Wrote Greenspan: "Anyone willing to do what is required to become president of the United States is thereby barred from taking that office. I'm only half joking."

It's no laughing matter. After all, what sort of person wants the job badly enough to spend years living out of a suitcase, begging for cash, glad-handing through primary states, and saying things that no intelligent person could possibly believe?

Greenspan's point was that people who seek the presidency today display a pathological power lust that ought to make us uncomfortable, given the powers the modern president enjoys.

George Washington was called "the American Cincinnatus," after the Roman hero who took power reluctantly and returned humbly to his plow when crisis passed. That's the model Americans once expected presidents to follow. Things have changed, and not for the better.

The last candidate to pay tribute to the Cincinnatus model was 1996 GOP contender Bob Dole, who praised the virtues of his birthplace, Russell, Kan., insisting it was either the White House or "home." It turned out that Dole left "home" deliberately vague. After losing, he returned to his condo at the Watergate, making bucks as a lobbyist and Viagra pitchman.

As for the current POTUS, "he's always wanted to be president," according to Obama's longtime friend and advisor Valerie Jarrett. No surprise, then, that, as Newsweek editor Jon Meacham put it in a profile of Obama earlier this year, he "likes and enjoys power," even "revels" in it.

In a fascinating article, presidential scholar Richard Ellis writes that "in the beginning, the presidency was envisioned not as an office to be enjoyed but as a place of stern duty." "Powerful cultural norms" told 19th-century presidents to approach the role humbly, with a keen awareness that power corrupts.

In public and in private, early presidents often acknowledged their deficiencies. "No event could have filled me with greater anxieties," Washington said of his election. Likewise, in his first inaugural, Jefferson worried that the task he'd undertaken was "above my talents."

Today, Ellis explains, the public demands greater confidence from presidential aspirants. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tells us that when he congratulated Barack Obama for a "particularly fine" speech Obama made as a freshman senator, Obama "said quietly, 'I have a gift, Harry.'"

Reid reports that Obama said that with "deep humility." We'll have to take his word for it.

Calvin Coolidge, a genuinely humble man and a fine president, wrote in his autobiography that it was "a major source of safety to the country" for the president "to know that he is not a great man." Few of our recent presidents display Coolidge's self-awareness.

Newsweek's Meacham reports that Barack Obama relishes "the capacity to shape reality in his image and by his lights." An interesting phrase, that — reminiscent of the Bush aide who bragged to reporter Ron Suskind that "we're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

And yet, as we learned during the Bush years, reality has a way of fighting back.

Obama's supporters have embraced the epithet Suskind's source coined. They fancy themselves members of the "reality-based community." Yet they doggedly defend a president for whom the word "hubris" might have been invented — one who thinks that the government, under his direction, can rationally reshape the one-sixth of the U.S. economy devoted to health care.

Our president describes his budget as a "blueprint" for America's future, and believes that, with the proper mix of social workers and soldiers, we can bring orderly governance to Afghanistan, which has never enjoyed it.

We'd do far better if our presidents had Coolidge's sense of his own limitations and of government's as well.

It's easy enough to blame the overconfident, self-aggrandizing characters who seek the office. But at the end of the day, we're the ones who reward them. Unless and until we seek out candidates who share Coolidge's modesty, we'll have no one to blame but ourselves.

Such a magazine, in print or digitally, is sorely needed now. Interactive civics classes have been replaced by testing and retesting assembly lines of students so that the state can evaluate whole schools rather than individual, evolving citizens. David Souter warned in May, as he was retiring from the Supreme Court, that surveys show many Americans cannot name the basic three branches of government (executive, legislative and judicial). He stressed that "(we need) to start the re-education of a substantial part of the public."

Souter's concern about "the restoration of the self-identity of the American people" was the urgent theme in the first issue of Constitution (Fall 1988) in Lynne Cheney's article "A Fading Heritage."

At the time, she was chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and we used to share, in phone conversations, our forebodings of the growing spread of "political correctness" on campuses and at large — a compulsory conformity of opinions that would have been foreign to such free-thinkers as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.

I have not spoken with Lynne Cheney for a long time, figuring she would hardly welcome my call after what I've written about her husband, former vice president Dick Cheney. But I continue to find her article in Constitution energizing and disturbingly contemporary.

"Consider," she wrote then, "how little history is required of our students. Once it was taught every year kindergarten through 12th grade; now many states require but one year." If that, these days.

Today, in a contemporary book that should be in every school, and certainly within reach of members of Congress and the Obama administration, The Genius of America: How the Constitution Saved Our Country and Why It Can Again (Bloomsbury USA, New York) — Eric Lane and Michael Oreskes write: "We are not burdened by a sense of history, our own or anyone ... Our sense of our own past, to put it politely, is thin and growing thinner. The evidence for this is all around us."

Lynne Cheney, in the magazine Constitution, quoted a political philosopher who had been chosen in 1986 as the Jefferson Lecturer by the National Council on the Humanities. Leszek Kolakowski emphasized in that lecture that among America's young, "the erosion of a historically defined sense of 'belonging' plays havoc in their life and threatens their ability to withstand possible trials of the future."

"Havoc," for example, surely exists among those of our young whose acute need 'to belong' somewhere brings them into the increasingly brutal gangs, not only in urban centers.

And many other youths, including in prestigious lower schools and colleges, would be very hard put to say why we have the First, Fifth, Fourth and Ninth Amendments in our Constitution, let alone tell why they could be so important in their own lives. Where are their moorings as Americans?

And how many in or out of school have a meaningful or even scant knowledge of such contributors to the roots of this nation as George Washington (except maybe for the cherry tree), Tom Paine, John Marshall, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain or Elizabeth Cady Stanton?

"Ideally," Lynne Cheney advised, "there would be fewer textbooks used in our schools. Teachers would enlighten their students with current and classic works of literature or historical documents. But to find and bring these into the classroom takes a breadth of knowledge that may be beyond some teachers ... because their preparation has been misdirected ... taking just courses in education. Because time spent taking these types of courses is time that cannot be spent studying 'content' areas like history, teachers find themselves knowing less than they should about the subjects they are teaching."

This includes knowing less about what students should know about this nation so that they can begin to feel they "belong" to it.

If an American roots coalition can be formed — across political and professional lines — with maybe Lynne Cheney involved, our history can be brought off the pages and into Americans' lives. David Souter is already showing the way, having joined a committee in his home state that is changing the civic curriculum for New Hampshire's public schools.

During his retirement speech at Georgetown University Law Center, Souter looked at his audience, saying: "If I can do it, you can do it, too."

A book I would love to see come into all Americans' lives is by a master narrator of our identities, Ray Raphael, whose abundant volume, Founders: The People Who Brought You a Nation (New Press) has the reverberating impact of the former CBS-TV series You Are There!

When, for instance, in 1772, at Faneuil Hall in Boston, as Samuel Adams, James Otis and other patriots formed a Committee of Correspondence to inform all the colonies of British abuses of these Americans' privacy rights in their homes and offices, you too are there in a meeting that was vital in precipitating the American Revolution. That's how to make the Fourth Amendment come alive again! Not only in schools.

As Kathryn Sinclair, a high school student in Murfreesboro, Tenn., engaged in a First Amendment battle with her principal 25 years ago, asked me: "Why don't the schools teach why we're Americans? So few people know."

A quarter-century later, sadly, there still isn't a reassuring answer for her.

Recently, Sen. Thomas Carper, D-DE, and Rep. John Conyers, D-MI, scoffed at the idea that they should read the health care legislation working its way through Congress (hey, it's only a matter of life and death). That attitude has inspired the "Read to Vote" campaign — designed to get congressmen to pledge to "read every word of every bill before casting my vote."

Read to Vote's efforts earned them a condescending Washington Post editorial last month, complaining that their proposal "would bring government to a standstill." (Heaven forbid.) "To read all 1,427 pages of Waxman-Markey," the Post fretted, "it would take at least 12 hours — tough on a tight legislative timeline."

Is reading the cap and trade bill tough? Tough. If you're planning to regulate every industrial process in America, you may have to do some heavy slogging.

True enough, the bills Congress passes have become increasingly impenetrable over the years. In Abraham Lincoln's first State of the Union, he worried about the growing complexity of federal law, but noted that, with a modest effort at revision, "all the acts of Congress now in force [could fit in] one or two volumes of ordinary and convenient size." Today, the Senate Finance Committee's 1,502-page health-care bill would take up more than that much space by itself.

Worse still, most of the actual "law" in this country — the rules that citizens have to follow, at pain of fine or imprisonment — is generated by unelected administrative agencies, which use broad authority delegated by Congress to add over 75,000 new pages to the Federal Register every year.

It's said that the Roman emperor Caligula posted new laws high on the columns of buildings so citizens couldn't read them and figure out how to avoid their penalties. He could have achieved the same effect by covering the country with such a dense thicket of rules that no one could tell what the law commands.

Legend has it that Caligula also made his favorite horse a senator. Considering how lightly most of our legislators take their constitutional obligations, you could probably do worse.

In February 2003, the New York Times reported that both parties had hired lawyers to run seminars for congressmen, explaining the requirements of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law they had just passed. "I didn't realize what all was in it," said Rep. Robert Matsui (D.-CA); "A real education process," echoed Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (R.-NY).

If congressmen can't be bothered to read a law that directly affects them, should we be surprised that they're not planning to read the health care bill, which won't?

But, even assuming we could force legislators to read the bills, would that lead to better government? Maybe not. Carper had a point when he said that modern legislative language "is so arcane, so confusing…[that] it really doesn't make much sense."

If congressmen had to read what they passed, they might draft shorter, more comprehensible bills. But one way to do that is by punting yet more lawmaking authority to the permanent bureaucracy, which can then issue its own mammoth set of unintelligible rules. That hardly solves the problem.

