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Wishful Thinking

If there were such an office as that of the President Elect, the person at the left is the only one I would accept right now in the position. But there's something screwy here, and it's a language thing. Office can refer to a physical location, space, room, building, or it can refer to a position. When we say a President "takes office" we do not mean that she/he literally takes over the Oval Office (although he does, ultimately). We mean she/he performs the prescribed duties and submits to protocol in order to assume a position. They are different, related meanings of the same word: polysemes.

So here's the catch: there is no official position called Office of the President Elect. In a way, it's an oxymoron. We elect in order for the candidate to assume office in a very formal way. There is no formality to becoming President Elect. There is a sequence of events, however. First the people vote, then the Electoral College votes, then Congress certifies. But even at the end of that last act (which has not happened yet, incidentally) nobody gets sworn in as President Elect.

That leaves me to wonder what this logo means. It cannot refer to a conferred office, so it must refer to a physical location. If the sign were hanging on a door, I would not be writing at the moment. But this event did not take place in an office. So I have to wonder what these people are thinking. There is no "Office of the President Elect" as an office in this country. Obama keeps saying that there's only one president at a time. Right. So why has he invented another presidential office?

Hillary Clinton Honored at Glamour's Women of the Year Awards

Hillary Clinton: The Trailblazer

by Kati Marton

This year Hillary Clinton did something very rare for a politician: She won while losing. No, she didn’t reach the White House—but she motivated a new generation of women of every political stripe. Former GOP congresswoman Susan Molinari told Glamour, “I’m a Republican, but I’m also a mother of two girls, and now my daughters have no doubts that they could grow up to be president.”
Hillary (does anyone use her last name?) sometimes calls herself “the best-known person in the world whom you really don’t know.” As it happens, I know Hillary Clinton. Over the past decade I have spent a decent amount of time with her, partly because I interviewed her several times for a book I wrote about presidential marriages, and partly because my husband served in her husband’s cabinet. So I have seen her in the White House and the Senate, and as an honored guest at our home on close to a dozen occasions. Perhaps this middle distance—not part of Hillaryland and not a complete outsider—allows me a useful perspective on this trailblazing political pioneer.
She has always defied the odds—and her critics. As First Lady, when she was called down and out after the failure of her health care reform, she picked herself up and used her bully pulpit to become a global advocate for women and children.
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Madame Secretary

She makes us look good, doesn't she?