Why Are They Running?

I suppose that, as a daily commentator, I have lots and lots of prejudices to bring to the table.  It is Friday, and those prejudices will tend to dominate my thought processes as a weekend approaches, but I figure there's no harm on Friday to let them loose.

That, of course, means that what is normally an opinion-oriented piece today becomes not only opinion but speculation.  I hereby grant myself permission to speculate.

We are now between political conventions, what with the conclusion of the Republican Convention and the imminent gaveling of the Democrats' meeting shortly.  That has given me pause, and time, to consider the question from which this piece is titled.

Why are they running?

Why, indeed, do Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton each want to be president?  We don't know; we don't have real insight into their innermost motives and don't even have a notion as to what they might be telling their inner councils that would shine a light for us on why they want .... well, why they are running.

But as I look at scraps of evidence that get tossed out over the months of the campaign, I come away with a very sobering thought.  Hillary Clinton, I surmise, is running to be president.  Not actually for the purpose of, or any desire to, help the country, but to sit in the Oval Office and call herself historic.  As Mike Pence said, "she wants a better title."  Donald Trump, I surmise equally, is running to address issues in the USA that he sees in desperate need of addressing.

Now, let's start by setting aside the issue of power.  People who run for president almost by definition have egos the size of Nebraska.  They want (more) power.  That may or may not be the primary reason for running, but it is a necessary characteristic.  In fact, it may have been prominently a factor in the campaign of every candidate since the very-reluctant James Garfield in 1880, who practically had to be forced to accept his party's nomination in a very contentious convention.

Donald Trump needs to be president like he needs more hair.  He has a prominent business that has made him immensely rich; he has a remarkable family that not only loves him very much but are amazing, wonderful people -- particularly his adult children.  Running for president has cost him a ton of money and transformed the public view of him from prominent businessman and TV personality to, well, candidate.  As a candidate, particularly a Republican confronting an overwhelmingly leftist press, he is bashed about the head, shoulders and hair on an hourly basis.

And Donald Trump is seventy years old.  I am 65, and the last thing I'm thinking about is taking on more responsibilities.  I'm trying to sell our home and downsize to prepare to retire -- when I'm 70.  But Trump is out there tirelessly campaigning, and with his prominence immediately prior to declaring his candidacy, there seems to be nothing that makes the presidency seem more attractive than running his businesses and winding down his career would be.

Except he is running.

Ego does not make you do that; anyone's ego would be more than satisfied by being the 2015, pre-campaign version of Donald Trump.  Adding the presidency as some kind of trophy appears inconceivable given the above.  No, rather, one must infer from circumstances that he is not running to "be" president, but to "do the job" of president, out of a conviction that the nation needs him at this time, and that he is indeed the change agent needed.  There are problems needing repair, and he is the mechanic.  Moreover, he is contemptuous of the current set of mechanics, and has no faith in their intent to do their jobs.

"Becoming president" and "being president" are two different things, and two very different ambitions.  The day after Inauguration, there is a job to do.  You either relish that job or you took it to be historic.  Donald Trump appears to me to feel there is a job to do, and the ego tells him he is the person to do it.

Hillary Clinton, who it appears will not be in prison at that time, appears from every angle to be running for the purpose of "being president."  In fact, it appears that since the Clintons left the White House in 2000, she has taken every step with the intent of becoming president; moving to New York to do a carpetbag run for an open Senate seat (where are those residency requirements when you need them?) and then tossing her hat in the ring in 2008.  Remember that campaign?  Remember how entitled she came across as being, and how livid she was at being "unentitled" by virtue of Obama's race card overshadowing her own gender card?

She was mad then, not because she wasn't going to be able to address the nation's issues and Obama would be able to; she was mad because it wasn't going to be Hillary Clinton.  Was that not obvious?  She could not have been compelled by the virtue of her solutions; she is a liberal and those solutions don't even work.  She has to know that.

She has to know that she has failed miserably at the one executive position she ever had, as Secretary of State.  So there cannot be the Trumpian conviction that there are problems that only she can fix.  Besides, she is going to be 69 years old herself in three months or so.  Only Ronald Reagan in American history would have been older at inauguration (for the record, Trump would be the oldest president at his first inauguration).  Without the sense of entitlement to the office, she could most certainly leave the presidency to someone of comparable views and 15-20 or so years of youth.

And there is the Bill factor.  They certainly are not as close as they want us to believe.  Bill Clinton embarrassed her in a huge way, as a sitting president, by fooling around with a White House intern, even after a series of peccadilloes over the years that appear to have been sometimes tantamount to assault, if not outright rape.  He has been, let's say, not the helpful candidate's spouse during this campaign, saying some things that make you wonder how much he actually wants her to be president (which, as I wrote here and here, I truly believe he doesn't want).

With what he has done to her, both as we the public see it, and as she sees it, it is easy to infer that a huge part of her running is to diminish her husband by saying that she, too, could win the presidency, ha, ha, it wasn't a big deal.  Once she gets there, well, not only would she get to sit in the Oval Office, but relegate him to being First Non-Gender-Specific Spouse, which would add to his embarrassment.  Actually governing, well, that she'd figure out once she got settled in.  The USA might collapse, but she'd have the first presidential uterus, and by God, that would be something Bill couldn't claim.

I really don't think I'm that far off, not with Hillary and not with Trump.  But it's Friday, and it's my column, and I'm going to write what I have become convinced of.

Have a nice weekend :)

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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