A better idea can be found in a resolution recently introduced by Sen. Jim Bunning, R-KY, requiring all new legislation to be posted online for 72 hours before consideration. That could put the distributed intelligence of the web to work, ferreting out the many devils in the details of proposed laws.

However, that's still just treating symptoms. Federal law has become incomprehensible because Congress has inserted itself into every area of American life. As James Madison explained, though, Congress's constitutional powers are "few and defined…. [to be] exercised principally on external objects," like foreign policy and international trade.

Read the bills? It's more important for congressmen to read the Constitution. They'll be pleased to learn that it's short and written in plain English.

I will not attempt to reproduce what I heard and learned, but I do wish to recommend at least one piece of reading material that could, if paid close attention to, set the record straight about how America got into its various economic messes.

I have in mind professor Robert Higgs' path-breaking Crisis and Leviathan (Oxford University Press, 1987). This book is a real gem. It shows with extensive research and analysis that those running governments repeatedly - and often deliberately - take advantage of economic troubles so as to amass power, and once the troubles have subsided rarely return the power to their populations. Instead they hoard it.

Some of the lectures I heard included PowerPoint presentations, and it was fascinating to see direct quotations and sometimes video and audio records of major government officials being openly gleeful about how the current economic fiasco provides them with the chance to grab power. They didn't even think of disguising their opinions but declared unabashedly that this is a great time to take advantage, for all those who like meddlesome government.

Something else that was clear from many of the lectures is that a great many people in American government, both at the time of the New Deal and now, reject completely the ideas and ideals of the major American Founders and believe, with the likes of Alexander Hamilton, that America should be a top-down political system, a monarchy.

Such people denied then, and do now, that individuals have any rights except the privileges granted to them by administrators of governments (just as in the past such people believed that it is the king who hands out privileges, selects the favored in the population, with no regard to anything like natural, individual rights).

In one of my lectures I laid out how the Lockean theory of individual rights presents us all with bulwarks against tyranny by requiring the limitation of governmental powers. Because of this revolutionary theory, the U.S. Constitution laid out a very limited set of powers for government and recognized that it is citizens who have sovereignty, not states.

Just now, of course, this idea is not even given the slightest respect by Obama and Co. When, for example, Obama claimed that all economists agree with him about the need for a massive stimulus, some researchers at the Cato Institute produced a document with the names of about 250 respected professors of economics from universities and colleges around the country who disputed the wisdom of the stimulus.

What was especially fascinating about the historical lectures at Cato University is that they showed that the same kind of prevarications dominated previous episodes of economic crises even though in every case the cause of them was widely known to be earlier government malpractice. Despite this, the lies are now repeated by some of the most prestigious academic cheerleaders of Obama's policies!

Sanford isn't the first Republican leader to stumble in his private life.

He's not even the first one this month. A week earlier, it was Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) revealing his own affair. And these revelations hurt Republicans more than Democrats because of the perception that Republicans set themselves up as moral arbiters. So Democrats are, in the unusually honest words of talk show host Bill Press, "gleeful tonight because another Republican hypocrite bites the dust."

If the Republicans keep making morality a public issue, and then fail to live up to those standards themselves, they're in for a long period in the wilderness.

After the revelation of the affair, The Washington Post dubbed Sanford "a Bible-quoting social conservative." Nancy Pelosi's filmmaking daughter calls him "another family values hypocrite." But let's keep this hypocrisy charge in perspective. True, Mark Sanford quotes the Bible — along with Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, and Scottish historians. He's a quoter. He's anti-abortion and has opposed gay marriage and civil unions.

But until his downfall he was never regarded as a vocal social conservative. He was a tax-cutting, budget-cutting fiscal conservative who was the most vocal opponent of President Obama's massive spending increases. He'd even been accused of being a libertarian for his emphasis on economic issues and his opposition to the intrusive Real ID program.

As a small-government conservative who focused on cutting the size of government, he stood squarely in the tradition of Ronald Reagan. And maybe also the tradition of former Sen. Phil Gramm, who ran for president in 1996. When "family values" leaders challenged Gramm's emphasis on economic issues, he told them, "I ain't running for preacher."

Of course, Bill Clinton was elected and re-elected despite evidence of his imperfections as a husband — and a strong majority of voters did not think he should resign after his affair with a White House intern. But voters seem to judge Republicans, who tend to make private morality a political issue, differently.

So this looks like a huge setback for Sanford, for the small-government voters he might have led, and for the Republican Party, which is desperately in need of a leader who can restore the GOP's reputation for fiscal responsibility.

Maybe it's time to stop demanding perfection from politicians. The current combination of religious-right moralizing and the 24-hour news cycle means that elected officials are subjected to scrutiny that few of our past presidents could have survived.

In 1987, Judge Douglas Ginsburg was forced to withdraw his nomination for the Supreme Court because he was discovered to have smoked marijuana. But now our last three presidents have acknowledged youthful drug use.

In his book The Age of Abundance and in other writings, my colleague Brink Lindsey has argued that there is a "libertarian center" in American politics.

Over the past 40 years or so, we have eliminated many government restrictions on both personal and economic freedom. Abortion, birth control, interracial marriage, and homosexuality are legal. Divorce laws have been liberalized, and free speech is better protected. And at the same time top income tax rates have been reduced, and New Deal-era micromanagement in the transportation, energy, communications, and financial sectors has been rolled back.

According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, since the 2008 election the number of independents has been growing, and they tend to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal. That's a constituency Republicans must appeal to.

Even among Republican voters, exit polls in 2004 found that 28 million Bush voters supported either marriage or civil unions for same-sex couples — suggesting that lots of Republicans don't fit the popular image of the socially conservative "Republican base."

Young voters are another constituency disgusted with the current Republican Party. Barack Obama carried young voters by more than two to one in the 2008 election. Voters 18 to 29 delivered Indiana and North Carolina to Obama. Republicans can't win the future without doing better among young voters, and their image as narrow-minded moralists is a big obstacle.

Voters overlooked Bill Clinton's private sins because they liked his approach to politics and policy. Are Republican voters ready to do the same? If they insist that their leaders be Puritans both publicly and privately, they're likely doomed to a long winter of disappointment.

Deeply concerned at how little knowledge Americans have of how this republic works, Justice Souter cited as an example that the majorities of the public can't name — according to surveys — the three branches of government.

Who we are, Souter continued, "can be lost, it is being lost, it is lost, if it is not understood." What is needed, he said, "is the restoration of the self-identity of the American people. ... When I was a kid in the eighth and ninth grades, everybody took civics. That's no longer true. (Former Justice) Sandra Day O'Connor says 50 percent of schools teach neither history nor civics." Justice Souter continued that when he was in school, "civics was as dull as dishwater, but we knew the structure of government."

This alert to the citizenry was almost entirely ignored by the press.

Admirably, O'Connor is trying to engage students in learning who they are as Americans through her Web site: Our Courts - 21st Century Civics (www.ourcourts.org). The site asks students what part of government they would most want to be a part of. And she invites teachers to click and "find lesson plans that fit your classroom needs."

Two years ago, David Boaz of the Cato Institute (where I am a senior fellow) quoted from a Washington Post article by Naomi Wolf: "Teenagers and young adults ... have little idea what liberty is. Few (young Americans) realize that 'due process' means that they can't be locked up in a dungeon by the state and left to languish indefinitely."

And the 2008 annual "State of the First Amendment" survey by the First Amendment Center (www.firstamendmentcenter.org) reported that 66 percent of Americans at least mildly agreed that the government should require TV broadcasters to offer an equal allotment of time to conservative and liberal broadcasters, and that 62 percent of Americans would apply the same requirement to newspapers.

In this republic, the government must regulate the fairness and balance of what we free citizens see and read? Not even King George III insisted that Tom Paine, Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson must be fair and balanced.

It was Jefferson — as you can see near the main entrance of the Library of Congress' James Madison Memorial Building — who told future generations of Americans how to never forget who they are:

"What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual & surest support?"

Jefferson also counseled: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. ... Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against the evils (of misgovernment)."

How deep our ignorance of who are has grown since Alexis De Tocqueville wrote in 1831 (Democracy in America): "In New England, every citizen receives the elementary notions of human knowledge; he is moreover taught the doctrines and the evidences of his religion, the history of his country, and the leading features of its Constitution.

"In the States of Connecticut and Massachusetts, it is extremely rare to find a man imperfectly acquainted with all these things, and a person wholly ignorant of them is a sort of phenomenon."

Am I exaggerating in speculating that now in our schools, homes and streets, there are many such phenomena largely ignorant of why they are Americans. Also, I would add the many in our state legislatures and in Congress.

And Obama, asking us to be "anchored in our timeless ideals," says nothing about his National Security Agency's accelerating attacks on our individual privacy as its enormous supercomputer (code name: "Black Widow") devours the Fourth Amendment in our Bill of Rights. The Baltimore Sun's national security correspondent, David Wood (Oct. 26, 2008), reports:

"(The Black Widow) scans millions of domestic and international phone calls and e-mails every hour" as it extracts "key words and patterns" of our communications to harvest and database possible threats to national security.

There's no way to get your name removed from that bottomless hole of suspects because you can't find out whether it's there. Imagine Jefferson's reaction if he'd been able to foresee the Government Black Widow at large in this republic.

The National Center for Constitutional Studies' book, The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World, tells of a popular textbook for children, a Catechism of the Constitution — with questions and answers on the foundations of who we are as citizens. It was published in 1828! Any such children's books now?

In the continuing debate on amending No Child Left Behind — and other federal surges in educational reform — I have seen hardly any mention of the imperative need of what Justice David Souter calls for: "the restoration of the self-identity of the American people."

