{"id":776,"date":"2009-05-25T09:21:00","date_gmt":"2009-05-25T13:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/05\/25\/the-next-soldier-president\/"},"modified":"2009-05-25T09:21:00","modified_gmt":"2009-05-25T13:21:00","slug":"the-next-soldier-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/05\/25\/the-next-soldier-president\/","title":{"rendered":"The next soldier President?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>President Barack Obama is the latest in a line 0f Commanders-in-Chief stretching back to 1993 who never served in the U.S. military during an armed conflict.<\/p>\n<p>That means a new crop of Americans are about to reach voting age without ever seeing a service-member in the White House.<\/p>\n<p>(George W.  Bush was a reservist in the Texas Air National Guard; but he avoided fighting in Vietnam.)<\/p>\n<p>But on this Memorial Day, I wonder if Obama may also be the last non-vet President for a while.<\/p>\n<p>Assuming he serves two terms, Obama will leave office in 2016.  By that time, a generation of Iraq-and-Afghanistan-era service-members will have come of age politically.<\/p>\n<p>Service has always been a big plus for American presidential candidates.  It&#8217;s not difficult to imagine both parties searching their ranks for Vet standard-bearers.<\/p>\n<p>Already, a first generation of soldiers from our latest wars have been elected to the House of Representatives &#8212; Patrick Murphy, Joe Sestak, Tim Walz, and Chris Carney won office in the Democratic landslide of 2006.<\/p>\n<p>And last year, the <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB120761362590096605.html?mod=googlenews_wsj\">Wall Street Journa<\/a>l reported that no fewer than seventeen Iraq vets were running for Congress as Republicans.<\/p>\n<p>If this trend continues &#8212; if these wars continue &#8212; we could reverse or at least moderate a shift toward leadership by non-service members that dates back to the end of the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n<p>(It&#8217;s worth noting that no Vietnam vet ever managed to reach the White House.  John Kerry and John McCain came closest&#8230;) <\/p>\n<p>What would that mean for American politics?  For our foreign policy?<\/p>\n<p>How would George Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama and Joe Biden view our current entanglements had they faced hostile fire?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>President Barack Obama is the latest in a line 0f Commanders-in-Chief stretching back to 1993 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}