The Purple Presidency 2024: How voters can reclaim the White House

By C. Owen Paepke
Real Clear Wire

Below is an excerpt from the book “The Purple Presidency 2024: How Voters Can Reclaim the White House for Bipartisan Governance” by C. Owen Paepke.

America deserves better presidents. Donald Trump and Joe Biden have been the most unpopular presidents since polling began. Each thoroughly earned voters’ low regard by ignoring or mishandling the nation’s fundamental and pressing problems. Trump became the first one-term president in three decades, and Biden may be poised to replicate that feat in 2024. Yet they remain their own biggest fans, touting imagined accomplishments, blaming their critics, and refusing to address their own shortcomings or accept responsibility for their mistakes in office.

Successful presidents rise above setbacks and course correct to minimize their faults. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton faced tough challenges and opposition during their first terms but won decisive reelections by working with their opposition to meet those challenges. Trump and Biden responded to adversity by dividing, denying, complaining, maligning critics, and doubling down on their failures, achieving very little.

Trump is seeking the Republican nomination for 2024. His fervent cadre of supporters and unique talent for sabotaging other contenders could make him the first-ever Republican presidential candidate in three consecutive elections. Biden remains the favorite among likely Democratic voters. Most Americans reject these choices, hoping that neither will run again and wishing that Candidate NOTA (None Of The Above) were on the ballot. Each may be the only opponent the other could defeat.

A system that could even contemplate renominating such unworthy and unwanted candidates is fundamentally broken. “Dysfunctional” is too timid an adjective to describe the current state of presidential politics.

More of the same will produce more of the same. Many younger Americans have never experienced voting for a candidate they really wanted as their president. This privilege has degenerated into voting against the greater of two evils. With each such choice, corrosive cynicism works itself deeper into the nation’s psyche. It threatens to become the new normal.

This short book is a plea for America to demand at least one deserving moderate or centrist presidential candidate in 2024. It appeals to the most fundamental tenets of democracy. Presidents Trump and Biden were duly nominated and elected under the auspices of political parties dating back more than a century, but most Americans do not want to be governed by either of them and probably never did. The parties themselves have taken on an undemocratic overlay, offering candidates most Americans would never choose as their president and debasing their votes on election day. These have been the parties’ presidents rather than the people’s. In office, they have lived down to voters’ expectations. Little wonder that “discouraging words” dominate the public discourse. Negative sentiments are pervasive, and they should be.

But the sheer bleakness of this picture may present the best opportunity for changing it. Few Americans want more of the same, yet the major parties seem intent on delivering just that. The parties and their presidents boast of their wonderful accomplishments in power, while the American people overwhelmingly see a nation in decline, blaming poor and divisive leadership in Washington. This disconnect between voters and their supposed representatives is stunning, but it has become business as usual, barely raising an eyebrow.

The parties will not change on their own. Most presidential aspirants now share negative favorability ratings in the polls and offer fringe policies that most voters are keen to reject. Until this century, that never happened. Candidates reflected America.

Poor leadership is hurting the nation badly. Neglected problems are becoming crises. The national debt has reached potentially dangerous levels. Feckless yo-yo policies on energy self-sufficiency and climate change have frittered away a decade that should have advanced the next energy revolution. Both parties fiddled while Social Security’s finances burned. Dictators have seized the global initiative, putting the free world on the defensive. The 2024 election may be the last clear chance to reverse such trends before they spin out of control.

Meanwhile, both parties have deserted their traditional core supporters in favor of fringes that will never produce a national consensus for action; indeed, they seem to relish creating even more division. Each seems committed to nominating another radically unsuitable and broadly unpopular presidential candidate in 2024. This is political malpractice, and it defies the bedrock principle of democracy: people have the right to choose the leaders they want.

This spells opportunity for a moderate or centrist. If the 2024 ballots include a credible presidential candidate committed to representing mainstream voters, those voters can write American political history.

The voters do not yet embrace this vision. Faced with partisan hubris, they feel helpless, but they, and they alone, have the power to fix this broken system if they commit to that end by placing nation above party. When the major parties cannot or will not nominate candidates who represent the views of most Americans, instill pride in their nation, and take responsibility for leading this nation out of its current morass, voters need to reclaim their rights and perform their democratic duty. The 2024 election is the time for drastic action, not in media rants or on the streets or over drinks but at the ballot box, as America’s founders intended.

Sincere and well-meaning naysayers are everywhere, warning the author and other like-minded individuals that this undertaking is hopeless. It is too big. Washington’s ways are impervious to mere citizens’ wishes. It is a waste of time and energy. On its face, that seems like sensible advice – why would anyone try to accomplish something on this scale against the wishes of powerful Washington interests? – but the founding fathers believed otherwise. They staked their lives and founded a nation on the novel premise that America’s government should represent the views and serve the interests of its citizens. With the republic in crisis, there is no better time to test their beliefs, however long the odds may seem.

A tsunami begins as a seismic disturbance producing an indetectable bump in the ocean, its power becoming apparent only as it nears land. Make a difference. Ignore the naysayers. Join the bump.

The circumstances may never be better for upsetting America’s political duopoly. The voter support for renominating Biden or Trump is narrow and concentrated in the fringes. Combine that with sharply rising numbers of independents, Trump’s legal problems, and deepening concerns about Biden’s physical and mental capacity for another term, the frontrunners are hardly impregnable. An effective uprising, however, will require moderate party members to unite behind one candidate. Scattered opposition would merely replay the 2016 Republican primaries.

An independent third candidate approach will require an ironclad moderate/centrist platform that tracks what both parties’ voters consistently say they want – lower deficits and inflation, border security combined with a welcome mat for lawful immigrants, progress vs. climate change while maintaining energy security, lower violent crime, a solvent Social Security system, and so on. The right platform will reward an Independent with a serious hearing from independents and moderate party members alike.

C. Owen Paepke is the author of “The Purple Presidency 2024: How Voters Can Reclaim the White House for Bipartisan Governance.”