IMAGINING A STATIST COOLIDGE:

Silent Cal's Lesson (Richard Cohen, March 3, 2005, Washington Post)

Under some unwritten rule, all modern presidents must pay homage to a like-minded predecessor. A picture is hung in the Oval Office. A bust is placed on the presidential desk. Bill Clinton, you will remember, made his pilgrimage up the Hudson to the Hyde Park estate of Franklin D. Roosevelt. George W. Bush, in the estimation of others (if not himself), is another William McKinley, the president who transformed the GOP and made it dominant until the New Deal almost made it obsolete. Nobody, though, mentions Calvin Coolidge.

Yet Silent Cal, a president of great and warranted self-effacement, is precisely the predecessor Bush should have turned to when, for reasons not yet clear, he decided that Social Security is in crisis and only personal investment accounts could save it. Think again, Cal would have said.

As a talker, Coolidge might not have been much. But as a writer, he made a certain amount of sense. After leaving office, in fact, he wrote a magazine article explaining why he had not sought reelection. "It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion," Coolidge wrote. "They are always surrounded by worshipers. They are constantly, and for the most part sincerely, assured of their greatness. They live in an artificial atmosphere of adulation and exaltation which sooner or later impairs their judgment." There you have it: Social Security reform.

Citing poor dead Calvin Coolidge for the proposition that Social Security should be inviolable is deuced odd. Indeed, no one was ever more pro-ownership:

When the country has bestowed its confidence upon a party by making it a majority in the Congress, it has a right to expect such unity of action as will make the party majority an effective instrument of government. This Administration has come into power with a very clear and definite mandate from the people. The expression of the popular will in favor of maintaining our constitutional guarantees was overwhelming and decisive. There was a manifestation of such faith in the integrity of the courts that we can consider that issue rejected for some time to come. Likewise, the policy of public ownership of railroads and certain electric utilities met with unmistakable defeat. The people declared that they wanted their rights to have not a political but a judicial determination, and their independence and freedom continued and supported by having the ownership and control of their property, not in the Government, but in their own hands. As they always do when they have a fair chance, the people demonstrated that they are sound and are determined to have a sound government.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 5, 2005 6:53 AM