Rubio and Cruz atop the GOP

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, October 30, 2015

‘Ted Cruz is only going to be popular,” a lefty correspondent sniffs, “in those places where the Osmonds are still popular.” If that is true, then the news for Senator Cruz could not possibly be better, inasmuch as this puts Nevada into play: Donny and Marie signed up for a six-week stint in Las Vegas back in 2008, and extended, and extended, and will be performing in the showroom now named for them until the end of 2016, at least. Good tickets for the reliably sold-out show are $260 each — no laughing matter when one considers that the Osmond demographic includes some pretty large families. It can be hard to see it from Williamsburg or Petworth, but the culture isn’t (only) what the hipsters think it is. If Senator Cruz proves as popular as Shania Twain and NASCAR, he won’t just be president — he’ll be president-for-life.

And that is of some interest, given that Wednesday’s debate very much left the impression that this is a Ted Cruz–Marco Rubio race.

About those other guys . . .

Jeb Bush’s performance confirms an earlier judgment of him, that he was a pretty good governor a long time ago with no special oomph today, a decent man whose misadventures on the critical policy questions of immigration and education, along with his too-familiar surname, are like heavy boots on a drowning man. His strategy to push Senator Rubio to the side in order to be positioned in such a way that the bulk of the reasonable-to-just-short-of-howling vote should fall upon his head as fading reality-television grotesque Donald Trump enters the Norma Desmond stage of his campaign, leaving Senator Cruz to wage a pyrrhic campaign for the moonbats, was too calculated. It was so calculated, in fact, that Senator Rubio was able to deftly parry it simply by pointing out the calculation. Bush père screwed up by reading his stage directions aloud — “Message: I care” — whereas the (younger) younger Bush stood mutely by as Senator Rubio read aloud from his playbook. It was like watching the smartest kid in the fourth grade mangle his own name at a spelling bee.

Ben Carson, whose occupation (neurosurgeon) and melanin level (high) assuage certain Republican insecurities, continues to be excellent and modest and in no way prepared to be president. As others have pointed out, he might have made an excellent mayor of Baltimore or governor of Maryland, if it weren’t for the fact that for certain men the presidency seems to be the only job in politics worth having.

Speaking of which . . .

Trump’s performance was — what’s that phrase? — low-energy, remarkably so. It is always difficult to calculate which moment was Trump’s lowest — that’s one of the challenges of chronicling low men — but his scoffing at Ohio’s energy industry stands out as characteristic of the Trumpkin approach: Governor John Kasich, Trump argued, deserves no credit for Ohio’s economic performance because Ohio “got lucky” with fracking, because it “struck oil.” That’s true. Trump’s native New York might have done the same, except for Governor Andrew Cuomo’s ban on modern techniques of oil-and-gas extraction. If only New York had had the services of some prominent, extraordinarily famous, and media-savvy businessman to spearhead a campaign in favor of energy exploration when Governor Cuomo was playing Hamlet-on-the-Hudson on the question! As with immigration, Trump has had a lifetime in the public eye to take the lead — or even to take a halfway honorable stand — on New York’s energy industry, but he cannot be stirred to act in the service of anything other than his own celebrity. Like Carson, Trump might have made a good mayor or governor, but neither is grand enough for him. New York’s Southern Tier is dying an ugly slow death, and New York’s most famous businessman — who says he wants to be president of these United States — hasn’t lifted a finger on behalf of his own state. That there is almost nothing behind Trump’s showmanship is becoming apparent to some of his admirers, albeit slowly.

The also-rans also ran. Senator Rand Paul’s testy libertarianism remains a hard sell in demographics more diverse than the dinner table when Matt Welch dines alone; Mike Huckabee is still a better candidate for Bill O’Reilly’s chair than Abraham Lincoln’s; Kasich leaves one wondering how he even got to be governor of Ohio, which, according to my almanac, is an actual state; Chris Christie’s “Hey, remember, I’m from New Jersey!” special-pleading shtick is sometimes charming but not the sort of thing that makes one want to hand him control of a nuclear arsenal; some of us true believers are still rooting for Bobby Jindal down in the junior-variety division, but there’s not much sign of hope.

