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Part of the fall in Washington's fortunes is simple shortsightedness, to which even historians are not immune. The relative prominence of Franklin Roosevelt is owing to the fact that Roosevelt created the modern state, in both its domestic and military aspects, and died before its ills were diagnosed. He takes the credit and escapes the blame.
Washington suffers, more seriously, from the intellectualizing and verbalizing of American life. Perhaps because Americans are better educated -- or, at least, spend more time in schools -- we believe only what we read in the papers, or in the great books.
Lincoln, who has twice won the historians' presidential sweepstakes, was the greatest stylist to occupy the White House. Of the Founding Fathers, Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton all helped write political classics. Washington can make no such claim. His most famous pronouncement, the farewell address, was written with Hamilton's assistance. His magnum opus was his life, and how can you put a life on a reading list?
Ideas are important. But they are not enough. Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton were erratic leaders, for all their brilliance, and they were far from the worst that the young country produced. Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr were also patriots. Washington possessed, to an unparalleled degree, three qualities America needed to succeed, in addition to sound political theory: the desire to serve its ideals, the ability to inspire others to serve them and an absolute unwillingness to be led astray by personal gain or ideological distractions.
Every subsequent revolution, from the French Revolution, the year of his first Inaugural, to the last coup in Fiji, has fallen short of his standards. The few liberators who were honest, even saintly -- San Martin, Garibaldi, Gandhi -- left chaos in their wake. Most have been rascals or monsters and forerunners of worse tyrants yet.
The character issue of the late 18th century was not a matter of politicians' sex lives. It was the question of whether a large-scale republic in the modern world could summon enough civic virtue to exist. George Washington, more than any other American, guaranteed that the answer would be yes.