Why I don't want Mike Rowe to be President

I have a confession to make...  

Anybody who's read even a few of my FB posts will know that I like Mike Rowe... a lot. Aside from being a genuinely likable guy, he's been involved in some of the best TV to grace the airwaves (cablewaves?):

- "Dirty Jobs"
- "Somebody’s Gotta’ Do It"
- The newly-released FB program, "Returning the Favor"

He's also been recording an excellent series of short pod-casts, and frequently pens humorous essays on his FB page (https://www.facebook.com/TheRealMikeRowe/).

More importantly, he's been spearheading efforts to close the ever-increasing deficit of skilled tradesmen (and women, of course) needed to keep a civilized society civilized, functioning, and growing. His organization, mikeroweworks.com (I encourage you to check it out), has already raised and distributed many millions of dollars to provide trade school scholarships to deserving folks.

In an internet world filled with vile insults and crass, vulgar, insensitive, and mean-spirited “discourse,” Mike speaks / writes with eloquence, good humor, civility, common sense, and a self-effacing wit that is a breath of fresh air.

With all this going for him, it’s not surprising that a significant number of his fans repeatedly call for Mike to run for President. Admittedly, having someone of Mike’s intelligence, wit, and (most of all) humility in the Oval Office is very appealing.

BUT….

I don’t want Mike Rowe to be President. And those calling for this are seriously misguided for several reasons:

While Mike is really good at what he does, there’s no expectation that he’d succeed as leader of the executive branch of the government. I suspect, given his intelligence, common sense, and likable nature, that he’d probably be better than some, but there are no guarantees. (One item in Mike’s favor is his great humility -- he most certainly knows and admits how much he doesn’t know and would assemble a team of expert advisers who would give him the necessary guidance.)

No, we need Mike where he is -- addressing (quite successfully) a single, but very important issue facing this country.

We can’t expect one person to fix all the problems we are facing -- We don't need ONE Mike Rowe in the White House, we need THOUSANDS MORE Mikes in the private sector or at the state and local levels, each with some unique set of characteristics and skills needed to tackle and solve a singular piece of the many thousands of problems we are facing.

And that leads to the most important reason I don’t want Mike Rowe to be President. All of those clamoring for him (or anyone else for that matter) to run seem to have the same faulty mind-set of what the President (and the Federal government, in general) can and (more importantly) should do.

First of all, it’s a serious mistake to think that our behemoth Federal government can somehow work if only we can get the “right guy” in charge. That one man can be in charge of a huge bureaucratic juggernaut that claims to be able to run the lives of 320,000,000 US citizens. This is the distorted thinking of all too many Presidential hopefuls and their supporters.

Second, the President is only the head of one of three co-equal branches of government. As the head of the Executive Branch, the President can only impact the execution of laws and the operation of existing agencies. He has no power to affect any new laws (other than either signing or vetoing those new laws passed by Congress). For any Presidential candidate to claim he will fix all our woes is either ignorant of our Constitution or is deliberately misleading the voters (of which too many are also ignorant of our Constitution).

But this leads to a singular issue: How do we find MORE Mike Rowes? How do we change the faulty mind-set of people who think that we just need to get the "right" person in the White House in order to make our lives better?