On the eve of the American Revolution, James Madison spoke of a "spirit of liberty and patriotism animating all degrees and denominations of men." What happened to it?

One group of Americans, however, has remained silent. They have not appeared on radio or television. They have no blogs. They would have been incapable of operating a typewriter, let alone a personal computer. Nonetheless, the nation's Founders would approve of key elements of Obama's speech.

How do I know? While they can't Tweet from the grave, their words and writings span the generations, and President Obama wisely connected U.S. policy in the 21st century to the principles that formed the Republic.

In his Cairo speech, Obama reminded his audience — or perhaps taught them for the very first time — that the United States was not now, nor ever has been, at war with Islam, or with any other religion. He quoted John Adams, who saw no reason why the United States could not enjoy good relations with Morocco, the first country to recognize the United States. When signing the Treaty of Tripoli, Adams wrote, "The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims."

President George Washington affirmed the nation's respect for all religions in his letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island. Washington rejected the notion that the new government "tolerated" particular religions, because that implied that it was through "the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights." On the contrary, Washington explained, "the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens."

In fairness, quotes can be taken out of context to serve many ends, good or ill. Fifteen minutes on Google could reveal comments by the Founders, including Washington and Adams, that would land a modern politician in a mandatory diversity training seminar. So much for the principle of racial equality in 18th century America, say the skeptics.

Still, for all their faults, the Founders views on foreign policy are worth recalling. They believed that the new nation should advance human rights and the cause of liberty by its example, not by force. They believed that military force was sometimes required, as does Obama today, for example, when he pledged to "relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security." By the same token, the Founders realized that war was one of the primary vehicles whereby governments infringed upon individual liberty, and they sought ways to limit the government's propensity to wage war, particularly by giving the power to declare and fund wars to Congress.

Some of our recent leaders seem to have forgotten that. Others, to the extent that they are aware of these Constitutional limits, have sought to remove them. They have taken their cues from a group of thinkers who scorned John Quincy Adams's admonition that America ought not go "abroad in search of monsters to destroy," and the Founders' broader vision of "sitting atop a hill and leading by example" as, in the words of William Kristol and Robert Kagan, synonymous with "cowardice and dishonor."

President Obama obviously disagrees. In Cairo he cast his lot with the earlier generation, quoting Thomas Jefferson who said "I hope that our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power the greater it will be." The speech signals the president's belief that we would be richer, freer, and safer if we adhered more closely to the wise standard that our Founders set for us. For that, Americans and non-Americans alike should be pleased.

A month before, at a dinner with journalists, Biden apparently let slip the location of the secret bunker used by Dick Cheney after 9/11. Last week, the Christian Science Monitor offered this sardonic headline: "Biden Speaks at Wake Forest—does not disclose nuclear launch codes."

"Between brain and mouth there is no interlocutor," Sopranos character Hesh Rabkin once said of matriarch Livia Soprano, and so it is with Joe. Are Biden's gaffes leading the president to keep VPOTUS at arm's length? We should hope that's the case, and not just because of this particular vice president's verbal incontinence.

The modern conception of the vice-presidency—where the veep serves as chief advisor and virtual copresident—is a dramatic departure from the veep's constitutional role. Worse, it clouds responsibility and makes accountability more difficult. After eight years of Dick Cheney, the last thing America needs is another Imperial Vice Presidency.

The Constitution grants the VP no executive powers; his sole powers are legislative, presiding over the Senate and breaking tie votes. At the constitutional convention, Roger Sherman defended this arrangement, noting that "If the vice-President were not to be President of the Senate, he would be without employment."

Early vice presidents never played a Cheney-like role. Far from it: our first VP, John Adams, was also the last to attend a cabinet meeting until Woodrow Wilson's veep, Thomas R. Marshall, over 100 years later.

Even so, Marshall likened the VP experience to that of "a man in a cataleptic fit: he cannot speak... he is perfectly conscious of all that goes on, but has no part in it." Offered second billing on the Whig Party ticket in 1848, Daniel Webster cracked, "I do not propose to be buried until I am dead."

But the office's power and authority began to grow in the 1970s, with the veep getting a budget line, enhanced staffing, and increased access to the corridors of power. Fritz Mondale was the first vice-president to get a permanent office in the West Wing and status as a key adviser.

That trend reached its apogee in Dick Cheney. From 9/11 on, Cheney exercised enormous powers, running much of the War on Terror, and even, pursuant to a Bush executive order (EO 13292), directly exercising powers to classify government documents and increase executive branch secrecy.

It's ironic that Cheney, a proponent of the unitary executive, drove this trend. In Federalist 70, Hamilton argues that a plural executive "tends to conceal faults, and destroy responsibility." That's what happened in the Cheney vice-presidency, where Cheney was often more "in the loop" than the president himself.

Information about the administration's warrantless wiretapping program was so tightly held among the VP and his allies that in 2004 President Bush was unaware until the very last moment that the top echelon of his Justice Department was ready to resign over the illegality of the original program. When an activist VP deliberately keeps the president in the dark, it can be difficult to discern where the buck really stops.

In an insightful 2007 law review article, "Is Dick Cheney Unconstitutional?" Glenn Reynolds argues that it's constitutionally problematic for a president to, as George W. Bush did, delegate executive power to an official whose key responsibilities are legislative, and that he cannot remove from office.

Reynolds also notes that the "co-presidency" model makes it impossible for the country to get a "fresh start" when the president is impeached or forced to resign. That frustrates a key—and too rarely employed—check on executive abuses: impeachment becomes more difficult when the president's replacement is deeply implicated in the "high crimes and misdemeanors" at issue.

Joe Biden's antics are certainly amusing, but they may also be useful if they prompt the president to put some much-needed distance between himself and his potential successor. To be sure, reining in the Imperial Veep isn't as nearly good as abolishing the Imperial Presidency, but it's a start.

Tucker Carlson compares it to a dog whistle: Inaudible to most, but irresistible to those who can hear it.

Obama "walks into a room and you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere," George Clooney gushed to Charlie Rose.

"I'll collect paper cups off the ground to make [Obama's] pathway clear," Halle Berry recently told the Philadelphia Daily News, "I'll do whatever he says." (Does Michelle know about this?)

Hollywood stars aren't known for their political wisdom. More disturbing is how starstruck the mainstream media has become. Hardball host Chris Matthews isn't the only one who gets a "thrill" up his leg at the very thought of our new president.

Last summer, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote that "Many spiritually advanced people I know … identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who … can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet."

The Politico recently ran a 900-word article entitled "The Power of Obama's Hand," reverentially describing how the president "uses touch to control and console simultaneously," laying hands on supporters and opponents alike.

And in February, author Judith Warner used her New York Times blog to confess that "The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into the bathroom to shave my legs."

Instead of keeping that information to herself, Warner "launched an email inquiry," which revealed that "many women—not too surprisingly—were dreaming about sex with the president." Those of us who like to point out that the Emperor has no clothes now have to worry that when we do, we may give rise to a new round of lurid cougar fantasies.

Conservatives like to think they're above this sort of thing. Their attitude is summed up by the subtitle of Jerome Corsi's recent bestseller: Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality.

But any conservative who thinks cultishness is exclusively a leftist phenomenon ought to take a good long look in the mirror. Because many of those who decry the "cult of Obama" are the same people who made a flight-suited action figure hero out of such common clay as George W. Bush.

Peggy Noonan called Bush's post-9/11 address to Congress "a God-touched moment and a God-touched speech." Fred Barnes wrote that "the stage was set for Bush to be God's agent of wrath." National Review Online ran ads for the Bush "Top Gun" action figure, and an article about how wonderful it was to have a presidential superhero to complement your GI Joe collection.

On Hardball, after the "Mission Accomplished" speech, G. Gordon Liddy got graphic enough to embarrass Judith Warner: "Here comes George Bush. You know, he's in his flight suit, he's striding across the deck, and he's wearing his parachute harness.... and it makes the best of his manly characteristic... He has just won every woman's vote in the United States of America!"

Presidential cultishness can be found all across the political spectrum. It's a pathology that needs to be rooted out, because when we swoon over the man who holds the office, we risk making the presidency far more powerful than it was ever intended to be.

William Hazlitt, the 19th-century English essayist, argued that man was by nature "a worshipper of idols and a lover of kings." As savages, Hazlitt wrote, we fashioned "gods of wood and stone and brass," but now, thinking ourselves above superstition, "we make kings of common men, and are proud of our own handiwork."

But America's very existence repudiates the idea that we're hard-wired for leader-worship. We became a nation by throwing off a king, and our Founders gave us a Constitution that's based on the notion that all men are flawed and none should be trusted with too much power.

Americans, of all people, should recognize how bizarre and dangerous it is to fawn over professional politicians.

In recent weeks, the president has been anywhere and everywhere, with a campaign-style blitz of media appearances and town hall meetings. But, hard as it is to imagine in this era of the omnipresent president, there was a time when presidents weren't seen much and were heard even less. There might be a lesson there for Obama.

Our founding fathers didn't want a president who'd perpetually pound the bully pulpit. They viewed presidential speechifying as a sign of demagoguery, and thought Congress should take the lead on most matters of national policy. They expected the nation's chief executive to pipe down, mind his constitutional business, and keep his hands to himself.

The "permanent campaign" that dominates modern presidential politics would have appalled our forefathers. Accepting the 1844 Democratic nomination, James K. Polk described the custom of the time: "the office of president of the United States should neither be sought nor declined."

When 19th-century candidates spoke publicly, they sometimes felt compelled to apologize, as 1872 Democratic contender Horace Greeley did, for breaking "the unwritten law of our country that a candidate for President may not make speeches."

From Washington to Jackson, presidents gave about three speeches a year on average. In his first year in office, President Clinton gave over 600. Things have changed, but it's not clear they've changed for the better.

