The In-Box Presidency.

• Author: Postrel, Virginia

What's behind the politics of personality

This truly is the first presidential race of the 21st century, a period defined not simply by dates but by states of mind. The 20th century was an age of ideological combat, of political visions clashing on printed pages and bloody battlefields, an age of heroic rhetoric and executive power. The century began in 1914, with the start of World War I, and ended in 1991, with the failed Soviet coup. We have been in an interregnum ever since, slowly adjusting to a changed world.

The 20th century was not just an era of ideological struggle. It was also an age of planning and high-level management, of bureaucracy as an ideal and society as an engineering project. The president was said to "run the country," as though American life were a machine or a corporation. The job of political leaders was, in Theodore Roosevelt's grandiose formula, "to look ahead and plan out the right kind of civilization." The president became the embodiment of national power and identity, an elected king with a nuclear trigger.

The trigger is still there, but the presidency has shrunk. The limits of social engineering and political faith were apparent by the 1970s, a chastening decade whose legacy of cold-eyed realism is too often denounced as cynicism by those over 40. By the early '90s, the end of the Cold War had made "leader of the free world" a less awesome title. Bill Clinton would never have been elected president before 1992, nor would a Cold War public have tolerated his scandals as merely personal.

Now the romantic age of political heroes is over, for a moment at least, and not everyone is pleased. When Time named Albert Einstein "man of the century," Churchill fans were appalled. Without their man, they argued, Western civilization would have fallen to the forces of darkness--forces that would have extinguished Einstein himself. They had a point. But there was wisdom in Time's choice. Einstein is the only 20th-century figure whose name will be a positive touchstone in 500 years. Though they did not realize it, Time's editors were already living in the 21st century, an age in which greatness need not be political.

Of course, neither politics nor public policy has disappeared. Political disputes are an essential aspect of civilization, an inevitable consequence of living together. At a more mundane level, Americans still have presidential campaigns every four years, and the energetic executive that Roosevelt and his...