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What do doughnuts have to do with how stressful a President's job is? I guess you'll need to read the article to find out!
Pop quiz time! What do George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton have in common? Well, yes, they're all considered by many to be amongst our greatest US Presidents of all time, depending on where you stand ideologically anyway. How did I hear you say that out loud? I must be psychic! But no, that wasn't the answer we were looking for. Say it with me, class: "They all made gaffes."
Yes, you read that correctly. Each and every one of these Presidents made mistakes during their stints in office, and the closer to our own time those Presidents are on the time line, the more pronounced their gaffes have been, for reasons we'll discuss shortly. Did you know that President Kennedy announced to Germany that he was "a doughnut" while speaking their language to a large crowd in Berlin? Do you remember when Ronald Reagan, accidentally believing he was off-air, joked that he was going to "outlaw Russia," and that "bombing would begin in five minutes?" Oops!
Every President has made gaffes of this nature, some more than others. The further back into history we go, however, the harder it is to expose those gaffes. Go ahead and open a new browser tab and Google "George Washington gaffes." You'll have a hard time finding them, even though journal entries from those days do admit he had the occasional public speaking flub. They're hard to find for our earlier Presidents because history is kind to heroes, and it wasn't until the past forty years or so that the media stopped covering up the mistakes of respected officials. Let's digress for a moment. We all know today that FDR needed a wheelchair to get around during his Presidency, but the American public back in the 1930's and 1940's had no clue. We all know today about Marilyn Monroe's famous rendition of "Happy Birthday," as sung to President Kennedy, but the media in those days avoided the story, because they believed they had an ethical responsibility to only report on the real stories, and leave out the fluff. Today, of course, the mainstream media is eaten alive by 90% fluff, 10% journalism. And yes, Fox News, that especially goes for you!
So why do all of these great men (and, in the future, women) make these mistakes? Is it because they're as ignorant as we want to believe they are? Not at all. There are actually several reasons why they suffer through these goof-ups. One of them relates to something we just touched on; the media relentlessly hunts for fluff, especially when they're trying to paint a specific picture of a President. It's rumored that Woodrow Wilson made many public speaking mistakes that journalists from those days covered up for him. This is in sharp contrast with Fox News making a huge deal out of President Obama accidentally writing in the wrong date on the register at a Church in the UK. The next reason why the President's gaffes are more pronounced today relates to that previous assertion; we know more about them, because we live in the information age, where news travels fast and from every conceivable source, from a journalist embedded with soldiers in a combat zone half a world away, to a teenage girl capturing police activity from a bus on her cell phone's video camera. Our constant, insatiable thirst for information means we need to seek out information that we would have found uninspired or irrelevant fifty years ago, and from that, we get "Bushisms" calendars and plenty of talking head fodder regardless of whose administration occupies the West Wing.
And now we come to the number one reason why the President's gaffes are so pronounced... and it's the reason why he makes those mistakes in the first place, too. The President's job is stressful to a degree that most of us will never truly comprehend. It's easy to look at the President jet-setting around the globe on the taxpayer's dime, meeting foreign dignitaries and shaking hands with the rich and tasteless, and to think to ourselves that anyone could do what the President does, or worse... that our own jobs are much more stressful than the President's. The facts couldn't be further from the myths in this case.
When you go into work in your office cubicle, is the fate of the free world resting on your shoulders? Have you ever been forced to make a decision that would permanently, or even temporarily, affect the lives of literally hundreds of millions of people in the United States, or billions of people around the globe? Have you ever dropped your signature on a piece of paper, an act through which the lives of a brave group of your fellow Americans would hang in the balance in the pursuit of the greater good? Unless you happen to be a former President, I'm guessing no, you haven't. The President wakes up earlier than you every single day, is briefed on domestic and foreign issues you couldn't wrap your head around (without your morning coffee or tea, anyway), makes decisions more important to more people than the ones you make at your job, works more hours than you work, and sleeps fewer hours than you sleep. All of that adds up to what, exactly? If you guessed "public gaffes," then congratulations, you've earned yourself a cookie! Eat it with pride, friend!
It's true that some Presidents make more mistakes than other. George W. Bush is easily a contemporary record-holder in public engagement gaffes, and I'd gladly entertain the idea that he holds a record for policy gaffes, too. For those of you leaning on the right-side of your desk while reading this article, you might think President Obama is a contender for those crowns as well... maybe even a winner, if you're falling out of your chair anyway. And to that end, I'll leave you with one final caveat of a President's number of gaffes: your own opinion. If you disagree with a President or their political party, you're going to notice their gaffes more... heck, you might even invent gaffes that aren't wholly accurate, or embellish a bit on the gravity of other gaffes, and that's not even considering policy decisions, which is a whole other ball-game in a much bigger stadium. But there's something Presidents have in common with you and me that they also have in common with every other President -- and human being -- in the history of the Earth: Everyone makes mistakes. No surgeon has a perfect success rate, no plumber gets the pipes fitted perfectly every single time, and no President will go through life without having the occasional public flub. That's how the doughnut crumbles.