Obama's address tonight isn't technically a State of the Union (SOTU) address, purists insist, since he's only been in office a month. But with members of both Houses and the Supreme Court in attendance — standing to clap for every outsized promise — it will look and quack like one.

In early SOTUs, presidents rarely went on at Castro-like length. George Washington's first SOTU was a humble affair, just over 1000 words, devoid of imperious demands for congressional action.

That wasn't humble enough for President Thomas Jefferson, however, who disapproved of his two predecessors giving the SOTU in person before Congress assembled. Jefferson saw that practice as "an English habit, tending to familiarize the public with monarchical ideas," much like the British king's "speech from the throne."

So our third president wrote out his SOTU speeches and had them hand-delivered to Congress. The Jeffersonian custom held for over 100 years, until the power-hungry Woodrow Wilson overthrew it. Of 219 SOTUs, only 71 have been delivered in person.

It's hard to imagine the camera-and-mike-hungry Barack Obama simply "mailing it in." But maybe he ought to think about making himself a little scarcer and pounding the pulpit less. If the president became less frantically visible, that might benefit the country and the president himself.

Today's president is a constitutional monstrosity: a national talk-show host with nuclear weapons. When the president dominates the airwaves, promising to cure all manner of economic and social ills, that leads the public to expect a presidential rescue plan for anything that ails the body politic.

The predictable result is an executive branch that rides roughshod over congressional prerogatives. The mortgage bailout Obama announced last week is a case in point, since the bulk of the plan, which has enormous repercussions for the U.S. economy, is being enacted without any action by Congress. A less vocal, less omnipresent president might help us right the constitutional balance of powers.

Moreover, it's not clear that all this speechifying is doing the president himself much good. After Obama announced his housing plan, one headline writer put it this way: "Obama Speaks, Market Listens, Sells Off."

When there's no escape from our national talk-show host-when he appears constantly above every gym treadmill-is it any wonder that we typically want his show cancelled just a few seasons in? Is it any wonder we get sick of him?

There was wisdom in the old ways. A president who talks less might be able to make his words matter more. And a president who promises less might be able to deliver more of what he promises.

The president's choice for HHS secretary withdrew on Tuesday. It turned out that Tom Daschle, who considered himself up to the task of redesigning the most complex and fastest-growing sector of our economy, had trouble figuring out his own taxes.

By the end of the week, Obama was facing growing resistance to key parts of his $800-plus billion stimulus package. Friday found the new president recuperating at Camp David.

Welcome to the NFL, Barack: There will be many more tough weeks to come.

The "Hopefest 2009" aura that surrounded Obama's inauguration made him appear unstoppable. But the smart money says that by 2012, Obama will look a lot more like Jimmy Carter than FDR. That's not because the new president is incompetent; it's because he's signed up for an impossible job.

Our Constitution's framers had a modest view of presidential responsibility: the president was, in Washington's phrase, the mere "chief magistrate," and his main job was faithful execution of the laws.

But today, Americans look to the president as the Savior-in-Chief, a figure who will heal what ails us—whether it's unemployment, hurricanes, divisiveness, or spiritual malaise. When it comes to the presidency, we demand what we cannot have and, as a result, we usually get what we do not like.

Political scientists have a term for the vast distance between what the public expects of the president and what he can realistically deliver: the "expectations gap." And no presidential candidate in living memory has done as much as Obama to stoke public expectations for the office—which were insanely high to begin with.

"Yes we can!" was the preferred hosanna of hope in the revival-tent atmosphere of the Obama campaign. We can, Obama promised, create a "new kind of politics," "end the age of oil in our time," deliver "a complete transformation of the economy," and even "create a kingdom right here on earth." With the presidency, it seems, all things are possible.

Post-election polls suggested that Americans bought the sales pitch. Eight in 10 expected Obama to improve conditions for the poor, 70 percent to improve education and the environment, and 60 percent counted on him to create a robust economy.

Obama entered office with a 79 percent favorability rating, the highest score of any newly elected president since, well, Jimmy Carter.

As the Carter experience suggests, in presidential politics, great expectations often lead to crashing disappointments. Every post-WWII president has faced what scholar Barbara Hinckley called "the decay curve"—the decline in popularity that occurs as the public recognizes that the president can't deliver the miracles he's promised.

String them together, and presidential approval graphs look like an EKG on a patient being repeatedly shocked to life—"clear!"—and then fading out again. Just as popularity tends to fade within each president's tenure, average approval ratings have been in decline from one president to the next for most of the modern era.

You'd never know it from his budget-busting economic nostrums, but Obama has taken office in an era of limits. And when he fails to fully heal our financial troubles, fix health care, teach our children well, provide balm for our itchy souls, and so forth, his hope-addled rhetoric will seem all the more grating, and the public will increasingly come to see him as the source of all American woes.

Perhaps, then, we ought to drop the notion of president as Savior-in-Chief. Our Constitution's Framers thought the president had an important job, but they never looked to him to heal all the nation's wounds and save the national soul.

Their vision of the presidency may be unromantic, but at least it's realistic (not to mention cheaper). Until we return to the framers' modest, businesslike view of the presidency, we shouldn't expect any president, however well-intentioned, to be "a uniter, not a divider" in American life.

The two can reinforce each other, but they can also work at cross purposes. Inspiration takes time and has a general effect, whereas intimidation can work quickly and have a precise impact. Consequently, there is a temptation to rely on intimidation too much, thereby creating resentment. Over time, this resentment erodes the ability to inspire.

The United States was created in an act of rebellion against empire. Its greatness, which the Founders foresaw, was to be based on its inspiring ideals. As George Washington put it in his Farewell Address, "it will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence."

We still retain the ability to inspire, even though we have not always been such a shining example as Washington envisioned. Anyone who doubts this should visit college campuses and marvel at the number of foreign students who still see the United States as a place of opportunity, a ticket to a better future.

The foundation of American idealism is its embrace of diversity. At the dawn of the modern era, with the identification of the nation with the state, diversity was considered threatening, something to be avoided and even violently suppressed. The path to national greatness was a uniformity based on "one king, one faith, one law." The result was decades of bloody conflict. Tolerance emerged out of exhaustion with this slaughter, but diversity was still seen as a necessary evil. The majority tolerated minorities, but did not welcome their presence.

The United States was founded on a different motto: E pluribus Unum. Out of many, One. Diversity was therefore seen as eminently desirable. Uniformity is stifling; sameness provides no room for growth. The encounter with difference provides an opportunity for learning and hence for improvement. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts because of this desire for improvement. The United States was settled largely by people who came here looking for something better. Mindful of the past, they were focused on the future, for themselves and their descendants. This focus is essential for progress. A society that is satisfied is a society that will stagnate; a society that defines its identity by its history, and especially by its grievances, will have difficulty responding to new challenges. Societies move forward by cultivating a culture of exploration, the search for something new, which means they must ultimately cultivate a culture of questioning authority. That, of course, was the culture of our Founders, who questioned the authority of King and Parliament. In place of the divine right of kings, they maintained that governments were established to protect the divine rights of the people. In place of obedience, they challenged the power of the government, appealing to "the laws of nature and of nature's God."

This language is rooted in the Enlightenment. It represents the emerging spirit of scientific inquiry, designed to uncover the mysteries of nature. Scientific method is based on challenge and response, theory and experiment. Rigorous testing is its hallmark; our knowledge is always conjectural, never final. No matter how good a theory is, we know there is always room for improvement.

Scientific progress rests on this culture of questioning, which helps explain why democracies emerged as the leaders in the field. Authoritarian systems can throw resources at scientific programs, which might provide short-term success. But in the long run, they fall behind, because they lack the proper culture to maintain innovation. This is a major reason why the United States outpaced the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

Unfortunately, our triumph in the Cold War was viewed as a victory for our power, and consequently we thought the application of that power in other parts of the world would yield similarly positive results, but that was not the case. Intimidation does not seem to be working, leaving us with the choice of escalation or retreat.

But there is another way. We can choose to emphasize our ideals. To do that, we must first focus on what we want our country to be, and we must commit ourselves to fulfilling that vision. We must constantly earn our place as "the city on the hill." That is our challenge, and in that lies our greatness.

Few have done more over the years to articulate the conservative response to liberal judicial activism than Judge Robert Bork. Writing recently in The American Spectator, he argues that courts, working reciprocally with elite opinion, have given constitutional finality to values most Americans oppose, "in a way that cannot be overturned by legislation." Thus undermined is our "first freedom"—"the power of individuals to participate in making the laws by which they are governed."

Bork is right about that. His concern, in particular, about the role of elite opinion in coarsening our culture is well taken. But my charge here is to comment critically, if briefly, so I turn to what I believe is the argument's central flaw—nothing less than its constitutional vision, which keeps Bork from fully appreciating the main problem today, the triumph of the Progressive Era mindset.

At bottom, Bork's constitutional vision rests not in individual but in collective liberty. Thus, his "first freedom" echoes his more ample discussion in The Tempting of America. There he wrote that our first principle is "that in wide areas of life majorities are entitled to rule, if they wish, simply because they are majorities." Nonetheless, he adds, there are "some areas of life in which the individual must be free of majority rule."

Calling those conflicting principles "the Madisonian dilemma," Bork in fact has Madison standing on his head. Not only in the Declaration of Independence—our founding document—but in Madison's Constitution as well we find individual liberty first, democratic rule second, as a means to securing liberty. The Preamble, in the state-of-nature tradition, makes it plain that all power rests originally with the people, as individuals. To be sure, they come together collectively to "ordain and establish this Constitution," but then they "grant" only limited powers to the government that follows ratification. The undelegated powers are reserved to the states "or to the people," as the Tenth Amendment says, never having been granted to either level of government.

