This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 18, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The cult of the presidency is ramped up with Barack Obama and it shows no signs of abating. The hope and change rhetoric has faded away,

but the aggrandizement of the Oval Office has not.

Gene Healy is author of the new Cato ebook, False Idol, Barack Obama Obama and the continuing cult of the presidency released today.

Your first book, The Cult of the presidency, was pretty well timed given what we got. We had eight years of George W Bush and then George W Bush more

broadly I think in a lot of areas with Barack Obama.

How has this idea of the cult of the presidency changed

since your book came out?

Yeah, I think the Obama presidency has been, while bad for the country, has been good for the

sales of my first book. The funny thing when the cult of the presidency came out I

got done writing it around February 2008 at a time when I thought

for sure that Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee, came out that summer, summer 2008 and a lot of people on the right

thought it was a hit piece against George W Bush. Since then some people have

had the impression even though I wrote it before

Obama secured the nomination that it's a hit piece against Barack Obama in a way

they're both right.

Obama really, the Obama presidency really underscored some of the themes of the

first book.

The enormous amount of hope and the enormous expectations Americans place into

the presidency how those expectations have inflated the president's job far beyond

what the framers wanted the president to be, and how that in turn has led to a dangerous concentration of power in the Oval Office.

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