I envision Carly Fiorina joining Mitt Romney in the role I sometimes describe as the crypto-presidency: If there is a Republican president come January 2017, these two should be the Cleaning Crew, given powers that are very narrowly defined but Gaullist in their vigor and tasked with cleaning out problem agencies, with the president declaring the Veterans’ Administration, the Secret Service, etc., something like federal disaster areas and then sending this duo in with a stack of pink slips and orders to bayonet the wounded. The fact that Fiorina would be extraordinarily good at this — and that she’s probably do it with a smile — is the best reason to vote for her for president, and also the reason that most people won’t.

​So, Cruz-Rubio/Rubio-Cruz.

Lifestyle liberals of the fair-trade-soy-latte variety recoil instinctively from Senator Cruz, and even many of his would-be friends and admirers lament what some unkind critics (including me) sometimes call his “Elmer Gantry” mode of persuasion, the televangelist mannerisms and the undertone of quiet desperation that makes it easy to imagine him saying to voters: “Tell me exactly what you want to hear, and I’ll say exactly that.” In an interview with Sean Hannity immediately after the debate, the senator was utterly abject, twice declaring his desire to see a debate moderated by Hannity, Mark Levin, and Rush Limbaugh. Which is to say, he practically begged Hannity et al. to lean his way once their infatuation with Trump and Trump-ism finally becomes too embarrassing to sustain.

It may be that Senator Cruz thinks that the Republican primary electorate is full of boobs and that he therefore must appeal to the yahooligan sense of style. It may be that Senator Cruz suffers from the affliction all too common among Texas politicians — notably Governor Rick Perry and former president George W. Bush — that causes them to do some sort of limp John Wayne impersonation when they are feeling beset by East Coast media types. In almost every corner of these United States — even Ohio — there is some sort of local pride; the two great exceptions to that are New York City, whose residents have instead of municipal pride a form of Stockholm Syndrome, and Texas, which has instead of a statewide identity a statewide case of psychotic grandiosity. (I’m from Lubbock; I’m allowed.) Senator Cruz, like Rick Perry and (in my very limited experience) George W. Bush seems like an entirely different man off-camera. Maybe that’s cynical calculation; maybe it’s just that he is, after all, still sort of new at this.

Senator Cruz is not unaware of his shortcomings as a politician. His confession that he is more of a designated driver than a guy you want to have a beer with — odious cliché — was well-considered. The republic could use a period of reflective political sobriety lasting, oh, 60 years or so, and Senator Cruz would be an excellent man to initiate that.

Nobody ever accuses Senator Rubio of Elmer Gantry-ism. Why? Because if he is a cynical, calculating performer, he’s a brilliant one. I like to think that I am immune to political oratory, but one does have to admire the way that Senator Rubio can turn on that American-dream stuff like flipping a switch. Shortly after the Gang of Eight immigration fiasco, I saw Senator Rubio face a very, very skeptical audience — with Senator Cruz also on the stage — of conservatives who were practically ready to bear him out of the venue on their shoulders when he was done. He is, as Jeb Bush put it icily, “a gifted politician.”

He is also an apostate on immigration, the issue that has revealed the purported “libertarian moment” of 2017 to be anything but that. Conservatives would be foolish to simply declare anathema upon Rubio for his ill-considered immigration-reform misadventure — he did, after all, walk away from the mess he helped make once it became clear what a dog’s breakfast it was — but they are right in being suspicious of the fact that his first instinct was to make a deal and to be willing to make one that even in the best-case scenario wasn’t very good.

