Campaign promises

In just over a month, Donald Trump will move back into the White House as the 47th President, the only one besides Grover Cleveland to serve non-consecutive terms. Among his supporters, anticipation is high for all the marvels he will achieve as soon as he is sworn in. Among his opponents, there is a level of gloom and dread over exactly the same topic.

But what is he really going to do? The only sure answer is, No one knows. 

The correlation between What candidates promise and What Presidents perform is not high. 

• Partly this is because Presidents have no control over external events, and those events can override all their plans. George W. Bush campaigned on a plan to be "the education President" and to focus on domestic policy; when Al-Qaeda struck the United States on September 11, 2001, his administration shifted to a wartime footing from which it never recovered. 
• Partly, some candidates for the Presidency—especially those who come from outside the Washington Beltway—seem to overestimate the office's power; then they find out after inauguration that they can't really do things the way they had planned. For example (at least, this is the most charitable explanation) Barack Obama campaigned in 2008 on a promise to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Obama served two full terms as President; but even today—sixteen years after his election—that camp is still open and functioning. A similar explanation might serve for the collapse of Bill Clinton's "gays in the military" initiative early in his first term. 
• And of course sometimes candidates make promises with no intention of honoring them. There's a story about Earl Long, the Governor of Louisiana, who reneged on a promise to a group of constituents. When they came to the Governor's office to ask about it, Long instructed an aide, "Just tell them I lied."

Back in 1964, most of my parents' friends were liberal Democrats supporting Lyndon Johnson. But they had one good friend who strongly supported Barry Goldwater. This unusual affiliation caused a good bit of discussion among my parents' friends, and years later I remember the man himself telling the story this way.

"All throughout the campaign, my liberal friends kept telling me, 'Goldwater is such a horrible man! If you vote for Goldwater, six months later we'll be stuck in a war in Southeast Asia!' And you know what? It turns out they were right. I did vote for Goldwater, and six months later we were indeed stuck in a war in Southeast Asia."

In case any of my readers are not American, or don't remember the 1960's, perhaps I should explain the deliberate irony in his remark. Yes, this fellow did vote for Goldwater—but notwithstanding that, Goldwater lost the election overwhelmingly, in one of the great landslides of the Twentieth Century. It was Lyndon Johnson, "the peace candidate," who finally committed American troops to the Vietnam War. 

What candidates say has very little to do with how they govern. With Trump, at least we already have four years of experience from which to guess how he'll perform. But then, Trump has said that he wasn't prepared in his last administration and this one will be different. So who knows?