Today is supposed to be Presidents' Day. It's actually a hybrid since Lincoln's birthday (on the 12th) and Washington's (22nd) are both in February, and postal workers and other federal employees, I guess, aren't supposed to get two days off this month.
So they combined them, and someone thought, Let's celebrate all our presidents. You know, they did get elected and they did lead our nation in one way or another. Since we're combining the celebrations of the two best presidents we've had, we've also had several who were pretty good as well. So we'll crush them in with one another, do one federal holiday instead of two and viola! We've saved a bit of money.
We've also introduced some serious mediocrity. Franklin Pierce? Please. James Buchanon? Heavens no. George W. Bush? I don't celebrate him; there's no reason. To the contrary, he presided over 9/11. And our most recent former president? Give me a break.
The best people don't always make the best presidents. The best people often don't run. The best people among those who run often don't get elected, either.
It depends on someone's station in life compared to what they think it will be if they get elected. After all, the Constitution limits a president to two terms, or eight years (ten at most). A member of the Senate, or a state governor, from which the rosters of most candidates are taken, might be able to last longer in their respective positions. Their worlds aren't quite as big, but their control may be greater.
The condition of the country at the time of the campaign matter, too. Joe Biden is president now, but this is his third serious try. The case could be made for saying that the utter incompetence, meanness, and criminality of the previous president paved the way for him, that under other conditions, especially without the pandemic, he wouldn't have even made an attempt, especially considering that he's 78.
If public speaking and thinking on one's feet are two good things to have, then Pete Buttigieg should have won the campaign. But it's simply too early for him. If thinking outside the box and coming up with unique plans would have done it, then Tom Steyer might have grabbed the momentum. But earnestness and money alone can't get it done. He's never held public office before. And he wasn't an inherent racist, like the winner of that campaign was, something that carried him much farther than anyone was ready to admit.
In his first inaugural address, Lincoln decried the division within the country, too, a lethal one since it led to the Civil War. Yet it was that division that made his candidacy a round peg in a round hole, his obvious political skills notwithstanding. His was a dark horse candidacy, possible because others were in the wrong place at the time. He won 39.4% of the popular vote in 1860, the lowest of any winner, talk about the tendency of the Electoral College to legitimize less than a majority.
The second time he ran, he didn't even have the Confederate states around to unite and vote against him; they were too busy exhausting themselves with their self-destructive temper tantrums. His chances at a second electoral victory, though, remained in doubt until the Union forces had won three crucial victories in 1864--Chattanooga, a major railroad center; the taking of Atlanta by Sherman and the very consequential march to the sea; and Mobile Bay by Farragut, which inspired "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead."
Washington's ascendance to our first presidency appears clear and obvious now, but he could easily have passed it up. Nobody could have blamed him, since he led the Continental Army to one of the world's great military upsets. As it was, he was offered army support if he would have accepted their entreatment to become the emperor of America and end the squabbling and incompetence that had emerged under the Articles of Confederation, an offer he declined.
Washington had to be coaxed into running the Constitutional Convention, too. He saw the need of the country to give it its first sturdy legs. He became president out of public duty, not out of a need for prestige or expansion of ego. He was just right for the moment.
There have been plenty of other effective, even very good, presidents, too: FDR, for instance. who should be mentioned in the same sentence as Washington and Lincoln, for guiding us through the Great Depression and the Second World War. But the country united itself behind him in both those regards, too. It resisted another world war and Congress passed Lend-Lease by one vote, but once attacked, it put that aside, the one time in our history that a war was universally approved. It made things much easier, though crisis-ridden.
Nixon could have been elevated to greatness or near-greatness, and like Obama a very good writer, but his paranoia and vindictiveness led to the scandals that cut his legs out. Lyndon Johnson might have had the same status and his persona loomed large, but Vietnam's ambivalence in the field and at home became a negative national turning point. Jefferson's accomplishments were great and his mind brilliant, but his slave ownership and actually having six kids by one of them cast a long shadow.
Obama's personal character and enormous intellect make us lucky to have had him, but the country was already too quarrelsome (and, I believe, largely ungovernable) and he too cautious at times to avoid unfair and ridiculous undermining--which in no small way brought on a racist successor, by far the worst we have had. Reagan was a phony actor in the literal sense, placed in front of a silly conservative parade as a robot of the feel-good. The doubled-down backward effects of that magical thinking persist to this day.
So to celebrate our presidents, in aggregate, is a stretch. I would rather lump Washington and Lincoln together, call it that, and be done with it; time, distance and timing taking care of proper posterity.
Where will Joe Biden land in this spectrum? He has a chance to come off well, but based on lies, the country is badly divided and violence has already been utilized as a mistaken remedy. His personality, which avoids running his mouth and running other people down, is already helping (kind of like Bush-41, who kept saying, "Don't listen to what we say, watch what we do."). But circumstances change and judgment with them. Of course I wish him great success. History will decide the rest.
Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. One more vaccine shot left. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
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