Our National Nightmare
I welcomed President Ford’s declaration and had hoped it would be true. It wasn’t.
I believe most of us strive to be what all of us know to be good--honest, truthful, caring, dependable. Ford did. Fewer of us seem to be driven by other forces. That smaller group grew increasingly influential over the past fifty years. Ford didn’t realize that he had become president during the early part of this transition. His attempt at healing our nation’s festering wounds was met with strident rebukes. The political strife that followed his presidency was not substantially different than what preceded it.
Those long on criticism but short on solutions, burdened with agendas but devoid of vision and obsessed with character assassination but unwilling to debate issues eventually dominated both parties and elected two presidents.
Perhaps the two tragic and recent wars will bookend their time of influence. Our profound problems, like global warming and healthcare, require serious debate and effective solutions. We will be well served when the congress is again dominated by the qualities found in Hubert Humphrey and Barry Goldwater and the presidency by the visionary leadership of the FDRs and JFKs of our society.
Technorati Tags:funeral, President Ford, Vietnam, Iraq, values
2 comments:
I read quite a bit of commentary about Ford this week. His harshest critics, including Christopher Hitchens, pointed out that he authored not a single influential piece of legislation in his 25 years in Congress, and that in the retrospective look of history, he botched nearly every foreign initiative he undertook, including his policy toward Iraq; then he denied everyone the satisfaction of seeing Nixon prosecuted.
20/20 hindsight can render a harsh judgment like that. But what I disliked about Ford had nothing to do with those things. While he seemed likeable and decent enough, I felt like he was a shameless self-promoter for the 30 years he was retired. It would have been much better for history if he had lived a quiet life of moderate obscurity like Harry Truman did, mixing with the public as one of them. Instead, he developed rich friends and moved to the west. He engaged in that modern, super-expensive ego trip, the Presidential Library and Museum in Ann Arbor. Library and Museum? Couldn't he have seen that the materials of his 31 month non-elected administration been donated to an existing federal museum of university?
I even saw him horn in on Ronald Reagan's birthday a few years ago. On the Gipper's 90th, Larry King recorded greetings from a bunch of notables, including Ford. Ford said something to the effect of "History will long remember that the dedicated efforts of the Ford/Reagan administrations led to the end of communism and economic prosperity." Come on. Whip-Inflation-Now had a president between itself and Reagan, and Ford had almost no impact on the cold war.
Ford never wanted to be President. He wanted to be Speaker of the House. Maybe it's just hard to be one of the guys if you've been President, even if only for a day.
Well it isn't a movie review, but check out this Onion Story about GW Bush called "Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Over". :)
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28784
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