Who’s the President?

Back in late November 2000, the controversy was swirling across the nation about whether George W. Bush or Al Gore won the Florida vote, which ultimately would decide the winner of that year’s presidential election. All sorts of legal actions and recounts were underway, and the media was full of images of officials carefully examining ballots for “hanging chads” and the like. Both Bush and Gore were assembling tentative cabinets and staff in anticipation of things falling their way in the end. All across the country, people were emotionally taking sides, either for Bush or for Gore. In this setting, I was going through the drive-through at my local Checkers fast-food place when the worker there, with whom I had talked before, posed me the “$60,000 question”: “So who’s the president?” To which I immediately replied (disregarding his intended meaning), “Why Bill Clinton, of course!”

As we go through the transition period between current president George W. Bush and president-elect Barack Obama, it would be a good idea to keep in mind that it is Bush, not Obama, who is now president. Whatever Obama does will matter on 1/20/09 and beyond. Until then, he is just the president-in-waiting. Naturally, Obama is the big figure in the news as he puts together and announces his staff and cabinet. Speculation is running rampant among the media’s talking heads about which directions he will take the economy and our foreign policy in. But right now it is still the Bush Show regarding the presidency.

It’s important to keep this in mind, for in the past we’ve experienced important events happening in this grey zone between a new president’s election and his inauguration. In 1992, outgoing president George H.W. Bush decided to send marines into Somalia on a “humanitarian” mission which, by the time that incoming president Bill Clinton inherited it, had morphed into a dangerous combat adventure. In 1980-81, the release for the Iran hostages was successfully negotiated between Carter’s defeat at the hands of Reagan in that year’s election and the latter’s inauguration. In 1960, the Bay of Pigs invasion designed to overthrow Castro’s leftist Cuban regime was designed and finalized in the last months of the Eisenhower administration. Incoming president John Kennedy did sign on to the invasion, but it was not of his making. And the most infamous example of this was the period of time in 1860-1861 between Abraham Lincoln’s election and his inauguration when most of the soon-to-be Confederate states seceded from the United States under the ineffective watch of failure-president James Buchanan. It was Buchanan, who had earlier derived much of his political support from the South, who utterly failed to keep the union together during this period when he could have exerted his presidential influence on those disaffected states.

There’s still a lot that can happen in America and the rest of the world before Obama steps in, and it will be Bush, not Obama, who will have the authority and ultimate responsibility for how our government behaves. Bush is already leaving horrendous messes in the Middle East and the economy for Obama to try to fix. Hopefully, he won’t do something during his final days in office to further complicate Obama’s new presidency.