By Hank Beckman -
Death came for V.I. Lenin 96 years ago this week when he left this earth due to complications from a stroke.
The first leader of the Soviet Union, and one of the great villains of the Twentieth Century, Lenin’s legacy includes a long list of quotes attributed to him, preserved by various leftist historians and writers for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the old monster.
One sometimes attributed to him was the adage that “any cook can run the government,” or “every cook has to learn how to govern the state.” I’ve seen both versions of the quote, and it’s hard to find decent scholarly sources for the quote. But even if apocryphal, it’s been repeated so often that it’s accepted as fact.
Of course, like much of the supposed wisdom that modern leftists cite like Socratic wisdom, it is complete nonsense, in the category of some catchy phrase a dilettante might think impressive. The idea that a cook, no matter how talented, could possess the skills needed to run a modern government is a gigantic stretch, even for a committed Marxist.
But to be fair, a glance in our rearview mirror suggests that while the old Bolshevik was certainly guilty of a gross exaggeration, he might have had the slightest glimmer of a point.
The American quarter century proceeding Donald Trump’s presidency has not exactly produced a parade of peerless statesmen who wound up sitting in Lincoln’s Chair. Beginning with Bill Clinton, the men who have ascended to our highest office would have hardly been considered presidential timber in earlier eras.
Many don’t remember that Bill Clinton was the accidental nominee of the Democratic Party in 1992. The presumed Democrat presidential favorites in the early nineties included Mario Cuomo, Bill Bradley and Al Gore. But with the seeming insurmountable popularity of George H. W. Bush in the wake of the first Gulf War, they all thought it best to sit out the race and wait four years.
But a recession intervened and Bush’s poor response to it—and help from Ross Perot—opened the door for Clinton, making president the governor of a small state who performed so poorly in his first term that he lost reelection.
When he returned to office, after getting Hillary to take his name and get a decent wardrobe that played better in conservative Arkansas, his record was nothing out of the ordinary.
Clinton had some success in education and health care reform, but in a state so small it could never have prepared him to be leader of the free world; when he got to the White House, his inexperience was glaringly obvious.
Clinton was followed by George W. Bush, whose only real qualifications before being elected Texas Governor were a famous name, being recently sober, and trading Sammy Sosa for a past-his-prime Harold Baines. (How’d that work out?)
Like Clinton he had some success reforming the state’s education and criminal justice systems; part of his criminal justice reform resulting in executing 152 prisoners, exceeding the rate of even “hang-em-high’ Rick Perry.
What success he did have is somewhat less impressive when one considers that Texas Democrats of that era were closer in ideology to moderate Republicans. When he got to Washington, Bush would find an entirely different type of Democrat.
As for Bush’s successor, the best one can say about Barack Obama’s qualifications is that he must have had some secret mojo to get elected president of the United States with no record at all. Nothing else explains it.
Well, something does explain it: white guilt. It is nonsense on stilts to think that any white candidate could be elected president of the Unites States based on giving a decent speech the 2004 Democratic convention, then giving another speech during the presidential campaign where he threw his own grandmother under the bus to explain being married by a racist lunatic like Jeremiah Wright—and then letting him baptize his children.
Obama’s record before declaring for the presidency was so thin as to be virtually non-existent.
He wrote a best-selling book, served six years in the Illinois State Senate, then went on to win a U.S. Senate seat when the divorce records of his strongest opponent were made public.
His signature accomplishment in the Senate was work he did with Republican Dick Luger on a conventional arms treaty; but he only served a couple years before launching his run for the White House.
The point is that none of the three presidents prior to Donald Trump had anything like the life achievements that most presidents have before they declared for the office. Say what you want about The Donald, but he at least had decades of substantial real-world experience before deciding he could run the country.
Could any of these men point to something that was the equal of John Kennedy’s work on the Senate committee investigating the rackets and crooked labor unions, the first significant attempt at taking down organized crime? Or his military service? Did any of them have the legislative experience of Lyndon Johnson, who worked with President Eisenhower to build the interstate highway system and contain the Soviet Union?
Which one exposed a traitorous spy like Alger Hiss, as Richard Nixon did, going on as Vice President to help Ike pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first federal civil rights bill of the century?
And even the most partisan Democrat has to admit that it’s a long slide down from Dwight Eisenhower staging the invasion of Normandy, liberating Europe, and becoming NATO’s first supreme commander to whatever it is that Barack Obama thought made him presidential material.
History will judge our recent presidents and assign whatever portion of blame they deserve for the pointless wars, ballooning debt, and porous borders that have marked their terms.
But during the same time period, the country survived quite nicely, thank you. People went to work every day, paid their taxes, started families, and built businesses. The government survived, no one missed a Social Security check, and we haven’t suffered another 9-11 level attack.
I’m not ready to support a cook for president—not even Bobby Flay—but recent history suggests that all these candidates currently running need us a whole lot more than we need them.
