The Internet and my life are moving so fast these days that this seems like old news, but Ford's funeral was only yesterday. I was heading to Minnesota for my second semester of school, coming back from a wonderful Christmas vacation with my family. I arrived at the airport early in the morning, looking forward to the plane ride but worrying way too much about the Homeland Security officials who waved me through. I headed towards my own space like everyday business, but then I saw a man sitting in an otherwise empty cafe. He wasn't drinking coffee, or eating breakfast, or reading the newspaper. He was watching Ford's funeral on CNN in reverent silence.
I joined him.
At first, CNN was giving the funeral the full red carpet treatment, talking about this and that person walking into the chapel. But then they, too, lapsed into silence for the chorus, and the speeches. More and more people gathered around me in the cafe. One of them asked the barista to turn up the sound so she could hear George H. W. Bush's eulogy. I thought I saw the elder Bush smirk, a little alarmingly, as he referenced the Warren Commission. But the main part of his message, and those of the speakers before and after him, resonated with me.
I wasn't alive for Ford's presidency, but I heard the story of a man who reluctantly served the people. As all his actions we've recently hashed over indicate-- his approach to religious practice, his statements about Bush delayed until after his death-- his decisions were not as bold as some of the other presidents in the past century, but he always took care in them. Any lesser man would have been remembered as a total failure for pardoning his friend Nixon. When Clinton pardoned his friends, even us Democrats saw it for what it was: simple cronyism. But here was someone different. We can say he made the wrong choice, and that's even easier to do thirty years later now that we can observe the pile-up of evidence with an unbiased mind, but Ford was not acting out of vice. And his legacy, while not an "era" like our longer-lasting presidents, is not one of failure. He was a Republican, but he was a good guy. Isn't that something?
Then CNN changed cameras, and I saw an impostor in the audience. Everyone was listening to the speech, both the people around me in the cafe and Ford's friends and political acquaintances in the chapel, except for this fellow on the camera with a totally disinterested look on his face. It's difficult to describe exactly how irreverent this man looked. At a glance, a casual observer would have seen this man watching the speaker with his eyes, and listening to the eulogy with his ears. But it was clear to me that absolutely none of his mental facilities were devoted to remembering Gerald Ford. That split-second image, right after the camera changed, broke the feeling for me. What a difference in Presidents we're seeing right now! How far we've come!
I choked back my disgust and wandered off somewhere else for a while, and came back to see the man was still sitting there. His neighbors in the pews were laughing, recalling a fond memory of Ford, and he was grinning vaguely, not quite sure what was going on. Elsewhere in the pews, Condi Rice was focusing intently on reading the funeral program. She clearly could have been paying closer attention, but for some strange reason she wasn't. Conscience?
The man got up on the podium. He spoke about Ford's willingness to make tough decisions, even when they proved unpopular. The man was drawing a big, fat analogy to himself. Imagine this absurdity: an analogy between a man who earnestly tried to make the right choices and thought over things logically and carefully, who was quiet and unassuming even as President and kept his religion and prayers private even as President, and a man who blindly follows any half-formed idea he or his staffers conjure up, who struts his blaring frat-boy image to the point where it occasionally makes faux pas in formal situations, who proudly pronounces his ridiculous religious views (creationism, for one) in order to do exactly what Gerald Ford feared: "Talk about going to Bible study, he worried, and people will get the idea that you think you're somehow better than they are."
I couldn't take it anymore. I got on the plane and left.
This administration is already a failure. Not only have their missteps hurt us domestically, and not only have they hurt millions of people in other countries around the world, but they have cost thousands of American lives. They have nothing left on their agendas for the next two lame-duck years but wallow in the failure they have created, and cowardly veto anything that tries to disrupt their legacy of failure. Why do we even need to talk about impeachment? If they had half the conscience of the late President they would be ashamed of themselves. They would step down. The utter lack of Gerald Ford's virtues is the only reason they're in office right now.