How FDR Ended the Great Depression, Bill Clinton Created Peace and Prosperity, George W. Bush Knocked Up Your Daughter, and Barack Obama Will Save the Climate

Barack Obama’s toxic health care plan would place about 15 percent of the American economy under the control of the federal government. In response, conservatives have offered up a raft of valid criticisms, wondering how a medical bureaucratic behemoth can possibly be funded with a projected deficit of trillions, and querying how the federal government, which can’t deliver mail packages efficiently, could possibly run the entire health care system. But all that aside, there’s something even more remarkable about this entire charade: Barack Obama believes he can singlehandedly redesign the American health care industry.

John Stossel made this point well in a column simply titled “Arrogance“. “It’s crazy for a group of mere mortals to try to design 15 percent of the U.S. economy,” Stossel writes. ”It’s even crazier to do it by August.” Yet Obama and his team of managers seem to actually believe this. A hefty (though constantly decreasing) chunk of the population agrees with him.

And its not just health care. Among the other Disney Princess dreams Obama seems determined to build his presidency on: the president of the United States can singlehandedly beat back pollution and save America from a climate disaster, the president of the United States can singlehandedly reverse decades of animosity between the United States and the Arab world, and the president of the United States can singlehandedly erase the rancor and acrimony that have been a hallmark of politics since the first caveman ran for tribal chief. His political advisors chatter frantically about how they must reverse economic misfortunes by 2010 so Obama is seen as helping the economy — and so Republicans can’t start referring to the Obama recession.

First and foremost, this attitude is our fault. The American people have lustily embraced a Jacksonian populism under which the president is the agent of the people, capable of moving mountains on their behalf.

Katherine Mangu-Ward, a writer for the invaluable Reason magazine, weighed in on this phenomenon today regarding another president: George W. Bush. Liberals are hopping mad about the fact that teenage pregnancy and syphilis rates have increased over the past decade, a problem they blame on (you have three guesses) Bush. Ward quotes a lede from the London Guardian: “Teenage pregnancies and syphilis have risen sharply among a generation of American school girls who were urged to avoid sex before marriage under George Bush’s evangelically-driven education policy, according to a new report by the US’s major public health body.” A Daily Kos diarist seized on this point and called Bush’s abstinence education policy “not only wrong, but also dangerous.”

It’s as though a syphilitic George W. Bush personally knocked up all those girls himself. For all of the 43rd president’s numerous flaws, one thing he did not do was embark on midnight panty raids across America impregnating as many teenagers as possible. That stopped after Bill Clinton’s second term ended. Among other factors that might have played a role in increased pregnancy rates other than Bush’s abstinence education: raging teenage hormones, broken contraceptives, college parties, binge drinking, marijuana usage, movies replete with sexuality, television shows replete with sexuality, books replete with sexuality, easy access to digital pornography, “sexting”, phone sex, webcams, and a culture increasingly tolerant of sexual liberation. But in an age where we ascribe to presidents an omnipotent control over the entire world economy, pointing the finger at George Bush for teenage pregnancies seems perfectly sensible.

Also perfectly sensible is the idea that Bush’s policies of “deregulation” led to the current recession like night into day. Of course, almost no actual deregulation occurred under Bush who was too busy adding pages to the regulation register, increasing government spending, bloating the federal bureaucracy, and growing the national deficit at a breakneck pace. But regardless, even if liberals were entirely correct and Bush’s policies had played a role in the economic bedlam, the president isn’t anywhere near the sole cause. The economy isn’t a starship that hapless dyslexic George Bush happened to crash into an asteroid. Wall Street shenanigans, speculators, predatory lenders, daft American homebuyers, the Federal Reserve, a rapidly inflating currency, the SEC, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, and countless other factors all had a hand in creating the recession.

We’ve been on a presidential power trip since the 1930s and it’s starting to wear thin. We repeat the same cliches over and over: FDR won World War II and ended the Great Depression, Richard Nixon lost the Vietnam War, Jimmy Carter destroyed the economy, Ronald Reagan won the Cold War, Bill Clinton ushered in a decade of peace and prosperity. It amounts to a hero worship that the Founding Fathers would have seen as dangerously monarchical. The Constitution paints the president as a figurehead executive whose only substantial power is in wartime. The Federalist Papers, though they endorse “energy in the executive,” clearly deem Congress to be the dominant branch of government.

Gene Healy has called this political malady “The Cult of the Presidency” and suggested it has dangerous consequences. He is, of course, correct. When we put so much faith in our presidents, we only give them more power that they cannot possibly to hold wield. Like a little child trying to swing a baseball bat much too big for them, the president ultimately grows the size of the government without ever exercising authority successfully or solving any of the nation’s problems. Within eight years when the public suddenly realizes that the president hasn’t driven out America’s demons, they turn on him with a vengeance. It’s the absurd, tragic, perpetual drama of the modern American president.

The acme of this presidential cult is Barack Obama, who believes that he can bring 15 percent of the American economy under federal control because he won an election by 4 points. Conservatives can at least take heart at this: he has no idea what he’s in for.