Stating the Case

I've figured out who the next president will be, thanks to reading these biographies. It's all so clear--I mean, out of the first eight presidents, five have this job, and we really can't count Washington in the list, since there's not really a government to have a job in before he becomes president. So I'm happy to announce that in 2016, the next President of the United States will be our current Secretary of State, Hilary Rodham Clinton!

Oh, wait. You're telling me that after Martin van Buren--Jackson's Secretary of State--becomes president in 1836, that only one other Secretary of State becomes President? Hmm...maybe Hil doesn't have this thing locked up.

But why have we made that change? At first glance, Secretary of State seems like the perfect position to become president: you get plenty of foreign policy experience, you're one of the president's trusted advisers, you're important enough to be the first cabinet member in the president succession line. The State Department website describes the job's duties thusly: The Secretary of State, appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate, is the President's chief foreign affairs adviser. The Secretary carries out the President's foreign policies through the State Department and the Foreign Service of the United States.

That's some important stuff. So why do we keep electing senators and governors, guys with single state experience, to run the whole dang country? Perhaps it's due to a desire to start over every 4 or 8 years--to separate ourselves from the previous administrations. But Bush the Elder won on what was basically a four-more-years-of-Reagan platform (I've always thought the Republicans must have regretted the presidential term limit amendment they put in the Constitution after FDR, as Reagan would have won a third term handily), and Gore tried to win on a four-more-years-of-Clinton platform (while at the same time trying to distance himself from Clinton himself). So that can't be the whole reason.

Perhaps it's due to the idea that we're less regionally defined now. This seems odd to write in the era of red-state-blue-state politics, but after slavery (and it's worth pointing out that Buchanan, the president right before Lincoln, is the last SoS to become president), we no longer think too much about a president who represents our region of the country--that's how you get Vermonters voting for an Arkansan and Alaskans voting for a Texan. So maybe the SoS was the guy who, by virtue of focusing on foreigners, was free of the regional stain--which is how a New Yorker like van Buren could appeal--for a single election cycle, anyway--to the slaveholding Southern Jacksonites.

So, Hillary, good luck. While the State job is an impressive line on the resume, it's not the growth position it once was.