Mark Levin hits back against the idea that only governors are qualified to be president. I suspect this comes in response to a certain Texas governor who said this weekend that the next president would not be a Senator and another sitting Wisconsin governor who doesn’t believe Congressmen make good presidents:
Republican governors running for president, although unannounced, insist that only governors know how to serve as president because they’ve actually run a state. So, they hope to re-define the qualifications for the presidency to exclude all other competition. That’s really stupid. They would have excluded,among others, George Washington, the father of the country, and James Madison, the father of the Constitution. They would have excluded Abraham Lincoln, considered by many our greatest president, and Dwight Eisenhower, one of our greatest generals. Don’t get me wrong,there were some great presidents who’d served as governor, including Ronald Reagan. But there were some pretty awful presidents who’d served as governors as well. For example, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Andrew Johnson,Rutherford B. Hayes, Woodrow Wilson, and Jimmy Carter.
The point is that Republican governors are going to have to do much better than expect all of us to accept their self-serving definition of presidential qualifications; they’re actually going to have to tell us how their records justify us promoting them to the presidency, as will all other candidates. And I don’t care what political office they’ve held. If they’ve supported big-spending and big-government, and reject the constraints of constitutional government, they’re not qualified by any measure.
Personally I think there are some fine Republican governors who would make great presidents, like Rick Perry and Scott Walker. But is that to say I don’t think Ted Cruz is competent enough to be president? Heck no. I think Ted Cruz would make a fantastic president, if not the most fantastic of the whole bunch.
So when it comes time to choose a Republican nominee I refuse to be pigeon-holed into the governor vs senator debate. I’ll be looking at experience, of course, but more than that I’ll be looking at principles and the ability to name and fight the enemy. Who is going to stand and fight for conservative principles despite having an extremely biased media.