Perfection as enemy of the good

Perhaps there are those of you out there, who aren't bots, who may have heard of this phrase.  The best example of this in my experience is the Reagan presidency.  I never voted for Reagan.  But I consider him the best President in my lifetime, by far.

Why didn't I vote for him?  Partly because I believed he wasn't very intelligent.  This attitude came from the fact that at the time, I was in the university working on my degree.  As a result, I had something of a liberal influence upon me.  Liberals like Tip O'Neill, the Speaker at the time, called Reagan an "amiable dunce".  There was no respect for the man's intelligence.  Yet, this was an incorrect assessment of the man's intelligence.  His intelligence was such that he was able to cobble together a winning strategy for the Cold War.  Nobody before or since has been able to match that, or even come close.

Reagan seemed to tap into the common folk's feelings.  People liked the man.  But this didn't matter that much to me.  Even more, I am suspicious of such things.  Heck, people seemed to like Obama.  They may still like him personally.  But I am a bit suspicious of a man who can move the common folk.  Maybe you can call this a bit of elitism in me, I don't know.  It didn't turn out too badly for Reagan, but it is turning out rather badly for Obama.

Neither of these two reasons were enough alone to make me not vote for him.  The thing that did it was his program for massive tax cuts and massive military spending.  I knew that couldn't work, and as the course of events showed, it didn't.  It didn't work in the sense that the budget couldn't be balanced with that type of program.  Yet, my being right about this doesn't diminish my respect for what he accomplished.  For, if it weren't for him, who knows what shape we'd be in right now.

The lesson I learned from that was that even though Reagan wasn't perfect, he was a good President.  We don't need perfection.  We just need someone who will be good.  It will be a big challenge to find such a person, because it may not be obvious at the time.  It wasn't with Reagan.  Reagan was behind in the polls, according to what I've heard about the election.  Before the debate, people may have had some doubts.  But the debate ended those doubts and he went on to victory.  I think the doubts were largely manufactured by the media, which was a lot worse than it is now.

People shouldn't dwell too much on the negatives.  There are some good things out there.  While there is plenty of bad, there is still the opportunity to turn things around.  Reagan was able to do it.  It is better to be hopeful than in despair.  Everybody needs to keep their chin up and work for good outcomes.