When the Founding Fathers sat down at the Constitutional Convention, one of the problems that bedeviled them was leadership, i.e. should we mimic the two Roman consul model or just have one dude on top? The argument was perhaps there would be too much responsibility placed on one person: As you can see today, Obama not only has to juggle ISIS and Russia, but he also has to face the economic malaise and racial tensions at home. Perhaps it would be better if we had one person handle foreign affairs and another domestic issues. Ultimately the Founding Fathers feared eventual clashes between the two figures would weaken the country and made the president responsible for everything.

That is not the case for every country. Some did chose the two-leader route, and France is one of them: To this day the prime minister is in charge of the home front and the president meets with world leaders. But the delegates at the Constitutional Convention were correct and fights do erupt between the two. Case in point: Poincaré and Clemenceau, two major figures during World War I, hated each others' guts. I'm reading a book about the Paris Convention of 1919, and this is what it had to say:

"There are only two perfectly useless things in the world," [Clemenceau] quipped. "One is an appendix and the other is Poincaré!" ... Clemenceau had been attacking Poincaré for years and even spread rumors about Poincaré's wife. "You wish to sleep with Madame Poincaré?" he would shout out. "OK, my friend, it's fixed." During the war, Clemenceau, who like many leading French politicians had his own newspaper, criticized the president, often unfairly, for the failings of the French military. L'Homme Libre ... carried editorial after editorial, written by Clemenceau himself, castigating the inadequate medical care for wounded soldiers and the shortages of crucial munitions. The conduct of the war was a disaster, those in charge utterly incompetent. Poincaré was outraged. ^*

I fucking love every sentence of this. It's so fucking insane. We often quip about how we've lost our innocence and look fondly on our genteel past, but there is no fucking way anyone nowadays could get away with this. Just put a comparison to today's politicians. If Boehner even attempts to say he can set up a one-night stand with Michelle Obama to anyone who asks, he would be slaughtered by the press and social media. And can you imagine Obama actually owning his own newspaper where he just writes everyday about how much the Republicans suck? People would complain about propaganda in a flash. When people complain about the viciousness of politics nowadays, I just scoff. Our guys are not even on this level, never mind the actual duels people used to do a generation or two before Clemenceau and Poincaré. It's not about truculence; it's intransigence. At the end of the day, people like Clemenceau and Poincaré were able to come together and work things out, something we can't do with this current congress, which isn't even making comments about their wives!

^* Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2002), pp. 33-34.