When you take certain positions, you leave yourself vulnerable to attacks by both sides.
President Barack Obama, U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and interim Hamilton County Schools Superintendent Kirk Kelly find themselves in that position this week.
Locally, Kelly, the former assistant superintendent who was selected to his position by the Hamilton County Board of Education in a 5-4 vote last month, added two high school principals to his central office staff Monday.
While his staff now has three new former district principals, including Jill Levine, who was named chief academic officer after she was not selected interim superintendent, three schools have lost effective leaders.
One of the raps about the district in recent years has been the turnover in principals. When a principal shows leadership in a school, it's been said, he or she is moved to the central office and rarely heard from again.
Levine, the former Normal Park Museum Magnet School principal, Howard School Principal Zac Brown and Red Bank High School Principal Justin Robertson now have joined that pipeline. Brown, as assistant superintendent of operations, and Robertson, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, will report to Levine.
However, Brown had been at Howard for only three years and Robertson, who trained under Levine at Normal Park, at Red Bank for only four.
Although national research shows principals are serving shorter tenures these days, other research shows principal turnover adversely affects schools.
"You're looking at three-plus years for a principal to really make an impact in a building," then-Hamilton County Schools Superintendent Jim Scales told the Times Free Press in 2008.
Ken Barker, who had been principal at Nolan Elementary for 10 years, echoed similar sentiments at the time.
"[With a longer tenure,] the staff, the students and the parents are headed in the same direction and understand academically what you're trying to accomplish," he said. "It's hard to build a program if you're always having turnover."
With hopes for a better, more innovative, broader thinking district, we wish Levine, Brown and Robertson well, and we hope the principals who replace them will offer a seamless transition.
Corker, meanwhile, gets hammered by agreeing to talk to presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who had reached out to him. But what kind of politician would he be if he refused to take the calls of, or advise upon request, the man who could be the next president of the United States?
Indeed, what kind of American and office-holder would he be if he declared he wouldn't talk to the New York businessman simply because of his blustery comments, his sexist remarks and his inelegant pronouncements? As the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he is in a better position than probably anybody in Congress to give the candidate a policy overview.
Corker may or may not have an interest in a potential Trump administration, but we believe sound and pragmatic advice of the type he would give can only help the GOP front-runner, whose statements on issues foreign and domestic have often been offensive, shallow and wandering.
The Tennessee senator, to be sure, has taken his chairmanship seriously and has visited numerous countries in pursuit of on-the-ground knowledge about the specific countries vis-á-vis the U.S.
And while we differ from Obama on a wide range of issues, we see the wisdom in his lifting this week the decades-old arms embargo with Vietnam.
Veterans of that 1955-1975 war may feel the anguish of the time and treasure the U.S. poured into that country - then North Vietnam and South Vietnam - but the president appears to be looking at the broader picture and the outsized shadow of China looking over the country's shoulder to the north.
While the lifting of the embargo contained no quid pro quo for the U.S. - such as a commitment for the Southeast Asian country to improve its human rights record - analysts believe the U.S. is interested in both arms sales to the country to enhance the country's effort to defend itself against its neighbors and in gaining access to the country's deepwater port at Cam Ranh Bay.
Obama and all future presidents, after all, will have to deal with superpower China and its access to the South China Sea, so having Vietnam as an ally of sorts in the region couldn't hurt.
So while the superintendent, the senator and the president may find people lining up on either sides of the decisions they make this week, they can take solace in the expression credited to both Voltaire and Spiderman that with great power comes great responsibility.