The premise of John F. Kennedy’s book “Profiles in Courage” was that true political courage is found when politicians take a principled stand that turns their assumed friends into sworn enemies.

Kennedy (or his ghostwriter) told the stories of eight senators who had crossed party lines or ignored their own political fortunes in order to do what they thought was the right thing.

I suppose the fact that Kennedy only came up with eight stories for his book out of all the hundreds of senators who had served till that time could be evidence that political courage is relatively rare.

Or maybe it is just easy to overlook because the people who exhibit it are often going against the grain, and are thus not always immediately — if ever — recognized as heroes. Sometimes they are publicly repudiated such as Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Democratic senator who vociferously supported President Bush in the war on terror. Other times they are belittled and trivialized such as the Republican establishment has tried to do with Sarah Palin and Ron Paul.

Often they are forgotten by history altogether.

Such is the case of Bainbridge Colby, the constitutional attorney who was briefly secretary of state under Democrat Woodrow Wilson. If you don’t like Sarah Palin, you will most assuredly despise Bainbridge Colby.

Colby was a vociferous opponent of the Soviet Union, even though Russia had been President Wilson’s ally in World War I, shortly before Colby took office. It was Colby who crafted the statement in which American recognition of the Lenin regime was denied, a policy which continued for 13 years until Franklin Roosevelt took office.

Perhaps that was what turned Colby against FDR. In the 1932 campaign, Colby had gone on a speaking tour supporting Roosevelt against President Herbert Hoover. Colby and Roosevelt were both upper-crust New Yorkers and probably had an affinity for one another. Indeed, Colby had been a supporter of FDR’s cousin Teddy Roosevelt in his failed 1912 campaign to regain the presidency as a Progressive.

But Colby foresaw the dangers of communism when it was still in its infancy, and he must have been doubly incensed when FDR not only recognized the Soviet Union but imported some of its social policies to the United States under the name of the New Deal. He spent the next several years campaigning against Roosevelt nationwide.

In 1934, he told the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, meeting in Portland, Maine, that “the overturn of our institutions, including the Constitution, is the avowed goal” of FDR’s immediate advisers. And in words that will be familiar to those of you who have fought against the indignity of Obamacare, he decried the “imposed regimentation” that will “take the place of American ingenuity and enterprise.”

He complained that “bureaucratic control, even of our going out and coming in, is to weigh down the land once known as the land of the free.” And Colby, like the Tea Party in 2010, argued that the American people must turn to the congressional elections “to save our beloved country from the enemies which are within the gates.”

“Congress is democracy’s arena under the Constitution. The elected representatives of the people are the spokesmen of democracy in America. But when I say Congress, I mean a true Congress, a self-respecting Congress, not a rubber-stamp Congress such as Congress proved itself in the last session.

“When I say representatives of the people, I do not mean the servile and herded majority, incapable of function as representatives, which in the last Congress allowed the executive to originate its measures and then passed them without reading or scrutiny.”

Does this sound familiar? This is the underground stream of liberty that has nurtured our republic for hundreds of years — these are the torrents that spring up from Samuel Adams and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and wash over all patriots still today.

“Read the bill!” Where have we heard that before? “Represent the people!” Where have we heard that before? This is the Tea Party movement rising up 65 years before George W. Bush took office and nearly 75 years before Barack Obama pledged to “fundamentally transform” America.

And when Bainbridge Colby concluded his speech, we can hear more echoes that are still heard today. Just as Barack Obama has his Valerie Jarrett and Bill Ayres and the rest of the Chicago mafia, so too did FDR have his “brain trust” from Eastern academic circles, including Rexford Tugwell, the advocate of agricultural planning who learned a lot of his tradecraft from the Soviet Union. Colby took dead aim at Tugwell, who had just then been promoted to undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“The country takes notice [of this] distinguished promotion,” Colby wryly said, pointing out that it was Tugwell, who declared “ ‘there is revolution in our midst,’ and who out-Russias Russia in his contempt for our popular morality, our public school education, and our religion, which ... he says, ‘clings to ethics long ago outworn.’”

