Hacker News Reader

Comment by rhacker | Hacker News Reader

Meh, we've had lots of unexciting presidents in the past. In my own lifetime the only president I was ever actually excited about was Obama. I think the only thing that does eclipse that excitement IS not having Trump anymore. I disagree with the notion that we need to be excited about a president in general because that's what GOT us Trump. The president should be boring, and move the country forward like a normal, boring job. I yearn for a president that might pop up every 45 days (oh yeah he's the president and he's doing something). Instead of what we just had.

With Trump I feel like we dangerously moved towards having super celebrity presidents that are more interested in being King. I don't think the US should have a King. It should have someone that "PRESIDES" over governments boring ass functions.

View on HN

When the framers were originally drafting the Constitution, they were originally planning on calling the President by "His Majesty", but the framers decided not to in order to specifically discourage any association with a King, who rules by fiat, and a President who rules through the consent of the governed.

Yep. It's just a job. You're supposed to go in there, do the work, and if you didn't do any scandals you get reelected. You're not supposed to be in the spotlight every day. You're not supposed to juice the economy or any of that. Nobody in a democratic government should have any power over a free-market system. If anyone in the government including president is messing around picking winners and losers, that's not free-market or capitalism. That's cronyism. We should be picking the president based on his qualifications, not on his false promises to juice this or that economic sector.

This has been a long-standing trend. Since Jimmy Carter each president has been less qualified than the previous, and more of a celebrity. Barack Obama hadn’t even held a state wide office for a term when he started to run for president. Bush and Reagan had at least been governors. Trump, well we’ll seen how that turned out.

The best thing I can say about biden at the moment is that he’s phenomenally unlikely to continue this cult of personality presidencies that we’ve had.

Emanuel Macron, président of France since 2017 famously decided that France needed just that, after 10 years of hypermediatisation of his predecessors.

I tend to think he was right.

Needs what? Macron is always in the spotlight.

I'd argue differently. Yes, his name is dropped often in the press.

However, if you compare the number of interviews, speeches, or other public interventions, they have been greatly reduced since the hyperprésidences of Sarkozy and Hollande.

As Dominique de Villepin predicted at the time (2010): a president that is omnipresent, managing everything directly, ends up being isolated, and paradoxically powerless since he is overloaded.

Francois Hollande is the one who campaigned on the fact that he wanted to be a "normal" president, as opposed to Sarkozy's taste for the spotlight.

You are completely right. But that was not what were talking about. When Hollande said he wanted to be "normal" he meant "less snobbish", or more precisely "not like Sarkozy". However, both Hollande and Sarkozy were "reactive", in the media making statements non-stop. Hollande organised a panicky press statement on a Sunday evening, during the apex of the "affaire Leonarda" (explanation for non-French : 'should this 16-year old get to stay in France').

The point that GP was making, was that perhaps a president should not be the only one in the spotlight, and that his interventions should be more "rare". And I simply pointed out that a similar discussion had taken place in France.

You know the US has a presidential and not a parliamentary republic right?

Trump is certainly not presidential, but if you look at his policy, he's not less autocratic and has done more to give power to the states than other presidents.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com