Filed under: Capitalism, Conservatism, Economy, Freedom, Heartwarming, History, Politics, The Constitution | Tags: Calvin Coolidge, Our 30th President, The Great Refrainer
President Obama has made it quite clear that he sees no possibility of reducing government spending. Every penny is necessary. Roger Kimball fortuitously described the president as “fiscally incontinent.”
Amity Shlaes’ magnificent new history of the Great Depression: The Forgotten Man, which all Democrats should have read, and few probably did, has been followed by a splendid biography of our 30th President, Calvin Coolidge., titled simply Coolidge. She calls him “The Great Refrainer.” “I am for economy.” he said. “After that, I am for more economy.”
George Will emphasized that it is the book needed now:
Were Barack Obama, America’s most loquacious president (699 first-term teleprompter speeches), capable of learning from someone with whom he disagrees, he would profit from Amity Shlaes’s new biography of Coolidge, whom she calls “our great refrainer” with an “aptitude for brevity,” as when he said, “Inflation is repudiation.” She says that under his “minimalist” presidency, he “made a virtue of inaction.” As he said, “It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.”
Will added:
He met his wife, the vivacious Grace, after hearing her laughter when she saw through a window him shaving while wearing a hat. Shlaes’s biography would be even more engaging had she included this oft-repeated anecdote:
When President and Mrs. Coolidge were being given simultaneous but separate tours of a chicken farm, Grace asked her guide whether the rooster copulated more than once a day. “Dozens of times,” she was told. “Tell that to the president,” she said. When told, Coolidge asked, “Same hen every time?” When the guide said, “A different one each time,” the president said: “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.”
Read this book, and send a copy to your favorite Republican legislator
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