Federalist/Anti-Federalist

I observed a rather curious remark or question come up online the other day "who between W and O(bama) was closer to the vision of the Founding Fathers?". I assumed the question was phrased as a joke question, but with the fellow involved, I can never quite be sure (he does at times worship those silly conservatives like W, but does accept the blame when he feels they did something wrong. The trouble is usually convincing him they did something wrong).

I don't even see that such a comparison is necessary. Firstly, so far as I can tell, the "Founding Fathers" was hardly a unified body of men with a distinct vision of governance. Almost immediately they splintered into Federalist and Anti-Federalist camps, followed by the founding of the Democratic-Republicans (later known as Democrats), both with very different ideas about the use of federal government bodies as they related to the states as well as to each other branch. Talking about "what the Founding Fathers wanted" is more or less a nonsensical claim (at most times anyway) because it becomes abundantly clear that they themselves did not know what they wanted and argued over it, throwing insult and accusation about in the daily circulating papers with the same wanton abandon as is common today. Politics has changed little. Merely the locus of argumentation and the complexity of the vocabulary being used.

Second, comparing two modern Presidential administrations to a modestly agreeable historical-Constitutional vision of government and the ever-expanding executive in particular would in large part be like asking whether you would like to be run over forward or backward by the same car at the same speed. The differences are so minor as compared to the thing you are ostensibly comparing them to that it makes no difference.