Trump's Most Baffling Policy (Or, yet another chapter in Trump's on-going battle with the future)

We beat the Nazis because we had better manufacturing and research capacity. We invented the atom bomb before they did. We made tanks and planes faster than they could.

Near the end of the war, FDR asked Vannevar Bush to explore how wartime research efforts could be transformed into peace time efforts to create new technologies and jobs and to increase life expectancy. Out of Bush's recommendations, captured in Science, the Endless Frontier, came the National Science Foundation which has steadily grown since, providing funding for the basic research that is life-changing over generations.

Bush had great insight into the importance of research and how it is best conducted. Speaking of basic research that doesn't immediately translate into a new product, he wrote about how medical research could be supported within medical schools and universities.

Apart from teaching, however, the primary obligation of the medical schools and universities is to continue the traditional function of such institutions, namely, to provide the individual worker with an opportunity for free, untrammeled study of nature, in the directions and by the methods suggested by his interests, curiosity, and imagination. The history of medical science teaches clearly the supreme importance of affording the prepared mind complete freedom for the exercise of initiative. 

As the United States acted on recommendations such as Bush's, our country clearly took the lead in the creation of new technology, industries and companies. The National Science Foundation is both reality and symbol of our on-going support for research. Bush saw in research the basis for our economic progress as well: 

Where will these new products come from? How will we find ways to make better products at lower cost? The answer is clear. There must be a stream of new scientific knowledge to turn the wheels of private and public enterprise. There must be plenty of men and women trained in science and technology for upon them depend both the creation of new knowledge and its application to practical purposes.

As it turns out, support for research is non-partisan. Since its creation, leaders of both parties have steadily increased the amounts they've asked for to fund the National Science Foundation. Until now.

Trump is the first president to cut average funding from his predecessor. (Or more precisely, request that the average be lowered during his administration. Presidents make a request and Congress makes the appropriation.) Add to his list of leadership qualities, "Not a fan of scientific progress. Facts? I don't need research for that. I can make those up."

Among the institutions he's trying to erode is this most basic tool for progress. His desire to cut even research funding might be the most baffling of his attempts to retreat from the modern world.

Basic research matters. We rightfully pay attention to the Fed's policy when it comes to setting interest rates because that can change investment and spending. The National Science Foundation doesn't just affect investment but actually is an investment in intellectual capital, which is the basis for new technologies, industries, companies, jobs, and wealth. Research takes longer to work than interest rates, but has a bigger effect. I would argue that a slowdown in research funding results in a slowdown in productivity and wage growth. But of course something with a 20-year lag struggles to get much attention in this world of 20-second attention spans.

The amount we fund the National Science Foundation seems paltry to me. Even at its peak, it never even hit even one-tenth of one percent of GDP and it has averaged 4/100th of one percent of GDP in its lifetime. It seems to me that we could hardly err by making it larger each year. Much larger. But alas, the man who looks at our economy and concludes that the rich are not rich enough and the poor are not poor enough has also decided that we know quite enough already. That hardly seems the case to me. 

Age is Just a Number. Then Again, So Are the Votes You Need to Win

Our last four presidents were all baby boomers.

Clinton, Bush, and Trump were all born within a year of when Japan's surrender ended WWII. Fittingly, the impulsive Trump was born a mere 9.5 months after.

Obama gets lumped in with that generation by demographers but was born 16 years after WWII ended. Less boom than echo.

Clinton, Bush and Trump time traveled together, hitting all the major events at the same age.

It is not just that the 2020 candidates include what could be the first Jew, black, woman, black woman, or gay to be president. It also includes members of the silent generation, baby boomers, gen x, and a millennial. These candidates have hit major events at very different stages of life and would bring a very different perspective to them. Bernie Sanders was 4 when Japan surrendered and the horrors of World War II would have been relayed to him as fresh stories by family members when he was a little boy rather than as distant history as it would have been for Pete Buttigieg who will be younger when he's sworn in than Sanders was when Buttigieg was born.

Here is a way to think about the age of the candidates in terms of where they were when historic events happened. (And obviously for the candidates, the age when "sworn into office" assumes that they would actually win the 2020 election.)

Oh, and yes. I know that Ocasio-Cortez is too young but I thought it was interesting to put her there for comparison. And she's too young for 2020 but she'll be old enough by 4 months to run in 2024.