Senator Rubio here has the opportunity to combine good politics with good policy and declare that, should he become president, in his first term action on immigration would be limited to border security and enforcement. If, at the end of four years, he can make a credible case that the border is secure, that we have developed a credible procedure for dealing with visa overstays, and — most critical — that we have a robust system of workplace enforcement of our immigration laws, then in 2021 we might have a reasonable conversation about what to do about the millions of illegals who are here already. If we’re actually doing real workplace enforcement, then there should be a lot fewer of them come 2021. He should also make it clear that even if we do settle upon some process for normalizing the status of at least some of the illegals already here — and you can go ahead and call that “amnesty,” because that is what it is — citizenship should be off the table. Indeed, it is a mystery why citizenship for illegals, as opposed to simple legal residency, has even entered the discussion.

If the final days of the GOP primary fight should in fact end up being a Rubio–Cruz contest, that would be an excellent thing: Republicans would be considering an all-Latino presidential field as a result of ideas, talent, and gumption rather than phony diversity rhetoric and affirmative action. Either man would provide a dramatic contrast to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who regards the presidency as a personal entitlement and who carries in her train more baggage than Louis Vuitton. Cruz-Rubio/Rubio-Cruz: One’s a little bit country, the other a little bit EDM — and the GOP could do a hell of a lot worse than either.

If You’re Black, Lead the Pack

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, October 30, 2015

Here’s something you may not know: Dr. Ben Carson is black.

Of course, I’m being a little cute here. The only way you wouldn’t know he’s black is if you were blind and only listened to the news.

For instance, Tuesday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe — a program that often serves as a kind of artisanal boutique of inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom — host Joe Scarborough expressed his consternation over Carson’s popularity. “I just don’t get it,” Scarborough said more than once.

Remarking on some Carson ad he didn’t like, Scarborough said, “This guy is up 20 points in Iowa? . . . It’s baffling.”

Co-host Mika Brzezinski kept saying, “I just don’t get the Ben Carson . . . ” before trailing off into in articulate exasperation.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson took a plausible stab at why Carson is popular. “They like him, they like him,” he repeated, referring to conservatives in Iowa and elsewhere who admire Carson’s dignified and soft-spoken demeanor.

True enough; Carson has the highest favorables of any candidate in the GOP field.

But what’s remarkable is that at no point in this conversation did anyone call attention to the fact that Carson is an African-American. Indeed, most analysis of Carson’s popularity from pundits focuses on his likable personality and his sincere Christian faith. But it’s intriguingly rare to hear people talk about the fact that he’s black.

One could argue that he’s even more authentically African-American than Barack Obama, given that Obama’s mother was white and he was raised in part by his white grandparents. In his autobiography, Obama writes at length about how he grew up outside the traditional African-American experience — in Hawaii and Indonesia — and how he consciously chose to adopt a black identity when he was in college.

Meanwhile, Carson grew up in Detroit, the son of a very poor, very hard-working single mother. His tale of rising from poverty to become the head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital is one of the most inspiring rags-to-riches stories of the last half-century. (Cuba Gooding Jr. played Carson in the movie about his life.) He was a towering figure in the black community in Baltimore and nationally — at least, until he became a Republican politician.

And that probably explains why his race seems to be such a non-issue for the media. The New York Times is even reluctant to refer to him as a doctor. The Federalist reports that Jill Biden, who has a doctorate in education, is three times more likely to be referred to as “Dr.” in the Times as brain surgeon Carson. If the Times did that to a black Democrat, charges of racism would be thick in the air.

Or consider the aforementioned Eugene Robinson, who routinely sees racial bias in Republicans. “I can’t say that the people holding ‘Take Back Our Country’ signs were racists,” he wrote in 2014, recalling a tea-party rally four years earlier, “but I know this rallying cry arose after the first African-American family moved into the White House.”

Wrong. Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry all used the slogan incessantly when George W. Bush was in office.

