Worst to First

DC has plenty of free expansive memorials like the Washington Monument, dedicated walkways like the Tidal Basin and museums like the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery.  It has a permanent presidential portrait gallery with one or more painted picture of every past president except Obama (it's coming), so to get an image of the current and worst president by far already, you have to go to the Smithsonian gift shop and buy a postcard.

But on the west end of the third floor of the old converted Patent Office building, you can see plenty of images of the best president, Lincoln, including busts, a life mask and a cast of his hands.  In contrast to the current era of divisiveness fostered by the current White House occupant, Lincoln kept our nation together, ended the intractable problem of slavery, reinvented American liberty with his Gettysburg Address and showed a way to the future with his astonishing 2d Inaugural Address.

You can find a portrait of the worst president, until Trump, Dubya; his "W" moniker stood for Worst.  He had all the worst impulses of a miscreant schoolboy, flippant ("Bring 'em on!"), irreverent (Doin' a heckuva job, Brownie"), intellectually lazy (he depended on Cheney's viewpoint of the world) and totally unprepared, in his own way, for the demands of the office ("Mission accomplished!"), his unfunded tax cuts and endless wars has impoverished the country but in contrast to the abysmal "presidential" performance we've seen this year, Bush the Second now seems positively presidential in comparison.

But then you can pause in the marble hallways to linger over several likenesses of the Father of our Country.  Washington won a guerrilla war against the greatest power on Earth, gave up the mantle of military power voluntarily, took on the country's first presidency under its new constitution and established many important protocols for the office and then retired after two terms, setting yet another lasting standard for the peaceful transfer of power.