‘I am not fit for this office and should never have been here,” Warren Gamaliel Harding, America’s greatest president, once admitted.
Now, no person, however highly he may regard his abilities, is truly fit to preside over the most powerful institution on earth. But, alas, someone needs to do the job. And “President Hardly,” as in “hardly working” — an unfair moniker — understood both the virtues of republican governance and man’s foibles far better than most. Which is why I tend to get a little upset when his political legacy, whatever little of it exists, is tarnished.
Every year, a …
This article appears as “More Harding, Please, Less Wilson” in the June 24, 2019, print edition of National Review.