The events of September 11, and the war on terrorism that followed, were powerful reminders of the importance of presidential leadership. As President Bush struggled to come to terms with the unspeakable horror of that day and rallied the country to respond to them, public officials, journalists, and talking heads on television sought to make sense of this crisis by placing them in history. They pondered presidents like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose response to past national trials have led the American people to rank them as great leaders.

In fact, Americans have a long-standing fascination with great leadership that goes back to the founding. This fascination still was evident during the 2000 election, although the American people's hope for greatness did not focus on George W. Bush during the presidential campaign. America's yearning for great leadership tended, instead, to rest on the more heroic figure of John McCain.

Whatever you think of McCain, I think we can agree that his appeal rested largely on the idea that he was somehow larger than life, an alternative to the ordinary, as Democrats and Republicans alike perceived not only Bush, but also Al Gore and Bill Bradley. Nor was the fascination with McCain unique. Think about the enormous fuss about Colin Powell in 1996. The fascination with McCain and Powell, whether appropriate or not, reveals something very important about American political culture: Americans crave extraordinary leadership—and at least if the various surveys of historians and the public at large are to be taken seriously—they think that at certain times in their history it existed.

America's great presidents are our guiding stars, the standard we use to measure our leaders, especially during crises. Only a few presidents have been deemed worthy of such enduring respect and reverence: Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. Cities, towns, and babies are named after them. Monuments are built in their memory. They are the subjects of popular novels and docudramas. Even when they are reviled, they are spoken of with awe. It is almost as if they occupied a different office and lived on a different plane from the others who have held the office.

Great leaders are not always celebrated in political life, especially in democracies, which tend to be jealous of great leadership. "Greatness" in leaders appears more appropriate for monarchy: Alexander, Peter, Catherine, Frederick all were called great, but I doubt any of them would be elected president. In fact, before the United States Constitution was written, conventional wisdom said that strong executive power and democracy did not mix.

And yet while previous democracies were fearful of great leaders, Americans are proud of and honor their great presidents. That fact has prompted Marc Landy and I to consider whether presidential greatness can be reconciled with democratic constraint. Our collective portrait reveals that, indeed, the great presidents were democratic leaders. In fact, they were great leaders because there were extraordinary leaders of American democracy. It was said of Lincoln, considered our greatest president, that he appeared to be "our country's consummate democrat" and "the embodiment of the people's government." We, therefore, revere Lincoln, long after he died, because he appealed to what is best about America, "to the better angels of our nature." In real and metaphorical terms, Lincoln was "everybody grown a little taller." So it has been with all of America's great presidents.

Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and FDR all reveal that democratic leadership involves the mutual interdependence of leader and led. It requires first of all that the leader remain answerable to his followers. Even as the president takes bold initiatives and ignores public opinion in the short run, he must enable his followers to hold him to account in ways that are practicable and timely.

In addition, because leadership is inevitably paternalistic, it can redeem itself democratically only if that parental responsibility is properly exercised. Good parents encourage their children to become independent and responsible, not to remain submissive and willful. Presidential words and deeds shape the quality and character of the citizenry. They can make the public more self-regarding and submissive, or they can encourage it to be more energetic and public spirited. Just as a parent is held responsible for the moral and practical education of his children, so a president bears a large share of responsibility for the public's civic education. As Felix Frankfurter once said of Franklin Roosevelt, he had a remarkable ability to take the American people to school on the meaning of their deepest political beliefs, in their own time. That talent is one displayed by all of America's great presidents.

Party building and partisan leadership have been central to this task of civic education. Washington apart, the great presidents were all either founders or re-founders of political parties. Historically, mass political parties, formed during the early part of the nineteenth century, are the most important source of democratic accountability. As collective organizations with a past and a future, parties have checked unwonted presidential ambition. Not only have parties held the president to account, but also, rooted in states and localities, they have been able to provide him with a strong base of popular support. More to the point, during periods of partisan realignment, they have given presidents the political strength to embark on ambitious projects of national reform. These episodes have a revolutionary quality to them. At first glance, they appear to threaten our Constitution—the sheet anchor of America's political tradition: consider, for example, Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus and his creation of military tribunals and FDR's "court packing" plan. But in the end, these revolutionary episodes of reform have not destroyed the Constitution. Instead, they have strengthened the attachment between the people and the fundamental law, to ensure, as Jefferson put it, that the Constitution "belongs to the living."

