Munchausen's Syndrome By Political Speculation

      People do it all the time.  It's a waste of effort, mental wheel-spinning.  I first noticed it during the Reagan Administration: something awful would happen, or at least something that the person talking or writing about it thought was awful.  They'd describe it and then go on to suppose that in response to the awful thing, or using it as an excuse, the Administration was then going to do something far worse.

      There's never the faintest shred of hard proof for the far-worse-whatever, but it is presented as a virtual certainty.  Oh, yes, there was wickedness in the works...!  But the predictions never happened, or were a nothingburger when they did.

      Nevertheless, the practice persists: "Situation Z is a disaster.  The President is going to declare war/martial law/King's X to take advantage of it/distract people from it...," all very Wag The Dog stuff. 

      Presidents come in for a lot of this kind of talk, and so do Governors and Mayors.  The Speaker of the House, the Majority Leader in the Senate* and the various party leaders are slathered with a bit of it sometimes.  All that is a clue: it is as though they were James Bond villains!

      In real life, a President trying to deal with a situation that has gone off the rails is a lot more likely to hold a press conference (or even a rally).  I'd almost prefer they were capable of Machiavellian maneuvering but the fact is, they're not.  Not a one of them.

      Most Presidents -- and their Administrations -- steer a course between blithe, ill-informed overconfidence and a frantic struggle to keep up with events, with occasional diplomatic set-pieces like G7 conferences serving as breathers.  While we like to think of Presidents we approve of as bold, wise heroes and the ones we disapprove of as wicked evildoers (and in either case, with everything under control), the fact remains that the President of the United States is Just Some Guy.  Oh, he's often (but not always) well-off; he's nearly always well-spoken, or at least very good at speeches to his base.  Some were generals or business leaders -- but there is no career that prepares anyone for the job, the demands and limits of it don't leave much room for major graft or sainthood and in the end, it's Just Some Guy (so far, and I don't think a woman would be any better or worse at it) and whatever kind of staff he could scare up, trying to perform an impossible task.  Events drive Presidencies, not the other way around. Screwups drive Presidencies.  Auric Goldfinger can tunnel into Fort Knox with nerve gas and an atom bomb in the movies, but Presidents have to reply on the unwieldy machinery of government to get anything done, and it's not a precision device.  Most days, they don't even get to decide what to have for lunch.

      Against such a backdrop, borrowing trouble in advance is a futile exercise.  A President may want to get up to awful stuff, but real life keeps 'em hopping.  Speculating about the terrible, terrible things an Administration might do, and bemoaning it as is if it real, is idle nonsense at best.  Every Presidency does bad stuff, some of it quite nasty indeed, and the time to call it out is when it happens.  Haul it out into the light, all the Lewinskys and Nan Brittons, all the Iran-Contras and LBJ shaking his willy at reporters.  It's not pretty, but it's not the stuff of movie-villiany, either.  Watergate is probably as close as we have come, and it was the same kind of tawdry mess, just writ large.  Go back in time and you get things like the sniping and fighting around Thomas Jefferson's Presidency and earlier: just as ugly, but with prettier handwriting, fancier speech and a different wardrobe.

      See them for who they are.  Point with alarm to their bad policies, oppose their politics when your own notions differ, but there's no need for hyperbole or fearful prophecy.  The real world is plenty bad enough and U. S. Presidents are rarely responsible for the worst of it.  They're not saints or heroes, but they're not out to Take Over The World like a Warner Brothers lab rat, either.
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* And usually not President Pro Tem.  That job generally goes to the most senior Senator from the majority party, presumably on the theory that he or she won't brook too much nonsense and can muster the votes to make it stick.  Well, it's a lovely thought; in practice, they take one of the Senators most likely to nod off and put them at the front of the room where everyone can watch.