Presidential suit

With President A P J Abdul Kalam due to lay down office the coming year, one thing seems certain—his successor will be a conventional political figure, and relatively young at that. We might find that the First Citizen will
not necessarily be a senior citizen, too. It’s a global trend,
says H Y Sharada Prasad

How old should a president or prime minister be when he assumes office? In America, it is a question that is perennially asked. Barely do they elect a president when they begin asking who his successor is likely to be. If he is a first-term head of state, he is likely to be succeeded by himself. But an American president can have only two terms and not more. That amendment was made to the American Constitution after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected for a fourth term, and there was idle talk about an “Imperial Presidency”. Most American presidents in the past few years have had a second term, the exceptions being Jimmy Carter and George Herbert Bush Sr (and Gerald Ford, who filled out Richard Nixon's unexpired term).

Military men, in countries they are in power, do not have this problem. President Pervez Musharraf has just announced his desire to seek another term. Anyway, most khaki presidents' terms end not through the ballot but through the bullet. In Parliamentary democracies, the prime minister is the chief executive. The president is usually older than the prime minister because an elder statesman or scholar is picked for the post. The president may not be a politician but presidential elections are

full of political drama and are accompanied by major consequences. We are likely to see this next year when President A P J Abdul Kalam 's term comes to a close.

One important factor that needs to be taken into consideration when picking a president is his age. This is so whether the president is just a Constitutional functionary or the real wielder of governmental power. It has so happened that four of our most recent presidents have been in their 70s or 80s—R Venkataraman, Dr Shankar Dayal Sharma, K R Narayanan and Dr Abdul Kalam. Dr Kalam is due to lay down office next year, but already the newspapers and political lobbies are full of speculation on who the next president will be. Dr Kalam, with his unconventional style is very popular, but it is unlikely that he will be chosen again, or that the politicos will allow the prize to fall into a non-political basket. Who it will be it is too early to say, but one thing seems certain—it will be a conventional political figure and the person will be relatively young. We shall find that the First Citizen need not necessarily be a senior citizen.

We find that in the "advanced countries", the trend is for the chief executive to be younger. The age of prime ministers and presidents seems to be inversely related to the average life span. Bill Clinton completed two terms when he was just 54. Tony Blair is speaking of retiring. He is only in his 50s, and we have been witness to the unusual spectacle of the prime minister's wife giving birth to a child while at 10 Downing Street. In India or Sri Lanka, it would be a “prime ministerial grandchild”.

Names have begun appearing in the American press of the likely candidates of the two big parties for next year's election. Among the Democrats who have already announced their intention of running are Senator Christopher J Dodd, Senator Joseph R Biden, John Edwards, Governor Tom Vilsack, and Rep Dennis Kucinich. And Senator Hillary Clinton has thrown her hat in the ring. No Republican has officially come forward yet. But the names mentioned are those of Senator John McCain, Rudolph Giuliani, and Governor George Pataki.

But the most popular of the names, according to several polls, is that of Senator Barack Obama. He is 46, and is African-American. The main criticism against him is that he is too inexperienced, having spent only two years in the Senate and seven years in the state senate of Illinois. But if you go through the list of candidates who have stood for the US presidentship, there have been many who were younger. William Jennings Bryan was 36 when the Democrats nominated him. John Kennedy was 43 when elected. Theodore Roosevelt (after whom teddy bears have been modelled) was 42 when he was sworn in.

How important is experience? According to USA Today, Obama would not be the least experienced nominee, because Wendell Willkie had never been elected to any office before he became Republican nominee for president in 1940. And Woodrow Wilson was governor for just two years when he was elected president in 1912. George Bush Jr himself served as Texas governor for just six years before becoming president.

In our country as well as in many colonies, we have had people who went straight from prison to the presidential palace .What counted was not legislative or executive experience but the fact of having exercised power over the people's minds. We often find that those who spent long years as No 2 never manage to become No 1. Always the bridesmaid and never the bride. Anthony Eden was Winston Churchill's heir for years but proved a flop as prime minister. Eden's great achievement was to turn the British lion into a timid, sick kitten.

Experience is not really related to years spent in office. Often that very fact would have earned a man many enemies and adversaries, as happened with George Curzon.

Experience is also the name given to that wonderful but rare gift of not making mistakes. To learn from mistakes, we need not make them ourselves: we learn from others' mistakes. When evaluating the life and work of Rajiv Gandhi, we find people listing the many mistakes he made, which he would not have made had he been longer in politics. But he was a tremendously quick learner. Had he been vouchsafed a longer life, there is little doubt that India would have seen many solid achievements.

What the political leader must possess is not

just experience and wisdom—the capacity to be proved right in retrospect—but decisiveness. It is that quality which persuades millions to entrust their future to the keeping of one man and his advisers. P V Narasimha Rao was a man of vast administrative experience and tactical skills. Imagine the record he would have left behind if he had also been endowed with a corresponding degree of decisiveness.