POTUS doesn't possess the office
One of the things I refuse to write on this blog is language that attaches the personal pronoun to the office of president of the United States.
For instance, I saw this sub-headline on a Business Insider story about Joe Biden’s standing in the polls. It said: Joe Biden needs to reset his presidency.
This is a small point, but I consider it a significant one. The presidency is not “his presidency.” It is ours. Yours and mine. The person who occupies the office is there on a temporary basis. Voters hire that individual to do work for us and then the individual is gone after four or at the most eight years.
Yet we keep hearing the media and even the president say things that suggest the office belongs to them.
Joe Biden has said it. So did Donald Trump. Yes, same for Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon … well, you get the point.
Of the men I have just listed, I’ll just say that two of them, Trump and Obama, were particularly greedy about seizing ownership of the office. Trump would refer occasionally to “my generals,” for instance; Obama routinely spoke of “my national security team” or “my vice president” or “my Justice Department.” Uhh, no. They ain’t yours, Mr. President.
It has been tempting at times for me to say something like “Biden’s presidency is … ” whatever. I have refused. My preferred phrasing is to refer to the president’s “tenure in office,” or the president’s “term in office.”
Look, I am not picking nits with this. I merely am trying to remind everyone who reads this stuff that the nation’s highest office belongs to the citizens of this country. The person who sits in the Oval Office and makes command decisions is merely our employee. It is up to us exclusively to keep him on the straight and narrow.