Thus, given the enumeration of powers—"few and defined" (Madison, Federalist 45)—the vision that emerges, unlike Bork's, is one of "wide areas" in which individuals are free simply because they're born free; whereas in "some areas" majorities are entitled to rule because they're so authorized. There, indeed, is the Constitution's theory of legitimacy: power is legitimate only if constitutionally authorized.

The doctrine of enumerated powers is thus key to understanding the Constitution: absent a power, by implication there is a right. And the Ninth Amendment complements the Tenth by instructing us not to "deny or disparage" unenumerated rights "retained by the people." The people cannot "retain" what they do not first have to be retained.

Unfortunately, Bork, a textualist, dismisses the Ninth Amendment—his famous "inkblot" remark. And he treats the Tenth Amendment as mainly about federalism: if federal powers are limited, states may experiment, and individuals may move. True, the freedom to migrate may flow indirectly from enumeration; but the main liberty the Tenth Amendment entails is that afforded directly by enumeration. Bork does not discuss that, however, saying simply that it was not New Deal justices who killed the limits imposed by the enumeration of powers but the people's thirst for big government; sooner or later they will get justices who will allow that, he writes. Then it is justices after all.

Having thus disparaged the Constitution's bedrock principle, the doctrine of enumerated powers, Bork turns to his main concern, what courts have done with the Bill of Rights. Disparaging that too, he notes that the Bill played almost no role in our courts until the last third of the 19th century; but he fails to mention why: it was because the limits imposed by enumeration were largely respected—by the political branches—and the Bill of Rights did not limit states, where most power resided, until 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified.

We come thus to a major divide between conservatives and libertarians—between those at one end who believe the Fourteenth Amendment wrought few changes in our federalism; and those at the other end who believe it incorporated against the states, ab initio, not only most of the Bill of Rights but our common law and natural rights as well. The infamous Slaughterhouse Court of 1873 reflected that divide; it continues today, in many variations.

Bork leans clearly toward the former camp. His textualism notwithstanding, with the Slaughterhouse majority he has dismissed the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause, meant to be the principal font of rights under the amendment, as unknowable. He believes many Lochner-era decisions reflected not the Constitution but merely the values of contemporaneous elites. He disparages the judicial incorporation that began in the mid-20th century—although his view of Griswold, unlike Lawrence, is unclear. In sum, he sees modern courts reflecting the "moral relativism" of our elites as they invent rights nowhere in the Constitution.

Too often, regrettably, today's courts do that: witness Roe v. Wade. But it is no answer to leave most things to the political branches. Nor does the Constitution force a choice between judicial and majoritarian tyranny. Rather, it leaves most things to private determination. If enumeration is the foundation of constitutional legitimacy, if the Ninth Amendment means what it says, and if the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to complete the Constitution by incorporating at last the principles of the Declaration, as the 39th Congress argued, then courts must mine those principles and carefully distinguish the political, the legal, and the private.

Griswold and Lawrence may reflect "moral relativism" regarding values, but not rights. Neither decision trampled anyone's rights, or forced anyone to use contraceptives or practice sodomy; and life continued quite normally in both Connecticut and Texas. The Court said simply that those are matters for individual, not collective, liberty.

In a diverse society, however, collective liberty—voting—over disputed values too often violates rights. It was the preferred liberty of the Progressives, who eventually gave us Leviathan. The triumph of that collectivist mindset is what the Constitution—and the courts—were meant to prevent.

LBJ began that spring day by stating a goal: "The purpose of protecting the life of our Nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a Nation."

Compare that statement to some earlier words about the purposes of American government: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." These words from the Declaration of Independence reflect the individualistic, natural rights philosophy of the American founders.

LBJ's words reflected a fundamentally different philosophy, Progressivism. Individuals do not pursue happiness within a framework of rights. Government pursues happiness for them or rather for "our" people.

Johnson noted two means to that collective end: the life of our Nation and the liberty of our citizens. The second is revealing. The liberty of the individual is not a goal of government. It is rather the means for the collective pursuit of happiness.

The great society would would realize that collective happiness. In the Great Society, "men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods." They put aside "unbridled growth" and "the demands of commerce" to fulfill "the hunger for community." Mere business and trade produce a "soulless wealth" that is far short of national aspiration.

The readers who see in LBJ's words a call to secular spirituality through government are not far wrong. He said to the students and faculty of the University of Michigan: "You have the chance never before afforded to any people in any age. You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation." The speech ends with the hope of a "new world," a remaking of the nation.

Ironically, in light of what actually happened later, LBJ also claimed that "The solution to these problems does not rest on a massive program in Washington, nor can it rely solely on the strained resources of local authority. They require us to create new concepts of cooperation, a creative federalism, between the National Capital and the leaders of local communities." Over the next decade, federal spending tripled.

Like LBJ, Barack Obama sees in politics and governing the possibility of secular transcendence. He is a far better orator than LBJ was, and his skills might well bring a third phase of Progressivism to the United States in 2009. However, there is room for doubt. Obama lives in different world than LBJ.

In 1965, democrats held more than two-thirds of both chambers of Congress. As LBJ said on his inaugural night, "We can pass it all now." Democrats may gain seats in Congress this year, but they will not have the same majorities LBJ had. President Obama will not say "We can pass it all now."

LBJ began his quest for the Great Society by cutting taxes. Obama will have to raise taxes to pursue his dreams -- excuse me, "our" dreams. Once "hope" and "change" cost real money, Obama will find Congress less willing to dream.

1n 1964, 76 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to do what is right almost always or most of the time. In 2004, 47 percent trusted the feds. Perhaps Obama's charisma will foster trust. Or maybe not. Obama is running as post-ideological. If he undertakes a new Progressivism, voters are likely to feel betrayed and trust in government will drop as it did when Clinton ran as a moderate in 1992 and tried to govern as a liberal in 1994.

Conservatives have reasons for pessimism in 2008. But the spring of 1964 was much worse. Barack Obama may expect to renew the left's quest for a secular spirituality rooted in politics and government, a religion to replace the older faiths. But 2009 is unlikely to be 1965. In fact, if Obama overreaches enough, 2010 might come to resemble 1994.

"I ain't running for preacher," Republican presidential candidate Phil Gramm snarled to religious right activists in 1995 when they urged him to run a campaign stressing moral themes. Several months later, despite Gramm's fund raising prowess, the Texas conservative finished a desultory fifth place in the Iowa caucuses and quickly dropped out of the race. Since then, few candidates have made Gramm's mistake. Serious contenders for the office recognize that the role and scope of the modern presidency cannot be so narrowly confined. Today's candidates are running enthusiastically for national preacher — and much else besides.

In the revival tent atmosphere of Barack Obama's campaign, the preferred hosanna of hope is "Yes we can!" We can, the Democratic front-runner promises, not only create "a new kind of politics" but "transform this country," "change the world," and even "create a Kingdom right here on earth." With the presidency, all things are possible.

Even though Republican nominee John McCain tends to eschew rainbows and uplift in favor of the grim satisfaction that comes from serving a "cause greater than self-interest," he too sees the presidency as a font of miracles and the wellspring of national redemption. A president who wants to achieve greatness, McCain suggests, should emulate Teddy Roosevelt, who "liberally interpreted the constitutional authority of the office" and "nourished the soul of a great nation." President George W. Bush, when passing the GOP torch to his former rival in March, declared that the Arizona senator "will bring determination to defeat an enemy and a heart big enough to love those who hurt." Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, suggests she is "ready on Day 1 to be commander in chief of our economy."

The chief executive of the United States is no longer a mere constitutional officer charged with faithful execution of the laws. He is a soul nourisher, a hope giver, a living American talisman against hurricanes, terrorism, economic downturns, and spiritual malaise. He — or she — is the one who answers the phone at 3 a.m. to keep our children safe from harm. The modern president is America's shrink, a social worker, our very own national talk show host. He's also the Supreme Warlord of the Earth.

This messianic campaign rhetoric merely reflects what the office has evolved into after decades of public clamoring. The vision of the president as national guardian and spiritual redeemer is so ubiquitous it goes virtually unnoticed. Americans, left, right, and other, think of the "commander in chief" as a superhero, responsible for swooping to the rescue when danger strikes. And with great responsibility comes great power.

It's difficult for 21st-century Americans to imagine things any other way. The United States appears stuck with an imperial presidency, an office that concentrates enormous power in the hands of whichever professional politician manages to claw his way to the top. Americans appear deeply ambivalent about the results, alternately cursing the king and pining for Camelot. But executive power will continue to grow, and threats to civil liberties increase, until citizens reconsider the incentives we have given to a post that started out so humble.

Minimum Leader

It wasn't supposed to be this way. The modern vision of the presidency couldn't be further from the Framers' view of the chief executive's role. In an age long before distrust of power was condemned as cynicism, the Founding Fathers designed a presidency of modest authority and limited responsibilities. The Constitution's architects never conceived of the president as the man in charge of national destiny. They worked amid the living memory of monarchy, and for them the very notion of "national leadership" raised the possibility of authoritarian rule by a demagogue ready to create an atmosphere of crisis in order to enhance his power.

The constitutional office they designed gave the president an important role, but he'd have "no particle of spiritual jurisdiction," the 69th essay of The Federalist Papers tells us. In Federalist No. 48, James Madison assured Americans that under the proposed Constitution the "executive magistracy is carefully limited, both in the extent and the duration of its powers." Indeed, the very pseudonym the Federalist's authors chose, "Publius," says something about how hostile Founding-generation Americans were to the idea of one-man rule. Publius Valerius Poplicola, a hero of the Roman revolution in the 5th century B.C., was famous in part for passing a law providing that anyone suspected of seeking kingship could be summarily executed.

