Amity did a commentary item for Marketplace radio yesterday, suggesting Coolidge as a model for current policymakers. I’ve included an excerpt below.

Coincidentally, I did an interview for Marketplace on Friday, exploring the history of tax rates. My comments on Coolidge ended up on the  cutting room floor (to use an anachronistic metaphor), but I suspect Silent Cal readers might be interested in the subject anyway.

Anyway, here’s the excerpt from Amity’s commentary. Link to the audi and ful text is at the end:

As presidents go, Calvin Coolidge is an unlikely hero. Conservatives focus on him far less than they do on Ronald Reagan, and after all, Coolidge served a long time ago, from 1923 to 1929. Coolidge said “no” so often that he was trashed as lazy even by his own peers. Today, Coolidge is held in such low esteem by most Americans that if they remember anything, it is his nickname: Silent Cal.

But Coolidge did three things that stand out today, especially from our budgetary perspective. The first was to monitor federal spending — personally, with his own pencil, and intensely. As president, Coolidge met with his budget director every Friday at 10:00 a.m. Once cuts had been made, Coolidge made more. Coolidge monitored every penny spent down to the salt and pepper on the dinner table. The housekeeper at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Miss Riley, managed to cut her outlays from $11,667.10 one year, down to $9,116.39 the next. “Very fine improvement,” the president wrote in a note to her.

More at: Looking to President Coolidge for budgetary perspective

C-Span has posted the video for the dedication of the Coolidge Museum and Education Center last August.

Writing for Salon.com, Coolidge biographer David Greenberg, a professor of history at Rutgers, has noted Sarah Palin’s interest in Coolidge.

A reader who knew only the author and title of Sarah Palin’s new book, “America by Heart,” would in all likelihood be able to predict many of the delights contained within: self-justifying accounts of her behavior on the 2008 campaign, snarky jabs at President Obama, paeans to the Alaska grizzly. Rapturous words for Calvin Coolidge, however, would probably not be among the expected finds. And yet peppered through Palin’s new volume of ruminations lies a handful of admiring references to our 30th president. The oddity is worth pondering.

Obviously, Greenberg is no Palin fan. But he does display a cautious (if not uncritical) appreciation for Coolidge. “To most people today,” he points out, “Coolidge is little more than a cartoon. If he’s remembered at all, he’s the grim-faced ‘Silent Cal,’ the man said by Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice to have looked as though he had been weaned on a pickle.”

In fact, though, Coolidge was a president of real accomplishment, Greenberg contends. As evidence, he cites both the Dawes Plan for European debt relief and the federal government’s response to the 1927 Mississippi flood. (He also mentions, but does endorse, Coolidge’s economic policies.)

Greenberg points out that Palin’s interest in Coolidge hardly makes her unique, especially among Republicans.

For decades, since the arrival in power with Ronald Reagan of so-called movement conservatives, Coolidge has been a patron saint to the right — a symbol of patriotism and piety, of hard work and thrift, and not least of low taxes and minimal government. When Reagan moved into the White House in 1981, he removed the portraits of Thomas Jefferson and Harry Truman in the Cabinet Room and put up those of Dwight Eisenhower and Coolidge instead.

Greenberg explains the Coolidge boom as a two-part phenomenon:

Coolidge retains this mystique because he reconciled two different strains of conservatism and two different factions of the Republican Party. His approval of the decade’s kinetic capitalism pleased Chamber of Commerce types. But economic growth also has a way of unleashing cultural change, and Coolidge’s flinty New England virtue reassured traditionalists worried about moral decay during a time of the “new woman” and the “new Negro,” of the Scopes trial and jazz. “We were smack in the middle of the Roaring Twenties, with hip flasks, joy rides, and bathtub gin parties setting the social standards,” wrote Edmund Starling, Coolidge’s Secret Service agent and daily walking companion. “The president was the antithesis of all this and he despised it.”

At the same time, however, Coolidge was a remarkably modern president, especially when it came to public relations. As Greenberg relates:

Despite his reputation for silence, moreover, Coolidge was a skilled speechmaker — a prizewinning orator as a student and the last president to write most of his own remarks — and he excelled especially at the patriotic homilies that Sarah Palin seems to admire.

