Along the Way: Presidents wear out their welcome

Nobody likes ol’ “W.”

He can’t get out of the White House soon enough. Go back to the ranch, clear some brush (pretending to work), ride his bike, shoot squirrels. Whatever.

Nobody liked ol’ Slick Willie, either. He couldn’t get out of the White House soon enough.

George The First, “W’s” daddy, was so popular he didn’t even get a second term. Comedians who impersonated him made more sense than he did.

Reagan’s act grew old and we were happy to see him in a workshirt on a horse, playing cowboy again.

He couldn’t get out of the White House soon enough.

Carter couldn’t get back to his peanut plantation soon enough, either. Mercy, all the Gomers and Goobers running around during his one-and-done residency in the White House!

Good riddance.

Ford needed to work on his golf game, and we were happy to oblige him. Aspen suited him better than Washington.

Nixon? PUH-lease. . . .he couldn’t get out of Dodge soon enough. Out of the country would have been better.

LBJ was all things to all men, including “jerk” to many of us. We couldn’t wait to send him back to the Hill Country.

Kennedy was different. He died in office. Assassinated on the darkest day of our lives. Young, handsome, bright, funny, charming JFK left us ‘way too soon. But had he lived to win a second term, let alone serve one, we’d have found a way to dislike him.

We almost always “hate” our presidents after awhile, in their waning days in Washington.

Those who’re around for a second term are especially despised, it seems. Too old, too conservative, too liberal, too compromising, too bull-headed. . . .too, too, too.

Our best become our least admired.

All those presidential handshakes in large crowds at the airport, all those babies picked up and kissed on the head, all those waves — to nobody in particular — from the First Helicopter. And for what? To be hated at the end.

We’ll be glad when you’re gone, you rascal, you! That’s how we feel about the men we choose for the highest office in the land.

And all those hawk-eyed, hankering candidates, who snarl at each other in debates and sing lullabies of prosperity to those of us who might care to vote in the next election, will wind up losers only if they win.

FDR was despised — he won four times, can you believe it? — until that day in April of ‘45 when he died. Then everybody loved him. Even those who hated him.

My own personal favorite, and not entirely because we both were born in Missouri, was Harry S Truman. He was a little guy, an underdog, who climbed to the top. Replaced FDR.

And, boy! was ol’ Harry hated! Couldn’t get out of Washington fast enough.

When I was a kid, Harry came through my hometown, Carthage, Mo., on a whistle-stop train trip. And the good people of Jasper County, though Republican, politely applauded.

Except for the idiots who threw tomatoes at the caboose Harry spoke from. Luckily, he had left the speaking platform and the train was lurching toward Joplin by the time the vandals struck.

But there you are. Truman was booed and his rail car was the target of rotten tomatoes — in his own home state!

That’s a measure of the respect we seem to hold for our chief executives in their final years of office.

History has been kind to Truman and he is generally considered now one of the very best. He deserves that. He earned it.

And if George Bush II, ol’ “W,” has trouble sleeping these days because poll vaulters have soared past him and left him with a mouthful of dust and the resentment of many of us, well, he can take comfort in one thing.

As the media’s Public Enemy No. 1, as the Man Who Can’t Get Out of the White House Soon Enough to suit us. . . .

He’s in dang good company.

Former Tucson Citizen columnist Corky Simpson writes a weekly commentary for the Green Valley News.