now living near Tucson. Farrington is also a member of the Arizona Daily Star’s Editorial Advisory Board.
