I have written recently on the lack of political imagination and how we need to begin anew to imagine politics, but what are sorely lacking in these exhortations are specific examples of what I imagine as a bi-product of taking my own medicine. So, in this post, I would like to introduce a radical (im)possibility: The First Poor U.S. President.
Even though Toni Morrison erroneously declared Bill Clinton as being the first Black president and, more recently, most accept that Obama is the vindication of that too-hasty declaration, the truth is that we have never had a Black or a White president. First and foremost, we have had rich presidents. Sure, some of them get rich in their own lifetime and others come into the world with the riches of previous generations, but, make no mistake, we have not had a poor president. Sure, there may have been a few who may have bordered on not-rich (Lincoln comes to mind), but never has a president intentionally vowed to embrace poverty or even been poor relative to the poverty of his (and I do mean his) time.
From Andrew Jackson to Sarah Palin/Barrack Obama, populists seem to think that people who get rich but were once poor or not-rich make good candidates, but they forget that after leaving poverty, none of them return on-purpose—it makes no sense. But what if a prerequisite of becoming president was to take a vow of poverty? To sell all you have and give it to the poor and never have it again or at least to never begin to accumulate riches until the term is over.
This radical idea makes the notion of having this or that looking person in office seem bland. So what if we have a blind/transsexual/Muslim/albino presidential spectacle? To “overcome” it all is to get rich and then show it off by populist appeal—and win. Many of you may be rolling your eyes at the sheer implausibility of this idea. And for good reason. After all, the politics of the day make this idea impossible, and that’s my point. However, in another way, this is not entirely out of the question for the Catholic imagination. We have the Pope.
Many would say that the Pope cannot be poor, simply by the historical fact of the many abuses or power and corruption that plagues papal history. But while we have had many indulgent pontiffs, we have also had some who lived under a vow of poverty. (The question is now whether or not they observed that vow.) And if we compare the lives of popes and U.S. presidents—celibacy certainly troubles this comparison—we will find that this task of imagination is not of the fairytale variety. It is a real possibility, despite the impossibility of our political imagination of the day to allow it inside the realm of the “real.”
So, instead of trying to figure out how we can find token colored people (like myself!) to take office, we might up the ante and try to imagine a politics that sees the politician as a true public servant, who must give up what they have in exchange for the power to decide who gets what. Now this is serious change and to do it we must begin with the imagination to think and feel it as something of this world.
(im)possible?
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