In a subtle loss of historical context, President’s Day suggests vague notions of presidents to be honored, along with blowout sales at the local shopping mall.

Yet, as Larry Kudlow points out in a Townhall column,

Whatever happened to Washington's Birthday? Or Lincoln's Birthday?

…not all presidents were made the same.

…why can't we celebrate true American greatness? This stuff about all Little Leaguers getting trophies is nonsense. Not every president gets a trophy either.

The third Monday in February came to be known as Presidents Day after Congress in 1968 moved several federal holidays to Mondays, with the fuzzy umbrella of Presidents Day linking the greatest and the least, and those in-between, of our presidents.

Jeff Jacoby, writing in the Boston Globe, and linked on Real Clear Politics, tells the story of the man he calls the “most honest president of them all,” Grover Cleveland.

Cleveland, the son of a Presbyterian minister and born in my hometown, was praised for his honesty during his 1884 run for the presidency. In Jacoby’s words:

But such insistent praise for a candidate’s truthfulness and honor was as remarkable then as it would be now -- voters in the Gilded Age, like voters in the Digital Age, had ample grounds to regard “honest politician” as a contradiction in terms.

As mayor of Buffalo, Cleveland “declared war on a ring of crooked city aldermen who were taking kickbacks on inflated public contracts,” and he later as New York’s governor fought the New York City Tammany Hall political machine:

Unintimidated by Tammany’s clout, Cleveland fired corrupt officials linked to the machine, vetoed pork-barrel bills, and publicly inveighed against the political spoils system.

As Jacoby quotes from a contemporary account, former Civil War General Edward Stuyvesant Bragg said in his seconding speech for the Cleveland nomination, people “love him most of all for the enemies he has made.”

Cleveland went on as president to amass a record number of vetoes for a two-term president:

He was never paralyzed by the fear of saying “no.” In his first term alone, Cleveland vetoed 414 bills, more than double the total of all the presidents who preceded him. Over his eight years in the White House, Cleveland rejected an astonishing 584 bills passed by Congress.

Only 1 percent of his vetoes were overridden — a testament to the power of ethical principle to withstand the political appetite for spending other people’s money.

Some presidents never met a principle they wouldn’t abandon for electoral gain. Cleveland, principled to the bone, was of a different breed.

Electing a Republican president in 2016 who can withstand the political appetite for spending other people’s money will go a long way toward reversing the excesses of the Obama years.