Change in Deficits From Reagan to Trump

Here is a chart showing the change in deficit from the first year of a president's term to the first year of his successor's term, the difference between what he inherited and what he left. It covers a span of 36 years. A negative number means that the president made the deficit smaller and a positive number means that he made it larger.

Reagan inherited a deficit of $419 billion and left George H. Bush a deficit of $252 billion. The deficit was $167.2 billion smaller by the time George took office, hence the -$167.2 in the graph above for the first bar.

Bush 1 turned the $252 billion he inherited into a $365.8 billion legacy for Clinton, increasing the deficit by $113.8 B.

Clinton turned this deficit into a surplus for his successor, reducing the deficit by half a trillion.

George W. Bush turned that surplus into the biggest deficit in history, a swing of nearly $1.6 trillion.

Obama whittled down the $1.4 trillion deficit he inherited into a still sizable $590 billion.

Trump is projected to increase that $590 billion into nearly $849 billion this year.

3 of the last 4 Republican presidents have increased the size of the deficit and both Democratic presidents have reduced it, suggesting that if you actually care about deficit reduction, you would not vote for Republicans. You can hate big deficits or love Republicans but you can't honestly do both.

Women, Hitler and the Inevitability of Progres

Progress is inevitable.

As someone who loves history I've come to believe that certain things are inevitable. Once the telegraph had been developed, someone would eventually find a way to push voices down the wires and allow conversation. Alexander Graham Bell was the first to file a patent for a telephone and then, hours later, Elisha Gray tried to file a patent for a telephone.  Had neither Bell nor Gray been born, we would still have had a telephone. It was inevitable.

Hitler was not inevitable. No one had to step into power in Europe and derail progress, tipping the world into so much madness and evil. Yet even Hitler illustrates the inevitability of progress.

Hitler killed 6 million Jews. It was one of the greatest horrors of the last century, this systematic killing of a people. But he made it even worse. By far. Hitler - in league with Mussolini and Hirohito - started a war of conquest that killed 50 - perhaps s many as 80 - million people. It was the mass manufacture of death.

Hitler's beliefs have still not completely died. Neo-Nazis are not done killing people, even if it never approaches a fraction of the scale of Hitler's madness.

Hitler was awful, not inevitable, and left behind a trail of destruction.

The Allies response to him? Accelerated progress. Technological and Social.

New products that came out of World War 2 include penicillin, the programmable computer, a jet engine, and radar.

Less obviously, production and quality methods came out of this that helped to raise productivity during the 1940s and probably for the rest of the century. Three of the business thinkers who most influenced my understanding of business and were heard and read by millions - Peter Drucker, Russell Ackoff, and W. Edwards Deming - all were involved in the war effort and carried lessons from that time into work with clients into the 21st century.

Hitler did not just accelerate progress in technology and production processes. He actually accelerated social progress.

In the US, men went off to war and women were brought into workplaces. (Management expected productivity to drop when this happened. Instead it rose. They investigated to understand why and what they discovered was .... when assigned to work on a new machine, women asked questions about how it worked. That was it. That was the difference that accounted for the productivity gain.)

To win the war, the US was eager to have as many able-bodied men as they could. This included minorities and this effort at integration did not end with the war. WWII ended in the Fall of 1945 and by the Spring of 1947, Jackie Robinson began playing major league baseball.

Hitler probably accelerated the development of medical care, aviation, computing, racial integration and women gaining more rights. He arguably caused more pain than anyone in the last century and yet .... even all that seemed to give progress more of a boost. (Let me be clear that we could have done this anyways and far less painfully. Probably not as quickly, though. Once we learn to follow the lead of intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, motivation progress will move along at a good clip and not be in reaction to crisis.)

Hillary Clinton came so very close to becoming our first woman president, losing a marathon race by half a second. Now, in the first election after her loss, there have been a record number of women elected to congress. (And still counting. It looks like the 116th Congress will rather fittingly have 116 women. One can only hope that their progress towards representing half of the 435 won't take another 200 years.) Many of these women were motivated by Trump's election and Clinton's loss. It is distinctly possible that the election of a man who bragged about just grabbing pussy because he was a star will actually lead to more women in power than we might have otherwise had.

Progress has a direction. More people have more freedom to live a life of their own choosing. They get access to inventions technological and social. We invent cool things like church and state, cars and planes. That makes life better. Then we figure out how to let more people use these cool things. Religious freedom and democracy, Ford's factory line and commercial air eventually give the everyday person access to these great inventions that once were tools reserved for the elites. Progress continues to create more  possibilities and then offer those to more people.

