America’s historical amnesia hit a new low this month with a Monmouth University poll that showed one in three of those polled believe that Barack Obama was a better president than George Washington.
The news was significantly more horrifying when considering the evaluations of self-identified Democrats who consider Obama to be a better president than Washington by a whopping 63 percent to 29 percent. Republicans showed more historical sanity by ranking the father of our country above both Obama and President Donald Trump, but not by enough to justify much solace.
Just a few decades ago, it was controversial that Abraham Lincoln and, in some polls, even Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had surpassed Washington as the best president, as ranked by elite historians. Those results, mostly from surveys of liberal-leaning academics, were troubling enough. The results of the Monmouth poll, however, are significantly more so.
The Case for Washington
That a case for Washington has to be made at all speaks volumes about the state of our civic education in the United States today. But, let’s make the case for Washington’s greatness in just a few sentences.
First, he was known as the father of our country for the very good reason that he was our founding’s “Indispensable Man.” The United States itself is inconceivable without Washington as our first commander in chief and first president.
Second, there would be no presidency at all without him, the office being created around the assumption that he would be its first occupant and would “fill in the blanks” of the Constitution.
Now, also consider that Washington was asked to ascend to an office unlike anything that ever existed. In an age of monarchy, the Constitutional Convention had created a republican executive. The vague language of the Constitution’s Article II and the lack of historical examples put Washington into a situation where he, quite literally, had to invent the office as he enacted it.
What does it mean to be commander in chief? What does it mean to faithfully execute the laws? What does it mean to work with the Senate to write and ratify treaties? No president ever faced such a daunting situation, because they all inherited an office Washington himself created. They had his precedence to rely on as they faced the challenges of their own age.
Putting the challenges faced by Lincoln during the Civil War and FDR during the Great Depression aside for another day, there’s simply no comparison at all between the challenges faced by our first president and those of the 44th and 45th. The fact that the question was even dreamed up to be asked is, frankly, shocking in itself.
Through most of U.S. history, our fellow citizens would have been steeped in history enough to know that no contemporary president could surpass a man commonly recognized as one of the greatest men of modern times.