Our great presidents have provided a critical element of leadership during these re-foundings. They brought about not only change but an enduring legacy. These men were revolutionaries, but of a distinctly conservative stripe. They taught the citizenry about the need for great change but also about how to reconcile that change with American constitutional traditions and purposes. All our great presidents have proven that the notion of "conservative revolutionary" is not an oxymoron, and it is the key to understanding presidential greatness.

George Washington gave literal meaning to the term "conservative revolutionary." His bearing and his principles were so conservative that it is hard to conceive of him as a revolutionary; yet without him it is difficult to imagine the success of the American Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution (at the time, considered a radical experiment in self-rule). Not only was he elected to two terms unopposed, but the certainty that he would indeed serve as the nation's first president calmed the fears of those among the Constitution writers who might otherwise have been disinclined to endorse the establishment of a strong chief executive.

As James Madison commented in 1789, Washington was the only aspect of the government that really caught the imagination of the people at the outset. Washington's task was to transform his enormous popular appeal into respect for the office he occupied and for the Constitution he had sworn to uphold, and to do so without raising excessive fears of presidential despotism. Through a brilliant combination of assertiveness and restraint, Washington showed the American people that a strong leader did not have to be a king; indeed, he set the precedents that made a democratic chief executive possible.

Perhaps the most important example of his strength was his dramatic demonstration that the president would uphold the law—the most critical and difficult executive responsibility in democratic government. When some rebellious farmers in western Pennsylvania refused to pay a tax on distilled whiskey in 1794 and forcefully obstructed the efforts of federal tax collectors to collect government revenues, Washington himself led 13,000 troops against the so-called Whiskey Rebellion. In the face of a Washington-led army, the rebellion dissolved, and the father of his country demonstrated that within the complex political system, with its deliberate distribution of power, the president has the responsibility to see that the laws are obeyed.

Yet force was joined to restraint. Washington's most remarkable show of restraint, although we take it for granted now, was his voluntary renunciation of power after two terms. Washington was extraordinarily popular, and it was widely accepted that he could stay on as president as long as he desired, that he could become, in effect, an elected monarch. Washington's willingness to give up power only served to enhance his reputation. More than that, it set a precedent that helped reconcile executive power and democracy. All subsequent presidents felt compelled to follow Washington's example except FDR (and when Roosevelt broke the two-term tradition, Washington's restraint was enshrined by the Twenty-second Amendment).

One's admiration of Washington should not bind one to the inadequacy of the model he provides for democratic presidential leadership, however. Washington's success was unique in that it was too dependent on the absence of rivals. Because of his extraordinary gifts and the circumstances in which he came to rule, he was able to suppress rivalry and factionalism. But Washington left no legacy capable of suppressing those centrifugal forces in his absence.

Ironically, the best means for taming factionalism and reconciling rivalry with lawful rotation in power has proven to be an institution Washington feared and despised, political parties. To compound the irony, Thomas Jefferson shared Washington's antipathy. He once stated, "If I could not go to heaven but as a member of a party, I would not go there at all," yet he created the first democratic political party, the Democratic-Republican party, to which both the Democratic and Republican parties trace their origins. In what he called a "great contest of opinion," Jefferson and his party won the election of 1800, beating the Federalists (then headed by his friend and rival, John Adams). With Jefferson's triumph, great presidential leadership no longer required the stature to transcend factionalism, the passions, and the conflicts of democratic life. Thereafter, great presidents had to possess the political gifts and talent necessary to master the hurly-burly of democratic politics.

Presiding over the first democratically elected regime, Jefferson used the occasion of his first inaugural address to remind the people (including the bloodthirsty among his followers) that "we are all Republicans, we are all Federalists." Through rhetoric, he cultivated a political climate in which he could establish profound democratic changes without departing from the constitutional framework established by his Federalist predecessors. The Democratic-Republicans stood for limited government and states' rights and opposed Hamilton's plan for an executive establishment that would create a large presence for the national government at home and in the world. Jefferson's "Revolution of 1800," as he called it, dramatically reduced the size of the national government, and it remained so until the Civil War. Even today, the United States retains a degree of local self-government, a commitment to the rights of individuals, a mistrust of elites, and a lack of centralized rule that is unique among modern democracies.

