Hi, everyone. Welcome to Smarter News. My name is Jenna, and we have a special report for you today. A moment to take a deep breath, a great moment to pause. And it feels like just the right time for that. Because the beginning of the year, the month of January, feels like it got shot out of a cannon,

doesn't it? All of a sudden, you wake up and it's the end of February. You wonder how you got here.

That's really how I feel. And the amount of different headlines that we've covered just in the first few weeks of 2024 really has been coming at a rapid fire pace. And it's only going to get quicker and more intense as we

move towards election day, 2024. And so I thought we have a really unique opportunity. Here we are

in a presidential election year. We are marking George Washington's birthday slash president's day.

So let's take a moment and reflect a little bit about American leadership.

And I thought strategically, this makes a lot of sense.

We had smarter news.

We love covering the headlines for you.

We want you to feel current, clear, clutter-free.

We want you to know the headlines and why it matters.

But every once in a while,

it's good to pause and take a step back from the headlines and not be driven by them so that we can think a little bit more deeply about what's actually happening in the country and some of

the stories that were reporting and also telling each other about the state of affairs. When you dig deeper into a lot of the news stories that we're reporting and also telling each other about the state of affairs.

When you dig deeper into a lot of the news stories that we cover, and I've always been amazed

by this over the years, at the heart of a lot of these stories are similar themes, even though

they look drastically different. You know, themes like patriotism, liberty, personal freedom, justice, questions of

what does American leadership really look like? What does success really mean? You know, some of these

really basic broad themes that we never get a chance to really dig into because we're moving

from one story to the next. So today's actually going to give us the opportunity to do that. We're going to do that through a tradition that's been taking

place in Congress for many, many years. And that's the tradition of reading President Washington's

farewell address. And there's a reason why Congress decided to do this many years ago and why the

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