Nowadays, Democrats are especially indignant about the political culture that they, as advocates of hyperkinetic government, have done so much to produce. "We are in this race," proclaimed an Obama-Biden campaign publication, "to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over." Actually, much lobbying is defensive, seeking to fend off regulatory burdens. And government sets the agenda for lobbyists by drawing them, as a magnet draws iron filings, to its activities that allocate wealth and opportunity. Obama promises to expand government's role regarding health care (17 percent of the economy), energy, adjusting the planet's thermostat and many other matters. These promises guarantee increasingly frenzied lobbying.

If Democrats really wanted to discourage "special interests," they could follow the example of Grover Cleveland, the last Democratic president who understood the federal government as the Founders did—as a government of limited, because enumerated, powers. "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government," wrote James Madison in Federalist Paper 45, "are few and defined." And so in 1887, President Cleveland vetoed the Texas Seed Bill, which appropriated $10,000 to purchase seed grain for drought-stricken farmers. Cleveland said: "I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution."

What about the power to provide for the "general welfare"? Madison had said no. He warned that if those words were construed to permit Congress to do whatever it said served the general welfare, that "would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators."

Concerning that metamorphosis, which was completed long ago, there is not a dime's worth of difference between the parties. "We have a responsibility," said George W. Bush in 2003, "that when somebody hurts, government has got to move." Given a sufficiently elastic notion of what constitutes hurting, compassionate conservatism can be an activism indistinguishable from liberalism.

In today's financial crisis, government is more frenetic than ever, which could be considered odd. "When depression in business comes we begin to be very conservative in our financial affairs," wrote a bemused ex-president in 1930. "We save our money and take no chances in its investment. Yet in our political actions we go in an opposite direction." The nation—well, a wee portion thereof—turns its lonely eyes to you, Calvin Coolidge.

© 2008