Jefferson's contribution was stylistic as well as substantive. Unlike Washington (who had an intimidating dignity about him), Jefferson made the president look like a democrat and he championed policies that pressed in an anti-elitist direction. Adams had sought to maintain the sort of aloofness that Washington embodied, with ceremonial trappings; Jefferson rejected them. He jettisoned the presidential coach and rode his own horse. He ignored distinctions of rank at official functions. The famous dinners he hosted for members of Congress, in which he plied his guests with fine French food and wine so as to make them more willing to accept his political direction, were held at a round table in which no diner, not even the host and president, stood out above the others. By the end of his term, Jefferson had severed the connection between rank and privilege that the Federalists had sought to maintain.

In one sense, Jefferson was too successful a democratic leader. His Democratic-Republican party killed off its Federalist rivals in elections. Federalists resisted the democratic politics that triumphed in the "Revolution of 1800;" in truth, the Jeffersonians were a bit squeamish about it too and made little effort to sustain the vitality of the Democratic-Republican party. For a time, the U.S. fell into a one-party mode of politics that from 1812 to 1820 quickly degenerated into a no-party mode. Never was an era more inappropriately named than the so-called "Era of Good Feelings." The country suffered under fragmented leadership that had no means to build popular support. In the War of 1812, Jefferson's heir apparent, James Madison, fiddled while the British burned the national capital—a fitting symbol for the decline of national government that continued even after the British retreated.

It was left to Andrew Jackson and organizational genius Martin Van Buren to resurrect democratic allegiance through the creation of the Democratic party, and more importantly, through the creation of an enduring party system. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Although Jackson's political enemies, the Whigs, at first resisted participating in, and supporting, a mass party system, they gave up this resistance in 1840. William Henry Harrison's famous "Log Cabin, Hard Cider" campaign signified that party leadership had become central to presidential politics and part of the "living Constitution." Unlike Jeffersonian democracy, Jacksonian democracy ushered in the two-party system that has proven one of America's greatest political assets ever since.

Jackson complemented his far more thoroughgoing democratization of America with a crucial act of constitutional statesmanship. He acted quickly and decisively to suppress the proto-secessionist efforts of the South Carolina nullifiers led by Senator John Calhoun. Jackson taught Jeffersonians how to combine their zeal for states' rights and limited government with a strong attachment to the Union. And of equal importance, he issued the Nullification Proclamation, which explained cogently and comprehensively why all Americans should make preservation of the Union their highest political priority.

Abraham Lincoln wielded this precedent in the service of the boldest of all presidentially inspired acts of constitutional change. He discovered in the purpose of Union itself a rationale for purging the shameful constitutional provisions that left America "half slave and half free," a "house divided against itself." Calling on Americans to live up to the core principle pronounced in the Declaration of Independence ("All men are created equal"), Lincoln set the standard for presidential civic education. In a series of simple yet extraordinary speeches, the greatest being the Gettysburg Address, he explained to the people why a house divided against itself could not endure, and why defense of the Constitution actually required the freeing of slaves.

Lincoln could not accomplish these unsurpassed feats of presidential greatness on his own. He played an important part in the founding of the Republican party (which replaced the Whigs) and became its first president in 1860. Although his attachment to party constrained and even frustrated Lincoln at times, it provided him with a critical means for coalescing political support. His aggressive use of political patronage and his inclusion of the various party factions in his cabinet enabled Lincoln to fully exploit the Republican party as a vital political resource for the cause of Union.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt also sought to save the constitutional order by expanding it. In his Commonwealth Club address during the 1932 campaign and elsewhere, he explained that the economic system would destroy itself if it were not subjected to constitutional reform and that this transformed economic constitution would be based on a new freedom: "Freedom from Want."

Constructing a foundation for economic security, FDR announced at each key rhetorical moment of his presidency, required supplementation of the inalienable rights secured by the Constitution—free speech, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures—with a "second bill of rights." Among these new rights were the right to a useful and remunerative job; the right to earn enough to provide adequate food, clothing, and recreation; the right of every family to a decent home; the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to enjoy good health; the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; and the right to a good education.

Of course, these rights never were ratified as constitutional amendments, nor were they all codified in statutory law (though some programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, were enshrined in legislation as entitlements). But these new rights resonated with the American people. They became the foundation of a new public philosophy in the United States, New Deal liberalism, that redefined the role of the national government. With the advent of the New Deal political order, an understanding of rights dedicated to limiting government gradually gave way to a new view of rights requiring the expansion of national programs and administrative power.

