America Needs A Boring President

Pete Buttigieg¹ recently stated in an interview that Americans don’t elect a President based on his (or, hopefully eventually, her) ideology. He’s right. We vote holistically. We vote for and against whole human beings. And while a candidate’s placement on the left-right-ideological-spectrum-that’s-just-an-outdated-(but-admittedly-fun)-social-construct-anyway is certainly one factor, there’s no reason to think it’s the most pertinent one. Hence the phenomenon of people who voted for both Sanders and Trump, or the people who love, say, Joe Biden but hate Nancy Pelosi, despite the similarities in their voting records and policy positions².

All politics is identity politics, really.

But I’d argue there is one factor that has mattered more than any other in the recent history of American elections: Coolness. Since 1992³, we have consistently elected the cooler, more fun, less boring of the two viable candidates.

Think about it: Clinton played saxophone on Arsenio. George W. Bush liked baseball⁴ and got straight C’s in college. Obama - enough said. And say what you will about Donald Trump – that he’s a xenophobic, narcissistic, proto-fascist who isn’t intelligent or responsible enough to be in charge of a single unloaded Nerf Gun, never mind the largest military in the history of the planet, for example– but it’s indisputable that he was (and remains) cooler than Hillary Clinton.

A quick caveat: “cool” is not the same as “popular.” This is what so many people who pay attention to middle and high school politics (i. e., middle and high school students) get wrong, and the source of the apparent paradox that I’m sure has frustrated many trying-to-listen-and-empathize parents, guardians, teachers, and other adults who are soundboards for adolescent angst: that the “popular kids” are usually disliked by almost everyone. They are, really, the “Cool Kids," which at least Echosmith got right.

The difference is this: being Cool has to do with intensity of feeling more than positivity. It’s about notoriety; it’s about significance; it’s about “no such thing as bad press.” When Fall Out Boy sang, “I don’t care what you think / as long as it’s about me,” they may well have been writing the official anthem of Coolness. (And arguably marking their own transition to being traditional-style Rock Stars rather than niche-emo-scene stars, which I am still kind of reeling from, which is why it took me until 2019 to actually listen to anything after Infinity on High.)

You can be tremendously popular without being the slightest bit Cool. Look at Maroon 5.

So who is the coolest person running for President in 2020? Well, the first obvious answer is Beto O’Rourke, but there’s also a chance that Beto may have crossed the line from Cool into Trying to be Cool, which is the least Cool thing imaginable. Bernie and Biden both have some residual Cool-old-guy energy, but I expect that to fizzle out soon. Kamala Harris is a possibility. But right now, I think the frontrunner in the Cool race is Buddha-judge himself, with the inevitable Ben Wyatt comparisons and Norwegian-book story, and, of course, his hidden-in-plain-sight homosexuality.⁶

If the Buttigieg bubble doesn’t burst and he actually wins the election, it’s proof of a couple things:

1. We’re still obsessed with coolness
2. We’ve culturally moved on from the idea of the Big Man to that of the Small Guy
3. The right-wing criticism of liberals as obsessed with “identity politics” is valid

Now, who is the least cool person running for candidate? That’s much easier. Elizabeth Warren. Look at her: she’s basically a personified owl. She’s what would be spit out by an algorithm designed to synthesize everything Americans hate about the intellectual ivory-tower left-wing. Despite being from Oklahoma (!), her voice is so gratingly Boston Brahmin it’s practically mid-Atlantic; all the condescension of a British accent with none of its majesty. Every time she speaks, I feel like I’ve been called into the Headmistress’s office – not even to be scolded, because getting in trouble is Interesting, so much as to be subjected to a dry lecture on the merits of extracurricular activities or something. Hell, even Warren’s biggest scandal is boring – she filled in the wrong bubble on some bureaucratic form like thirty years ago. It makes Theresa May’s running through wheat fields sound wild.

