LETTER: The choice is clear

Randy Hughes

Creston

An important consideration when selecting the next president should be how that president would respond to unforeseen events.

Campaign rhetoric is designed to attract voters and is an unreliable roadmap to any president’s actual accomplishments. Recent examples could include a foreign financed border wall, a new health care package and infrastructure improvements. The last of those was, however, accomplished under a later president.

Nobody foresaw President Kennedy needing to deal with the presence of Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba. Navigating the fallout from the Iranian Revolution was not a topic when President Carter took office. Did anyone imagine President Bush needing to respond to the attacks on the U.S. on Sept. 11? Who could have anticipated the seriousness of the threat to the U.S. under President Trump posed by a deadly pandemic? In each of the above circumstances, our presidents responded, with varying degrees of success, to those circumstances.

When the unexpected arises the country must rely upon the intellect of the president and the quality of the team surrounding the president. The candidate who boasted, “I only hire the best” has seen many of the “best” jailed or awaiting sentencing, as is he. Of the approximately 40 cabinet members who served under him, only four have endorsed him for a second term. More than that number have declared him unfit for holding that office.

From the standpoint of who would be most reliable to exercise competent leadership when the inevitable, but as yet, unforeseen crisis arise, the choice is clear.