The Ideal President

[Plane]

[trivia: "They don't hold White House lunches the way they used to at the beginning of the century," Edmund Morris once recalled. "On Jan. 1, 1907, for example, the guest list was as follows: a Nobel prizewinner, a physical culturalist, a naval historian, a biographer, an essayist, a paleontologist, a taxidermist, an ornithologist, a field naturalist, a conservationist, a big-game hunter, an editor, a critic, a ranchman, an orator, a country squire, a civil service reformer, a socialite, a patron of the arts, a colonel of the cavalry, a former Governor of New York, the ranking expert on big-game mammals in North America and the President of the U.S. All these men were named Theodore Roosevelt."]

http://www.time.com/time/time100/leaders/profile/troosevelt.html

Clare Boothe Luce famously said that each President is remembered for a sentence: "He freed the slaves"; "He made the Louisiana Purchase." You have to figure out your sentence, she used to tell John Kennedy, who would nod thoughtfully and then grouse when she left. Ronald Reagan knew, going in, the sentence he wanted, and he got it. He guided the American victory in the cold war. Under his leadership, a conflict that had absorbed a half-century of Western blood and treasure was ended ? and the good guys finally won.

http://www.time.com/time/time100/leaders/profile/reagan.html

William F. Buckley once famously remarked that ?the office of the presidency is so staggeringly complicated that nobody, nobody, can be a good president.?

http://hnn.us/articles/1529.html

[Xavier_Onassis]

William F. Buckley once famously remarked that the office of the presidency is so staggeringly complicated that nobody, nobody, can be a good president.
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I think it is safe to say that no president is going to be considered a good president by everyone.
There is great disagreement over what a president's job is.

Some people want the US to be an empire, and dominate the world.

Others want the government to be their mommy.

There are a number of people who judge the president on one issue: abortion, Israel, protection for peanut growers, price floors for hops growers, hog farmers, whatever.

No one can even come close to pleasing everyone.

A perfect president would be a real problem for editorial cartoonists.
Chief Justice Roberts seems to present them with a difficult task.