Never were constitutional limitations more essential than when it came to using military power. Early Americans were no strangers to national security threats; in 1787 the U.S. was a small frontier republic on the edge of a continent occupied by periodically hostile great powers and Indian marauders. Yet the Constitution limited emergency powers and sharply rejected the idea that the president was above the law. "In no part of the Constitution," Madison wrote in 1793, "is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department." In any other arrangement, "the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man." That sentiment crossed party lines. As Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in 1801, "the whole powers of war being by the Constitution of the United States vested in Congress, the acts of that body can alone be resorted to as our guides."

Today Americans expect their president to pound Teddy Roosevelt's "bully pulpit," whipping the electorate into a frenzy to harness power against perceived threats. But the Framers viewed that sort of behavior as fundamentally illegitimate. In fact, the president wasn't even supposed to be a popular leader. As presidential scholar Jeffrey K. Tulis has pointed out, in the Federalist the term leader is nearly always used pejoratively; the essays by Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay in defense of the Constitution begin and end with warnings about the perils of populist leadership. The first Federalist warns of "men who have overturned the liberties of republics" by "paying obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants," and the last Federalist raises the specter of a "military despotism" orchestrated by "a victorious demagogue."

Instead of stoking public demands for action, the chief magistrate was expected to resist "the transient impulses of the people" and use his veto to keep Congress within its constitutional bounds. That role didn't require much speechifying. Early presidents rarely spoke directly to the public; from George Washington through Andrew Jackson, they averaged little more than three speeches per year, with those mostly confined to ceremonial addresses. In his first year in office, by comparison, President Clinton delivered 600.

In the early State of the Union addresses to Congress, presidents knew better than to adopt an imperious tone. After his third SOTU, Washington wrote that "motives of delicacy" had deterred him from "introducing any topic which relates to legislative matters, lest it should be suspected that [I] wished to influence the question" before Congress. Yet the deference shown by Washington and his successor John Adams didn't go quite far enough for our third president, Thomas Jefferson, who thought their practice of speaking before the legislature in person smacked of the British king's "Speech From the Throne." Jefferson instead inaugurated a new tradition of delivering the annual message in writing. For 112 years, that Jeffersonian tradition held sway, until the power-hungry Woodrow Wilson delivered his first State of the Union in person.

The 19th century did see presidents occasionally taking independent action of enormous consequences: Jefferson purchased Louisiana without congressional approval, Madison seized West Florida in 1810, Andrew Jackson governed as an irritable populist, and Abraham Lincoln expanded presidential power dramatically throughout the course of the cataclysmic Civil War. Yet taken as a whole, the 19th-century presidency was a pale shadow of the plebiscitary office we know today.

In a 2002 study tracking word usage through two centuries of SOTUs and inaugural addresses, political scientist Elvin T. Lim noted that in the first decades under the Constitution presidents rarely mentioned poverty, and the word help did not even appear until 1859. Nor did early presidents subscribe to the modern notion that it's all "about the children"; they rarely even mentioned the little buggers. But Lim found that "Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton made 260 of the 508 references to children in the entire speech database, invoking the government's responsibility to and concern for children in practically every public policy area."

George Washington did mention kids in his seventh annual message, lamenting "the frequent destruction of innocent women and children" by Indian raiders. But that was a far cry from Bill Clinton in 1997, who declared in the State of the Union that "we must also protect our children by standing firm in our determination to ban the advertising and marketing of cigarettes that endanger their lives."

Wail to the Chief

A little-remembered vignette from the 1992 presidential race underscores how far we've traveled from the Framers' unassuming "chief magistrate" — and how infantile our politics have become along the way. The scene was the campaign's second televised debate, held in Richmond, Virginia; the format, a horrid Oprah-style arrangement in which a hand-picked audience of allegedly normal Americans got to lob questions at the candidates, who were perched on stools, trying to look warm and approachable. Up from the crowd popped a ponytailed social worker named Denton Walthall, who demanded to know what George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and H. Ross Perot were going to do for us.

"The focus of my work as a domestic mediator is meeting the needs of the children that I work with…and not the wants of their parents," Walthall said. "And I ask the three of you, how can we, as symbolically the children of the future president, expect the three of you to meet our needs, the needs in housing and in crime and you name it."

One wonders how some of the more irascible presidents of old would have reacted at the sight of a grown man burbling about childish necessities to the prospective national father. Yet under the hot lights of the 1992 campaign, Ross Perot said he'd cross his heart and take Walthall's pledge to meet America's infantile needs, whatever those were. Bill Clinton, being Bill Clinton, pandered. And Bush 41 spluttered through his answer thusly:

"I mean I — I think, in general, let's talk about these — let's talk about these issues; let's talk about the programs, but in the presidency a lot goes into it. Caring is…that's not particularly specific; strength goes into it, that's not specific; standing up against aggression, that's not specific in terms of a program. So I, in principle, I'll take your point and think we ought to discuss child care — or whatever else it is." That wasn't just an example of the Bush family's famous locution problems; it's hard not to stammer when faced with the limitless and bewildering demands the public places on the presidency.

How did we go from a reticent constitutional officer to the modern commander in chief, a figure who continually shifts back and forth between gushing empathy and military bluster, often within the same speech? As Tony Soprano might have put it, whatever happened to Calvin Coolidge, the strong, silent type?

There is no single explanation for the presidency's growth. New communication technologies such as radio and television played a role, as did growing material progress, which made Americans less willing to suffer inconveniences and more receptive to the belief that public problems could be solved with collective action. Yet in each key period of the presidency's growth, we see a familiar pattern: expansionist ideology meeting practical opportunity in the form of successive national crises.

The 100-Year Emergency

Much of what's wrong with American government today can be traced to the Progressive Era, that period of reformist backlash against the Industrial Revolution that dominated the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century. As the Progressives saw it, if the Constitution stood in the way of necessary reforms, then too bad for the Constitution. "We are the first Americans," a young scholar named Woodrow Wilson wrote in 1885, "to hear our own countrymen ask whether the Constitution is still adapted to serve the purposes for which it was intended; the first to entertain any serious doubts about the superiority of our institutions as compared with the systems of Europe."

The Progressives were "the nearest to presidential absolutists of any theorists and practitioners of the presidency," wrote Raymond Tatalovich and Thomas S. Engeman in their 2003 book The Presidency and Political Science: Two Hundred Years of Intellectual Debate. For the new century's reformers, power wielded for national greatness was benign, checks on such power perverse. The Progressives had no use for the restrained oratorical traditions of the 19th century; it was the president's job to move the masses, unifying them behind calls for bold executive action.

Their model and embodiment was Teddy Roosevelt, whom the Progressive journalist and New Republic founder Herbert Croly described as a "sledgehammer in the cause of national righteousness." When T.R. took the stage at the 1912 Progressive Party convention, he foreshadowed Obama's quasi-religious fervor and McCain's bellicosity, barking, "To you who strive in a spirit of brotherhood for the betterment of our Nation, to you who gird yourselves for this great new fight in the never-ending warfare for the good of humankind, I say in closing.…We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord!"

The most astute among the Progressives recognized that, given the American public's congenital resistance to centralized rule, a sustained atmosphere of crisis would be necessary to sell the expansion of White House power. Two world wars and one Great Depression did the trick nicely. T.R.'s activist, celebrity presidency heralded the coming of a new sort of chief executive, one who would evermore be the center of national attention, the motive force behind American government. With his expanded power, Roosevelt busted trusts, carried a big stick throughout the Americas with a newly imperial U.S. Navy, and issued nearly as many executive orders as all of his predecessors combined. Woodrow Wilson then proved what Progressives had long hypothesized: that soaring rhetoric combined with the panicked atmosphere of war could concentrate massive social power in the hands of one person. Over the course of his presidency he helped create the Federal Reserve, nationalized railroads, and used the Espionage and Sedition Acts (along with more than 150,000 vigilantes) to carry out the most brutal campaign against dissent in U.S. history.

But it took FDR to eliminate the last remaining vestiges of the modest presidency. Roosevelt used Wilson's Trading With the Enemy Act to shut down all U.S. banks in 1933, grabbed the power to approve or prescribe wages and prices for all trades and industries, and authorized the FBI to spy on suspected subversives. He changed the Supreme Court from a bulwark against presidential overreach to an enabler. By the end of his 12-year reign, FDR had firmly established the president as national protector and nurturer, one whose performance would be judged in terms of what political scientist Theodore Lowi has identified as the modern test of executive legitimacy: "service delivery." In his 11th State of the Union address, FDR conjured up a second Bill of Rights, one whose guarantees would include "a useful and renumerative job" and the "right of every farmer to…a decent living." Depression-era economic controls and war-driven centralization had turned the American system of government, in Lowi's words, into "an inverted pyramid, with everything coming to rest on a presidential pinpoint."

War was the health of the presidency during the long twilight struggle against the Soviet Union as well. "The worse matters get," Harry Truman's adviser Clark Clifford told him in 1948, "the more is there a sense of crisis. In times of crisis, the American citizen tends to back up his president." During the Cold War, presidents used the all-purpose rationale of national security to justify spying on their political enemies. Richard Nixon might have been the most notorious abuser, with a series of dirty tricks and flagrant offenses that led to his downfall, but his predecessors also wielded the presidential bludgeon with gusto. When American steel companies raised prices in 1962, John F. Kennedy declared privately that "they fucked us, and now we've got to fuck them," then (along with his attorney general, brother Bobby) ordered up wiretaps, Internal Revenue Service audits and early-morning raids on steel executives' homes. During the 1964 presidential race, Lyndon Johnson used the CIA to obtain advance copies of Barry Goldwater's campaign speeches, and the FBI to bug Goldwater's plane.

