"We have not men fit for the times. We are deficient in genius, education, in travel, fortune _ in everything. I feel unutterable anxiety."

_ John Adams, 1774

We tend to think of our nation's Founding Fathers more as omnipotent, all-wise and confident archangels than as flesh-and-blood, fallible human beings.

So when we see that foreboding quote from the diary of our second president, arguably the Foundiest Father of them all, it should put our unease about today's crop of political leaders into some context.

Two years before he signed the Declaration of Independence, things looked pretty bleak to Mr. Adams. That year, he wrote to his wife, Abigail: "We live, my dear soul, in an age of trial. What will be the consequence, I know not."

Well, things are also looking pretty bleak 230 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Like Adams in his time, it's easy to despair over a lack of talent among those who want to run things in our country.

The general sentiment seems to be: "If only we had leaders like those who created the United States of America. Where are the George Washingtons? Where are the Thomas Jeffersons? Ain't nobody around today going to get his face carved on Mount Rushmore or printed on money like those dudes."

So, how could John Adams look around and see Americans such as Washington and Jefferson (not to mention Benjamin Franklin), and say "we have not men fit for the times"?

Easy.

Not even being the "father of his country" prevented Washington from being pilloried by his political opponents while he was president and by second-guessers while he was leading the troops at Valley Forge.

The most horrid things were said and written about the author of the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, and many of them were justified.

It's terribly difficult to be a demigod to your contemporaries.

Washington and Jefferson owned slaves until the day they died. Washington's will stated that his slaves weren't to be freed until after the death of his wife, Martha. Jefferson, despite his pledges to free his slaves, never quite got around to it.

All of which is not to say that Washington and Jefferson weren't great men. They were. Their accomplishments are staggering in their scope and their importance. But those men weren't perfect, they were just men.

The men and women of today who want to lead us are just men and women. Asking them to be anything more is not only counterproductive, it's an exercise in futility.

The reassuring thing, though, is this nation's almost preternatural ability to choose leaders "fit for the times."

Just going back to 1968, it's easy to see a pattern of voters scratching a national itch. It's terribly simplistic, but it's a pattern nonetheless.

At that time, America was in turmoil. The civil rights movement was in full swing, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated and the Vietnam War was tearing at the very fabric of our idea of who we were as a nation.

Although hated by most of the intelligentsia, Richard Nixon had a palliative effect on the country ... for a while, and was overwhelmingly re-elected.

After the smarmy Watergate cover-up brought down his presidency, Nixon gave way to clumsy and affable Gerald Ford, who lost the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter, considered a squeaky-clean, moral person _ in stark contrast to the oily Nixon.

Those things Carter may have been, but he was also a terrible president, hopelessly lacking in leadership skills.

So the voters turned from Carter's "malaise" to the ebullient optimism of Ronald Reagan. The former actor contributed to the end of European Communism and made a lot of people proud to be Americans, even as he drove up the deficit and headed an administration responsible for the corrupt Iran-Contra scandal.

George H. W. Bush was Reagan without the sunny optimism and winning personality but with the same rising deficits and hurting economy, so in came Bill Clinton.

Clinton led the country through eight years of peace and prosperity, but his affair with an intern while in office turned Americans off so much that they turned to a far-less-cerebral president.

Now, fed up with the war in Iraq and a secretive, furtive and arrogant administration, the American electorate seems poised to punish President Bush by taking control of the House of Representatives and maybe even the Senate away from his party.

"I am but an ordinary man," wrote John Adams later in his illustrious life. "The times alone have destined me to fame."

We are a nation of ordinary men and women. Fortunately, "the times" seem to destine some of those ordinary people to extraordinary achievements.

Let's just hope it happens again.

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Sam Pollak is editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at spollak@thedailystar.com or at (607) 432-1000, ext. 208.