So let me take a moment to remember not the best, nor the brightest, not the bravest or even the staunchest, no, allow Humble Elias to devote a few lines of praise to Warren Gameliel Harding the Worst President of the United States ev-errrrrr.
He got nominated by the GOP in 1920, because everyone else had beaten themselves to death grasping for the Purple, he won because Henry Cabot Lodge told him to keep his mouth shut and say as little as possible (Truly he knew his man and his almighty vacuity) and once in office Harding guilelessly appointed every mook, porch-climber and highwayman in Ohio to Federal Office.
These guys were serious career criminals, the absolute scum of the Ohio Republican Party they thought nothing of stealing everything that was not nailed down from the damn Veteran's Administration and beyond!
And that was before all that oil-mishaugas at Teapot Dome Wyoming.
And yet when it all came out, Harding was appalled, he was too simple-minded to realize that he had spent his entire public life in the company of men whose gruesome lack of ethics would have shamed the Hells Angels.
But then that is what I like about Harding, he was human, not a neurotic self pitying Political Frankenstein's monster like Nixon or an aging fraud like Reagan, after Harding the Presidency would progressively become more and more image conscious until that imagery would literally consume the office.
Some men are simple and steadfast, the office fortifies them, not Warren Harding the whole thing crushed him to a pulp and in three short years too.
Harding cheated on his battle-ax of a wife incessantly, he drank god-awful Prohibition-era rotgut even as he piously defended the Noble Experiment, played poker with the boys and freely admitted his complete ignorance of economics and diplomacy even as he signed whatever was put in front on him sans demure.
A proud Ohio Newspaper Editor before he got into politics, Harding was noted for his abysmal gaffes, unintelligible syntax and hopelessly inane speechmaking.
H.L. Mencken once observed that Harding "writes the worst english I have ever encountered...it reminds me of dogs barking idiotically thru endless nights".
Even FDR felt pity for the guy, Harding was in over his head and everyone knew it, most of all Harding.
Still and all that, he wanted to make good, he meant well, for all his small town Sinclair Lewisian crassness, FDR once said that Harding was a courteous well meaning soul trapped in the wrong job.
He knew the guy and the Second Roosevelt was a shrewd judge of character.
And if Harding "made Heaven" it is because he set the Socialist Leader Eugene Debs free after he'd gone to the Federal Slams in 1917 for agitating against America's entry into World War One.
And when his old heart gave out, the country wept, signed and buried him in this preposterous mausoleum which stands today in Marion Ohio as a mute warning that ambition prepares us but poorly for the supreme challenges of life.
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