I think the title of John Dickerson’s magnificent book, The Hardest Job in the World (2020), which I recently finished, explains why every discussion about leadership inevitably arrives at the US presidency. As he observes, there is a similarly inevitable idiosyncrasy to the office itself:

When a president has improvised in office, it has often added to the job description. New assumptions of what the job entails are conveyed, like the Oval Office furniture, to the next president. A modern president must now be able to jolt the economy like Franklin D. Roosevelt, tame Congress like Lyndon Johnson, and lift the nation like Ronald Reagan.

Other duties as assigned, meet the buck stops here. We often talk about mission creep (where a problem changes while you attempt to solve it) but we pay far less attention to the same drift as it applies to the responsibility of roles themselves. Dickerson argues that America would do well to more formally evaluate candidates for its highest office but also notes that ultimately even hiring the right person does not guarantee success, especially as “it is overburdened, misunderstood, an almost impossible job to do.”

Here’s a line from historian Andrew Roberts, in his Spectator article about the release of the so-called “Lockdown Files,” that I wish that I had for my last editorial: “Some people…seem to have emerged from the Lockdown Files with their reputations enhanced, but part of the genius of history is that it is an argument without end, where reputations rise and fall, literally forever.”

I always enjoy when a lone Canadian tries to show the rest of the country that it is far more interesting than it pretends to be. In the Globe and Mail last week, John Ralston Saul reminded us that Canada’s democratic spirit precedes the formal founding in 1867 and demonstrates a political maturity we ought to celebrate.