I'm more appalled at Trump than most people I know. I think he already has created so much unnecessary grief and could be responsible for far more. That said, if even Hitler could not derail progress, there is no way that a man as simple-minded and emotionally needy as Don is going to. All these women winning elections is just the first good thing to come out of his presidency.

What is Certain in Today's Election

We live in a probabilistic, not deterministic world. The Democrats will probably win the House and the Republicans will probably hold the Senate but .... we don't know. Yet. Fivethirtyeight gives Republicans a 15% chance of keeping the House and the Democrats a 15% chance of winning the Senate.

Reality is choosing among possible paths as rapidly as it can but there are so many of them. We can simulate reality so much faster than reality can play out because reality does not simplify.

One of the things that we will learn is how unique is Trump. It is very normal for a Republican to win the presidency after two terms of a Democrat in the White House. In that sense, the 2016 election was boring and normal. But of course Trump is a bizarre character who seems to most of us to be hugely different than a typical Republican. If he really is, the backlash could be bigger than what is captured in current probabilities; if typical Republicans and swing voters think he is really no different than a normal Republican, there will likely be a swing towards Democrats but it won't be very dramatic; about enough to win the House but still be still be a minority in the Senate.

What is certain? 

Democrats could win by 6 points nationally (53 to 47) and still lose the House. Because of gerrymandering and the fact that individual voters in big cities have less influence even in House races, Republicans have about a 5 to 6 point starting advantage for Congress. That strikes me as the most remarkable thing about politics in this second decade in the 21st century.

Related, the counties that voted for Clinton represent two-thirds of GDP. It is the areas of the country that least understand how to create jobs and wealth that thought Trump's anti-trade, anti-immigrant, nationalist agenda sounded like a good idea.

As it now stands, our policy is being decided by minorities as counted by the number of voters and GDP. That's certain. And that is certainly weird.

What else is certain? The House will decide whether we learn what Mueller has learned about Trump. The House will decide whether Trump will - for the first time in his life - experience any negative consequences for any negative deeds. Voters today will decide whether we continue to have a Republican-led House that merely enables Trump or a Democratic-led House that checks his worst excesses. 

What is certain is that Trump will be more dangerous with a Republican-led House. I'm certain that I don't want two more years of a Congress that merely acquiesces to his every whim; I wish I could be certain we'll get that.

Finally, as I think about today's election, the words of Tiny Tim repeat in my head: God bless us everyone.

Trump's Birthday and the Baby Boomer Model of Leadership Expiration Date

Today is Donald Trump's birthday. He's 72.

Trump, George W. and Bill Clinton were all born within 66 days of each other in the summer of 1946, 9 to 11 months after the end of WWII. They are the very definition of baby boomer. Bill was elected at 46, George at 54, and and Donald at 70.

I suspect there is a "lead by end of 20th century" expiration date hidden somewhere on the back of their neck but the GOP are the guys who find something in the back of the fridge and say, "This says 'Sell by 2000' but it doesn't smell weird. I won't get sick if I eat it, will I?"

Shout it - Yellen was Flawless at the Fed (Hopefully It Won't Be Another Century Before Another Woman is Fed Chair)

This Monday was our first day with Janet Yellen as Fed Chair in four years. The market marked her departure with the biggest ever one day drop in the Dow. Now that's a send off.

The job of Federal Reserve Chair has become more important since Congress has become more dysfunctional. In an ideal world, the government has a mix of fiscal and monetary tools to use to help to smooth out the inevitable bubble and busts of an economy. Now we really have just monetary policy, the tool of the Fed. In the recovery from the Great Recession, when unemployment was still above 8%, the media and Republicans made a great deal of noise about deficits. Now that unemployment is only 4.1%, the Republicans have decided to add another trillion to the debt this year with no noise from Republicans (they're the ones creating this) and very little noise from the media. This is backwards and the Fed has had to work against Congress in their efforts to keep the economy from extremes during the recovery. Yellen has done that flawlessly.

For 100 years we had Fed Chairmen. Then, four years ago, Obama appointed Janet Yellen to succeed Ben Bernanke as Fed Chair. Here is how the economy has performed during her four-year term.

