Dan Marsula, Post-Gazette Click photo for larger image.

What prompts a person to think about bad presidents? The low standing of our current chief executive might be one reason. Or it could be the early stirrings of the 2008 campaign. Whatever the reason, my thoughts these days drift past the revered images of George and Abe and Teddy towards the likes of James Buchanan, Ulysses S. Grant, Warren G. Harding ...

For me, Harding is the magic name among this bunch. Our 29th president has been synonymous with graft, sleaze and moral turpitude ever since his suspicious death while in office in 1923. Historians have generally pegged Harding as an amiable incompetent who appointed criminals to Cabinet posts while keeping busy with booze-fueled poker parties and romps with his mistress in the Blue Room. Warren G. Harding's life resembles an Edward Albee play adapted into a David Lynch film. Once you get comfortable with the most lurid parts, though, there's a good deal that his story can tell you about America.

Barry Alfonso is a journalist and author living in Swissvale (louminatti@earthlink.net). Here is a link to the Harding Home in Marion, Ohio.

Last month, my wife and I took a drive to Marion, Ohio, to visit the Harding home, now maintained by the Ohio Historical Society. The late president's 1891 Queen Anne-style residence is ample but not grand, a house fit for an up-and-coming politician in a moderately bustling small city. It was necessary to swallow anti-irony pills before looking over the exhibits and taking the house tour. Not surprisingly, Harding's sins and inadequacies were downplayed in favor of a more benign portrayal. As I walked up the house's front steps and stood on its impressive semi-circular porch, I let myself think kindly of Warren. Once you get past the smelly scandals, it isn't hard to do.

The Harding home and the small museum behind it try very hard to present Harding as a regular guy. We are shown the Shriners' fezzes he wore, the instruments he played in the local marching band, the overstuffed leather chair where he sat and smoked cigars. This is not the home of a scheming political genius; there's no sense of lingering malevolence here. True, there were some creepy aspects to the house, such as the family clock which reputedly stopped at the moment of Harding's death. But there's a poignancy to the experience of walking in Warren's footsteps that supercedes moral judgments about the man.

Visitors come away with the sense that Harding was a typical American of his day. And -- in spite of the exceptional corruption associated with his administration -- it was true. In fact, the word most associated with Warren G. Harding (other than "bloviate") is normalcy. It was the thing he promised to the American people when he ran for president in 1920.

"America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums but normalcy, not revolution, but restoration," he told a nation traumatized by World War I, red scares and economic downturns. The voters overwhelmingly chose the tall, friendly silver-haired man who promised to make things right again.

Three years later, Harding was dead, the victim of a heart attack -- or tainted canned crab meat or possibly murder, depending upon which book you read. My own theory is that Harding was killed by normalcy.

Though he was often accused of spewing semi-meaningless oratorical gush, Harding had something definite in mind when he advocated normalcy. And by and large, the American voter of 1920 knew what he meant by the word. Normalcy was pro-business government, low taxes, modest spending, no more foreign adventures or major social reforms. It meant old-line Anglo-Saxon Protestant values, the Republican Party, rugged individualism, church on Sunday morning and a chicken dinner that afternoon. The American melting pot worked to the degree it submerged the Irish and Italians and Jews into this pattern of conduct -- while not really caring what the Negroes did. You might want to defy this kind of normalcy, but you knew what it was back then. It was the national religion -- to quote Rush Limbaugh, it was "the way things ought to be."

By today's standards, it all seems naive -- and more than a little evil. Normalcy in the Harding sense had probably been a dead letter since the 1890s. Still, millions of people blindly wanted to believe that the pieties of the Good Old Days could be sustained by sheer belief. And so they voted for the handsome Mr. Harding, who campaigned on his front porch and soothed away discord with his sweet words.

Anyone clinging to dreams of restored normalcy received a very rude awakening as the 1920s unfolded. And no one got a greater shock than Harding himself. He may have found a way to make excuses for his own drinking or sexual indiscretions; normalcy allowed for hypocrisy as long as it didn't get out of hand. But the larceny of his attorney general and interior secretary (among others) couldn't be squared with the values he'd championed.

Harding began to accept the truth just before embarking on a presidential trip to Alaska. "I can take care of my enemies," he told a reporter. "But my damn friends, my Goddamn friends ... they're the ones that keep me walking the floor nights!"

The sordid revelations poured forth after Harding's death. Scandals involving the Teapot Dome oil reserves, the Veterans' Bureau and the enforcement of Prohibition didn't implicate the late president directly; rumors of sex trysts and illegitimate children did. All of this combined to kill off the idea of normalcy once and for all. But it's also fair to say that normalcy had broken Harding's heart. He should've been living proof that even an ordinary fellow could become president of the United States by dint of loyalty and faith in his country. Instead, the promise turned to poison.

It's hard to imagine anyone running for the White House on a platform of normalcy in 2008. As much as we'd like to return to some pre-Iraq, pre-9/11, post-Cold War interregnum of relative peace and prosperity, as much as we'd like our next president to be "a uniter, not a divider," there's no archetypical normal man or woman to aim such a pitch to. The conservative white Rotarian who represented such an ideal in Harding's time wouldn't dare to be identified as "normal" today -- it would be bad for business.

Before choosing our next president, I'd recommend a visit to the home of Warren G. Harding. Stand on the front porch and face the front lawn, where thousands once came to hear a weak but lovable man talk about America. Then look far down the shady streets of Marion for the long-gone ghost of normalcy.