Our Founders Idea of Greatness in the Presidential Office

Real academia's leaders, journalists and popular historians agree. Our greatest presidents are the ones who confronted a national crisis and mobilized the entire nation to face it. That's the conventional wisdom. The chief executives who are celebrated in textbooks and placed in the top echelon of presidents in surveys of experts are the "bold" leaders – the Woodrow Wilson's, Franklin Roosevelt's and JFK's – who reshaped the United States in line with their grand "vision" for America.

Unfortunately, along the way these great presidents inevitably expanded government, thereby shrinking our liberties. As the 20th-century presidency has grown far beyond the bounds the Founders established for the office, the idea that our chief executive is responsible to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States" has become a distant memory.

Anyone with a semblance of intelligence and historical knowledge recognizes the Founders had an entirely different idea of greatness in the presidential office. The personal ambitions, populist appeals and bribes paid to the voters with their own money that most modern presidents engage in would strike them as instances of the demagoguery they most feared – one of the great dangers to the people's liberty that they wrote the Constitution explicitly to guard against. The Founders, in contrast to today's historians, expected great presidents to be champions of the limited government established by the Constitution.