Running for President, Being President

In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson sent Robert Livingston to France with authority to spend up to $10 million to purchase the city and port of New Orleans.

Later in the year Jefferson doubled down. He sent James Monroe to join Livingston.

Both were stunned when the French offered not only New Orleans but the entirety of the Louisiana Purchase.

Napoleon needed money for military adventures.The French asked $15 million ($350 million in today’s money) or about 3 cents an acre for 530 million acres – 828,000 square miles — and, most importantly, the entire western bank of the vital Mississippi River. Until then, the U.S. had only the river’s east bank.

Although they lacked authority, Livingston and Monroe took the chance and spent more to buy much, much more. There was at that exact moment in late 1803 a small catch. The territory didn’t actually belong to France.

In the chaos and confusion of Europe after the French Revolution, in the early Napoleanic period, the territory actually belonged to Spain but France was in process of acquiring it and sold it on speculative promise.

It all came together swiftly. The French took ownership and within days completed the sale to the United States. That it really belonged to hundreds of Native American tribes and bands mattered to no one then any more than it matters now.

The U.S. immediately doubled in size as it took possession of land famously explored in 1804 and 1805 by William Clark and Merriwether Lewis, which ultimately included all or parts of 15 states.

The overriding point is this: The Louisiana Purchase, the most important thing that happened during Jefferson’s two terms of office, had not been imagined much less discussed in the 1800 campaign that won him the White House 30 months before the deal was conceived, much less closed.

Is that unusual? Unusual for presidencies to be remembered mostly or entirely for events and developments no one imagined or could forsee? Events that were total surprises, having little or nothing to do with the preceding campaign?

Let’s look.

Did James K. Polk know when he ran for president in 1844 that events would transpire to give the bellicose U.S. excuse to go to war with Mexico in 1846, emerging in 1847 with a treaty that made land concessions to the U.S. that now form all or part of 9 western states?

When in November 1860 Abraham Lincoln won a four-way White House contest, did he know that by March 5, 1861 one day after he became president, 11 states would have seceded? Did anyone know that over the next four years there would be a Civil War that would kill well over 600,000 men, some say over 700,000, and end slavery?

President Lincoln knew there was trouble brewing. But neither Mr. Lincoln nor the American people, knew how much death and destruction lay ahead. Did he, could he have known that on a November day in 1863 he would respond to those terrible events with the most memorable address in American history?

Did T.R. know when he became president following the assasination of President McKinley that he would be able to cause events to fulfill his determination to dig the Panama Canal? It was not part of the 1900 campaign that brought the McKinley/Roosevelt ticket to the White House. After all, T.R. wasn’t supposed to be president. McKinley was.

Did Woodrow Wilson think when he won in 1912 on a modest progressive domestic federal policy outline that his presidency would be remembered principally for American intervention in WWI and his subsequent failed campaign to convince Congress to ratify the Versailes Treaty including the League of Nations?

How could he or anyone else know that in 1912 when the war didn’t begin until July 1914? WWI quickly over-shadowed all else, subsuming his presidency as the overriding cause went from staying out of it in 1916, to winning “the war to end all wars”in 1917.

Do we know or think when FDR campaigned in 1932 for old age income protection that three years later his staff, his labor secretary, Frances Perkins, and Congress would present the Social Security Act of 1935 for his signature?

Do the voters think when FDR took the presidential oath for the second time in 1937 that by late 1939 and into spring 1940 events would transpire in Europe and Asia to convince him to do the unthinkable – seek a third term – even though he never actually said he would until he accepted that third nomination when it came in the summer of 1940?

On Jan. 20, 1937 there was not a general war in Europe. The United States was still mired in the depression notwithstanding New Deal advances and was decidedly isolationist despite the increasing bellicosity of Germany. No one then, including the president, could or would have predicted events would soon put more than 15 million American men into uniforms.

When Army Capt. Dwight Eisenhower concluded the U.S. needed much better roads and more of them while observing the slow progress of an Army truck convoy that crossed the country in 1920 on primitive, rutted, often unpaved roads did he even conceive three decades later he’d be president?

