They would also be pro-family. Provide incentives to encourage couples to marry and have children. Fight against the redefinition of marriage.

They would encourage economic growth by focusing tax incentives in productive and beneficial industries. They would help to support the economic development of poverty-stricken areas by encouraging business to expand their operations and provide jobs.

They would expand domestic energy production, by opening up currently restricted oil reserves, expanding the use of nuclear power, and funding continual development of alternative energy sources as is practical.

They would recognize the fact that immigrants are human persons, not statistics. However, they would work to make sure that immigration is controlled and legal, and push for integration.

They would work towards universal coverage for health care, but do so carefully. It doesn’t need to be rushed, nor do we need to we need to radically change the entire system. Find out what works, find out what doesn’t. Keep what works, fix what doesn’t.

I suppose my ideas can pretty much be boiled down to pro-life, pro-family, pro-growth.

Just some ideas off the top of my head.

But, where do we find someone like Aragorn? Maybe we can look to politician saints?

How about a president like Bl. Charles of Austria. As far as I know he is the only political leader in the 20th century who has been raised to the altars.

If we are to learn from the Church, then it seems we must then look to him as a model of what the excellent and catholic christian politician is.

grega: I am not in the least dissatisfied, I am just trying to moderate. Now, my political message right now is trying to see what happens when we allow ourselves to wonder and imagine about the political—when we give ourselves a little bit of a Peter Pan moment.

But you are quite right that there is nothing new about my stance. After all, I am something of a perennialist. The question of politics has always been fundamentally about the courage of a people to imagine what they would like and try to reconcile with that with what they have and lack, I think.

By the way in my view the current office holder serves this country very well. A realistic, smart, solid President – not perfect – but real.
You dream on – you can do that until the end of your days on this fine planet if you wish – but do not expect to ever see a major tilt towards your dreamed up perfection.
“Be perfect as my Father is perfect.”
Oh well- what can I say.

Well, for what it’s worth, I did indeed read those posts as they came out — I just chose not to comment on them at the time, in part because of the sort of concerns expressed above.

I think I can see what you’re trying to drive for (and why you’re finding the responses to these imaginative exercises generally unsatisfying) but I’m not sure that the exercise as you’re currently approaching it is going to get you to real knowledge, mainly because your readers are often confused by the distance between the thought process you’re trying to follow and the actual nature of politics.

DarwinCatholic: I hate to send you to other reading, but I have a very specific purpose to these questions which corresponds to what I have recently posted on the failure of imagination in politics. After those pieces (that began with an IM interview) I posted two pieces on (im)possible presidents. I wanted to follow-up those posts with our hopes and dreams. After all, a just world is a hope and a dream that is hardly practical or feasible, but it is still to be articulated lest we forget what we are called to: “Be perfect as my Father is perfect.”

I hope for a better society, and I try to work for one, but it seems to me that one of the important elements in such an endevour is to understand the limits of what policies or presidents are likely to achieve are — and I suspect those limits are in fact very great. Politicians seem to have a great deal of ability to destroy, but very little actual ability to build and improve.

Perhaps an example would serve. I just finished having to spend a bunch of time picking out a health care plan for my family for the next year. The prices of the insurers that my company offers had changed, and I had to weigh risk against price, decide whether to switch insurance companies in order to seek lower rates, etc. I made my choice based on a number of factors, and if I was asked to design a better set of options I would have a number of ideas. But if someone asked me, “What is the ideal sort of health coverage for people to have,” I would tell him he was asking the wrong question. Health coverage is a pragmatic attempt to meet a human need, and while some solutions will be better than others, all will be necessarily imperfect. There is no ideal type of health coverage. And even when taking large strategic directions, there are massively different ways one could go which appear to show good resuls. For example, I tend to be enamoured of how Singapore does health coverage. Others are enamoured of Denmark’s model or France’s. Yet clearly, none of these are in fact ideal. None is an end state which one might yearn for and then find lasting peace upon reaching.

Since any particular solution to a problem in the pragmatic art of politics is at best an imperfect response to a set of circumstances encountered at the time and the available options as perceived by both political leaders and their constituents, I don’t really see the point of planning out an “ideal” set of platform positions or candidate characteristics.

Though I would suggest this, if one wants to play at ideals: Politicians are formed (or deformed) by voters. If you want to imagine an ideal, perhaps you should try to envision the ideal voting public and society.

After all, I’m sure that all of us, as soon as we imagine the sort of candidate we’d _like_ to vote for, think: But of course, the sort of person I like would never get elected.

I don’t have a very buttoned-up sense of the limits of hopes and dreams. In my estimation they are parts of the imagination. Imagination, in my view, has no limits. In fact, it is this feature that makes it what it is.

There are maybe a half-dozen sets of beliefs that account for 95% of all voters. Naturally, the two parties have lined up to capture as many of those people as possible, so those sets of beliefs tend to match certain parties. That doesn’t mean that there’s a partisan motivation behind the thinking. (BTW, there’s scant evidence that additional parties improve the ability of a voter to have his voice heard.)

It’s not surprising that a person’s principles would overlap with one of the main parties, but that he’d be hard-pressed to find an individual candidate who matches those principles exactly.

—

DC, “dreams” may be too sweeping a word, but surely a person can have hopes for a better society? We’re called to make our society better, on both the large and small scale.

Sure government is often useful or perhaps even necessary — but I would think one’s hopes and dreams ought to center around real people and real relationships, real life — not around policies and presidents.

Please, try to think without the blinders of the Elephant and Donkey dualism. Try to answer from your hopes and dreams.