The uninterrupted streak - a new record
When Yellen took over as Fed Chair, the American economy had been creating jobs every month for 40 months. That's great but on two different occasions, the streak had lasted longer: 46 months in the mid-2000s and 48 months in the late 1980s.

Not once did the jobs report come in negative during her time as Fed Chair. The streak is now 88 months and counting; she set a new record each month for the last 40 months of her tenure, shattering the old record and bringing the unemployment rate down from 6.7% to 4.1%. No other Fed Chair presided over a time in which every single monthly jobs reports was positive.

Second best annual job growth
Uninterrupted job creation makes it easier to create a lot of jobs. During her four years the economy did. Only one Fed Chair - Miller who served for only 17 months during the 1970s - presided over a higher annual average job growth.  (And wasn't it curious how the media continued to whine about so-so job creation rates, as if they had any instances of it being better during a four year or longer Fed term?)

Second best annual rate of stock market return
The market returns during her tenure were also second to only one other Fed Chair - Volcker. It seems fitting that the market began falling spectacularly after her last meeting Wednesday and before Powell's first day of work Monday. (Speaking of which, Powell did have a miserable start in his first two days. After Monday's huge sell off, the market return for his first day worked out to a 99.9% annual return which would have made him the first Fed Chair to have lost the entire stock market in his first year on the job. "Where are the returns Jerome?" "I don't know. Yellen seems to have taken them when she cleared out her desk.")

Lowest Inflation
The Federal Reserve has two goals: keep unemployment and inflation low. No one presided over lower inflation rates than Yellen. The goal is 2%. Her highest year was 2.1%. Only Bernanke - who was dealing with horrendous unemployment rates - was close to her and most Chairs were more than double that.

Trump, unsurprisingly, decided that Yellen's performance wasn't good enough to warrant a second term and thus hers will be the shortest term of any Fed Chair since 1979 when Carter decided that inflation was too high and he needed to truncate G. William Miller's term and replace him with Volcker.*

Of course it was unsurprising that Trump would replace Yellen. In Trump's final campaign ad, he lumped Yellen with Clinton, Soros and other world leaders as "globalist" financiers "who don't have your good in mind."

As it turns out, for a woman who didn't have our good in mind, she did pretty good. I'd go so far as to say that her performance was flawless. Let's hope it's not another century before a president has the good sense to appoint the second woman to head the Fed.

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*(It's worth noting that when Carter interviewed Volcker for the job as Fed Chair, Volcker warned him that his approach to squeezing out inflation would hurt the economy short-term and about the time Carter was running for reelection the economy would be in bad shape. Carter said, But this is what we need to do. And sure enough, in November of 1980 when Americans elected Ronald Reagan to take Carter's place, unemployment was at 7.5% and continuing to rise.)

Trying to Make Sense of Why Republicans Can't Make Sense of Deficits

It's not clear whether Republicans have given up on caring about the economy or if their ideology blinds them to what even sharp high school students can see. What I do know is that a horde of friends who - presumably fed by Fox news or other conservative news outlets - were loudly fretting about deficits during the recovery are now mum about the deficits that will follow from Trump's new tax cut.

One of the simplest things we know about economies is that when unemployment is high you should increase the size of deficits and when unemployment is low you should lower the size of deficits. This is so obvious that it hardly merits mention and yet Republicans seem to miss this point. I don't know if it is because of a paradigm filter, crass disregard for the larger economy, or simple opportunism that comes from disregarding any goals but tax cuts.

Deficits stimulate the economy. That said, there are deficits that are good stimulants and deficits that are poor. The best deficit comes from spending money on things like infrastructure that will leave an economy more able to grow. Ideally, a deficit stimulates the economy short term and lays the foundation for higher productivity in the future.  The worst deficit just adds more money to wealthy people who are unlikely to spend much of it. (If your net worth is $3 million and you get another $10,000 in tax cuts, you are less likely to spend any of that money than someone whose net worth is $10,000.) Good or bad, a deficit stimulates the economy, although to different degrees.

As trade makes up a bigger part of the economy, deficit spending it more likely to drive up asset prices like stocks and homes; rather than see a rise in the price of apples, you might see a rise in the price of Apple stock.

(Yes there are other factors. No I'm not going to cover those here.)

Why does this matter? Well, you can't just say that it is good or bad to increase the size of a deficit. If you suffer from high unemployment, increasing deficits is great; if you are enjoying low unemployment, increasing deficits is bad. Atop that, deficits that build the economy's capacity (borrowing to invest in building freeways or high speed rails or basic research or education initiatives) are better than deficits that just create a temporary blip in spending (e.g., tax cuts).