Overall, Greenberg’s take on Coolidge may not sit well with Silent Cal’s contemporary admirers (including many readers of  this blog, no doubt.) But Greenberg does show a willingness to take Coolidge seriously as a political figure — rather than treating him as some sort of nameless, faceless, do-nothing presidential potted plant. And that’s something we should all be grateful for.

C-Span has posted a short clip from the August 3 Coolidge event at the Library of Congress. Organized to mark the publication of Why Coolidge Matters, the event doesn’t seem to be available in its entirety anywhere on the web (despite suggestions from the LOC press release that it will be.) But the clip is worth a quick look anyway.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlwGmXJTAro]

David Frum invokes Coolidge to challenge the notion that politics is all about messaging:

You know whose White House was really, really terrible at communications? Calvin Coolidge’s. “Silent Cal” notoriously refused to talk to anybody at all. The story goes that, when still governor of Massachusetts, he was seated at a dinner beside a Boston society woman who liltingly insisted: “Now governor: My husband has bet me $20 you wont say even three words to me. What do you answer to that?” Coolidge: “You lose.”

Coolidge won 382 electoral votes and 54 percent of the vote when he ran for re-election in 1924. Had he sought a third term in 1928, he would have won even more crushingly.

Why? The Coolidge boom.

A few thoughts:

1. Materialist interpretations of history and current politics seem to have carried the day in almost every corner of the commentariat. If the only issues in every election are the objective status of “peace” and “prosperity,” as Frum suggests, then there’s not much room left for ideas and political conviction.

Call me naive, but that sort of interpretation strikes me as simplistic, if pleasantly empirical. By positing that political outcomes can be deduced from empirical realities (i.e. the state of the economy), it reduces a confusing, maddening, and often incoherent political process to a set of nice firm metrics. Comforting, I suppose. And defensible, according to many political scientists. But I’m still dubious.

2. I’m also not persuaded by Frum’s invocation of the mythically silent Cal. After all, Coolidge wasn’t really so silent — he had plenty to say, if only on a limited number of occasions.

It’s fair to say, in fact, that far from being “terrible,” Coolidge was actually quite good at communications. Successful messaging requires that a president know when to talk and when to keep quiet. Over-exposure is a real threat for denizens of the White House. Coolidge, I think, understood that less was sometimes more.

3. More to the point, however, I’m not convinced that Coolidge’s 1920s communications strategy (which was, in some ways,  a throwback to nineteenth century White House messaging) is relevant today. We live in a very different world, especially when it comes to communications technology and mass media.

Coolidge may have been one of the first presidents to explore the utility of mass media, as historian David Greenberg has noted in his fine and admirably brief biography. The ostensibly Silent Cal was a progenitor, of sorts, for the Great Communicator himself, Ronald Reagan.

But while Coolidge’s career may hold lessons for modern politicians, it can’t tell them how to navigate the modern 24-7 news cycle. How would Coolidge have handled the unquenchable thirst of modern media outlets for news, commentary, and invective? We’ll never know.

And somehow, even if he figured out what to do with CNN, Fox, and MSNBC, I’m pretty sure that Coolidge would have found the notion of “social media” unintelligible.

And repulsive, if he ever figured it out.

My dog Hoover

Just in passing (and a few weeks late), I’d like to note Mona Charen’s column on Coolidge. Two unrelated thoughts occur:

1. I love the fact that Charen named her dog Coolidge. She and I apparently share a personality quirk: we name our pets for presidents. I call my dog Hoover (sorry, Amity — I know you’re not a fan, but I couldn’t resist the vacuum allusion for my hungry labrador). And my erstwhile cat (who ran away when we rudely moved from Washington to Charlottesville) was named Truman (sorry again). Next up? Eisenhower, I think.

2. Why are conservatives the only people writing about Coolidge? I know its naive, but I wish people would take history on its own terms, rather than always looking for a usable past. Sure, Coolidge has some obvious contemporary salience — I understand why many people would like to establish him as a mythic hero of sorts. But he’s also just plain old interesting, not least because he’s so under appreciated. It’s puzzling to me that liberals don’t pay more attention to him. Hell, they don’t even both to attack him. What’s with that?

Andrew Kostanecki of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation offers an audio commentary on Why Coolidge Matters Today.