In the pre-Watergate age of the heroic presidency, public trust in government was at its height, and mainstream scholars lauded the presidency as an earthly manifestation of the living God. As political scientist Herman Finer put it in 1960, the office was "the incarnation of the American people in a sacrament resembling that in which the wafer and the wine are seen to be the body and blood of Christ." The president, Finer said, was "the offspring of a titan and Minerva husbanded by Mars."

I Hate You; Don't Leave Me

After Vietnam and Watergate, America's intoxication with the imperial presidency ended with a crushing hangover. A newly aggressive press and assertive Congress produced serial revelations of the executive abuses that blind trust had enabled. In the bicentennial year of 1976, Idaho Sen. Frank Church's Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities summed up the damage:

"For decades Congress and the courts as well as the press and the public have accepted the notion that the control of intelligence activities was the exclusive prerogative of the Chief Executive and his surrogates. The exercise of this power was not questioned or even inquired into by outsiders. Indeed, at times the power was seen as flowing not from the law, but as inherent, in the Presidency. Whatever the theory, the fact was that intelligence activities were essentially exempted from the normal system of checks and balances. Such executive power, not founded in law or checked by Congress or the courts, contained the seeds of abuse and its growth was to be expected."

During the Eisenhower 1950s and the JFK/LBJ 1960s, the newly ascendant conservative movement coalescing around Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley's National Review was the most potent source of criticism of the imperial presidency. "Others hail the display of presidential strength…simply because they approve of the result reached by the use of power," Goldwater wrote in his 1964 campaign manifesto, "This is nothing less than the totalitarian philosophy that the end justifies the means."

But enticed by the long-awaited prospect of an "emerging Republican majority" and turned off by the journalistic and congressional attacks on Nixon, conservatives learned to stop worrying and love the executive branch. During the post-Watergate reform era, two senior Gerald Ford White House aides named Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld fought tooth and nail against what they felt were dangerous shackles on the executive branch, supported by a conservative commentariat that refocused its ire on the Democratic Congress and the left-leaning press. "I didn't like Nixon until Watergate," National Review stalwart M. Stanton Evans once quipped.

Although Americans finally recovered their native skepticism toward power after Vietnam, Watergate, and the revelations of the Church committee, we never reduced our demands on the executive branch. The lesson we seemed to have learned from the legacy of abuses was to trust less, ask more. In 1998 the Pew Research Center noted that "public desire for government services and activism has remained nearly steady over the past 30 years." Two years later, a report on a survey by NPR, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government put it pithily: "Americans distrust government, but want it to do more." The spirit of Denton Walthall lived on in the years leading up to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Superman Returns

The Bush administration's extraconstitutional innovations in response to those attacks are by now all too familiar. John Yoo, David Addington, and other members of the president's legal team constructed an alternative version of the national charter, a "neoconstitution" in which the president has unlimited power to launch war, wiretap without judicial scrutiny, and even seize American citizens on American soil and hold them for the duration of the War on Terror — in other words, indefinitely — without ever having to answer to a judge.

Conventional accounts of the post-9/11 imperial presidency emphasize the role of dedicated ideologues within the administration, men and women who had long believed that post-Watergate America had swung the pendulum too far back, jeopardizing national security. There's good reason for that emphasis, but the "cabal of neocons" narrative risks obscuring the role that public demands have played in driving the centralization of power.

In his 2007 book The Terror Presidency, Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the president's Office of Legal Counsel, describes the prevailing atmosphere within the executive branch after 9/11, one where the president's men were acutely aware that all eyes were on the commander in chief. What is he doing to keep us safe? What more is he prepared to do?

Goldsmith, a dissenter from the Bush administration's absolutist theories of executive power, often clashed with Dick Cheney's deputy David Addington, the hardest-driving supporter of those theories. But Goldsmith understood why Addington was so unrelenting: "He believed presidential power was coextensive with presidential responsibility. Since the president would be blamed for the next homeland attack, he must have the power under the Constitution to do what he deemed necessary to stop it, regardless of what Congress said."

That dynamic can lead to enhanced presidential power even in areas far removed from the War on Terror, as was demonstrated in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In business or in government, responsibility without authority is every executive's worst nightmare. That was the political reality facing the Bush administration in late summer 2005, when New Orleans was under water and desperate for assistance. As Colby Cosh of Canada's National Post put it at the time, "the 49 percent of Americans who have been complaining for five years about George W. Bush being a dictator are now vexed to the point of utter incoherence because for the last fortnight he has failed to do a sufficiently convincing impression of a dictator."

To be sure, the administration deserved plenty of blame for bungling the disaster relief tasks it had the power to carry out. But it soon became clear that the public held the Bush team responsible for performing feats above and beyond its legal authority. One almost had to feel sorry for Michael "Heckuva Job" Brown(ie), the disgraced former Federal Emergency Management Agency head, when he was obliged on Capitol Hill a month after the hurricane to inform an irate Rep. Chris Shays (R-Conn.) that in our federalist system, the FEMA chief has no power to order mandatory evacuations, or to become "this superhero that is going to step in there and suddenly take everybody out of New Orleans." "That is just talk," Shays responded. "Were you in contact with the military?"

For a president beleaguered by public demands, seizing new powers can be an adaptive response. Small wonder, then, that the Bush administration promptly sought enhanced authority for domestic use of the military. Although few in the media noted the historical moment, the president received that authority. On October 17, 2006, the same day he signed the Military Commissions Act denying centuries-old habeas corpus rights to "enemy combatants," the president also signed a defense authorization bill that contained gaping new exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, the federal law that restricts the president's power to use the standing army to enforce order at home.

The new exceptions to the act gave the president power to use U.S. armed forces to "restore public order and enforce the laws" when confronted with "natural disasters," "public health emergencies," and "other…incidents" — a catchall phrase that radically expands the president's ability to use troops against his own citizens. Under it, the president can, if he chooses, fight a federal War on Hurricanes, declaring himself supreme military commander in any state where he thinks conditions warrant it. That's the kind of executive power grab that happens when the public demands that the president protect Americans from the hazards of cyclical bad weather.

2009 and Beyond

To understand is not to excuse: No president should have the powers President Bush has sought and seized during the last seven years. But after 9/11 and Katrina, what rationally self-interested chief executive would hesitate to centralize power in anticipation of crisis? That pressure would be hard to resist, even for a president devoted to the Constitution and respectful of the limited role the office was supposed to play in our system of government.

In the current presidential race, none of the major-party candidates comes close to fitting that description. Aside from the issue of torture, there's very little daylight between John McCain and George W. Bush on matters of executive power. For her part, Hillary Clinton claims she played a key role in her husband's undeclared war against Serbia in 1999. "I urged him to bomb," she told Talk magazine that year. In 2003 she told ABC's George Stephanopoulos: "I'm a strong believer in executive authority. I wish that, when my husband was president, people in Congress had been more willing to recognize presidential authority."

Barack Obama has done more than any candidate in memory to boost expectations for the office, which were extraordinarily high to begin with. Obama's stated positions on civil liberties may be preferable to McCain's, but would it matter? If and when a car bomb goes off somewhere in America, would a President Obama be able to resist resorting to warrantless wiretapping, undeclared wars, and the Bush theory of unrestrained executive power? As a Democrat without military experience, publicly perceived as weak on national security, he'd have much more to prove.

As Jack Goldsmith put it in his 2007 book, "For generations the Terror Presidency will be characterized by an unremitting fear of attack, an obsession with preventing the attack, and a proclivity to act aggressively and preemptively to do so.…If anything, the next Democratic President — having digested a few threat matrices, and acutely aware that he or she alone will be wholly responsible when thousands of Americans are killed in the next attack — will be even more anxious than the current President to thwart the threat."

Law professors Jack Balkin of Yale and Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas at Austin are both Democrats and civil libertarians, so they take no pleasure in their prediction that "the next Democratic President will likely retain significant aspects of what the Bush administration has done." Indeed, they write in a 2006 Fordham Law Review article, future Democratic presidents "may find that they enjoy the discretion and lack of accountability created by Bush's unilateral gambits."

Throughout the 20th century more and more Americans looked to the central government to deal with highly visible public problems, from labor disputes to crime waves to natural disasters. And as responsibility flowed to the center, power accrued with it. If that trend continues, responses to matters of great public concern will be increasingly federal, increasingly executive, and increasingly military.

In the years to come, many Americans will find that the results of executive action are not to their liking. And if history is any guide, they'll respond by vilifying the officeholder and looking for another man on horseback to set things right again.

In The Road to Serfdom, economist and political philosopher F.A. Hayek chastised the "socialists of all parties" for their belief that "it is not the system we need fear, but the danger it might be run by bad men." Today's "presidentialists of all parties" — a phrase that describes the overwhelming majority of American voters — suffer from a similar delusion. Our system, with its unhealthy, unconstitutional concentration of power, feeds on the atavistic tendency to see the chief magistrate as our national father or mother, responsible for our economic well-being, our physical safety, and even our sense of belonging. Relimiting the presidency depends on freeing ourselves from a mind-set one century in the making. One hopes that it won't take another Watergate and Vietnam for us to break loose from the spellbinding cult of the presidency.

Most people, including most Americans, would be surprised to learn that the word "democracy" does not appear in the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Constitution of the United States of America (1789), or its first ten amendments, known as the Bill of Rights (1791). They would also be shocked to learn the reason for the absence of the word democracy in the founding documents of the USA. Contrary to what propaganda has led the public to believe, America's Founding Fathers were skeptical and anxious about democracy. They were aware of the evils that accompany tyranny—in that case, the tyranny of the majority. The Framers of the Constitution went to great lengths to insure that the federal government was not based on the will of the majority and was not, therefore, democratic.

The original Constitution established the rule of law and the limits of government. About 20% of the Constitution itemizes things that the federal and state governments may not do. Another 10% of the Constitution is concerned with positive grants of power. The bulk of the Constitution—about 70%—addresses the Framers' conception of their main task: to bring the United States and its government under the rule of law.