Take heed. A lot of folks are once again saying there is a revolution in our midst — folks like Van Jones and Mark Lloyd and Cass Sunstein and President Obama — and like Tugwell, some of those folks have contempt for our popular morality and our religion.

Indeed, the description of Tugwell is reminiscent of President Obama’s analysis of those poor backwards folks of Pennsylvania who still don’t get it that big government is their friend.

“It’s not surprising then that they get bitter,” Obama told a fund-raising dinner in San Francisco in 2008. “They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Or they cling to the Constitution.

Which may be what worries folks like Paul Krugman of the New York Times and Keith Olbermann, formerly of MSNBC, who miss no opportunity to blast the Tea Party movement as hate-filled and vitriolic. These are educated people who know quite well that the Constitution doesn’t allow big federal government, and that therefore the superstructure of the New Deal and the welfare state is illegal. They encourage us all to return to the state of wakeful sleep that has existed for the past half century, because that is good for their progressive agenda.

Perhaps the last time before now that the American public had been fully engaged in an earnest desire to protect their political liberties was indeed the era of the New Deal, when not just Republicans but Democrats spoke out passionately against government encroachment.

In 1935, Bainbridge Colby said this: “The political party founded by Thomas Jefferson, and elected on a platform which proclaimed the liberties of which I speak, has converted the American Republic into a socialist state and enveloped it in a mesh of tyrannous and bureaucratic rule which has no counterpart save among the peoples of Europe, now sunk under the autocratic sway of unresisted dictatorship.’

“ ‘As a Democrat,’ he went on, ‘I would venture to remind the heady and nonchalant innovators of the moment, who are officiating as instruments of the Democratic Party, and usurping its name, that the government of the United States was established to get rid of arbitrary, discretionary executive power...’

“The Democratic Party cannot nor will it turn from legal regulation to executive regulation, from law to personal power, without rending itself in twain and divorcing from its ranks countless thousands who have a fixed attachment to its historic principles.

“Such Democrats do not intend to abandon the foundations of liberty and just government. Nor will they at the behest of anyone, or under the pressure of a needlessly, and I sometimes think a wantonly, prolonged depression renounce the birthright of democratic government and turn back to the most discredited models of government known to history.” 

No doubt, those who support bigger government and find the foundation of their progressive agenda in the work of Franklin Roosevelt will cringe at the words of Bainbridge Colby. No doubt if asked who was the traitor against his country, FDR or Colby, they would not hesitate to point at the man who defended the Constitution against the New Deal.

But who had more political courage? The president who pandered for votes by dismantling the Constitution and auctioning it off piece by piece to garner funds for his New Deal? Or the loud-mouthed friend of liberty who didn’t just shut up and go along to get along?

My vote is with Bainbridge Colby, a forgotten hero.

The Billings, Mont., Gazette eulogized Colby after his death in 1950 as “an independent liberal” who was “often called a ‘radical’ during the years when he was a conspicuous figure in the political life of the country.”

It is the “independent” label more than the “liberal” label that defines Colby’s political perspective, and just like the “independent conservative” Sarah Palin, it was his independence that made the mainstream media label him as a “radical.” True independents eschew labels and embrace principles, and both Palin and Colby are principled defenders of the U.S. Constitution.

As the Billings Gazette said about Colby:

“He was too intelligent to permit his sincere and constructive liberalism to be used to further the designs of those who would weaken or betray the free institutions of our constitutional government.”

Accordingly, Colby spent most of his career outside of government; so too may Palin. They may never be seen as giant figures of history,  but both of them carry the banner of 1776, and thus cannot be ignored. If they never achieve greatness themselves, they still stand on the shoulders of giants — those immortals who shaped the Constitution of the United States of America.

For true patriots, that is enough.