This Thanksgiving, Looking Back at George Washington

I know it sounds really corny, but this Thanksgiving, I’m grateful that George Washington was our first President — and that Barack Obama who like GW can be austere and seemingly distant from common folks but yet is smart and chameleon-like in his ability to forge compromises can still get a great deal right in his presidency.

Reading Ron Chernow’s excellent Washington: A Life, I realize how different our world would have been had someone like Tom DeLay or Aaron Burr been America’s first president. We might have ended up with someone who never wanted to leave the position as Washington did.

Or among the early founding fathers, if John Adams had come first, or Jefferson – the consolidation of a single political faction’s control over the machinery of government at such a fragile stage might have meant civil war far earlier than the one America eventually got.

This Thanksgiving essay was originally written for the Huffington Post.

Tags: Aaron Burr, America, Barack Obama, first President, George Washington, Huffington Post, John Adams, machinery, Thanksgiving, The Huffington Post, Tom DeLay

Steven Clemons directs the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, which aims to promote a new American internationalism that combines a tough-minded realism about America̵ ...read more