Characteristics of a president

I am amazed at how the 2008 presidential campaign is bringing out the Luddites. The recent opinion piece by C. Robert Gates is symptomatic of what I am observing. Statements are equivalent to “you better not elect that lawyer from Illinois because he wants to free the slaves.”

No amount of training or experience will prepare anyone to be president of the United States because significant unpredictable, unanticipatable and unforeseeable challenges will surely appear during any presidency.

“I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile — a hijacked airplane as a missile,” said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, May 17, 2002.

I believe that the characteristics, which an electable candidate for president must possess, are intelligence and adaptability. I believe that such personal characteristics are the only ones that will surely benefit the nation. As described in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” those are precisely the characteristics which Abraham Lincoln possessed, and which served the nation so well during his presidency.

In my opinion, George W. Bush’s lack of intelligence and his stubbornness, e.g. a C student at Yale, “bring them on” and “I am the decider,” are precisely the personal characteristics which have severely wounded this nation during his term in office.

As for John McCain, based upon the positions which he held before 2004, I made a significant donation to his Senate re-election campaign. Due to his recent flip-flopping from his pre-2004 positions on a number of significant issues, apparently to garner the support of the Republican Party base for his presidential campaign, I can no longer support him.

Donald E. Schreiber

Incline Village