Who would you rather be President?

IT WAS HERE THAT Roosevelt was irresistible and inimitable. He liked people, almost any people. He liked their company, liked to pick their minds and see what they were thinking, liked to know the details of their lives and their problems.
I know nothing that illustrates the contrast between him and Woodrow Wilson, the previous Democratic President, better than their attitudes toward Henry Ford. I lunched with journalist George Creel one day,who told me the difficulty they had with Wilson in the early days of World War I, getting him to confer with American businessmen to gain their cooperation in the war effort. He refused to see most of them, saying they were specialists who had nothing to teach him with his general problems affecting the whole nation. Finally they prevailed upon him to see Henry Ford, and after the interview, Creel entered and said to the President, "What do you think of Henry Ford?" Wilson impatiently answered, "I think he' is the most comprehensively ignorant man I ever met." He had complete contempt for Ford. Two or three days after that lunch with Creel, I noticed that Ford was President Roosevelt's luncheon guest. I happened to be at the White House that afternoon late and opened the conversation by saying, "Mr. President, I see you had lunch with Henry Ford." "Yes,", he said, "I had a grand time with Uncle Henry." He then described the conversation enthusiastically and with gestures. He said he tried to discuss with Ford the problem of an annual wage for workmen. Roosevelt described how he edged him up to the subject, and when Ford saw what he was leading up to, he would draw back, then he would work him up to it from another angle and Ford would draw back, and he said he spent his whole luncheon hour playing chess with "Uncle Henry, as he called him, trying to get him up to the subject. Roosevelt said, "You know, I never got him to it." But he liked Ford and respected him for the things in which he was able and had none of the contempt that characterized the Wilsonian attitude.'

Robert H. Jackson, That Man: An Insider's Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt. New York. Oxford, 2003. p.135.

To judge by its selection of page one photos, The Financial Times favors the candidacy of John Kerry. Tuesday’s front page bore a large picture of Kerry arriving in Virginia where he is being greeted by an African American porter of a certain age. The two men are shown shaking hands warmly while looking off camera and smiling broadly as if amused by someone performing a stunt or shouting some amiable words of encouragement. I was struck by the impression that here were two grown men celebrating a kind of mature, and not alone politically, knowingness. This is in contrast with the impressions I have harvested of G.W. Bush as a kind of perennial adolescent, swooping onto the stage as if to make a cameo appearance in a college historical pageant. The question is whether a substantial block of the voting citizenship is in itself caught in a kind of adolescence, shaped by the forces of a media that in itself is juvenile. I don’t know how otherwise to account for the “bring it on” mentality that seems to cause a general blindness to the spectacularly evident failings of this administration.