Mitch, you wrote of “the extent to which later-day politicians of various stripes tried to tie their policies to those of the founding generation.”

Our current president is a practitioner ad nauseam of this tack, made more nauseating by the utter incompatibility between his politics and the Founders’ ideals:

… how [Obama] has made that approach in the past ? first by referencing the ideals of the Founders, then after having imitated the soaring rhetoric of past American luminaries, changing the focus to make it sound as if the next step for American liberty is to become a socialized nanny state.