People know what to do when a president dies.
We discover the directions they’ve usually personally laid out. We polish the horse-drawn caisson, and we placed on a present of pomp and circumstance that gathers political foes in a show of collective mourning, reflection and unity.
That’s what’s occurring this week in Washington, the place former President Jimmy Carter is mendacity in state within the Capitol Rotunda earlier than a funeral tomorrow that can convene all 5 residing present, former and future presidents: three Democrats and two Republicans. The pageantry is unfolding simply days after the uneventful certification of the election, giving the nation an uncanny week of routine — of bipartisan political ritual — on the eve of political upheaval.
“It just made me happy,” the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin instructed me in the present day, “to see these moments can still exist.”
None of it is sufficient to cowl up the nation’s stark political divisions. As Carter’s coffin approached the Capitol yesterday, it handed tall safety fencing erected as a result of the ritual of peacefully transferring energy is not a given. President-elect Donald Trump stopped in on the Rotunda a number of moments in the past to pay his respects to Carter, however he earlier this week attacked one among Carter’s signature achievements, the everlasting neutrality of the Panama Canal, and not too long ago complained that Carter’s dying means flags will likely be at half-staff when he’s inaugurated in every week and a half.
And whereas no person is aware of what awaits the nation when the rituals of January are over, many insist they matter all the identical.
“They are a demonstration to the citizens of this country and to the world that our country is not just the hot mess of what we see on social media every day,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat whose prime position on the Senate Guidelines Committee means she is instrumental in coordinating inaugurations and memorial occasions on the Capitol, instructed me.
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