As much as we talk about ideology and competence, our judgment of presidents doesn’t hinge on either of these things in isolation. What matters is the perception — or perhaps the illusion — that one is shaping events, rather than being shaped by them. The modern presidency, like the old “Get Smart” series, is about chaos versus control.

Take, for instance, the cautionary tale of Jimmy Carter, whose presidency, it is often said, was felled by inflation, or maybe Iranian hostage-takers or gas shortages, depending on who is doing the eulogizing. In fact, inflation was probably at the core of Carter’s troubles. Those other misfortunes contributed, too…

And yet a president’s ability to confront chaos seems more central to the office now than it was, say, a half-century ago, when almost no one blamed Dwight Eisenhower for allowing quiz show scandals or Mississippi tornadoes to go unchecked. In part, this is probably a function of our having lost so much faith in the ability of government generally. There is, after all, a short distance between believing that government doesn’t solve our problems to believing that government actually causes them, and a lot of Americans in the last few decades have made the leap. If tar balls are turning up along the Gulf Coast, then some bureaucrat somewhere must be to blame — and why not the bureaucrat-in-chief?

On a deeper level, though, we may be reacting to our own lack of control as workers, providers and parents. For about 40 years, since the onset of industrial decline, Americans have been trying to negotiate an increasingly unstable economic and cultural landscape, the effects of which are clear in any community where factories or farms (or often both) have withered away — substance abuse, failing schools, higher rates of crime and divorce. The chaos is all around us, and what we ask of a president, increasingly, is to somehow use the instruments of government to rein it in.