We Want a New President

by David Bernell and Ambassador Thomas Graham (Retired)

We would like to have somebody new as President of the United States.

Every one of the people who have served in this role has been flawed, and they had great failures in office. Both of us have had plenty of criticism of many American presidents. But we also recognize they had good qualities too, in spite of our differences with them.

To that end…

We want a president with the ability of FDR to juggle a thousand moving pieces and address the great challenges he faced that made him one of the country’s great presidents, on par with Washington and Lincoln.

We want a president who could rise to the occasion like Harry Truman did, twice, at the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War.

We want a president who understood, like Dwight Eisenhower, that power was demonstrated not in the unending use of force against other countries, but in being strong enough so that the use of force could be avoided.

We want a president who exhibited the courage of John F. Kennedy in his readiness to defend the free world.

We want a president with the vision of LBJ to see a country that could achieve civil rights, voting rights, and health care for all, and the skill and tenacity to achieve more of these goals than all his predecessors combined.

We want a president with the geostrategic sense of Richard Nixon, and the ability to turn 180 degrees to alter confrontational relationships with other big powers, such that the world now refers to anyone doing this as the equivalent of “Nixon going to China.”

We want a president with the decency and humility of Gerald Ford.

We want a president with Jimmy Carter’s laser focus on human rights.

We want a president who has Ronald Reagan’s popularity, likability, and ability to connect with their fellow Americans in expressing grand moral truths in simple terms, like “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

We want a president with the sense of responsibility of George H.W. Bush.

We want a president with the extraordinary political instincts and sheer brainpower of Bill Clinton.

We want a president with an impulse for human decency like George W. Bush, who championed a program like PEPFAR to combat HIV and AIDS around the world.

We want a president like Barack Obama who shared hope and optimism for a better, more just future and combined it with the realism required to achieve change that was possible.

We want a president like Joe Biden who saw his role as serving all Americans, not just the ones who liked him or voted for him.

And from Donald Trump, we want…nothing.

A president like that would be ideal.