Akhil Reed Amar opens Article II of the Constitution by contrasting the new presidency with the weak presiding officer it inherited its name from under the Articles of Confederation, a role with no veto, no pardon power, no army command, and no fixed term. He argues the title survived partly for continuity and partly because Philadelphia delegates had spent the summer calling George Washington Mr. President. Amar walks through the design choices: a single executive rather than a plural one, continuous tenure because crises do not wait for Congress to reconvene, and a four-year term defended both against shorter state governorships and as leverage in dealing with hereditary monarchs abroad. He closes on the unlimited reelection the text actually allowed, and how the two-term norm began only as Washington's personal choice to step down. Part of Yale's America's Written Constitution course.