Today is Presidents Day. Would you say that this holiday has lost something? Has the presidency lost its grandeur, even its respect?
Presidents Day was a mash-up of the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, but that plural (not possessive) honors them all. Most of our presidents, beyond those great two, were far from paragons. But as we contemplate the current presidential election and the candidates we have to choose from, do you find the prospects for that office rather depressing?
Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) says that we have defined the presidency down. He gives some choice and rather funny characterizations of four of the contenders, which I quote after the jump. But his analysis of why our standards have sunk so low is thought-provoking. I’ll try to summarize it.
From Bret Stephens, Defining Presidential Down: If This Election is so Crucial, Why Have the Front-Runners Been so Awful?
He says that our four top contenders give us a choice between:
1) A compulsive liar with a persecution complex, a mania for secrecy, and a bald disdain for rules as they apply to lesser people.
2) A bigoted braggart with a laughable grasp of public policy and leering manners of the kind you would expect from a barroom drunk.
3) A glib moralizer who is personally detested by every single senator in his own party, never mind the other one.
4) A Sixties radical preaching warmed-over socialism to people too young to know what it was or too stupid to understand what it does.
Mr. Stephens applies Daniel Moynihan’s dictum to assert that we have “defined the presidential down.” He then identifies the turning point as the presidency of Bill Clinton, which brought into the presidency 60’s-style immorality plus brash lying. The American public, in the meantime, accepted those standards in the name of “results,” as long as the policies “seemed to work.” Another downturn was the presidency of George W. Bush, which brought us intellectual shallowness.
Try to find his entire column in the Wall Street Journal.
Is he overstating the case?
What would it take to restore the office?
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