If At First You Don't Succeed...

...do the same thing over and over again:

Can George Washington and Thomas Jefferson succeed where Susan B. Anthony and Sacajawea failed? The U.S. Mint is hoping America's presidents will win acceptance, finally, for the maligned dollar coin.

The public will get the chance to decide starting in February when the first of the new coins, bearing the image of the first president, is introduced.

Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison are scheduled to grace the coin in 2007, with a different president appearing every three months.

The only way for this to work is to start phasing out the dollar bill, which nobody seems particularly interested in doing. This is one of the few European ideas that would actually work in this country. European currencies phased out one-unit pieces years ago. I remember even in Germany in 1995 coins went up to the five marks, with paper bills starting with 10.

The most irritating aspect of this dollar coin project I'm sure will be the hundreds of millions of dollars spent promoting the thing. Because that worked so well when they spent the money on the Sacajawea dollar.