PSU Magazine Fall 1988

Win • your Confidence Every four years the American voter is faced with the difficult task of sorting through the speeches, the issues, the personalities and the media hype to choose our next president. by John R. Kirkland W hat a coincidence that presiden– tial elections always fall on the same year as the Olympics. They have the thrust and parry of fenc– ing, the long-distance endurance of the marathon , the crowds, the loyalties, the primal contest of dominance. And along . every sideline, in every locker room, are the cameras and the notebooks, endlessly recording and speculating on the outcome. The difference is when the Olympic contests are over, they 're over. In an election, the end is a beginning - a time when the candidate the pundits have scrutinized, the pollsters have analyzed and the voters have elected by gut feel takes charge of an office for which , in most cases, he has no experience. The responsibility put before the voting public is enormous: they must somehow separate fluff from reality and choose the person who will be their figurehead , their leader, their proxy to the world for the next four years. PSU 4 At least two PSU professors - David Smeltzer and Jim Heath - are making sense of the rhetorical whirlwind that is presidential politics for students who, more likely than not , will go to the presidential polls for the first time in November. Heath's history class on American presidents looks at the men from Washington to Reagan who have held and changed the office. Smeltzer's political science class on the presidency analyzes both the office and the election process and uncovers the strategies candidates must use to win. Their perspectives are slightly different, but one point is agreed upon at the outset: predicting how a candidate will perform once he's in office is all but impossible. Said Heath, "I suppose if a candidate has really good character and some in– telligence you might gamble on him. But all the jobs in the world that person has held might not mean they 're going to do a terribly good job as president." An impressive resume sometimes doesn't mean a thing. Heath points to the example of James Buchanan , a man who served on the Cabinet, was Minister to Great Britain , Minister to Russia , Secretary of State, and a U.S. Senator, yet ultimately was an unsuccessful president. On the other hand , Abraham Lincoln had only one term as a U.S. congressman and several years in the Illinois legislature before becoming one of the greatest presidents in our history. "Education? Harry Truman is generally regarded as having been a successful president. He never went to college," said Heath , adding that Benjamin Harrison , "a marvelously educated man," was a disaster in the Oval Office. " That's what makes it tough : you're gambling in advance as to what someone's going to do when they get there. Will they have good instincts? Will they have good judgement? You just don't know." Smeltzer echoes the point. "The ques– tion that comes to my mind with any of them is you just have no idea how they will handle the pressures and position once they achieve them. Some people