Today is Thomas Jeffersons birthday. Number 272, if youre counting. Democrats safely claimed ownership of the founder of their party for the longest time. Nowadays, however, Republicans seem better equipped to do so, regularly isolating quotes that fix on Jeffersons small-government credentials. No less curious and intriguing than Jeffersons malleability in partisan politics is his universality: he continues to possess an aura that none of the other founders can claim. Mikhail Gorbachev proudly acknowledged that his college study of Jefferson influenced his own commitment to reform in the Soviet Union. After the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the president of Bulgaria asserted that Jefferson was being widely quoted in his country. The Dalai Lama made his own pilgrimage to Monticello.

Jefferson may be Americas best-known slaveowner, but everyone still wants a piece of him; all politicians want to salvage something of the man Im dubbing democracys muse. As an ideal, as the beloved blueprint of human governance, democracy cannot do without the historical figure most closely associated with its name. Democracys Musehas had a hold on Democrats and Republicans alike over the past 75 years, from FDR to Obama. Evidence abounds. But will Jefferson continue to matter? And do we even know what a Jeffersonian democracy, as it was construed when Jefferson lived, would look like in our world?

On April 13, 1943, the Revolutionarys 200th birthday, President Roosevelt dedicated the Jefferson Memorial. In fact, FDR had a major hand in bringing the structure to life, down to approval of the dome element and the featured quotes on several sculpted panels. In keeping with New Deal initiatives on behalf of the little man, the most eloquent of the founders was almost everywhere regarded as a big government liberal once Roosevelt adopted him. Indeed, back in 1924, with big-business Republicans in charge of Washington, FDR had mused in print: Is there a Jefferson on the horizon? Either you were a Hamiltonian back then, comfortable with an alliance between the moneyed few and government; or you were a Jeffersonian who thought government should speak for the voiceless majority of citizens.

During World War II, Jefferson helped symbolize the fight against Nazism. In 1942, a U.S. senator from Utah projected the as yet uninvented United Nations in his patriotic book, Thomas Jefferson, World Citizen. Harry Truman called Jefferson my favorite character in history. And in April 1962, at the lavish party he threw at the Executive mansion for forty-nine Nobel Laureates, John F. Kennedy ad libbed: I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge . . . ever gathered at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone. In eulogistic reflection on the life of his friend Robert F. Kennedy, astronaut-turned-Senator John Glenn said of RFK: Hed quite often quote Thomas Jefferson, who said that if our democracy was to work, every man must have his voice heard in some council of government.

It is open to debate, however, whether any Democrat loved Jefferson as much as Ronald Reagan did. It was President Reagan who, more than anyone else, enshrined the third president as the champion of a small, non-intrusive federal government, and who insisted that the most Jeffersonian thing of all was an abhorrence of taxes and of passing on debt. In his First Inaugural Address, in 1801, Jefferson waxed eloquently about a wise and frugal government and called his nation the worlds best hope. In his Second Inaugural Address, in 1985, Reagan channeled that Jefferson: Let history say of us, these were golden yearswhen the American Revolution was reborn, when freedom gained new life, when America reached for her best.

Republicans ever since the Reagan era have relished that kind of assertive patriotism. And what politician wouldnt? When a totalitarian enemy is seen to exist, whether Fascist, Communist, or terrorist, the words (circa 1800) that circle the interior of the Jefferson Memorial are democracys catechism: I HAVE SWORN UPON THE ALTAR OF GOD ETERNAL HOSTILITY TO EVERY FORM OF TYRANNY OVER THE MIND OF MAN.

If Reagan resurrected Jefferson as a small government advocate, the meaningfully named William Jefferson Clinton began his 1993 inaugural journey by replicatingalbeit by busthe third presidents ride from Monticello to Washington, D.C. For Clinton, as for FDR and JFK, Jefferson was an agent of progressive change. On the founders 250th birthday that year, Clinton said: We can honor him best by remembering our own role in governing ourselves and our nation: to changefor it is only in change that we preserve the timeless values for which Thomas Jefferson gave his life over two centuries ago. In the year 1993 alone, President Clinton invoked Jefferson on twenty-five separate public occasions.

Why Jefferson? He is the closest to flesh and blood among the founders. George Washington was kind of a cold fish, and little that he said addressed the human spirit; history, therefore, likes him better in his marble, statuesque incarnation. James Madison is viewed in cerebral terms alone (which is dead wrong, if youll consult my earlier, coauthored book, Madison and Jefferson). John Adams was quite colorful, but not inspirational. Jeffersons nemesis Alexander Hamilton was contentious, conniving, disdained democracy, and had no room for popular protest of any kind. Plus his writing is thick and unpretty and unmemorable. He was a snob of the first order.

Jefferson loved language. He was not an exciting public speaker, but his written words were, and remain, iconic. Americans have been debating the meaning of the phrase life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for two centuries. Did he simply crib from John Locke? No, but he employed a vocabulary that his peers around the political world understood, one that captured Enlightenment values. Happiness had a philosophical ring then, one that only exists in academic circles now. Jeffersons pursuit of happiness connoted individual freedom and the realization of a broad moral community ideas that might even seem contradictory in todays partisan environment.

One thing is for certain, though: Jefferson would be thrown for a loop if he suddenly appeared, messiah-like, and witnessed all that was taking place in his political name. Among his present-day admirers, government haters aggressively quote one hyperbolic outburst from his time as the American minister in Paris: The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. (Timothy McVeigh was wearing his Tree of Liberty T-shirt in 1995, when he blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City with chemical, rather than natural, manure.) As president of the National Rifle Association, actor Charlton Heston quoted Jefferson: No man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.

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Thomas Jeffersons torturous afterlife: How Ronald Reagan and the Tea Party try to steal his legacy