In the middle of Hillary Clinton's push for national healthcare in 1993, Bill Clinton cited Thomas Jefferson's concern for health issues as, somehow, apparently indicative of a need for federal management of the nation's healthcare system.

Maybe the most interesting find in my research is that it is clear that Ronald Reagan, among all modern presidents, plainly rediscovered the founders.

In part, it's almost surely a failure of modern education, whether K through 12 or higher education, or really both. Barack Obama went to Ivy League institutions like Columbia, which are reputed to be among America's top colleges. And yet, this very recent product of those American institutions is not publicly articulating an appreciation of the American founding or the founders and their vision for America.

You would hope that the supposed best of American educational institutions would teach its students about America as an institution.

Learning is a good thing, but unless it's tempered by faith and a love of freedom, it can be very dangerous indeed.

It is interesting that liberals don't mind a strong faith at all. When it's their guy with a strong faith - whether it's Jimmy Carter or Woodrow Wilson or Harry Truman - that's just great. FDR inscribing Bibles and sending them to the troops. God bless him! But when a Republican president cites Jesus Christ as his favorite philosopher, as George W. Bush did on a famous occasion, then, well, the liberals cry out that [Tomás de] Torquemada is on the loose and warn gravely of the coming Inquisition.

[Gerald] Ford and [Jimmy] Carter, in fact, were huge disappointments to me. Think about this: They were the presidents around the time of America's historic bicentennial, and yet rarely quoted the founders.