Say Anything Blog

From an article by Mary McNamara, Times Television Critic, about HBO’s recent special about John Adams:

In his portrayal of our second president, Paul Giamatti creates a man perpetually dissatisfied, disgusted by the preening ambition of politics even as he is infected by it. If his relentless crankiness was a bit hard for some of us to take in early episodes, in the second half of the series it makes much more sense. While exhorting angry men to throw off the shackles of tyranny offers many opportunities for rhetorical fabulousness, setting up a new government is a bureaucratic nightmare, with oversized personalities disagreeing over things both petty and fundamental. George Washington (David Morse) so quickly tired of the infighting among his Cabinet and vagaries of public opinion that he stepped down from the presidency after a single term. “I know now what it is like to be disliked,” he says to Adams, his perpetually disliked vice president.

Actually, Washington was rather famous for setting the “two terms only” tradition for American Presidents which, until it was made official in the 22nd amendment to the constitution (ratified shortly after FDR was elected to four terms), was not law.  Washington’s popularity at this nation’s birth was such that he could have ruled the country, not unlike a monarch, until death.  He didn’t.  He served two terms and then stepped down into civilian life.

That a newspaper journalist doesn’t grasp this most basic fact about American history, a fact about a defining characteristic of our nation’s leadership from the early days of the republic, is pathetic.