The More Things Change...

By Scott R. Cooper, Crook County Judge
published in the Powell Butte View, Feburary 2005
http://www.powellbutteview.com

Two Georges, Two Centuries Apart, Had Similiar Problems

With the bitterly divisive election over and the festivities surrounding the President’s second inauguration fading fast from memory, the country is turning once again to other concerns. Congress is back in session, and the partisan squabbling that is background chatter on the national political and media stage has resumed. Citizens in the countryside are keeping a watchful eye on the economy, hoping that the nascent economic recovery continues and worrying that the international situation might tank hopes for a rising stock market and falling rates of joblessness.

If you stop and think about it for very long, it all seems huge and overwhelming and far, far away.

Feeling very much that way, I checked out from the local library and read with great interest last month an interesting and short little biography of the nation’s first president. More than anything I’ve run across lately, I was reminded how true it is: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

The book is “George Washington” published in 2004 and authored by James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn. It crisply and thoroughly lays out the challenges faced by the country’s founding executive in building a nation, managing his fractious cabinet, working with a difficult Congress dominated by members of his own party, managing an increasingly bitter partisan divide and handling a delicate and explosive foreign affairs agenda.

His challenges were many. The voices of his detractors grew steadily louder and more bellicose as his term proceeded, and the magnitude of his problems—some of which were the direct result of his own choices of Cabinet officers—grew bigger. I suspect George W. Bush could relate.

Washington’s economic program was authored by Alexander Hamilton. It was described as pro-mercantile, pro-capitalistic, urban, upper-class American. Some of the harshest critics were those who would gain the most from it, an irony not lost on anyone who remembers that among the President’s biggest detractors in the last election were billionaires George Soros, Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

One component of Washington’s economic strategy was to urge governmental support for economic initiatives which supported the build up of the American military. In part, Washington believed that government-sponsored support of the military complex would help secure a place for the country in world affairs, a position echoed by George W. Bush in his 2004 campaign when he asserted, “The United States must strengthen its defenses to protect the nation's interests and to assure a leading role in global affairs.”

President Washington’s views on the economy and the military provoked sharp disagreement from some of his former friends and supporters, led mainly by Thomas Jefferson, a one-time member of Washington’s cabinet and James Madison, a strong ally of Washington’s in his first term. Jeffersonian Republicans opposed Hamilton’s view that by closing linking the agendas of business and government, the country as a whole would prosper. They were also alarmed by what they saw as an increasing trend toward an “imperial” presidency characterized by strong executive branch leadership and disregard for individual rights, and Hamilton’s enthusiasm for using public debt as a tool to manage the national economy. Sound familiar? Anyone who tuned in to news of the Democratic National Convention in 2004 didn’t likely miss the rhetoric about “King George”, repeated statements of concern about the pernicious Patriot Act and expressions of angst over the growing national deficit. George Washington and George Bush would have reacted similarly to such sentiments.

Neither man ever showed much patience with dissent.

Washington believed, write Burns and Dunn, that “public opinion need be taken into account only when it expressed a “right understanding”—something that (Washington) conflated with approval of his own administration.” After his retirement as President, he endorsed the Sedition Act, which prohibited newspapers from criticizing the government, and remarking that if the charges against one editor were true, punishment ought to be inflicted. For his part, the sitting President’s disdain for press conferences, dislike of reading newspapers generally and tendency to answer reporters who ask unpleasant questions with silence and an “icy stare” are well documented facts of White House life.

Likewise, the two men shared a concern about foreign influences, particularly French influence. Washington once labeled the influence of Revolutionary France on American politicians as “nefarious” and specified that officers in his army must not display “general opposition” to the government or “predilection to French measures.” The Bush campaign in the last election attacked John Kerry as being unfit to be President because he “looks French.” Both leaders took a hard line toward illegal immigration. Washington was so concerned about potential alien influence on American policy that he supported a vast expansion of executive power to deport illegal immigrants without benefit of due process—a debate which the Patriot Act resurrected in the current President’s term.

The parallels go on and on.

None of this is to suggest that George Washington and George W. Bush can be equated in the annals of history. Rather, it points out the intractable nature of some of our Republic’s deepest divisions—divisions which two centuries of debate, multiple changes in political party control, 43 presidents and 109 sessions of Congress have not resolved.

As our nation confronts challenges in a 21st Century context, there is comfort in knowing that whatever the magnitude of our problems seems to be, we have survived and endured them all before.

“George Washington” by James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn, 2004, Times Books is available at the Crook County Library in hardcopy and CD Rom format.