Popular expectations of the presidency were changing, and not just when a storm hit. The bigger the federal government became, the more a president had to act as a warming face of that distant behemoth—and its avatar on TV. “In the ’60s, expectations exploded,” says Sidney Milkis, a political scientist and Miller Center fellow at the University of Virginia. “We’ve become a presidency-obsessed democracy.” A key question, Milkis says, is “whether 300 million people can expect so much from one individual and still consider themselves involved in something that can be described as self-government.”
Sidney Milkis