How strange it must be for people who comfort themselves with the slander that the GOP is a cult of organized racial hatred that the most popular politician among conservatives is a black man. Better to ignore the elephant in the room than account for such an inconvenient fact. The race card is just too valuable politically and psychologically for liberals who need to believe that their political opponents are evil.

Carson’s popularity isn’t solely derived from his race, but it is a factor. The vast majority of conservatives resent the fact that Democrats glibly and shamelessly accuse Republicans of bigotry — against blacks, Hispanics, and women — simply because they disagree with liberal policies (which most conservatives believe hurt minorities).

Yet conservatives also refuse to adopt those liberal policies just to prove they aren’t bigots. Carson — not to mention Carly Fiorina and Hispanics Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio — demonstrates that there’s no inherent contradiction between being a minority (or a woman) and supporting conservative principles. And that fact is just too terrible for some liberals to contemplate.

Bernie’s Conspiracy Theory

By Rich Lowry

Friday, October 30, 2015

Bernie Sanders is the most prominent conspiracy theorist in America.

He runs around the country saying that the economy is “rigged” by what he calls “the billionaire class.”

Sanders doesn’t mean this metaphorically. He’s dead serious. As he put it in his speech at Liberty University a couple of months ago, our economy is “designed by the wealthiest people in this country to benefit the wealthiest people in this country at the expense of everybody else.”

Designed. Per Sanders, the wealthy have built and maintained a self-serving system of income inequality at the cost of the 99 percent — “heads they win, tails you lose.”

The Sanders view has all the hallmarks of a good conspiracy theory. It finds a common thread in disparate phenomena and attributes them to the workings of a shadowy, nefarious force. It is simplistic, paranoid, and seductive. And it is, outside the hothouse confines of its own assumptions, wholly implausible.

Consider what vast, complex forces the wealthy would have had to manipulate to “rig” the economy as Sanders alleges. (In what follows, I draw on the proceedings of a conference on income inequality held by the free-market Hoover Institution.)

Since the top 1 percent mostly make their money not by sitting on inheritances but by earning salaries, they must have shaped broader economic conditions for their benefit.

They had to enhance the return to education. They had to forge a revolution in computing and invent the Internet to enhance the scale in which talent could operate. They had to open up the global economy. If you thought these were inexorable elements of the modern world, you underestimated the power of the billionaire class.

They had created the predicate for higher pay — and not just for CEOs, financiers, and lawyers, but for other talented individuals, including professional athletes.

But the work of the billionaire class wasn’t done. It had to cover its tracks. It ensured that the United Kingdom and Canada experienced basically the same trend of gains by the top 1 percent. It saw to it that the proportion of children born in the top 20 percent of the income distribution in the U.S. who stay at the top or drop lower in the distribution is roughly the same as in the U.K. and Scandinavian countries. Clever.

For whatever reason, the billionaire class constantly eases people in and out of the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest people in the U.S. and favors entrepreneurial newcomers. In 1982, only 40 percent of the Forbes 400 owned first-generation businesses. In 2011, roughly 70 percent did. Fifth- and sixth-generation businesses, inherited and passed along, had disappeared from the list. Even more mystifying, the share of the Forbes 400 who grew up wealthy has declined through the decades.

Who can understand why the wealthy conspired to increase the share of federal income taxes paid by the top 20 percent of the income distribution from 65 percent in 1979 to 93 percent in 2010? Or the share of the top 1 percent from 17 percent to 37 percent? Doesn’t this undermine the entire effort? According to the Congressional Budget Office, once taxes and transfers are taken into account, the proportion of income going to the top 1 percent in 2009 wasn’t much different than in the mid-1980s.

It’s not enough for billionaires to protect their interests unless dispossessed people beneath them are denied the means of ascent. Clearly, the country must have a rotten, utterly unaccountable public-school system — and so it does.

Yes, the billionaire class has a lot to answer for.