The year before George W. Bush took office, unemployment averaged 4%, its lowest since 1969. It seems safe to say that the economy was at full employment. What did George W. Bush do once he took office? He cut taxes to stimulate the economy. What happened? The price of homes - assets - and the mortgage back securities that financed their purchase went up. Spectacularly. This stimulus created a bubble and bubbles burst. The year before Bush took office unemployment averaged 4% and the year after he was in office it averaged 9.3%. Stimulating an already strong economy turned out to be disastrous.

The first year of Trump's presidency, unemployment will average 4.4%, its lowest since Clinton's last year in office. What does Trump do? He is cutting taxes to stimulate the economy. This could feed a bubble in asset prices ... a bubble that will pop more spectacularly than it otherwise would have. Stimulating a weak economy can create a strong one; stimulating a strong economy can create a bubble.

The Republicans who hollered about deficits during the Great Recession are now creating a deficit in a time of full employment.

It seems as though Republicans like deficits in good times and hate them in bad times.

The question is, why? This is not a difficult concept to grasp and yet Republicans refuse it.

I can only think of a few reasons.

One, they want tax cuts more than they want a healthy economy. They really do think it's possible to live like the rich in banana republics, comfortable even when the larger economy is bad, and as long as they get their tax cuts they don't really care about the larger economy.

Two, they don't believe that macroeconomic policy makes any difference, instead believing that individuals make all the difference. (It is true that individuals make a difference; some do well in bad economies and some do badly in good economies. It is not true that recessions hit because the percentage of lazy people in an economy suddenly doubles, because of changes in individual behavior. The strategies to get near the top of a group are different from the strategies to move a group's median income up.)

Three, they can't distinguish between individuals and a community when it comes to who should get a loan. It is true that you don't want to loan to a guy who is out of work and you'd be happy to loan to a guy with a great job. In that sense they are right that deficits are "safer" when the economy is good. But of course debt is very different for an economy than it is for an individual or household. Even a household engages in deficit spending when times are bad and pays down debt when times are good; if you are unemployed you borrow from your savings or friends; if you are fully employed you save. The banker may rather loan to the guy with a job but it is the guy who is temporarily out of work who most needs the loan. It may seem safe to create more debt in the economy when times are good but that stimulates spending that threatens to create bubbles.

What will be the result of the Trump tax cut? The economy will get worse. Not immediately. Immediately it will get better because the start of bubbles are the best part; it's the busting of bubbles that is miserable.

What Would We Be Fixating on if Trump Didn't Control the Media Narrative?

Because Americans couldn't look away from Trump, they now can't look away from Trump. A question worth asking is What would Americans be fixating on if it weren't a topic that Trump pointed us towards?

For about a year, Americans (myself included) could not look away from the train wreck of a candidate who was Donald Trump. He offended everyone from veterans (dismissing McCain's sacrifice because he prefers heroes who weren't captured) to women (bragging about how he can grab anyone's pussy because he's a star) to anyone with a triple-digit IQ ("I know more than the generals," "I know all the words, all the best words"). He kept the country incredulous throughout his entire campaign. I honestly thought at one point that he'd made a bet with some friends about all the things he could get away with before finally dropping in the polls. (Of course now we realize he has no friends. He has only sycophants and people who fear him.)

We couldn't look away from the candidate and now the price we pay for our inability to simply dismiss him and move on with a normal campaign is that we now can't look away from the president. He might gut our healthcare. He may start a nuclear war. He might jettison an investigation that would prove he colluded with Putin to seize the White House. He might pardon any racist who has committed any crime. Now he is the most powerful leader in the world and the damage he can do is worse than any hurricane.

One of my beliefs about us is that what we fixate on we head towards. Like a little kid learning to ride a bike, we steer in the direction of the thing that captures our attention. It's worth being careful about what seizes your attention because - whether it's fear of being alone or poverty or looking foolish - what you fixate on could become your reality.

We're living towards the end of the information economy, a time when little seems capable of holding out attention. In every direction there is a new distraction and it seems shiny at first. Trump's genius was knowing how to seize and hold attention. Now, of course, what he does has very real consequences, whether it is failing to initiate aid to Puerto Rico, Florida or Texas or initiating nuclear war. Before we could not look away. Now we can't look away.

