ying "You are
not America. We only are America!"

This makes the President lonely. We elected him a few months ago to be
President of all of us. It is slow work being President, being a good
mixer, when there are ten groups of people who will not listen and who
all turn on you and hate you, rend you if you try to get them to listen
to each other.

The way the President is going to meet this issue and insist until we all
thank him for it--on being President of all of us, is with his
temperament.

III

THE PRESIDENT'S TEMPERAMENT

If I were writing a book for the next President to run for President
on--a thing I have guilty moments of hoping I am doing--the first thing I
would arrange for in the book, would be to put down in it two platforms
for him to run on--one platform on what he believes and the other
platform--the way he believes it and gets other people to believe it.

The way the next President we pick out, does his believing, the way he
keeps from believing weakly what he wants to, and from being fooled about
his party and about himself, the clean-cutness and honesty of his mind,
the tone, the ring in which he believes in himself and gets other people
to believe in him, is going to be, from the point of view of his getting
for this country at home and abroad, what it wants, the most important
thing about him.

The most important part of the next President's platform is going to be,
in the eyes of the people, his character, his temperament, the way his
personal traits and habits dramatize what he says, the way he lives what
he believes.

The American people may not be shrewd about seers, or about historians or
philosophers, but they are very likely any minute to be deep about
people. When Henry Cabot Lodge draws a rough sketch in chalk of history
he wants a hundred million people to help him make, and when he is being
fooled about it and is all out of perspective the people may defer to
him, may feel Mr. Lodge is too deep for them, but the moment they see Mr.
Lodge being fooled about himself, they find Mr. Lodge easy.

In a trait in human nature like this, with which they are familiar every
day, a hundred million people--without trying, are deep.

If a hundred million people could sit down and write a book--a book or
open letter addressed in the next two months to those two big vague,
whoofy Nobodies we call our Political Parties, and tell them in so many
words the kind of President the people