The Cult of the Presidency

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The Cult of the Presidency

• Gene Healy
• Cato University
• July 24, 2008

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Rock Star
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Cult of Obama

• 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, of relating and
  connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly
  experiment. These kinds of people actually help
  us evolve.
• --Mark Morford, San Fran Chronicle, June 6. Is
  Obama an Enlightened Being?
• Obamas finest speeches do not excite. They do
  not inform. They dont even really inspire.
  They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander
  moment, as if history has stopped flowing
  passively by, and, just for an instant,
  contracted around you, made you aware of its
  presence, and your role in it. He is not the
  Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over
  flesh, over color, over despair
• --Ezra Klein, The American Prospect (online),
  January 3. Obamas Gift.

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Cult of Dubya
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• split screen

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What Well Cover

• The Constitutions Chief Magistrate
• The Presidency Transformed
• The Progressives
• The Conservatives
• Why the Worst Get on Top and Get Worse
• The Audacity of Hope

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Anti-Bully Pulpit

• Of those men who have overturned the liberties
  of republics, the greatest number have begun
  their career by paying obsequious court to the
  people, commencing demagogues and ending
  tyrants.
• Federalist No. 1
• What we have to fear is the military despotism
  of a victorious demagogue
• Federalist No. 85

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The Myth of the Modern Presidency?
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Who Dat?
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A Sledgehammer in the Cause of National
Righteousness
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• Presidential primacy in the news is not a
  recent development, but in fact predates the
  emergence of broadcast technology. presidential
  dominance of news from Washington appears to have
  arisen from the transformation of Congress and
  the presidency during the early decades of the
  twentieth century. Presidents in the grip of
  progressivism became national tribunes.
• --Samuel Kernell and Gary C. Jacobson, Congress
  and the Presidency as News in the Nineteenth
  Century, The Journal of Politics 49 (November
  1987)

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War Is The Health of the Presidency

• It is of the nature of war to increase the
  executive at the expense of the legislative
  authority.Federalist No. 8

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A Trained and Loyal Army
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Tell Me Your Troubles
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Conservatives Learn to Love the Imperial
Presidency

• Some of the current worship of powerful
  executives may come from those who admire
  strength and accomplishment of any sort.  Others
  hail the display of Presidential strength
  simply because they approve of the result reached
  by the use of power.  This is nothing less than
  the totalitarian philosophy that the end
  justifies the means. If ever there was a
  philosophy of government totally at war with that
  of the Founding Fathers, it is this one.
• --Barry Goldwater (1964) 
• I call on the House to increase the power of
  President Clinton. . . . I want to strengthen the
  current Democratic President because he is
  President of the United States.
• --Newt Gingrich (1995)

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Modern Rhetoric
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With Great Responsibility Comes Great Power
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John Yoos Neoconstitution
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• David Addington 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.
• --Jack Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency (2007)

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Why the Worst Get on Top and Get Worse

• The socialists of all parties believe that it
  is not the system we need fear, but the danger it
  might be run by bad men.
• --Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944)

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Neither Sought Nor Declined

• It will not be too strong to say that there will
  be a constant probability of seeing the station
  i.e., the presidency filled by characters
  pre-eminent for ability and virtue.
• --Federalist No. 68

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The Permanent Campaign
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• It is difficult for men in high office to avoid
  the malady of self-delusion. They are surrounded
  by worshippers... They live in an artificial
  atmosphere of adulation and exaltation, which
  sooner or later impairs their judgment. They are
  in grave danger of becoming arrogant or
  careless.
• --Calvin Coolidge, Autobiography (1929)

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The Gullibility Index
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The Implicit Infallibility of Presidents

• Out of the gobbledygook, comes a very clear
  thing you cant trust the government you
  cant believe what they say and you cant rely
  on their judgment and the the implicit
  infallibility of presidents, which has been an
  accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this,
  because it shows that people do things the
  President wants to do even though its wrong, and
  the President can be wrong.
•  
• --H.R. Haldeman to Richard Nixon, June 14, 1971,
  describing the likely effect of the Pentagon
  Papers publication.

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