The newspapers often have hateful letters to the editor about the
President (Obama, that is). Maybe he deserves criticism, but that is not the
point. The point is that hasn’t ever President received severe criticism?
Maybe not Harrison as he was not in office long enough to offend anyone
unless his long winded
inaugural address did. How about Washington? Did the father of our country
get the same venom that I read about Obama? I hear that the present
generation cannot judge the effeteness of the current President and that
judgement should be left to future historians. So give me you wisdom about
presidential criticism.
PS: I see the is a book on a related subject: “Packaging The Presidency: A
History and Criticism of Presidential Campaign Advertising”, but I am not
asking about campaign advertising which we all know as bull hockey.
There is a story about a political cartoon where George Washington is on a donkey and a man has a rope on the donkey and the caption says the man is leading an ass to Washington.
Whether that was an actual cartoon or not, point is every single President had their detractors.
My Dad told me that a popular joke in the 30’s was a man stopped at a news stand and looked at the headlines of a newspaper. The attendant asked him if he wanted to buy the paper and the man replied he was just checking the obituaries. The attendant replied that death notices weren’t on the front page to which the man said “the sonofabitch I’m waiting for will be!” FDR won 4 landslides yet there were significant numbers that hated his guts and weren’t ashamed to exclamate it.
Washington lived by his principles and may have been seen as inflexible. I seem to recall reading that when George Washington was inaugurated, some Americans quipped that we had traded George the Third for George the First.