As the most GOP presidential recent debate drew to a close, the moderator asked a mild question: Which former president would you draw inspiration from and why? This is not hardball stuff. Being the last to respond, however, can make it tricky.

Chris Christie had an easy response: Ronald Reagan, on whom he is about to publish a book. Nikki Haley, perhaps greedily, chose two, Washington and Lincoln, almost unimpeachable picks. Even Vivek Ramaswamy, a self-conscious disruptor, named Thomas Jefferson, a figure he has turned to in the past, though he could not resist pointing out Jefferson was only 33 when he drafted the Declaration of Independence.

Ron DeSantis, left till last, could have found it awkward. To whom should he point? Extraordinarily, the Republican Party finds itself in an ideological position in which Reagan is the only uncontroversial choice of the last 150 years. Eisenhower is dangerously centrist, Teddy Roosevelt too wayward, Grant an argument not worth having. But the Florida governor did not hesitate: he chose the 30th president of the United States, Calvin Coolidge.

Coolidge does not get much attention from modern historiography. It doesn’t help that he was preternaturally taciturn: A (possibly apocryphal) story has a woman seated next to Coolidge at a formal dinner confessing that a friend bet her she couldn’t get the president to say more than two words — to which Coolidge responded, “You lose.”

The man known as “Silent Cal” was in many ways as participative in politics as........

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