George the first

Even when it comes to honoring presidents, we've resorted to praising everybody instead of trying to single out the really great ones. So, we forget George Washington and celebrate President's Day, the nation's "most nondescript holiday" and another one of Richard Nixon's terrible ideas:

The slide into moral equivalence took its toll on Washington in different ways. With even an incumbent president of the United States unclear in his own mind as to whether there is such a thing as “American Exceptionalism”; too few students, and even members of Congress, familiar with the words and meaning of the U.S. Constitution; and leaders of so many sectors of society — education, business, entertainment, and even clergy — unwilling to declare fealty to universal truths, it is no wonder that hosannas to Washington have become fewer in number. He had after all warned his fellow citizens that only a moral people could remain a free people and that Providence was the source of all morality.

Pretending that all presidents were, in fact, equal proved a convenient way for those unwilling or unable to draw moral distinctions to retain the holiday, while depriving it of meaning. The term “Presidents Day” had a leveling effect. Rather than focus on what made Washington, in the language of Barack Obama, a “transformative” figure in world events, it lumped him together with the many mediocrities that came after him. In The American Commonwealth, published in 1888, Lord Bryce informed his readers that the odds against great men becoming president were long. Of the few who made it, Washington was, it can be forcefully argued, the greatest.

Washington was our greatest president because he had no blueprint to follow. He had to make it up as he went along and get it exactly right to keep our great experiment from falling apart. He did.