What does a civil libertarian president look like?

After eight years of abuses of privacy, due process and the rule of law under George W. Bush (and eight previous years under Bill Clinton that inspire nostalgia in civil libertarians only in the way that a bout of the flu might seem preferable to a dose of Lyme Disease), it's worth asking: What would it be like to have a president who abides by limits on government power, respects dissent and treats the Constitution's protections for indvidual rights as actually binding? Would a civil libertarian president be inspiring? Revelatory?

Or would he disappear into the fog of memory, little appreciated for his good deeds?

History suggests that Americans might be underwhelmed by an administration that didn't draw their attention with an occasional extra-legal slap.

In his book, The Cult of the Presidency, author Gene Healy points out that Warren G. Harding is best remembered today -- if he's remembered at all -- for the Teapot Dome scandal that tainted his administration, involving several of his appointees (though, by all accounts, he remained above the muck). Harding's public image is unfair to the man, says Healy, because Harding was remarkable in that he took possession of a presidency that had been bloated and expanded in power by his predecessor to almost dictatorial dimensions, and shrank it back to constitutional proportions.

Place those faults against Harding's great merits: he presided over the dismantling of Wilson's draconian wartime controls, ushering in an era of prosperous normalcy. ... And Harding's good nature and liberal instincts led him to overrule his political advisors and pardon 25 nonviolent protesters that Wilson had locked up, including Eugene Debs. "I want him to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife," Harding said.

Writing on the popular Volokh Conspiracy blog, Ilya Somin agrees with Healy and adds, "Harding also lobbied hard for a federal anti-lynching bill to curb the rampant lynching of blacks by whites in the South - again, the first post-Reconstruction president to do so (the bill passed the House, but died in the Senate due to the threat of Democratic filibusters)."

Harding was far from perfect on civil liberties, and he was in many ways a mediocre figure (though that may be just what a free country requires from its political figures in order to stay free), but he seemed to know his limitations and -- more important -- to believe that political power should be subject to limits too. Following in the wake of a president who jailed political opponents, criminalized dissent, oversaw the conviction of roughly 2,000 people for sedition, commandeered the economy and fanned the flames of racism, it would have been easy for Harding to simply assume the powers that Wilson left in his wake. He didn't, and actually shrank those powers back to something resembling their intended scope.

As his reward, Harding is consistently ranked at or near the bottom of America's chief executives -- far below Wilson, who generally makes the top ten -- by presidential scholars who seem to be as addicted to the whip hand as a roomful of submissives who have willfully forgotten their safe words.

When history rewards presidents who abuse their power and behave like tyrants, while dismissing restrained chief executives as failures, what's the chance that either Barack Obama or John McCain will confine himself, Harding-style, to undoing the damage done by his predecessor?

Yes, we can imagine a civil libertarian president. But I doubt we'll have the chance, anytime soon, to compare our imaginations to reality.

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