>The president’s job - and if someone sufficiently vain and stupid is picked he won’t realise this - is not to wield power, but to draw attention away from it.

True, just makes me wonder who was the last truly elected and acting president (or, rather, chief of government). IMO, it should be JFK, the last guy who did a few things the powers-that-are didn't like (like trying to implement "the buck stops here" or to try to stop the Bay of Pigs excursion). The only evidence that I have to corroborate this is the length of his term.

Don't get me wrong, this is not about US - FRY and then Serbia had a successful line of presidents in charge of really trying to not get involved in their jobs. The only two I may think of as an exception in this decade may be Vaclav Klaus and the dead twin in Poland.