Even if you have a dim view of the wealthy, you have to admit that the story is more complicated than the lurid Sanders version. But sometimes it’s ill-advised to try to engage with an inflamed, hands-waving believer in a wild conspiracy theory. It’s best just to nod and back away: Yes, Bernie, it is all rigged. Whatever you say . . .

It’s Time to Thin the Republican Herd

By David French

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Last night’s GOP debate was a mess. The moderators were terrible — historically terrible. They were biased, they were unprepared, and they infuriatingly combined their incompetence with stereotypically liberal smirking and condescension. But even the best moderation can’t obscure a fundamental failing of the Republican field: There are simply too many candidates in the race. The sheer numbers dilute the conservative message, create an unprofessional atmosphere of on-stage chaos, and diminish the candidates as they’re often reduced to shouting for attention like students in an unruly classroom.

Yes, I understand ambition. I also understand hope – especially when filtered not only through fans and supporters who believe the candidate’s breakout moment is just around the corner but also through the candidates’ own political history of triumph, sometimes against long odds. The presidency is the job of their dreams, they think they can win, and they also feel that it will be best for the nation they love if they’re in the Oval Office rather than their rivals.

Moreover, they can make a case for hanging in just a bit longer. After all – if you’re an establishment candidate like Jeb Bush – can’t you argue that John McCain was dead in the water in 2007, right until he came roaring back to win the nomination? If you’re a low-polling insurgent, wasn’t Rick Santorum barely registering in the polls – even in Iowa – before emerging as the last Romney-alternative standing and the runner-up in 2012? And aren’t most of the politician-candidates having trouble believing that the Trump and Carson surges are any more concrete than the Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain boomlets of 2011? In other words, in their minds almost 50 percent of the Republican primary electorate is still functionally up for grabs.

So they stay . . . but at some point, hope has to yield to reason, and even candidates who believe they still have a chance should step aside. Is there a plausible case that any of the candidates in the undercard debates will move even to the middle of the pack in a crowded field, much less to the center lectern on the main stage? The back of the pack is on the verge of Dumb and Dumber thinking, where a one-in-a-million shot is enthusiastically interpreted as a “chance” to win.

The main stage should be cut down as well. Is there a plausible path for Mike Huckabee? For Chris Christie? For John Kasich? Does Kasich actually believe that the Republican electorate has been searching for a louder, angrier John Huntsman? And I’d argue that Rand Paul’s campaign died in 2014, when the rise of ISIS reminded Americans of the jihadist threat. Paul’s foreign policy built around non-intervention and a domestic policy notably characterized by opposition to anti-terrorist surveillance measures became politically untenable – especially in a Republican primary.

I still think it’s too soon to count out Jeb Bush. He’s still in the top five in the polling averages nationally (and in Iowa and New Hampshire), but the trend lines are bad, and the last debate did him no favors. Over at The Weekly Standard, Jonathan Last called the Bush/Rubio exchange over Rubio’s attendance record in the Senate “the kind of body shot that buckles your knees,” and it’s hard to disagree:

Moreover, the McCain model is misleading – a look at the 2008 race shows that he was leading (decisively) at this point in 2007, and with the exception of a brief Huckabee surge actually led throughout the vast majority of the campaign cycle. The Bush campaign is on life support, and even if Trump and/or Carson fade, it’s hard to see their supporters migrating to Bush and not Cruz, Rubio, or Fiorina.

It’s hard to watch dreams die, and it takes no small amount of integrity and selflessness to follow Scott Walker and Rick Perry’s path – to acknowledge that a small chance of victory isn’t worth the certainty of further division, further campaign confusion, dilution of precious fundraising resources, and yet more debate chaos. Multiple GOP campaigns are on life support. It’s time to start pulling plugs.

What Kind of Presidency Do We Want?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

A recent poll finds Ben Carson pulling ahead of Donald Trump, with the Republican presidential primary electorate apparently shifting toward a man with no particular qualifications for the office and away from a man with something like the opposite of qualifications for it. That is progress.

