I received a book a couple of weeks ago called “The Cult of the Presidency.” I started reading it back then; it’s an awesome book. The author explains that, back in the day, Americans did not expect much from their president. He should preside over the government, but he was not meant to be a fulfiller of dreams, nor should he strongly pursue his own agenda. But that changed over time, especially in the 20th century. American progressives took the lead in transforming the presidency.

Sadly, however, I left the book in the Netherlands. I forgot to take it with me, so I cannot finish it. Today, however, an article was published at Reason with the same title, and from the same perspective… and written by one of the co-authors of before mentioned book (well worth your time to read).

The article, which I think should make every single person think about what to expect from a president, starts off as follows:

“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.

Quite right. They realize that they’ve got to pretend that they’re running for preacher-in-chief. If they take the old line, if they take the old approach, they will not win.

The main example of someone running for preacher-in-chief today is – aside from Mike Huckabee – Barack Obama:

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.

Although John McCain is less bad than Obama, he ain’t exactly old school either:

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.”

In short:

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.

The author of the article and co-author of the book “The Cult of the Presidency” then goes on to explain what the founding father’s vision for the presidency was.

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.

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.”

But all is different today. These days, Americans expect their president to use the bully pulpit (something America’s founding fathers would have objected to… and strongly so). “The Framers viewed that sort of behavior as fundamentally illegitimate. In fact, the president wasn’t even supposed to be a popular leader,” Gene Healy writes.

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.

In short, in the 19th century, presidents normally exercised limited power, and they agreed with the limitations put on them. They did not want to have more power, because they knew that having more power means that one is more likely to abuse it.

They did not attempt to tell Americans how to live, for it was not any of their business. Nor did they try to ‘reform’ the nation; that was not any of their business either. Laws, it was believed, should be made by Congress. The President should simply execute those laws (hence executive branch).

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.”

And their are far more examples of course. They all cause the author – and this reader – to wonder how Americans went “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.”

The article goes on for a while, I suggest you read it. Interesting food for thought. It’s one of those articles that should encourage America’s more conservative elements to call for a different view of the presidency. If conservatives do not change their view on the presidency, of what they believe a president should do, and so on, they can be sure of one thing: the government will continue to grow, and the executive will draw increasingly more power to himself.

What’s most fascinating, in my opinion, about the debate about the role of the president in the US, is that both liberals and conservatives accuse each other of giving the president too much power. They basically both want him to have tremendous power, more than ever before, and certainly more than the founding fathers envisioned, they only agree on what he should do with that power.

For instance, conservatives want him to have more power to fight crime and terrorism. Progressives disagree; they simply want to give him more power to “fix society’s ill.”