the absence of S Carolina's governor - whether or not he is walking the Appalachian Trail to clear his mind - got me thinking. In a sense that is nothing spectacular - I view almost everything I encounter as an opportunity for further thought, for imagining "what if" scenarios inspired by the occasion.
Let me stipulate before going into my latest mental meandering that there are several things wrong with how Sanford has gone about this - he has not left clear lines of authority, and there are always risks in not having some level of security with oneself, if for no other reason than to protect against the possibilities of blackmail.
Nevertheless, the idea of a governmental leader completely stepping aside, and apart from the responsibilities of high office, actually makes a great deal of sense.
I want to argue in favor of two propositions:
- no person should be so indispensable that s/he cannot take time off
- totally absenting oneself from one's regular responsibilities not only clears one's head and recharges one's energy, but probably results in better performance when one is on the job.
Several decades back I was a fairly serious Orthodox Christian. My personal spiritual father was on Mount Athos, a monastic "republic" in Northern Greece to which no women are admitted (and yes, it has its own web page!). I would periodically go for sojourns of between 7 and 30 days. I wondered how, were in some parallel universe I to become President, I would be able to maintain my pattern of even the shorter stays. While notable political figures have visited, the idea of a president needing to have constant communication if for no other reason than being the only one authorized to use nuclear weapons seemed contradictory to the idea of a full retreat to a place that when I first visited in 1981 had almost no electronic connection to the outside world - although this had changed by my final visit in 1989. And the idea of armed Secret Service men in a place of prayer and pilgrimage seemed alien.
That got me thinking of the need for time off. I can remember early in my first career in data processing, when I was truly a work-aholic, a boss (Ralph Mordo) who ordered me out of the office for my own good, telling me that if I called or came back before a full week had passed he would fire me, even though I was his most productive programmer. Ralph had seen me making an inordinate amount of mistakes because I was burning out. That day I left the office near Macy's on Herald Square and first walked up to Central Park where I sat on a rock doing nothing for about two hours, then walked home to Brooklyn Heights, including taking off my shoes and socks and walking barefoot through the streets of Manhattan, drawing many puzzled smiles (I still had my tie on albeit pulled down, while I carried my jacket over my shoulder).
I can also remember my first principal, the now-retired Marian White-Hood, telling me one Monday afternoon that I had been working too hard - besides my teaching I was head of the technology committee and I had been processing several dozen computers we had been given, cannabalizing parts to wind up with 16 that actually worked by the time I was done. Doc as we called her (she had a Ph. D.) told me she was giving me the rest of the week off and I needed to go away and rest and recuperate. She was right - I was becoming short-tempered with my students and my fellow faculty, very much unlike me. I went off to a cabin in the woods, not totally isolated, perhaps 25 minutes from Charlottesville, a place that was like a time share with lots of other cabins, but which was semi-deserted in early March. I walked around the lake, read, wrote in my journal, wandered around C'ville, spoke to my wife perhaps once a day, and came back totally refreshed.
I have never had or sought elective office of any kind. The responsibilities I have borne and still bear - for example those of a teacher - as important as they are do not carry the weight of many elective offices, and certainly nothing as crushing as being a Governor, much less the President. I think of our nation's highest office, and of the two most recent former occupants, both of whom were born the same year as was I, 1946, each a few month's younger than me. I look at how they appeared when they were elected, and how worn they were upon completion of their second terms. And no matter how many days one might spend at Camp David or at the ranch in Crawford, one was never really "off." The office is a killer. Despite the criticism when one takes one's wife out to dinner and the theater or one's children for some ice cream, one is always accompanied by "the football" - the package with the launch codes, the Security with comm equipment that can instantaneously put one in touch with any part of the government. One is not fully "off."
I suspect that some of the mistakes we see Presidents of all stripes make during their tenure of office is less due to their limited faculties or their misguided ideology than it is to sheer exhaustion, mentally or otherwise. And I wonder if we need to rethink our expectations of our top political leaders.
The 25th Amendment has a provision for a President to temporarily step aside. We have used this when the President undergoes anaesthesia, and the TV show "West Wing" imagined President Bartlet temporarily surrendering his authority when his youngest daughter was kidnapped. At least in theory we have at the federal level a mechanism where a President could totally step away from the responsibilities of his office for several days, even two weeks, to unwind, clear his head. Given that he has chosen his number 2 at least theoretically to be able to run the country should something happen to him, if he ahas kept the VP thoroughly in the loop, any risk associated by having the VP act in his stead for a few days might well be outweighed by the benefits gained for the President in being able to fully unwind and clear his head.
Some states have provisions that when the Governor is outside the state, the next in line becomes acting. When Jerry Brown was governor of California, he had to be careful not to leave any unfilled appointments because his Republican Lt. Gov. Mike Curb would move to fill them. On the positive sign, before Barbara Jordan left the Texas Senate to assume her House seat in DC, as I recall both the Governor and Lt. Gov. arranged to be out of state so she could be acting Governor for one day. Of course, if as in California then or Virginia now the Governor and Lt. Governor are elected separately, they could be of different political parties (our situation in Virginia) which would represent a problem.
Then there are the states without a Lt. Gov - Arizona, Oregon, Wyoming, Maine and New Hampshire - and those who designate the title on the President of their state senates - Tennessee and West Virginia.
Most companies and organizations have provisions for someone to be acting in the absence of the head of the organization. There may or may not be provisions to reach the official head in a real emergency, but there are also executives who want to go camping in the wilderness, or make an ocean sail, and do not want to be disturbed as they step aside.
I do not claim to have a perfect solution. And I understand why some might now want to use Sanford's absence to belittle him, just as many criticized the man of the 43 Presidency (but technically, only our 42nd president, given the two separate tenures of Grover Cleveland) for his many absences from the White House. And given his #2, Darth Vader Cheney, one might be very reluctant to see him officially wield the reigns of power even for a day (although he may have effectively wielded them far more than that). In this I am reminded of the aphorism of Justice Felix Frankfurter that hard cases make bad law, and choose not at this point to try to design something for the worst case scenario.
Mark Sanford may have gone about it in an improper fashion. The lines of authority in the state government might not in this case be clear enough. But I do not think we should reject out of hand the idea of a top governmental leader, Governor or President, to temporarily step aside and surrender the reigns of power so that he - or eventually she - can recharge and refresh.
What can we learn from Mark Sanford? Perhaps one other thing as well - that as a society we are far too quick to pass judgment upon the actions of others, particularly those we view as political opponents, but also far too often those we have supported when they do not act as we think they should - the latter point can be demonstrated here any day by several dozen diaries complaining about Obama and/or Democratic senators and representatives.
And that leads to another point - maybe each of us needs periodically to step away from the fray, from finding ourselves reacting to every single twist and turn of the political world in which we operate?
These are my mental meanderings this morning. Take them any way you choose. I will not be offended.
Peace.