What kind of president you want is intimately bound up with what kind of presidency you want. In descending order of grandiosity, the choices are:

President as personification of the nation. This is a creepy and deeply un-American view of the presidency, but an increasingly common one. This goes a state beyond the idea that the president is our national representative, our ambassador general, and encompasses a quasi-monarchical approach to the chief executive: He is an avatar of the nation, an expression of the nation, an embodiment of our national character, our virtues, and our habits. This is how President Barack Obama understands himself and was implicit in Bill Clinton’s promise to appoint “a Cabinet that looks like America.” (President Clinton was successful in naming a Cabinet that looked like a pretty good cross-section of millionaire American lawyers. Baby steps.) L’Etat, c’est moi and all that.

If that is how you see the president, then you want a president who is culturally and socially like you, a president who as a man expresses your values. A great many Republicans have decided for the moment that their values are best represented by a Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon and culture warrior whose relatively high melanin levels discomfit would-be tormentors on the left; for Democrats, it’s uterus über alles. The Trumpkins are dead set on their man because their deepest desire is to shout “Loser!” at every individual and institution that ever has reminded them of their precarious socioeconomic position. Fearing his trademark phrase above all, they want the guy who says “You’re fired!” on their side for a change. Trump is a lowlife; Carson is a fine man. But in both cases, this is a pretty dumb way to approach the presidency.

President as commander-in-chief. My fellow conservatives often make too much of the president’s role as commander-in-chief, a duty about which the Constitution has almost nothing to say. It is of course the case that the national defense is the first priority of the government, that defense matters are one of the few issues that are obviously in the federal portfolio rather than in the 50 state portfolios, and that the executive has a natural part to play as the energetic executor of military affairs. The Trumpkins are looking for a tribune of the plebs, while the national-security conservatives are looking for an imperator, which is the Roman term for commander-in-chief, a fact that we lowercase-r republicans should always have in mind. But, conservative rhetoric to the contrary, we are not really a country at war, at least not in the traditional sense. We are a country facing the sustained threat of terrorism at home — against which a large conventional military is of relatively little use — and engaged in trying to stamp out its sources of succor abroad. We are not a country that is about to be invaded by Canada — or by China.

The militarization of the presidency is a lamentable, un-republican tendency, one that corrupts both civilian and military manners. (John Lukacs was exactly right about that jaunty presidential salute; there’s a reason that U.S. presidents, including those who were generals, do not wear a uniform.) There is something a little fantastical, a little distasteful, and a little grandiose in the conception of the president as a military man primarily, but if that is your thing, then you’re out of luck: Jim Webb and Rick Perry are out of the race, though Colonel Lindsey Graham of the U.S. Air Force is hanging on. In terms of military policy, Carly Fiorina seems to have the most well-developed and detailed views on the Republican side.

President as policy entrepreneur. This is probably the most common position among conservatives and progressives both. You may indulge a little bit of presidential caesaropapism around the State of the Union, but you’re mainly interested in the president as a font of policy. This is frequently a frustrating position, since the Constitution puts the actual lawmaking authority in the hands of Congress. But the president remains the rock star of the policymaking world: proposing budgets that Congress will more or less ignore, proposing reforms that Congress will more or less ignore, making promises and demands that Congress will more or less ignore, and then taking credit and enduring the blame for everything from the price of wheat to the interest rate on zero-down mortgages.

This is the ground on which much of the presidential contest actually happens, though our increasingly polarized parties and our increasingly narrow political movements ensure that of all the questions that are asked, one of the most relevant ones — How do you propose to work with Congress to get this done? — rarely comes up. That makes for a lot of fun for people in my business, watching the CBO score theoretical budgets crafted with excruciatingly fine detail and bound for — nowhere. It keeps us busy, and for that we are grateful.

