In a recent column , the author offers that “…no one came into the presidency with more challenges that Obama — not Washington, Lincoln or FDR.”
I will not attempt to rate Barack Obama’s presidency.
Others, who are eminently more qualified than I, will do so over the passage of time.
However, historians and scholars have had the opportunity to do so with Washington, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, and their challenges on taking office far exceeded those of Obama.
When George Washington was sworn in, our fledgling nation had been governed by a Congressional Congress during the Revolutionary War and under the Articles of Confederation after that.
Both were failed forms of government.
The Constitution was another attempt, and Washington accepted the challenge to make it work. The economy was in a shambles.
Family members and neighbors who were Loyalists to the King were being evicted from their homes and sent into exile.
Everything he did was precedent-setting. He came into office knowing that he would be held responsible if this “experiment” worked or failed.
He had no guarantee that anything would work, and it came perilously close to not working several times.
Before he took office, Abraham Lincoln knew that a portion of the country that he was elected to lead would secede from the Union as a result of his election.
He was faced with certain Civil War that would place brothers against brothers in armed internal conflict with guaranteed generations-long upheaval.
In 1933, the Great Depression had already been gripping the nation for over three years.
When Roosevelt entered the Oval Office, the unemployment rate was 25 percent and millions had lost everything.
Over 70,000 factories had closed by 1933, and terrifying dust storms ruined crops, killed livestock and destroyed 100 million acres of land.
He knew that the population looked to him to turn it all around and that he would be required to take actions that bordered on socialism in order to preserve our democracy.
I dare say that Washington, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt are in a class by themselves as Heroes of American Government.
Others, like Barack Obama, have had their challenges, but fall far short of those faced by those great men and which pale by comparison.
Kenneth J. Buettner
Port Washington
