From Gene Healy’s review of F.H. Buckley’s The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America:
Presidents can isolate themselves in a cocoon of sycophants, even putting protesters in “Free-Speech Zones,” where their signs can’t offend the liege. And his role as head of state “tends to make criticism of a president seem like lese-majeste“–as Justice Samuel Alito learned when he dared mouth the words “not true” while Obama pummelled the Court in his 2010 State of the Union.
“Thin-skinned and grandiose” characters do better in presidential regimes, Buckley writes, whereas “delusions of Gaullist grandeur are fatal for Prime Ministers.” In the UK, they have to face the music in person every week. The aforementioned Harold Macmillan, British PM from 1957 to ’63, admitted that the very prospect used to make him physically sick.
The PM’s Question Time is but one facet of the superior executive accountability offered by parliamentary systems, Buckley argues..
It is difficult to imagine Obama (for example) facing Trey Gowdy-esque questioning, on camera, and on an almost daily basis, and surviving with his pomposity – or his policies – intact.
The whole review here.