Because Congress is complicated and the presidency is relatively simple — just the one guy — we’ll continue to talk about “Reagan deficits” and “Clinton surpluses” rather than “O’Neill deficits” and “Gingrich surpluses,” and we’ll evaluate our presidential candidates as though their deviations on this or that issue were more significant than they are. If you are a contemporary Republican of the sort whose mood is set by talk radio and cable news, you’re treating every policy disagreement as a personal betrayal — every difference of opinion is straight out of Macbeth on the airwaves in 2015 — so you’ll campaign against Marco Rubio as though he were the devil himself because of his never-consummated apostasy on the matter of immigration reform. You should probably care a lot more about who is the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest — surely, all you immigration-is-the-only-real-issue guys know who that is? — who in all likelihood will have much more of an effect on an eventual immigration law than the president.

And, finally . . .

President as chief administrator of the federal bureaucracy. This is my preferred model of the presidency: not a Bismarckian chess-master, not a personification of the nation, not even the chief organ of governance.

Our Constitutional order gives us three branches of government but four chief institutions of government. Two of them, the House and the presidency, are largely democratic, though the democratic nature of the presidency is diluted by the Electoral College, a feature of the American way that should be cherished rather than despised. The other two, the Senate and the Supreme Court and its inferiors, are antidemocratic, though the Senate is a good deal less antidemocratic than it should be — than was intended by the Founders — thanks to the direct election of senators, a disastrous policy innovation mandated by the 17th Amendment. (If you really wanted to improve American democracy, you’d repeal the 17th Amendment and raise the voting age to 35.)

American sovereignty resides in the American people, not in the American state, still less in the person of the chief executive, and the organ most closely representative of the people is the one whose members we call, not coincidentally, representatives. We are a nation under law, a nation of laws, a nation with equality under the law, etc., which necessarily means a nation under lawmakers — not a nation under an elected and term-limited pharaoh. It is the role of Congress to decide what the federal government is to do, and it is the role of the president to get it done. The president is a servant, not a master.

I have written in the past that there really are no qualifications for the presidency as currently understood — which is to say, in its caesaropapist form. But there are qualifications for president-as-chief-administrator, which is why so many of us with a more modest conception of the chief executive prefer governors over senators: A candidate for an executive position who has held executive positions is to us instinctively preferable to one whose occupation is making speeches. President Obama is an excellent example of what happens when you elect a president who believes, still, seven years into the thing, that his job is to make speeches. (President Obama gave a very stirring eulogy for Ambassador Chris Stephens, who perhaps would have preferred something else from the president, such as an effective diplomatic-security apparatus.)

For us small-presidency guys, the State of the Union is a grotesque spectacle, the president’s comings and goings via armored convoy with a vast accompaniment of retainers and courtiers worrisome indeed. President Obama’s characteristic rationale for reinterpreting presidential powers in an expansive and autocratic way — that Congress refuses to act — is, properly understood, indefensible. We are a nation of laws, not a nation of Barack Obama’s enthusiasms.

The increasingly autocratic and anti-democratic substance of the presidency is rooted in the presidency’s increasingly democratic form: A candidate has to promise everything, from abolishing the bogeyman to making the rains nurture the crops, to win election, and therefore has great incentive to arrogate to himself ever greater portions of political power. George Washington’s presidency was democratic only in a very shallow sense: The Electoral College twice certified him a unanimous winner with no opposition. George Washington got better reelect numbers than Saddam Hussein, but these United States were none the worse for it. There is more to authentically democratic and genuinely liberal governance than majority sign-off via plebiscite.

While we are thinking about who should be entrusted with the awesome powers of the American presidency, perhaps we should think just a little bit about whether those powers are a bit too awesome, and about whether the presidency should be somewhat reduced to something closer to its original constitutional conception. Calvin Coolidge could afford to be a modest president, because he occupied a much more modest presidency. Before you decide what kind of president you want in 2016, think about what kind of presidency you want in 2016, and thereafter.