Great.
There are several news magazine covers worth looking at. There is this cover for The World Today for this article “Why Greatness Eludes Obama”. There is the cover for the Weekly Standard feature, against the “Rehabilitation” of Bill Clinton’s image. And there is the Washington Monthly — “The Incomplete Greatness of Barack Obama” — which, I suppose does dovetail with the other two.
Clinton disclaims the news reports that he was obsessed through his second term with “Legacy”, and that was the subject of conversations he had with Dick Morris — “How can I snag a spot as ‘Great’ President'” — the kind history will get him snagged onto dollar bills. If you read through the World Today article, you do get the sense that just about every president behaves like Richard Nixon in his final days — talking to presidential portraits. See:
As Teddy Roosevelt said of Lincoln, even as he lamented the absence of his own momentous crisis: without the Civil War “no one would have known his name.”
These things go on and on. We further see the suggestion in this article that “Jefferson, Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, and Truman” don’t make the cut with Washington, Roosevelt, and Lincoln — because of the lack of crisis. Which would be news to a Wilson throwing his dice in the World War, a Truman off into the Cold War, and a Jackson who faced down Calhoun’s Nullifiers. And everything here becomes a little arbitrary. In the categories of what makes these presidents “Great”, a line is thrown out — the category “Character”. Franklin Roosevelt was a duplicitous two-faced figure — you’d have to define “Character” oddly to get him in there.
A question for Eric Alterman:
People conveniently forget that the now nearly sainted Bush I
I understand Alterman as “setting the record straight” — he does this same remarking about Barry Goldwater’s historiological turn in the popular imagination. But where are these people who have sainted Bush I?
And now we end up with the odd realities. The Washington Monthly feature venetrates Obama as a completion of Clinton (see, those swarming advisors who tend to have liberals in a tizzy). A lot of things depend on public relations — there was an article in the paper about Obama strategy team which has a lot of careful consumer selecting that makes the Joe McGinnis “Selling of the President” book about Nixon ’68 laughable. The list of Obama’s accomplishments has a good deal of “small bore” things — which is good and well: as the World Today article asks, “Why do we want ‘Great’ness?” A question which leads to the simple answer: actually, this is your game — the rest of us are content to state that a Bush I or Clinton are… imperfect figures in a dreary system– moderately agreeable or disagreeable after the tumult of their time ends.