Like all great presidents since Jefferson, Roosevelt wielded a mighty partisan weapon, the New Deal Democratic party, for the purpose of bringing about his constitutional redefinition. Although FDR did not found a new party, his ability to attract new loyalists (such as industrial workers) to the Democratic party was tantamount to a partisan re-founding. The benefits of Roosevelt's party leadership were realized in 1936, an immense victory that relegated the Republican party, and Herbert Hoover's concept of "rugged individualism," to the political wilderness.

We still live in the political order created by the Roosevelt revolution. Roosevelt's legacy, the modern bureaucratic state, may have been the last great transformation in American history. And Roosevelt himself may have been the last great American president. A careful examination of Roosevelt's legacy sheds light on the obsession with, but absence of, presidential greatness in our own political time.

Roosevelt's redefinition of the social contract held that the national government was responsible not just for political liberty ("natural rights") but also for the economic and social welfare of the American people ("programmatic rights"). In the pursuit of this "economic constitutional order," Roosevelt and his New Deal allies aroused intense partisan conflict, condemning their Republican political opponents as "Tories" and "economic royalists." Roosevelt strengthened partisanship in the short run and gave rise to still another critical realignment in American history. But this may have been the last partisan realignment in American politics, for the New Deal transformed the Democratic party into a way station on the road to a more administrative Constitution, to a more centralized and bureaucratic form of democracy that focused our political life on the president and administrative agencies. As Roosevelt put it in the Commonwealth Club address, "The day of enlightened administration has come."

In the wake of this development, the president, rather than the party, became the leading agent of popular rule. Indeed, during his second term, and, if truth be told, during his unprecedented third term as well, Roosevelt pursued a program dedicated to creating an executive establishment. This effort included controversial initiatives such as the "court packing" plan (1937) and the 1938 "purge" campaign (in which he campaigned against conservative Democrats and for "100% New Dealers" in the 1938 congressional primary elections). But its centerpiece was the Executive Reorganization Act (1939). This statute, enacted only after a brutal two-year struggle in Congress, created the Executive Office of the President. The Executive Reorganization Act is the organic statute of the "modern" presidency: it transformed what had been up to this point a relatively simple office into a massive institution and the center of politics and government in the United States.

The rise of the modern presidency had a profound effect on American democracy: the presidency-centered administrative state that FDR launched weakened the connection between the presidency and political parties (and, in turn, weakened the party system). The institutional presidency, the Executive Office of the President, staffed by the likes of John Sununu, George Stephanopoulos, David Gergen, Karl Rove, and Karen Hughes robbed party leaders of the very tasks that gave them status and influence: linking the president to interest groups; staffing the executive department; developing policy; providing campaign support; and perhaps most important, communicating with the people.

Significantly, Roosevelt was the first president to make effective use of the radio; he also was the first president to make extensive use of surveys and pollsters, giving the president a direct source of information about what the people were thinking and how they were responding to his program. That direct link with people culminated with JFK, who was the first master of television politics.

With these changes, presidents no longer won elections and governed as the head of a party; rather, they were elected and governed as the head of a personal organization they had created in their own image—think Friends of Bill or the Bush Family and Loyalists.

The independence of the modern presidency, of course, was greatly augmented, and political parties weakened further, by World War II and the Cold War. As James Madison anticipated, and feared, at the time the Constitution was written, "War is the true nurse of executive aggrandizement." Like "Freedom from Want," "Freedom from Fear" became a new guarantee of security. First announced in 1941 in Roosevelt's plea before the Congress for the Lend-Lease Act to aid Great Britain in its desperate trial with Nazi Germany, "Freedom from Fear" signified the government's responsibility to protect Americans and all free people against foreign imperialism.

Given the domestic and international challenges posed by the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, much of this transformation seems justified. A new sense of executive responsibility was needed, one that the contemporary presidency fulfills rather admirably. Indeed, extraordinary presidential leadership played a critical part in the two greatest triumphs of recent American history—the end of forced segregation in the South and the triumphant conclusion to the Cold War. The accomplishments of Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan reveal the possibilities for modern presidents to do extraordinary things. Yet, in the absence of vital party politics, without institutions that could empower them for monumental accomplishment and keep them faithful to broader interests, both LBJ and Reagan failed to remake the ideas, institutions, and policies that governed political life in the United States. As the disappointments of Vietnam and Iran-Contra suggest, modern presidents bask in the honors of a more powerful and prominent office that emerged from the New Deal, but find themselves navigating a treacherous and lonely path, subject to an uncertain political climate that makes the stuff of greatness—popular and enduring achievement—unlikely.

