PRESIDENTS’ DAY: Lessons for America and the Future

President George Washington (1789 – 1797) & President Abraham Lincoln (1861 – 1865)

Presidents’ Day Honors

George Washington, 1st President (1789 – 1797)
and
Abraham Lincoln, 16th President (1861 – 1865)

George W. Bush, 43rd President (2001 – 2009),
could learn a lot from the difficulties each President faced:

President Abraham Lincoln entered office just after seven Southern states had seceded from the Union. As a war-time leader, Lincoln exercised the most inspiring and effective presidential leadership in American history. Lincoln’s strength, vision, and amazing political skill brought a bitterly divided country through the Civil War, the bloodiest war our nation has ever known.

President George W. Bush has a vision of a democratic Iraq leading the way to a peaceful democratization of the entire Middle East. Unfortunately, Bush’s vision is one that fewer and fewer Americans see as the war drags on with more and more Americans and Iraqis being maimed, killed, or kidnapped by insurgents.

President Lincoln brought together a Team of Rivals for his Cabinet, as Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote about so eloquently, to manage the war. President Bush needs to do the same with all of the rival Heads of State in the Middle East. Now that Palestine has just elected a Hamas Parliament, Israel’s suddenly peaceful Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is in a coma, and Iran has elected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is bent on building nuclear weapons, the need for ongoing Peace Conferences is greater than ever before. This will not and cannot happen without President Bush’s and America’s leadership.

President George Washington entered office with great prestige and skill as a political leader. This allowed him to rise above the fray of 13 quarrelsome states because he placed himself above partisan politics and sectional differences.

President George W. Bush entered office in 2001 after a hotly contested election. The tragedy of 9/11 allowed him to rise above the fray and pull the country together as we entered a new era when homeland security became his top priority.

Unfortunately, the country has split again on how best to handle the Iraq War, which President Bush entered when faulty (manipulated?) intelligence indicated that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Now the mission has become the democratization of Iraq, which is not going well.

The partisanship was never more apparent than during President Bush’s sixth State of the Union Message on January 31, 2006, when Republicans and Democrats stood and cheered or jeered independently. Congress must rise above its bitter bipartisanship, difficult to do in a mid-term election year, but as President Lincoln said, “United we stand, divided we fall!”

Surely we can all come together again to find a peaceful solution in the Middle East.

« Previous: OUR HUGE RESPONSIBILITY to IRAQ, PALESTINE, ISRAEL, and the ENTIRE MIDDLE EAST: We Need New Ideas and Solutions | AT THE CROSSROADS: The Hamas Electoral Victory and the Hope for Peace Next: »