One thing we do know about Trump, though, is that he creates the biggest distractions when he has the most to hide. Talking about "fire and fury" with North Korea or tweeting about firing black athletes who protest are topics that are sure to horrify or embolden people and pundits. And as Twitter and the airwaves become full of these topics, less attention is paid to the mounting evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the election.

What should the American people and pundits be angrily debating? Not taking a knee in protest. Instead, they should be angrily debating whether the same rules of the Olympics hold with our elections. In the Olympics, if they discover that the gold medal winner cheated, the silver medal winner gets the gold. Once we prove that Trump cheated to win the election, the presidency should go to Clinton. That seems both obvious to me and like a topic that Americans should fixate on. This is unprecedented in our history and, it seems to me, worthy of our focus. Let's start that conversation.

All the News That's Fit to Post

A rare 710-year-old copy of the Magna Carta was sold at auction for $21.3 million this week. The sale price made Bush regret, for the first time, that he sold the Bill of Rights for only $4.7 million.

A fire broke out in Dick Cheney's suite of offices, near the White House. The fire was traced back to an overheated paper shredder. The fact that the fire broke out on the same day that a federal judge ordered an investigation into the destruction of CIA interrogation tapes was just a coincidence, said an aide.

Home prices dropped around the country last month. Investors pining their hopes on median home prices of $3.7 million by 2020 expressed surprise and disappointment.

Britney's 16 year old sister Jamie Lynn Spears announced that she is pregnant. Defending her decision to keep the child and raise it herself, she said, "Our mother was young when she had us. Parenting is not that hard."

Storms have left residents of the midwest without power for 10 days. Al Gore, touring the region, said "Try going without any power for 10 years, then complain to me."

Two weeks away from the first contest in Iowa, Huckabee and Giuliani are in a tie for the Republican nomination and Clinton and Obama are tied for the Democratic nomination. Pundits and reporters could not be happier. "After a year of campaign coverage, we might finally have a story," said an excited Anderson Cooper.

The wives of David Letterman and Jay Leno are desperately working behind the scenes to end the writer's strike. "He still feels compelled to do stand up every night. He stands in front of the TV and tells me jokes," Leno's wife said, "but as it turns out, he is not that funny."

The Federal Reserve is proposing new regulations for the mortgage industry. "Under the new rules, those that issue subprime loans would have to show that borrowers can realistically afford to pay." Apparently, it never occurred to them that they could simply let the subprime lenders make bad loans but refuse to bail them out when borrowers default.

Changing the Presidency Into a Two-Person Job

My daughter told me an amusing story. A group of medieval monks were arguing about the number of teeth in a horse's mouth, trying to remember what number Aristotle had claimed they had. A young monk said, "Well, we all rode here on horses. Why don't we just go out to the stable, open the mouth of a horse, and count the teeth?" His idea was dismissed as nonsensical.

In today's political world, we rarely go out to the stable to actually take inventory of what is needed. Instead, it is fashionable to debate about what the writers' of the constitution actually meant by this or that point. Readers of this blog will know that I frequently refer to the need for social invention as a partner to technological invention. I'd like to ask the reader to step away from the constitution and walk out to the stable with me as I make the case for a change to our current politics.

Intel is increasingly relying on "two-in-a-box" executive positions. Instead of putting a single person in charge of their communications division, they'll put two. The markets, the technology, and the direction of the business are so complex that it makes sense to share authority over it. Why not consider this model for the US Presidency. The complexity facing the holder of that position is certainly no less than that facing the two-person teams running an Intel division.

Imagine that we have, say, Joe Biden and John Edwards, sharing the presidency. Biden could couple his foreign policy smarts and experience with Edwards domestic agenda and youth. Or, depending on your brand of coffee, you might prefer to see McCain and Chuck Hagel, or for the really bold, Clinton and Huckabee (who may come from different parties but who both come from Arkansas). I, for one, quite like the idea of two people sharing duties, one able to largely focus on foreign policy affairs and the other focused on domestic issues.

I know, I know. Supposedly presidents have cabinets to help complement their expertise. But it is a very different thing to give advice and be responsible for implementing that advice. Partnership has a great tradition in this country. Think of Hewlett & Packard or Laurel & Hardy. Isn't it time that we stepped out into the stable and took stock of what we really expect of a president before concluding that it is a one-person job?