I had a thought reading about the Taft and Lincoln anecdotes. There are likely many thousands of people in this country today, and there likely were back in Taft's day and Lincoln's, who, had the cards fallen differently, would have been excellent or competent presidents. Every time has it's own peculiarities, and Taft and Lincoln were men of their time, as John F. Kennedy was a man of his time (TV), and Obama is a man of today (grassroots online organizing). It is easy to say that because TV would preclude Taft today due to his weight, but of course Obama would not have won in Taft's time due to his ethnicity.
Which is all to say, there are always distractions, society is always on the brink of collapse. We should remain vigilant, but technology and the media it enables is ever-changing, and we will always be struggling to adapt.