Grover Cleveland was very principled as President, but he didn't really do a good job pushing his agenda. At heart, Cleveland was a classic Jeffersonian. He believed in individual initiative and this appealed to the rural core of the Democratic party, which at that time was based in the rural areas of this country. In many ways however, Cleveland was fighting the tides of change. The Industrial Revolution was gaining steam in this country and along with this, workers were beginning to demand their rights. Centralization was inevitable in a society like this and Cleveland didn't respond to the mood of the country. Trusts, huge business enterprises, were beginning to drown out the small entrepreneur. Cleveland, for all his advocacy for the little person, was tied down by a strict constitutional view that the President could not intervene to break up these entities. Democrats tried however to turn the issue on the Republicans, charging that they wanted to stop fair competition by endorsing tariffs that allowed for trusts to grow in the first place, but it didn't work. It wasn't until Theodore Roosevelt that these monopolies would be broken up. However, the big issue of the times was the protective tariff. The Republicans at the time were big on protectionism. Indeed, the Republicans really didn't become free traders until the Reagan years. At the time, the main source of government revenue came from tariffs on imports. The purpose was to protect industry and jobs. It was used as a means to promote nationalistic pride; American work for American laborers was the Republican slogan. They contended that the tariff therefore spread benefits to all the economic classes. Of course, the US didn't want to face competition from the British Empire, which was strong during the late 19th Century. However, tariffs did raise prices on consumer goods, so it ate away at peoples pockets anyways. So that was the fight that Cleveland faced. He did a good job considering that there were no easy solutions to these problems. Those matters would just balance themselves out at the end of the day. In his second term, Cleveland faced a huge depression like had never been seen before. The causes were complex, but it had to do with the balance of gold and silver in currency markets. It was more structural than anything really and it wasn't Clevelands fault. On foreign affairs, he was rather weak. The trend at the time internationally was to exert influence in the great global game. Cleveland didn't want to get involved, but the truth of the matter was that at the time, America needed to spread it's wings a bit. Cleveland didn't want the protective tariff, but in order to exert influence, the country had to make its stake known in places like Hawaii, Cuba, and the South Pacific. Cleveland didn't get that connection between dropping tariffs and exerting influence internationally. So in retrospect, Cleveland, for all his honesty and capability, will be confined to the mediocre middle tier of those who occupied the presidency. He failed to understand his place in time; his successors William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt would end up revolutionizing and strengthening America to heights never seen before.