Yesterday OC Ed-in-Chief Ossie and I drove up to Kell’s Irish Pub in Portland to hear Gene Healy of the Cato Institute talk about his new book, The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power. The good folks at the America’s Future Foundation hosted the event.

Healy is a smart, funny guy, and we enjoyed throwing back some Guinness with him. I haven’t read the book yet, but everything he said last night was spot-on. In short, voters and politicians on both sides of the aisle need to get rid of the idea that the President is the daddy or mommy who will fix all their problems. I did have to disagree with Healy when he started bagging on Teddy Roosevelt, though. Ugly views on manifest destiny aside, Roosevelt was pretty awesome; he gave a 90-minute speech after being shot in the chest. C’mon, Hillary Clinton isn’t even that hardcore in her fantasies.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 3:47 pm by CJ Ciaramella and is filed under Booze, Elections, Media, National, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.