America is more than its presidents
Once upon a time American children — OK, boys — were told that if they studied hard, theirs was a country in which virtually anyone could grow up to be president.
After all, Abraham Lincoln was a barefooted pioneer who never attended a single year of school. Harry Truman never went to college. Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy struggled with lifelong, chronic illnesses.
Theodore Roosevelt was thought to be too impetuous. He was, but turned out to be one of the greatest presidents. Interestingly, some of the most talented people America has produced never served as president, including Alexander Hamilton, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Barbara Jordan, Eleanor Roosevelt, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Taft Sr., Abigail Adams, Robert Kennedy and Frederick Douglass.
There was a time when a potential president had to fit into a narrow set of parameters, like staying married, or being a regular churchgoer, or possessing a breadth of government experience. There now is no such thing as a deal-breaker — well, except, maybe, being a woman.
The old disqualifiers have gone; the hurdles to becoming president have never been easier to clear than they are right now.
Points of light
Because we’ve seemed to have lost our taste for statesmanship, any candidate who dares offer a nuanced, detailed response, who can’t deliver an entertaining sound bite inside of 10 seconds, should prepare to be derided.
We apparently have no more use for the kind of eggheads who created the Monroe Doctrine than a bird has for a bicycle.
If George H.W. Bush tried to deliver his “thousand points of light” inauguration speech today, he would be hooted offstage and turned into an internet meme wearing a tutu.
Diplomacy no longer seems to be what we aspire to, not when a bare-knuckle, drop-kick strategy will do. What presidents might have done in times past no longer holds value for us. So, now that scholarship, tradition and precedent have gone out with the buggy whip, the only thing left is swagger. Monday was Presidents’ Day, when we honor those who have and will serve this nation. The genius of America always has been its ability to survive whoever “Hail to the Chief” is played for, whoever might be sitting behind the Resolute Desk.
In some other countries, buildings and public spaces are plastered with the likeness of their leader of the moment; the message being that person and the state are one. That’s why when the revolutions come; the portraits usually are the first things to go.
We are the state
But the idea that is America, namely that “We the People” are the state, always has been bigger than one person, one party or even one cause. It has withstood the blunderings of the worst presidents and the arrogance of the best.
It has outlasted those who abused their privilege as commander-in-chief, as well as those who failed to exercise the enormous potential of the office for the greater good. America has survived slanderous, vengeful, corrupt, dictatorial and flat-out incompetent presidents. It has done so because the founders understood how easily we humans get warped by power. They were prescient enough to know the preservation of individual rights and the separation of powers would be necessary if the republic were to survive.
So, if America should fail, it won’t be the fault of any singular president. In the great scheme of things, four or eight years are a blink of an eye.
America is ours. If it crashes to Earth, it’s because we let it.