Under some unwritten rule, all modern presidents must pay homage to a like-minded predecessor. A picture is hung in the Oval Office. A bust is placed on the presidential desk. Bill Clinton, you will remember, made his pilgrimage up the Hudson to the Hyde Park estate of Franklin D. Roosevelt. George W. Bush, in the estimation of others (if not himself), is another William McKinley, the president who transformed the GOP and made it dominant until the New Deal almost made it obsolete. Nobody, though, mentions Calvin Coolidge.

Yet Silent Cal, a president of great and warranted self-effacement, is precisely the predecessor Bush should have turned to when, for reasons not yet clear, he decided that Social Security is in crisis and only personal investment accounts could save it. Think again, Cal would have said.

As a talker, Coolidge might not have been much. But as a writer, he made a certain amount of sense. After leaving office, in fact, he wrote a magazine article explaining why he had not sought reelection. "It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion," Coolidge wrote. "They are always surrounded by worshipers. They are constantly, and for the most part sincerely, assured of their greatness. They live in an artificial atmosphere of adulation and exaltation which sooner or later impairs their judgment." There you have it: Social Security reform.

Probably because he was such a rock-ribbed isolationist, Coolidge did not mention how foreign policy can addle the presidential brain. It is in that area, of course, that a president is nearly supreme. It is an odd paradox of our times, but Bush may well have found it easier to take our nation to war for the wrong reasons than to monkey with Social Security for any reason. Saddam Hussein in his jail cell would go nuts trying to figure it out....