May 18, 2010--Primary Thoughts

Egos and personal ambition are on full flagrant display today in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, and elsewhere where hotly contested congressional primaries are underway.

Perhaps this is a moment to remember, in our time of self-seeking, George Washington's remarkable reluctance on the eve of becoming our first president.

This from Joseph Ellis's excellent biography, His Excellency. There are lessons here for all concerned:

His thinking was multilayered like his earlier expressions of reticence about becoming commander in chief of the Continental army. Modern sensibilities make it difficult to comprehend Washington's psychological chemistry on this score and dispose us to interpret his routinized reticence as either a disingenuous ploy or a massive case of denial.

But in Washington's world no prominent statesman regarded the forthright expression of political ambition as legitimate: and anyone who actively campaigned for national office was thereby confessing he was unworthy of election. What makes then so different from now was the . . . assumption that any explicit projection of self-interest in the political arena betrayed a lack of control over one's own passions, which did not bode well for the public interest. Washington carried this ethos to an extreme, insisting that any mention of his willingness to serve as president prior to the election violated the code. (Emphasis added.)

All the best to you Rand Paul, Arlen Specter, and Blanche Lincoln. Remember, country first.