The Constitution is primarily a structural and procedural document that itemizes who is to exercise power and how they are to exercise it. The Constitution divided the federal government into legislative, executive and judicial branches. Each branch was designed to check the power of the others because the Founders did not want to rely only on the voters to check government power.

As a result, citizens were given little power to select federal officials. Neither the President, members of the judiciary nor the Senate were elected by direct popular vote. Only members of the House of Representatives were directly elected by popular vote. The Constitution was not a Cartesian construct or formula aimed at social engineering, but something to protect individual citizens from the government. In short, the Constitution was designed to govern the government, not the people.

The Bill of Rights further establishes the rights of the people against infringements by the State. The only claim citizens have on the State, under the Bill of Rights, is for a trial by a jury. The rest of the citizen's rights are protections from the State.

If the Framers of the Constitution did not embrace democracy, what did they adhere to? To a man, the Framers agreed that the purpose of government was to secure citizens in John Locke's trilogy of the rights to life, liberty and property. The Framers wrote extensively and eloquently on liberty. John Adams, for example, wrote that "the moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence."

The Founders' actions often spoke even louder than their words. Alexander Hamilton, a distinguished lawyer, took on many famous cases out of principle. For example, after the Revolutionary War against the colonial power, Great Britain, the state of New York enacted harsh measures against Loyalists and British subjects. These included the Confiscation Act (1779), the Citation Act (1782) and the Trespass Act (1783). All involved the taking of property.

In Hamilton's view, these Acts illustrated the inherent difference between democracy and the law. Even though the Acts were widely popular, they flouted fundamental principles of property law. Hamilton carried his views into action by having the rule of law thoroughly applied. He successfully defended— in the face of enormous public hostility—those who had property taken under the three New York state statutes.

The Constitution was designed to further the cause of liberty, not democracy. To do that, the Constitution protected individuals' rights from the government, as well as from their fellow citizens. To that end, the Constitution laid down clear, unequivocal and enforceable rules to protect individuals' rights.

In consequence, the government's scope and scale were strictly limited. Economic liberty, which is a precondition for growth and prosperity, was enshrined in the Constitution, and that's how things remained for America's first century of extraordinary development and growth.

George Washington was the man who established the American republic. He led the revolutionary army against the British Empire, he served as the first president, and most importantly he stepped down from power.

In an era of brilliant men, Washington was not the deepest thinker. He never wrote a book or even a long essay, unlike George Mason, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams. But Washington made the ideas of the American founding real. He incarnated liberal and republican ideas in his own person, and he gave them effect through the Revolution, the Constitution, his successful presidency, and his departure from office.

What’s so great about leaving office? Surely it matters more what a president does in office. But think about other great military commanders and revolutionary leaders before and after Washington—Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon, Lenin. They all seized the power they had won and held it until death or military defeat.

John Adams said, “He was the best actor of presidency we have ever had.” Indeed, Washington was a person very conscious of his reputation, who worked all his life to develop his character and his image.

In our own time Joshua Micah Marshall writes of America’s first president, “It was all a put-on, an act.” Marshall missed the point. Washington understood that character is something you develop. He learned from Aristotle that good conduct arises from habits that in turn can only be acquired by repeated action and correction – “We are what we repeatedly do.” Indeed, the word “ethics” comes from the Greek word for “habit.” We say something is “second nature” because it’s not actually natural; it’s a habit we’ve developed. From reading the Greek philosophers and the Roman statesmen, Washington developed an understanding of character, in particular the character appropriate to a gentleman in a republic of free citizens.

What values did Washington’s character express? He was a farmer, a businessman, an enthusiast for commerce. As a man of the Enlightenment, he was deeply interested in scientific farming. His letters on running Mount Vernon are longer than letters on running the government. (Of course, in 1795 more people worked at Mount Vernon than in the entire executive branch of the federal government.)

He was also a liberal and tolerant man. In a famous letter to the Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, he hailed the “liberal policy” of the United States on religious freedom as worthy of emulation by other countries. He explained, “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.”

And most notably, he held “republican” values – that is, he believed in a republic of free citizens, with a government based on consent and established to protect the rights of life, liberty, and property.

From his republican values Washington derived his abhorrence of kingship, even for himself. The writer Garry Wills called him “a virtuoso of resignations.” He gave up power not once but twice – at the end of the revolutionary war, when he resigned his military commission and returned to Mount Vernon, and again at the end of his second term as president, when he refused entreaties to seek a third term. In doing so, he set a standard for American presidents that lasted until the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose taste for power was stronger than the 150 years of precedent set by Washington.

Give the last word to Washington’s great adversary, King George III. The king asked his American painter, Benjamin West, what Washington would do after winning independence. West replied, “They say he will return to his farm.”

“If he does that,” the incredulous monarch said, “he will be the greatest man in the world.”

Frist speaks for many conservatives who want to change the rules of the Senate on a simple majority vote, to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominations. Fifty-five Republicans, 55 votes to change the Senate's rules, case closed.

But those conservatives are being ahistorical, short-sighted, and unconservative. Judicial nominations are important, but so are our basic constitutional and governmental structures. Conservatives aren't simple majoritarians. They don't think a "democratic vote" should trump every other consideration.

The Founders were rightly afraid of majoritarian tyranny, and they wrote a Constitution designed to thwart it. Everything about the Constitution -- enumerated powers, separation of powers, two bodies of Congress elected in different ways, the electoral college, the Bill of Rights -- is designed to protect liberty by restraining majorities.

The Senate itself is apportioned by states, not by population. California has 53 members of the House to Wyoming's one, but each state gets two senators. If each senator is assumed to represent half that state's population, then the Senate's 55 Republicans represent 131 million people, while its 44 Democrats represent 161 million. So is the "democratic will" what the 55 senators want, or what senators representing a majority of the country want? Furthermore, the Senate was intended to be slower and more deliberative. Washington said to Jefferson, "We put legislation in the senatorial saucer to cool it."

The Founders didn't invent the filibuster, but it is a longstanding procedure that protects the minority from majority rule. It shouldn't be too easy to pass laws, and there's a good case for requiring more than 51 percent in any vote. And supermajorities make more sense for judicial nominations than they do for legislation. A bill can be repealed next year if a new majority wants to. A judge is on the bench for life. Why shouldn't it take 60 or 67 votes to get a lifetime appointment as a federal judge?

Throughout the 20th century, it was liberal Democrats who tried to restrict and limit filibusters, because they wanted more legislation to move faster. They knew what they were doing: they wanted the federal government bigger, and they saw the filibuster as an impediment to making it bigger. As Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute writes, the filibuster "is a fundamentally conservative tool to block or retard activist government."

Conservatives know this. For decades they have resisted liberal efforts to grease the Senate's wheels. In the 19th century, Senate debate was unlimited. In 1917, at Woodrow Wilson's prodding, the Senate adopted Rule 22, which allowed 67 senators to invoke cloture and cut off a filibuster. In 1975 that quintessential big-government liberal Walter Mondale moved in the post-Watergate Senate to cut off debate with a simple majority, to make it that much easier to advance the Democrats' legislative agenda. Conservatives resisted, and the Senate compromised on 60 votes to end a filibuster.

Conservatives may believe that they can serve their partisan interests by ending filibusters for judicial nominations without affecting legislative filibusters. But it is naïve to think that having opened that door, they won't walk through it again when a much-wanted policy change is being blocked by a filibuster -- and naïve in the extreme to think that the next Democratic Senate majority won't take advantage of the opening to end the filibuster once and for all.

In the play A Man for All Seasons that great conservative St. Thomas More explained to his friend Roper the value of laws that may sometimes protect the guilty or lead to bad results. Roper declared, "I'd cut down every law in England ... to get at the Devil!" More responded, "And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide?"

American constitutional government means neither majoritarianism in Congress nor acquiescence to the executive. If conservatives forget that, they will rue the day they joined the liberals in trying to make the Senate a smaller House of Representatives, greased to make proposals move quickly through the formerly deliberative body. The nuclear option will do too much collateral damage.

Most Americans have always been passionately devoted to education. The current national panic over our plummeting learning scores is only the latest sign of this devotion and is remarkably similar to the panics over purported education crises that have occurred throughout U.S. history. Unfortunately, almost all of the politicians and so-called expert educationalists rushing forward to solve this latest education crisis seem to have forgotten the simplest facts about the early history of American education, which enabled this country to produce far more than its share of the world's most creative thinkers. This ignorant panic is inspiring a headlong rush into the central planning and bureaucratization of education that have been increasingly destroying the effectiveness of U.S. education for over 40 years.

The founders of the new American colonies were completely convinced that individual learning was the way to self-improvement of all forms. That faith in individual learning was most intense among the Puritans of New England and was a direct result of their passionate religious faith. The Puritans knew from their experience that control of education was the foundation of the church bureaucracy's tyranny over individual hearts and minds. They believed that each individual must be able to read the Bible in his native language so that the bureaucratic experts of the church could not assert themselves as the powerful intermediaries between Christians and their omnipotent God as revealed in ancient tongues read only by the bureaucrats. They knew that real learning--individual knowledge and thought free of the church's control--was the first prerequisite of freedom from the tyranny of bureaucracy.

As soon as they had overcome their immediate anxieties about starvation and disease, those devotees of individual education founded what is now Harvard College (in 1636) to ensure a steady supply of educated young men for their growing colony. By the time of the Revolution, that devotion to education had supplied the American people with a remarkable community of scholars and scientists who led them in creating "The First New Nation." The Founding Fathers of our constitutional democracy were probably the most brilliant, creative, and knowledgeable group of leaders in human history. They certainly vastly surpassed the politicians who now press upon us a miasma of bureaucratic solutions to our education crisis.