Between now and the November elections, Barack Obama and John McCain will each spend millions of dollars to describe his vision to the American people. From
ridding the world of evil to making sure our credit card payments are
properly recorded, no task is too sublime or too trivial for the candidates' attention — or voter expectations.
And there's the rub.
The claim of expansive presidential capability to solve the ills of mankind is more than simply over-promising and under-delivering. A president of whom great deeds are expected will demand — or seize — great power to tackle those expectations. The context of the political conventions provides an opportunity to reconsider the nature of the presidency and judge candidates not by the eloquence of their rhetoric or the expansiveness of their policies but by the standard of the U.S. Constitution.
The vision of president who is a combination
"guardian angel, shaman and Supreme Warlord of the Earth" is so pervasive that Americans are reduced to weighing campaign rhetoric without the balance of context. Partisans will be praising, journalists will be reporting and pundits analyzing what Obama and McCain would do as president. Doing so, they miss the key question: What should a president do?
"The Constitution's architects never conceived of the president as the man in charge of national destiny," says the Cato Institute's Gene Healy, author of
"The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power." 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."
*snip*
