By Anne W. Semmes
Stepping away to Boston for the weekend to visit a daughter with a birthday during Presidents Week I received more than my usual share of TV news. The political stream was constant. The news feed would change from the right to the left with changed channels. I was watching a tennis match, the ball being called in or out of court, and suddenly that Peanuts comic strip came to mind of Snoopy standing happily at the net with victorious paw extended reflecting, “Game, set, match…Life!”
What’s missing in this presidential race is humor, a candidate of “political wit,” a folksy fellow, or female. Entertainer, social commentator Will Rogers comes to mind. He departed before I was born – but his humor lingered long after. Like his aphorism, “I am not a member of an organized political party. I am a Democrat.” Like what he wished inscribed on his tombstone, “I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I didn’t like.”
Steve Martin might get my vote. Just imagine him in a debate.
All kidding aside, this presidential race is a serious matter. One has to search out the gravitas needed in a candidate as easily found in Lincoln. He’s quoted this past weekend in a fine oped reflecting on his boyhood reading about George Washington’s battles for our independence. “…boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for; that something even more than National Independence; that something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come.”
But even George Washington who we are celebrating his birthday week is being raked over the coals. According to a new book, “You Never Forget Your First, A Biography of George Washington,” by Alexis Coe, George was so disliked at the end of his second Presidential term, “the House voted against adjourning for 30 minutes to wish him well on his birthday.” As historian Coe tells it George suffered the caustic infighting between two political parties, that had also split his Cabinet. He had stepped reluctantly into the presidency and left it “warning Americans against political factions and foreign influence.”
Reality check time. “People are the same, just some more eloquent than others,” quips my big sister. The fact is that second term was a downer for Washington. Lincoln (unluckily) never had a second term. So, maybe we go back to a one term presidency. Maybe by election day Trump will decide he’s had enough. He can leave off with a booming economy. Presidents will have to pull off their great contributions in four years.
So, what would our late great local historian Barbara Tuchman have to say about the state of the union and presidential terms? Fasten your seatbelt: “Owing to the steady accretion of power in the executive over the last 40 years,” she observed in an oped in 1973, post-Watergate, “the institution of the Presidency is not now functioning as the Constitution intended, and this malfunction has become perilous to the state.” What needs abolishing, she writes, is “the executive power as exercised by a single individual.”
Tuchman’s recommendation: a six-man Cabinet, “to be nominated as a slate by each party and elected as a slate for a single six-year term with a rotating chairman.” One would need six TV’s to stream the news feed of that kind of race!
No thank you, Barbara, whom I was privileged to know. I’m on the hunt for that one candidate with great ideas, who reference other great leaders or writers. One wonders what books are on the bedsides of the current candidates. Might I suggest John Gardner’s “Quotations of Wit & Wisdom?”
But don’t forget those maxims of George Washington. I discovered years ago that perhaps the most well-worn book found in Washington’s library in Mount Vernon was “Contemplations, Moral and Divine,” written by a 17th century British barrister, Sir Matthew Hale. “It was from that volume,” wrote 19th century historian Benson Lossing, “that Washington’s mother [Mary] drew many of those great maxims which she instilled into the mind of her son, and which had a powerful influence in moulding his character.”
So, here are a few takeaways for those presidential candidates given the opportunity: “Harmony and good will towards men, must be the basis of every political establishment.”…“I never wish to promise more, than I have a moral certainty of performing.” …“It is much easier to avoid disagreement, than to remove discontents.”… “Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called Conscience.”
Postcript: Maxims gathered from an 1854 collection, “Maxims of Washington – Political, Social, Moral, and Religious.”
