Silent Cal the Right-Wing's Pal

Conservative movie critic Michael Medved has a column out on the most underestimated president in American history.

It's not James K. Polk and his war of conquest over Mexico. Not James Buchanan the Confederate sympathizer. And not James Madison the author of the Constitution.

Instead, it's Silent Cal Coolidge whose main claim to greatness according to Medved is that he would not have responded to the Depression with anything like the New Deal.

In nominating Coolidge for most underestimated leader, Medved wants to reclaim an America that was before social security, before government regulation of banks and Wall Street, before federal involvement in constructing highways, school buildings, hospitals and medical schools, before "big government" began protecting the rights of workers, African-Americans, women, and gay people. Medved wants a society that is much more poor, nasty, brutish, and ignorant, than the society that emerged from the New Deal, WWII, and the Great Society.

That's what makes Medved a conservative.