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Table for One?By Rick Horowitz
In case you were wondering: I don't want to be president. This particular thought, I realize, might not have occurred to you. But just in case it had -- or just in case it occurs to you a few days or weeks from now -- I want to put the matter to rest once and for all. I don't want to be president. Really. Too much pressure, for one thing; the fate of millions of people could be riding on any one of my decisions. Too many expectations, too; when you're the president, everybody wants something from you -- an autographed picture, a tax loophole -- and there's only so much you can do, and then some of them get annoyed at you. And too many bad chicken dinners in places you wouldn't even think of going if they didn't have some high-school band tootling "Hail to the Chief" in your honor. So all in all, presidentially speaking, I think I'll pass. Not that you asked. But there's one part of being president I wouldn't mind making my very own: the presidential table. "What presidential table?" you wonder. "I didn't know there was a presidential table." Sure you do. You just haven't been paying attention; they talk about it all the time. You know how, whenever there's some international crisis -- Iran looks like it wants to go nuclear, or North Korea announces that it already has -- and everybody tries to figure out what the president is going to do about it? A U.N. resolution? Economic sanctions? Surgical air strikes? Another invasion? So the president's advisers go on the Sunday-morning talk shows to talk strategy, and what do they always say? "The president isn't taking any options off the table," they say. Or sometimes they'll narrow it down a bit. "The commander in chief," they'll say, "never takes any military options off the table." That table. It's the same thing on the domestic side. Social Security, for instance. The current president has been zipping around the country trying to sell his ideas for changing the Social Security system -- not that he's been all that specific about his ideas, particularly his ideas about how he'd pay for all the changes he wants. That's because everything's still -- now you remember! -- on the table. Well, almost everything. "The one thing I'm not open-minded about," the president admitted the other day, "is raising the payroll tax rate. And all the other issues are on the table, and that's important for people to know." Assuming the president is being honest about it -- and I always prefer to assume the president is being honest about it, whatever "it" is -- that still leaves plenty of other issues sitting on the table. And that's just for Social Security. Then there are all those other domestic issues; I'm sure plenty of them are still on the table, too. And the president's advisers have already told us that military options never get taken off the table. So what I want to know is: How big is this table? And how can I get one? (Other than by getting elected, that is.) I definitely need an upgrade, table-wise. The table I have now would barely handle Social Security -- and even then, I'd probably have to pile some of the minor funding options on top of one another. There's no way I'd have room for any other domestic issues, let alone all the foreign-affairs stuff, especially if I could never remove any of the military options. My current table is jammed to the gills already, and all I have on it at the moment are a coffee mug and an empty water bottle, a ballpoint pen and a short stack of index cards, a cell phone, a wallet, a comb, a few keys, some spare change, a couple of newspapers and a crumpled napkin from Dunkin' Donuts. (Chocolate glazed.) And it all has to be off the table by lunchtime. I still don't want to be president. But I could use the extra space. Posted 2/17/05. Put
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Rick Horowitz