But none of this stops me from liking her, supporting her, or (most likely) voting for her in the Democratic primary in 2020. I think it’s about time we had a boring president again. One who will actually sit down and do the dull, wonky policy work that will make the country better, and who will recognize that we Americans are greedy, selfish children who will never appreciate what she does for us. Boring people get shit done.

Another caveat: I can say all this because I'm a boring person, myself.

We need to suck it up and make the responsible choice for once. We need to be like Rachel in that episode of Friends where she gets to hire an assistant and has a choice between the young, hip, (albeit stupid-named) eye-candy Tag⁷ and “dumb, old, perfect-for-the-job Hilda," and maturely hires Hilda. (Never mind that she changes her mind and impulsively offers Tag the job the next day. That’s a whole Joey-scene later so it doesn’t really count. Pretend your cable went out or your oven timer went off or something.)

Or else – if we want to continue⁸ to have a functioning country – we need to turn the Presidency into a ceremonial, figurehead role like QEII, and make the Speaker of the House or the Senate Majority Leader into, like, co-Prime Ministers or something (or, better yet, eliminate the Senate altogether and just go full-unicameral.) That way, we can keep the entertainment and the palace intrigue, without actually trusting the Cool Kids with any real responsibilities.

But until then - let’s make “But Her Policies” the new Democratic version of “but her emails.”

***

Totally Optional Endnotes

¹ Pronounced “Buddha judge,” as far as I can determine

² The White Guy factor here seems so obvious it doesn’t need pointing out, but here we are anyway. Since I am a White Guy myself, I don’t want to be seen as ignoring or minimizing the powerful role of race and/or gender in these decisions. Thank you for joining me here in the endnotes, by the way, (despite the fact that I specifically said they were optional) - endnotes that, in another classic White Guy move, I have to admit are brought to you largely by the fact that I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace lately.

³ Or maybe even since 1980, as long as you treat '88 as a fluke. George H.W. Bush was boring as hell, of course (although so was Dukakis), but you could make the case that he wasn’t really so much an elected president as he was the Remnants of Reagan. Like Reagan was the TV show you actually had sat down to watch (remember TV? Wasn’t TV great?) and then GHWB was the one that came on afterwards when you were too lazy to look for the remote (aka the only reason why I've seen any show that airs on CBS at 8PM on weekdays, with the exception of Survivor). In that view, then, our last boring president was Jimmy Carter, whose boring practicality is best epitomized by sweaters.

⁴ Certainly, this detail was enough for me and my third-grade classmates during the election of 2000. We skimmed a Time For Kids comparison chart of Bush and Gore, saw that Bush owned a favorite baseball team and Gore gave some liberal-elitist non-answer like “not really into sports,” and it was sealed right there – Mrs. Twomey’s class, of the third portable off the cafeteria, elected GWB almost unanimously⁵. Even I cast my ballot for him, because I hadn’t yet come to terms with my own identity as a proto-Gore – I was still a few years away from being the obnoxious sort of “non-conformist” conformist who posted things on social media during the Super Bowl to the effect of, “Oooooh did the sportsballer score a home run?!”

⁵ Speaking of the 2000 election, one of the lesser-known consequences of the whole debacle is that it got me and my classmates out of a homework assignment. We were supposed to watch the election (with our parents/guardians, presumably) and then color in a map of the United States based on the results – red, blue, that whole shebang. But then the next day, we showed up with a veritable LGBT+++ pride flag of Floridas (okay, that’s not actually true – most of them were still white, and the others were red, blue, or that unGodly color that results when you color first with one crayon and then another one over it, which is certainly not anything resembling purple) and so Mrs. Twomey said we could have a little more time to work on it, just until the country actually figured out who had won Florida (which I am assuming will be any minute now.)

⁶ Obviously, Buttigieg is open about being gay, but he doesn’t have The Voice or partake in any of the tropes that actually connote gayness to most Americans. He’s Will, not Jack.

⁷ Played by Eddie Cahill, in case you’re headed to a Friends trivia night sometime soon.

⁸ Being generous here