As president, Ike signed his National Defense Highway Act to put in place the giant, indispensable interstate highway system on which we move ourselves and our commerce every day -a national highway network on no one’s map in 1952 when he ran for president. But the issue in that campaign was not roads, it was Korea.

Did Jimmy Carter know the hostage taking in Tehran in 1979 would doom his presidency the next year? In 1976, no one expected religious fanatics to overthrow the Shah or use a Persian flying carpet to pull the rug out from under an American president.

Could Ronald Reagan know that he would barely survive an attempted assassination in his first year in office even though presidential assassinations were not unknown?

He could not have known anymore than anyone could have warned Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy they’d be assassinated or how each of their deaths would change history.

Did Bill Clinton know that his personal wrecklessness would reintroduce presidential impeachment to American politics for the first time since 1868?

When George W. Bush became president Jan. 20, 2021 did anyone know nine months later the events of 9/11 and the wars he would order in response would take over his White House? Most Americans could not then find Afghanistan or Iraq on a map. Most still can’t.

When President Bush took office for his second term in 2005 did he or anyone else know it would end in panic with the housing/financial crash of 2008?

Do we think when President Obama said we needed to provide affordable health coverage for all Americans that he and his White House staff and Congress would come up with the Affordable Care Act – Obama Care – or that today it would cover the health care of 45 million Americans?

When Trump won in 2016 could anyone know the decisive event in his presidency would be a worlwide pandemic starting at the end of 2019? No one had heard of Covid and more than one million Americans who would die from it were alive.

When Joe Biden won election in 2020 talking about Covid and recovery, no one imagined or would have predicted Oct.7 and the subsequent wars across the Middle East. None of that was imagined much less forecast -least of all by the Israelis, who should have known.

When Russia invaded Ukraine a second time early in 2023 (the first was in 2014) whether U.S. intelligence saw it coming or not, massive military assistance to Ukraine with all that entails for the U.S. and NATO had not been a significant 2020 campaign issue.

Similarly despite all the commotion now in the press/media with demands for “policy specifics” most Americas cannot even name the three branches of government, and seem convinced the only thing anyone needs to know about the national economy is the price of a carton of eggs.

Do presidents even know how their broad policy statements and promises will be accomplished if at all? Of course they don’t and neither do we and – pointedly – neither does the media.

Harris says her administration will build three million new housing units (a foolish promise by the way). How? How, she is asked by reporters. It is a promise. It is not the legislation to do it. Trump says he’ll make overtime pay tax exempt. How, in what legislation, taking back what to pay for it? No one knows, least of all Trump.

How should anyone know if or how those things can or will happen? How can they begin to know unless and until the White House sits down with key members of the House and Senate; fends off or finds compomises with hundreds of lobbyists; engages a broad array of federal agencies, and measures public response? Doing all of that is how presidents turns ideas into laws.

The president we elect Nov. 5 does not know and cannot know what lies ahead. Neither of them knows beyond the general subject what will be in the new laws enacted during the next administration except for the broad campaign topics they say those bills should address – housing, taxes, immigration.

Is that what the next administration will be remembered for? Maybe. But most likely the next presidency will be most rembered for how it responds to something we do not imagine at all much less see coming.

The great likelihood is that the presidency that results from the 2024 presidential campaign will be about unknown and unforseen matters to come and not what we hear day in and day out from the candidates.

As Thomas Jefferson could attest, presidencies are almost never about the campaigns that precede them but are shaped by events and what those events beget.

Presidencies and the history they make are usually and mostly about unforseen events and how presidents respond. How they respond shapes how we respond as a nation.

The campaign does not foretell the future. It tells us who is more fit to be president and most particularly in this campaign, who is fit at all.

This campaign is about choosing a competent, able, intelligent, grounded, coherent leader to meet new events and challenges when they come – and they will come.

Knowing this, we have but one choice. She – she is the only choice to be in the White House when the next unknowable-until-it-happens happens.