We can, perhaps, live in the absence of greatness. Great presidential leadership seems to flourish in times of crises, and perhaps those sorts of crises may now be behind the country. Do we really want another Civil War or a Great Depression, and the extreme measures that Lincoln and FDR had to take to meet those national crises? Presidential greatness is always dangerous, but it is necessary as a regime goes through the growing pains of development. The founding of the nation, the awakening of mass democracy, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and World War II were part of America's maturation, and required extraordinary democratic leadership. But in our own age, with the welfare and national security states in place, such leadership may no longer be so necessary.

The task for today's effective leaders, then, might not be to leave their mark on the nation, to build a regime in their own image as past great presidents have. Instead, their responsibility may simply be to "do the job:" to administer the welfare and national security states that form the core of America's responsibilities at home and abroad. President Bush had a shaky beginning to his presidency. Like Bill Clinton's "Third Way," his "Compassionate Conservatism" seemed to be a weak effort to please all sides. Even conservatives were making fun of his apparent mediocrity; a week before September 11, conservative pundit David Brooks called him the political equivalent of television's Gilligan (the lovable but dopey character of a popular 1970s sitcom). But President Bush found his voice, and a mission for his presidency, in justifying the war against terrorism in words that restored the commitment of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal to a greater security. "Freedom and fear are at war," he told a joint-session of Congress on September 20, 2001. "The advance of human freedom—the great achievement of our time—now depends on us. Our nation—this generation—will lift a dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail."

Civil rights reform, the Cold War, and the war against terrorism confirm the Roosevelt revolution. Contemporary expectations placed on the national government require presidents to exercise considerable power, indeed, to assume many prerogatives outside of the Constitution and independently of partisan conflicts. Presidents no longer are confined to enforcing the law—the task Washington saw as central to executive responsibility—in the name of the people. More particularly, in the service of two new freedoms—"Freedom from Want" and "Freedom from Fear"—they often become lawmakers themselves, taking action without the benefit of law, and sometimes even against it, in the public interest.

It is telling, I think, that hardly a discouraging word was heard as President Bush responded to September 11 by creating a new government agency—an Office of Homeland Security—by executive order, with the proverbial stroke of the presidential pen; nor were a alarm bells sounded when he launched an ambitious war not on the basis of an old-fashioned congressional declaration of war, but instead, on the vague authority of a legislative resolution strikingly similar to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that Congress gave to LBJ to justify sending 500,000 troops to Vietnam.

Extra-constitutional power is not new, nor is it a post-FDR occurrence; Jefferson took liberties in purchasing the Louisiana Territory, as did Lincoln in suspending many civil liberties during the Civil War. But with the New Deal and the emergence of a government from which much is expected at home and in the world, prerogative power is now exercised routinely.

The good news is that presidents can, as Alexander Hamilton hoped they would, carry out "extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit." Not many among us would want President Bush to be handcuffed by the Constitution or partisanship in meeting the challenges of the invisible but relentless enemy of terrorism.

But the more active and competent state, resting on presidential responsibility, we have built in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has not come without a price. The danger has been, and still is, that presidents will abuse their privilege as the embodiment of the national will. The worst example, of course, is Nixon's Watergate. But the troubling reality of contemporary presidential politics, as the political scientist Theodore Lowi has put it, "is that there is a Watergate of some kind every day in the life of the president."

The modern presidency requires a vigilant citizenry to guard against presidential imperialism. And yet, the modern presidency in its very power weakens our democracy. Television, polls, and focus groups have created the illusion of democracy, rather than the real article. For all their limitations, political parties, rooted in America's communities, got people to participate in politics. For most of the nineteenth century, there was a participation level in presidential elections of nearly 80 percent and citizens voted in large numbers at all levels of the political system. As has been the case in most presidential elections since 1960, barely half the American people eligible to vote turned out in 2000. Even worse, only about 30 percent vote in congressional and local elections. With the president, rather than parties, at the center of our political life, politics has become a spectator support: It is telling, I think, and a little disturbing, that the television drama West Wing is a big hit, and much discussed, while turnout in presidential elections has declined to embarrassingly low levels.

We can only hope that President Bush will offer inspiring and responsible democratic leadership. But no president, no matter how decent and talented, can restore the vitality of American democracy from up high. In the end no president can rule responsibly over a complaisant people, mired in rank apathy.

Sidney M. Milkis is James Hart Professor of Politics and a senior scholar with the Miller Center of Public Affairs. He is author, with Mark Landy, of Presidential Greatness (University of Kansas, 2000).