I can't really find anything significant, or anything, that any of the presidential candidates have done in their current position. Can anyone lend a hand?


What has McCain done?
What has Clinton done?
What has Obama done?
What has Ron Paul done?
What has Nader done?

:shrug:

They're in congress. They do nothing.

I can't really find anything significant, or anything, that any of the presidential candidates have done in their current position. Can anyone lend a hand?


What has McCain done?
What has Clinton done?
What has Obama done?
What has Ron Paul done?
What has Nader done?

:shrug:

for the first 4 you can go to the congress's website and search for bills by name that they worked on

Q:What's the opposite of CONgress?

A: PROgress

Q:What's the opposite of CONgress?

A: PROgress

Clever. :D

I'd agree that none of them have done much to impress me. Obama is a upstart with only a few years under his belt which isn't a very good thing to really know him or what he will do besides promise us everything with his rhetoric and sweet talk but not deliver because all he is is talk. Hillary we already know can't eveen keep track of her own husbands dealings so how is she going to keep up with Americas doings. Besides that the Whitewater affair does show that she is very contemptible and exploitable as well. McCain is controlled by big businesses that deal with the military -industrial complex so they will be his guides along his pathway if he gets elected. So I really don't see anyone that's very electable that will really do anything to really help the common person. :(

What have they done?

Who cares? Maybe the next POTUS should do NOTHING. There's been a "doer" and a "decider" in the White house for the past 8 years. If the next leader does nothing but deliver "rhetoric and sweet talk", fine by me. It'll be a definite improvement and that's all anyone can realistically expect for the next few years.

Thank you for expressing what I consider the most Constitutionally-correct viewpoint thus far in this thread, dsdsds

What qualifies a President? What is the purpose of the Presidency? Do we seek a king or an administrator? Are we participating in the process as responsible citizens, or more like stupefied viewers of American Idol?

At least as much as we need to compare canditate resumes, we need to examine our expectations for the office. So far (except for dsdsds' post) this thread has suggested the outlook of a pygmy democracy, where there is a desire for some mythical philosopher king, in place of a presiding executor of the national consensus. No national consensus you say? Don't gaze upward to a President for its manufacture. The United States is suffering from a declining understanding of the Constitutional purpose of the Office of President, and a declining will to hold present and past Administrations accountable to the people. Lacking a rational dialogue about the present failures of accountability in the office, we're behaving like children to throw up our hands and exclaim that no candidate is "electable", as if the fault is not our own. All candidates are electable, and we have the democratic responsibility to examine their platforms issue by issue, and then to hold the elected candidate accountable to the platform, and not regress into childish expectations of appointing a national parent-figure.

Our perceived dearth of effective Presidential candidates is a reflection of our ambivalence about the purpose of the office, and the partisan diversion of mass democracy from deciding a single national office that should not be accessible in the name of a single party, but instead should be briefly assigned to the candidate most articulative of the national consensus.

The purpose of the Presidency is being increasingly and dangerously distorted. Part of the confusion over who is eligible involves our anti-democratic crisis-management trend. In the wake of 9-11, an anti-democratic virus has fast been gaining influence- This cancer on our system of government insists that the greater the national crisis, the more we must invest national decision-making into one seat of power- short-circuiting our democracy into the President, and his arbitrary cabinet. A noticeable portion of campaign rhetoric focuses on how a candidate may be expected to act decisively in some vaguely-imagined future hour of imminent national peril. We have become so democratically crippled, that many USAmericans do not realize that that very thought is itself a national and democratic peril. There has never been a national crisis that required the suspension or delay of Constitutional debate before new policy has been implemented. Yet we readily accede to the idea, even within the language of election campaigns, oblivious to the danger.

We are experiencing increased confusion in US Presidential campaigns, because the public is being actively distracted from, and is apathetically losing sight of the purpose of the office. There is a reason why it should be difficult to find a King Solomon for the Presidency, and there is a reason why the onus is on us to hold our Presidents accountable as humble executors.

What have we done? Why are we ignoring the defining principle that the Presidency is not a throne?