But What About the Meek?
Gene Healy praises do-nothing presidents, and wonders where historians get their taste for blood. Excerpt:
But wherever Bush ends up, there’s something odd about the preference of scholars for crusading presidents with contempt for constitutional limits. Last year, in a piece for Foreign Policy, University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner examined the WSJ/Federalist survey and concluded that it demonstrated that “Imperial presidents perform better than limited-power republican presidents.”
But is that the right lesson to draw? Is there something wrong with limited-power republican presidents? Or does the fault lie with the scholars who give them short shrift?
Consider Warren G. Harding, dead last in the Schlesinger polls, next to last in the WSJ/Federalist poll. Historians have downgraded him for his scandal-ridden administration. But that can’t be the only reason for his abysmal ranking: Harding wasn’t personally corrupt, after all, and he never profited from his cronies’ misdeeds.
Place that fault against his great merits: Harding presided over the dismantling of Wilson’s draconian wartime controls, ushering in an era of prosperous “normalcy.” (Is it the normalcy that presidential scholars hold against him?) Harding’s good nature and liberal instincts led him to pardon the dissenters that Wilson had locked up, among them Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs, imprisoned for making a speech against the draft. “I want [Debs] to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife,” Harding said.
