"In many respects, it is an even more effective form of isolation than physical confinement. The prisoner doing a spell in solitary knows that he is cut off from other human beings. The president, however, is surrounded by large, adoring groups that give him the illusion of human contact when all they really do is act as an echo chamber for his thoughts."

—George Reedy, The Twilight of the Presidency.

It is a marketing device masquerading as a holiday. If George Washington and Abraham Lincoln both had not been born in February, nobody ever would've thought to combine both of their birthdays into a single Monday holiday white-sale binge. Hell, if Lincoln had been born in March, and the February presidential birthdays belonged only to Washington, William Henry Harrison, and Ronald Reagan, my money says we'd all still be getting February 22 off, although I'm fairly sure the Republicans would be trying to sneak Reagan in there, too. There are a lot of things wrong with Presidents Day. Its shameless commercialized birth is only one of them.

Why Presidents Day? We have three branches of government. Why not a Congress Day, or a Supreme Court Day? We already have Constitution Day, but everybody has to work , unless September 17 falls on a weekend. The president is—theoretically, anyway—subordinate to the Constitution. He swears an oath to uphold it. Why isn't Constitution Day a federal holiday? What is it about the job that plops a man down in what Harry Truman called "that great white prison," and Abigail Adams dismissed as "the great castle" that has so earned its own holiday? Presumably, now, Presidents Day celebrates all of them now: Washington and Lincoln, Kennedy and both Roosevelts, but Harding and Hoover, too, as well as the four guys immediately preceding Lincoln—James Polk, Zachary Taylor/Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan—whom my friend George Reedy used to call The Four Stooges. (Once, Reedy was talking about them and said, "If you think they were bad, go look at the guys they beat." OK, so one of the defeated candidates was Henry Clay but, as for the rest, the horrifying fact is that the best guy probably won.) This is respect-the-office-not-the-man taken to its maximum extreme, and that's where we all get in trouble.

One of my favorite things about The West Wing is that, in its original conception, Martin Sheen's President Jed wasn't supposed to appear much at all. It was supposed to be about the speechwriters and the staff with only the occasional cameo by their boss. But, even in a fictional White House, the Oval Office is the great, sucking magnetic core of power that draws everything else towards it. Once the show launched, it was impossible to make the president—excuse me, The President—a supporting character and, by the middle of season one, we had the whole staff swearing, "I serve at the pleasure of the president," as though they were the Musketeers, armed for the final showdown with Richelieu. That this was something that easily also could have been said by G. Gordon Liddy on the morning of June 17, 1972 is something the TV show rather neatly avoids.

NBC

I do not feel compelled to respect a president any more or less than I respect somebody I hire to fix my roof or paint my house. Whomever gets elected works for me. As to the office, well, I understand how it is a single unifying figure within the government, and how he—again, theoretically—represents the whole country. But, in my lifetime, the Oval Office has seen coups, burglaries, and illegal arms sales planned. It has been the venue for criminal mischief and illicit canoodling. That it is also the place where the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were signed is the great paradox. But the idea that I have to respect The Presidency qua The Presidency is something that raises the hackles in my democratic conscience.

First of all, there's this commander-in-chief business. By constitutional mandate, the president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Period. He is not my commander-in-chief. Neither is he yours. Neither is he the commander-in-chief of the civilian government. The Congress can tell him to go whistle. The Supreme Court can slap his agenda back in his face. Nobody outside the military has to salute him. But, in every presidency, there's a temptation to push the commander-in-chief prerogatives a little further into the civilian sphere, and this is powerfully dangerous. To his credit, Garry Wills has been railing against this for years. He points out that, when Richard Nixon decapitated the Watergate Special Counsel's office, Alexander Haig presumed to tell assistant attorney-general William Ruckelshaus that Ruckelshaus' "commander-in-chief" had given him an order. Ruckelshaus told Haig to pound sand and got fired. Nixon wasn't Ruckelshaus' commander-in-chief. He was just his boss. As Wills wrote in the Times:

The glorification of the president as a war leader is registered in numerous and substantial executive aggrandizements; but it is symbolized in other ways that, while small in themselves, dispose the citizenry to accept those aggrandizements. We are reminded, for instance, of the expanded commander in chief status every time a modern president gets off the White House helicopter and returns the salute of marines. That is an innovation that was begun by Ronald Reagan. Dwight Eisenhower, a real general, knew that the salute is for the uniform, and as president he was not wearing one. An exchange of salutes was out of order. (George Bush came as close as he could to wearing a uniform while president when he landed on the telegenic aircraft carrier in an Air Force flight jacket). We used to take pride in civilian leadership of the military under the Constitution, a principle that George Washington embraced when he avoided military symbols at Mount Vernon. We are not led — or were not in the past — by caudillos.

Which, in a master irony that Wills did not intend when he wrote that in 2007, brings us to our current situation on this Presidents Day. So far, the president* has produced a distressing amount of evidence that he is on the wrong side of the concerns expressed by both George Reedy and Garry Wills. He has bunkered himself in the isolation of his office with sycophantic lightweights and wildmen. And he certainly has shown a sweet-tooth sharpened into a fang for the quasi-military aspects of his office, surrounding himself with retired generals and claiming that he knows more about military matters than they do anyway.

Mercy Otis Warren, the great pamphleteer of Revolutionary Boston, and one of the avatars of this particular shebeen, in her doubts about the new federal Constitution, saw within in the possibility that, two centuries and change later, the system therein devised would cough up someone like the current president*.

And when patriotism is discountenanced and publick virtue becomes the ridicule of the sycophant—when every man of liberality, firmness and penetration who cannot lick the hand stretched out to oppress, is deemed an enemy to the State—then is the gulph of despotism set open, and the grades to slavery, though rapid, are scarce perceptible—then genius drags heavily its iron chain — science is neglected, and real merit flies to the shades for security from reproach…

Perhaps the best way to celebrate Presidents Day this year is to recognize what the office is—and, especially, what it is not. We do not serve as citizens at the pleasure of the president. He serves at ours.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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