Fmr. Sen. Bumpers: There’s No Way to Prepare for Being President

The next president, whoever he is, would be well advised to take note of what Bill Clinton said shortly after he entered the White House, according to former Sen. Dale Bumpers (D-Ark.).

Clinton invited Bumpers, who had proceeded him as governor of Arkansas, to the Oval Office in January 1993, and told him, “You cannot imagine what this job is like, there is no way to prepare for it,” Bumpers told The Hill in an interview ten years ago this month, as he was preparing to leave the Senate after three terms.

“And I said, ‘Well, what do you mean? And he said, ‘That’s just it. I just can’t describe it for you except to say that it’s just unbelievable.’ And I know, within the bounds of not ever having been president, what he was saying.”

Bumpers recalled his 1993 conversation with Clinton last week, as he waited to learn the outcome of Tuesday’s election.

“I’ve thought a lot about what Clinton said to me that day, and the more I’ve thought about it, the more I appreciated it,” said Bumpers, now a senior partner at a Washington law firm. “I’ve had a few days the way he described it, but it’s like that all day long every day for a president. It’s like getting that 3 a.m. phone call every day. “

Not surprisingly, Bumpers hopes that Barack Obama defeats John McCain on Tuesday to become the first African-American president.

“I’m kind of nervous about it because you can never predict how an election turns out, but my take right now is that Obama is almost certain to win if he carries Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, but that’s a tall order.”

Bumpers predicts that if Obama wins, “and particularly if he conducts himself well and has a fairly successful administration, it would put a whole new perspective on the presidency. Every African-American child would grow up saying ‘I can be president some day.'”

As governor and U.S. senator from the state that was the site of the explosive school desegration controversy in Little Rock in 1956, Bumpers is sensitive to the racial undertones of this year’s election. But he discounts the likelihood that voters will mislead pollsters by saying they will vote for a black candidate when they don’t intend to.

“I really don’t think that will happen,” he said. “I was sort of shocked when it happened to Bradley,” he said, referring to Tom Bradley, the black mayor of Los Angeles, who lost the California gubernatorial election after leading in the polls, apparently because white voters turned their backs on him. “But I think that takes a lot of the possibility out of it happening again.”

Bumpers praised Obama, saying, “He’s really handled himself well, he’s a very bright man with good values. I think a lot of the things the McCain campaign tried to do [in terms of negative campaigning] really has not worked as they intended.”

“The other thing is we won’t have any more elections like this because it’s unique to have an African-American at the top of the ticket and leading right now. I think it will give the nation a whole new sense of values if he wins.”

–Albert Eisele