WE WANT OUR MONEY BACK!

9/5/11

Rick Perry is governor of Texas. He is also a candidate for president of the United States. How does one do both? We hear constantly from incumbent governors (and most stentorially and unceasingly from he who holds that job in the Land of Lincoln and is no relation to yours truly) how hard the job is, how it is more than a full time job, how the incumbent never gets time off, and other such blather. So how is Rick Perry, or any sitting governor who has ever run for president, suddenly able to find time in his grueling, demanding, never a day off schedule to run for president? Are the people of Texas getting a refund of at least part of Mr. Perry’s salary, for the portion of that salary attributable to the time during which he is on his flight of further self-aggrandizement rather than serving the people of Texas?

This is not, of course, a knock exclusively on Rick Perry; I am, at least at this juncture, neither hot nor cold on Mr. Perry’s candidacy. The same questions would apply to Chris Christie should he decide to throw his hat in the ring, an unlikely prospect. If my memory serves me effectively, Bill Clinton, who, in retrospect, and certainly by comparison to the two that followed him, was one of our great presidents, ran for the Oval Office while an incumbent governor. And I suppose the same logic applies to sitting Congresspersons (including Ron Paul and Michele Bachman) and senators (Though one wonders how tough getting one’s hindquarters kissed by shameless lobbyists and having various sycophants bow and scrape at your feet all day, approximately the job description of a member of Congress, can be. Surely one can take a break from the obsequiants to seek further self-glorification, but I digress.), at least as far as the taxpayers getting some kind of refund of their salaries. Come to think of it, a similar argument applies to presidents: if, as we hear, the president’s job is so grueling, how does he, whether Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush I, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon…. find so much time to prance around and tell us how wonderful he, and what a scoundrel his challenger, is? We should at least get some of our money back. Better yet, the incumbents should take at least a temporary, unpaid leave of absence and put the country, their states, or their seats in the hands of someone who wants to do the job rather than use it as a platform for seeking another one.

If one had a job in the private sector or the public sector doing actual work rather than the primping and preening that is involved in holding and seeking public office, one would not be able to suddenly take off a year or more to spread the gospel of one’s self and still get paid for the job one wouldn’t be doing. Why do our public servants get to do so?

And, for future reference…the same reasonable expectation of a leave of absence or at least a refund of salary while running for president would apply to a mayor seeking our nation’s most vainglorious office.