This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, July 23rd, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Time was that mainstream conservative leaders were extremely distrustful of government power vested largely in the executive branch, even during the Cold War.

Cato Institute Senior Editor Jean Healy says that in recent decades,

self-described conservatives have found themselves fighting to vest even Democratic

presidents with increased, sometimes dramatically increased powers.

Today, Healy discusses how conservatives learn to stop worrying and love the imperial presidency.

When did conservatives begin to view presidential power with much less suspicion than

they had previously? Well it's hard to point to any one precipitating event,

but after Watergate, when a lot of the country

seemed to have a renewed appreciation of the value of constitutional restraints on

presidential power, many prominent conservatives started moving in another

direction. In 1974 you noted that Jeffrey Hart wrote a cover story for National Review called

the presidency shifting conservative perspectives in which he argued that only a

centrist or conservative president willing to use the bully pulpit could check the

liberal media in the fight for American public opinion.

This seems to be gospel within the Bush administration, isn't it?

Yeah, I think so.

And it is an odd idea because originally conservatives

distrusted the use of the bully pulpit by a powerful activist president.

There was, you know, when the it by a powerful activist president.

There was, you know, when the modern conservative movement sort of coalesced around

...