It's a Family Affair

I guess I'm a bit of a traditionalist at heart. I miss Washington's Birthday.

Since 1948, historians have consistently ranked three presidents among the country's best--George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. Ironically, if FDR's mother delayed delivery for another 48 hours, all three men would have been born in February.

When I was a school boy, teachers spent most of February giving both Washington and Lincoln the attention they deserved. These were great men, who deserved their own holidays. Lumping them together with mediocrities, such as Benjamin Harrison, Franklin Pierce, and Warren Harding, just for the sake of a unified presidential holiday and countless automobile ads, seems to be a travesty.

In a lifetime filled with moments that defined the United States and its future, one of Washington's best decisions is often overlooked. He declined an opportunity to run for a third term. He understood the danger of dynastic rule.

American voters may be fascinated by political families, but very few have had any staying power on the national scene, because we remain deeply suspicious of them. For most of my adult life, two families have dominated the presidency--the Clintons and the Bushes--and Hillary is learning first hand the dangers of assuming tacit "inheritance" of the nation's highest office due to your last name (see Ted Kennedy's failed effort to unseat Jimmy Carter in 1980).

The legacy of the Bush-Clinton-Bush years has been a dynastic dynamic defined by division. Those voters who flock to Obama see a charismatic figure who trumps his shortcomings in experience with a message of unity and civility. Clinton tries to the frame the argument around competence, rather than pretty speeches. Dukakis tried that same message against George the First, and failed.

In his farewell address, George Washington, the only president not to belong to a specific political party, warned against the perils of partisanship. "The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it," he said. "It agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection."

Obama views himself as the purple candidate. Washington, who devised the original Purple Heart medal, probably had a fondness for that color, too.

It's My Party (and I'll Cry If I Want To)

In 1864, Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, took the unusual step of selecting a Democrat, Andrew Johnson, as his running mate. It was a cagey move. Lincoln had been impressed with Johnson's administration of Tennessee as a wartime governor, and he created a National Unity ticket with an eye towards a post-Civil War reconciliation with the Confederate States.

Given Lincoln's willingness to put partisan politics aside, I found some irony from a recent post in the Monmouth Country Republican Blog, which is managed by an anonymous editor who goes by the name of "Honest Abe." Abe was lamenting the recent results in Holmdel, in which only one of the two Republican candidates won a seat on the Township Committee:

Mayor Serena DiMaso was reelected, but her running mate, Jerry Allocco, was defeated by Democrat Janet Berk. DiMaso and Allocco were on opposing slates in the primary, but teamed up for the general election. Sadly, it is reported that some Republicans worked for the democrats, resulting in a close race and Allocco's loss.

The truth is actually a little more interesting. GOP candidates for state and county offices easily routed their Democratic opponents in townwide voting. Even the eventual Democratic winner in the Freeholder race, John D'Amico, trailed his nearest opponent by almost 400 votes. Holmdel's Republican proclivities remain solidly in place. In the face of this Republican landslide, it counts as a small political miracle that Janet and I collectively attracted 52 percent of the vote in the Holmdel Township Committee race.

Abe's sadness (which might be better described as ire) stems from his frustration that Republicans in Holmdel are not political robots. They can unite with Democrats and Independents around issues of common local interest without sacrificing their political loyalties on a national, state or even county level.

A healthy political discourse begins by replacing polemics with consensus building and problem solving, especially since party platforms cannot cover every contingency. Common sense usually fills the void. Or to quote from Lincoln himself--"Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed."

Lincoln made that observation in 1858. Roughly 150 years later, it still offers a good guidepost for addressing the challenges of any community.