The American Presidency

In at least one blog entry, reflect on the American presidency.

I wonder what a day in the life of an American President is like. I think about how much I can get done in a day (or sometimes how little), and it just seems like there's no way a President could get more done than the rest of us. Think about what your responsibilities would be as President:

• You have to have an armored car no matter where you go.
• You have serious decisions to make, affecting a lot of people.
• Your email box is probably very full, and not just with fwd's. These ones require a serious response.
• You have to be informed on an enormous amount of issues. Even though you have aides, you still have to spend time listening to them and trying to ingest all of their info.
• You have to give speeches constantly. I'm sure someone will write them for you, but you still have to read over them beforehand to ensure that you really want to say it all.
• You have an entire military to command.
• You have to make extra sure that your food isn't poisoned.
• You probably never get a full night's sleep without some major crisis happening in some part of country or world that you have to attend to immediately.
• You're under the scrutiny of your 304,059,724 constituents who all have a different opinion. You'll never be able to please them all.
• You have to (in Obama's case) continuously pester the House and Senate to get your pet projects passed.
• And at the end of the day, your wife and kids are going to want to spend some time with you.

And people sign up for this job?

According to Dr. Michael Roizen, "The typical president ages two years for every year they are in office." And while these before and after shots may be a bit exaggerated, there's no doubt that it's a stressful job!

Caption at bottom: President Barack Obama, in a photo illustration demonstrating how he might age after four years in office.

I can't imagine who might have time to speculate on such a silly thing as how a president might look in 4 years, but apparently somebody did!