In the good old days, political pros and party bosses would meet in smoke-filled rooms to identify political talent and select presidential candidates.
That’s how we ended up with relative titans as president, and as failed presidential nominees—men like Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon.
Today, by contrast, democracy rules and the people decide; and, as a result, we have… Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Trump is mentally ill and obviously incompetent, while Biden clearly shows signs of senility and dementia.
It gives me no joy to say this. I sincerely wish it were otherwise. But the truth is the truth. It should give all of us serious doubts about the wisdom of pure, unadulterated democracy. More filters, checks, and balances, please.
Party Bosses. Why, just imagine if the political parties were stronger than they are now, and if the party bosses were true bosses, and not figments of our historical memory. Who, then, would be our two major 2020 presidential candidates?
There are, I think two obvious choices: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, and Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican.
Why Cuomo and Cotton? First, unlike Trump and Biden, they both pass the threshold test of being physically and psychologically healthy—of sound body and mind.
Part of this is age: Cuomo is 62 and Cotton turns 43 in May. Trump and Biden, by contrast, are 73 and 77, respectively.
But age, in itself, is not the problem. While Trump is obese and may be a heart attack waiting to happen, he is, nonetheless, spry of mind.
Moreover, Anthony Fauci, M.D., who heads up the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is 79 years old, and no one would ever accuse him of being too old for that or any other job.
Biden and Trump. However, people age in different ways and at different paces. Joe Biden today is clearly and obviously not the same man he was 12 years ago when Barack Obama selected him as his running mate.
Age has taken its toll. Biden often loses his train of thought and sometimes has conspicuous difficulty articulating full sentences and coherent thoughts.
Trump, meanwhile, is a narcissist with the maturity of an insecure and needy adolescent. He has shown no interest in mastering the difficult art of governance, nor in applying himself as a student of public policy. He is beyond his depth in a big way, and it shows each and every time he tweets or opens his mouth.
Cotton and Cuomo, by contrast, are capable and competent in ways that Trump and Biden simply are not. Indeed, agree or disagree with them, no one can deny that Cotton and Cuomo are on top of their game and can effectively wield political power.
Cuomo has spent his entire life in politics and government, learning at the knee of his father, the late great Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York.
Cotton is younger but whip-smart and a combat veteran to boot, with tours as an infantry platoon leader in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in just three years before earning a law degree from Harvard as well.
As important, both Cotton and Cuomo have proven themselves equal to this moment in history.
Cuomo has distinguished himself through his steady and sure-handed management of the coronavirus. His daily press briefings have been informative and uplifting—reassuring not just New Yorkers, but all Americans during this time of doubt, darkness, fear, and confusion.
Cuomo’s leadership stands in marked contrast to Trump’s dismal and dismaying lack of leadership during this crisis. For Trump, it’s always about him. For Cuomo, it’s always about us.
Cotton, meanwhile, was arguably the only political leaders who saw the coronavirus coming, and who tried valiantly, back in January, to alert the Trump administration and the nation to the impending danger.
Of course, for doing so, Cotton was mocked and ridiculed by the media, which was willfully blind to the virus emanating from Wuhan, China.
Still, Cotton was right—and his prescience and wisdom become increasingly apparent each and every day as we learn more about the origins of the coronavirus and China’s duplicity and deceit regarding its spread and transmission.
History. In an earlier era in American politics, the two major political parties, and the so-called party bosses, would have realized that Cotton and Cuomo should be running for president. They, not Trump and Biden, should be competing on the national stage for America’s biggest and most coveted political prize.
Cotton and Cuomo, after all, are natural political leaders, who have stepped up in a big way at this moment of national crisis. Thus they are deserving; Trump and Biden are not.
And while the vox populi may not fully understand or appreciate this, the political parties and the party bosses do. We need them back—and we need less pure, unadulterated democracy, and more filters, checks, and balances. And we need this precisely to save American democracy from itself.
Feature photo credit: Tom Cotton (Mark Wilson/Gett Images via Slate) and Andrew Cuomo (Pat Arnow via Wikipedia).