The Ohio Farmer comments on the fundamental change that Teddy Roosevelt brought to the presidency in his letter “Caesars or Presidents.” The Ohio Farmer argues that the election of 1912 was the turning point. After this election, presidents devoted to progressive ideology tried to become Caesars who rejected the constitutional constraints on the office. Obama’s speech yesterday that referenced TR seems to indicate he is planning to follow in TR’s footsteps.
Teddy Roosevelt lost the 1912 election, and the Progressive Party never again really mattered, but its spirit—its Caesarian impatience with the mediating institutions of political parties and constitutional checks and balances—came to define the political framework America lives in to this day…..
…It is not simply, then, that we have different kinds of candidates than we did before 1912, but that they are running for a different kind of presidency. TR urged Americans in 1912 to regard the president as “the steward of the public welfare.” This Caesarian conception of the presidency will not hesitate for a moment to ride roughshod over the impediments of constitutional government limited to securing the natural rights of the governed.
