Presidents' Day

This "President" thing has always vexed me.

     The first time I ever heard of a president was when I asked why my mother was crying and my brother told me "the president" had been killed. I was told that he was a great man and he had two children around my age who were now very sad. A president, I gathered, was a good thing, but also a vulnerable one who brought pain and fear.

      My first awareness of what a president was came through Lyndon Johnson. At first I was hearing good things about him in my family, as he signed the Civil Rights Act, but then came that hideous war and I began to hear about his cruelty and duplicity, his vulgarity and madness. A president, then, betrayed people.

      When I was eleven, I first began to understand some basic political realities, and the American people elected Richard Nixon. He defined "president" during the six most formative years of my political education. I don't imagine I need to elaborate.

      I almost thought Ford was going to get in and out without causing too much damage to the nation or its soul, but then he pardoned Nixon. Not just for the crimes we knew he'd committed, but for any crimes he might have committed.

      And yet, all through this I was being taught in school that there had been great presidents in the past who changed history in noble ways and came to represent what was good about our country. Not all of them, not hardly: one February my class held a "Presidents Pageant," and somehow I ended up being James Knox Polk. And even then I suspected that the story was a bit cleaned up. But clearly it had once been possible for a president to be a leader. My parents spoke of one—"FDR" my father called him, with something like infatuation in his voice—who in their childhoods had turned the mood of the country from fear to hope and sustained that hope through twelve hard years. I fell in love with '30s movies and through them—Warner Brothers from Little Caesar through 42nd Street to Dead End—I could feel the transformational power of that president across the intervening decades. Even Truman and Eisenhower didn't sound so bad against the self-destructive losers I'd seen in the job.

      I wanted to give my heart to Jimmy Carter, although even before the election there were yellow flags waving all around him. I waited and hoped for him to rise above the confusion and ineffectiveness of the first part of his administration. I even wanted to believe that his "malaise" speech was the turning point, although that cold spot in the middle of my gut told me that it was really the opposite. Perceptive sociology but lousy politics. Then came the Iran hostage crisis and his announcement that he would not leave the White House until it was resolved, still my personal choice for the just-plain-stupidest presidential moment in history.

      Reagan at least acted presidential. He at least made it through two full elected terms and actually became more instead of less popular as he went along. And a lot of things went pretty well during his tenure: the economy perking up, the vile Soviet empire beginning its final crack, a national snapping-out of the malaise, a lot of fun dance tunes. (Those were also the most exciting years ever for the comic book industry, for reasons that had a lot to do with Reagan; but that's another essay.) The problem with Reagan was that I hated what he was doing to the country long-term. The hastening of the two-tier economy, stirring up our latent social intolerance into a hostile and wrong-headed "values" movement, the so-called war on drugs that's still crippling us as a country, the manipulation of the Iran-Iraq War that led us straight to where we are now.

      The first Bush was more a place-holder than a president, at least until his own contribution to the Middle East mess.

      I was 35 years years old and feeling pretty well beaten up by American presidents when Bill Clinton caught my fancy. Yes, I was a bit troubled by the faint aroma of sleaze that filled every room he entered. Even then he had the air of a man who would say anything to get the approval he craved. But he said some fine things, and I liked his wife, and I saw the potential in him to turn the nation's political tide. Then came those infuriating first two years, when he handed Gingrich and the neocons everything they needed to take over Congress. The dawning awareness that he would cut any deal to remain the main conduit of power in the room. He did some good things too, and for a while my country seemed to be doing better, but gradually his obvious love of political gamesmanship and symbolic victory came to overwhelm his political agenda.

      Finally came the nightmare of the Lewinski aftermath. Not that I couldn't feel some compassion for his obvious sexual compulsiveness: I grew up under a cloud of addictive behaviors, especially alcoholism, and I've had to deal with plenty of my own compulsive patterns. What sickened me was the smug, gleeful game-playing afterward. The hairsplitting over not having had "sex" with that woman. The definition of "is." His apparent belief that he had won the fight, although he had demoralized his party and his country on the way to scoring a legalistic stalemate. For years the public life of my nation was about Bill Clinton's dick. Literally and metaphorically.

      By the election of 2000 I felt thoroughly disgusted with presidents. I started telling myself that there was something so inherently wrong with the post or the system or the country that we could not do any better. I even voted for Ralph Nader in the 2000 election—and I don't even like Ralph Nader very much. I just wanted to believe that there could be some way out of the duality of the party of Clinton and the party of Tom DeLay. So disgusted was I that the difference between a Democratic and a Republican president didn't really seem to matter.

      Then the Republicans on the Supreme Court hijacked my democracy and handed my country to a gang of thugs. That taught me something about the need to choose between the Democrats and the Republicans, but even it wasn't enough to thrill me about the prospects the Democrats were offering up. I campaigned some for Kerry, seeing him as clearly the lesser of evils, but I also felt some relief at his defeat; I didn't see a Kerry presidency doing the progressive cause much good in the long run. Knowing that Hillary Clinton would be up next did not thrill me. I liked her a lot more than Kerry. I knew I could admire her savvy and toughness, and with a Democratic Congress she might be a lot more effective than her husband. She might well be a president who could engineer the legislative and executive changes I wanted to see made. But I also saw her pulling us deeper into a political drama I was sick of. She still seemed to have her punitive streak, her feeling of entitlement, her love of conflict for its own sake, and, of course, that husband and co-president of hers. I would vote for her, even campaign for her, but with a certain sickness of heart.

      I found myself at 50, beaten up and resigned and not believing that I would never know what it was like to have a president who wanted to make this country better and had the mind and soul to do so, who had the skill and the spiritual soundness to turn his values into realities, who could actually represent what I hoped was still true about America, who could actually be an inspiration and not an obstacle to my belief in my country. Then I heard Barack Obama speak, and I found myself thinking that it might be possible. I began to follow his campaign, I studied him, I talked to my trusted friends about him. And sometime in January I realized that I'd begun to believe.

      I've wanted to know a Presidents' Day that actually made me want to celebrate the president. Next year I think I may get that at last.