Positive Liberty

With the parties’ candidates determined, and the last two interminable months of the campaign before us, it may be time to offer some perspective on the presidency, lest anyone get their hopes too high about either candidate’s chances creating a paradise here on earth (not that such hopefuleness about the candidates seems to be endemic on this blog.

Presidential scholar Thomas Cronin wrote an excellent short piece called “The Presidency and Its Paradoxes,” (which first appeared inThe Presidency Reappraised, then expanded into a whole book). He lists 10 paradoxes, but in the interest of something vaguely resembling brevity I’ll only address a few here.  These paradoxes help explain why it is nearly impossible for a president to succeed in the job.

2. The Programmatic but Pragmatic Leader Paradox

We want a president with a clear plan, but we also want somebody who is not ideologically inflexible.  Consider this in light of the current election.  Obama is clearly keeping his options open by not committing to any programs, and just speaking generally of some unspecified “change.”  This opens him to charges of being too vague–not programmatic enough.  But few things are more certain that he’d be instantly crucified if he committed to anything that wasn’t broadly popular.  Remember Mondale’s pledge to raise taxes?  That was nicely programmatic, but scared people.  Remember G.H.W. Bush’s pledge to not raise taxes?  It was popular, but left him too little flexibility so that he was crucified when he acted pragmatically.  The difficult ideal is to have a clear general program without too many specifics.  Reagan handled this well.  He clearly projected a program to make America strong against the Soviet Union, but didn’t commit himself too firmly to any specific course of action.

4. The Inspirational, but “Don’t Promise More than You Can Deliver” Paradox

In the book Good to Great, the story is told of a company that always made public projections of profits that were below what they really expected to make.  Then, if they fell below their own expectations, they could still exceed public expectations.  Presidents don’t really have this luxury, because to build support for election they have to promise us the moon. People want to be inspired, so they want a president who promises to deliver paradise.  But no president can achieve all that is promised, and we turn on them for their failure.  I’m not sure McCain faces this problem. Nobody seems to take his promises at all seriously; there’s a tongue-in-cheek quality about everything he says, and his real support seems to be come from those whose major goal is to stop Obama.  It would be hard for McCain to really let us down, because we don’t expect much.  Obama, however, implies the promise of paradise.  “Change,” a peaceful withdrawal from Iraq, thousands of jobs, an America where the politics of negativity don’t exist anymore…Not that everyone believes in his promises, but he has made them, and I think he’s setting up unrealistic expectations that he will surely fail to deliver on.

6. The Taking the Presidency Out of Politics Paradox

Americans want a president who is above politics.  This comes about because of two distinct roles that are combined in the president, Head of State and Chief Executive.  In many countries, the Head of State is not the head of the government.  In England, for example the queen is the Head of State while the prime minister is head of government.  In France, the president takes on the Head of State Role, while leaving the prime minister to head the government.  In those cases, the everyday business of politics does not get in the way of being the representative of the whole country.  Perhaps the most problematic aspect of the executive our founders created is this fusion of conflicting roles.

For example, when President Bush went to the World Trade Center after 9/11, he was playing the role of Head of State.  It is symbolically important for the country’s representative to make these gestures.  But because he is also head of government (Chief Executive), it is impossible for the event to not have political implications.  Opponents can call it a photo opportunity, mere sensationalism, while the president–whether it is his purpose or not–cannot escape the knowledge that making the trip builds political support by polishing his Head of State credentials.

Only two presidents have (relatively) successfully played this role, Washington and Eisenhower.  Each had, before their political career, become a national hero for something that was beyond everyday politics: winning American independence; saving the world from tyranny.  Neither had a political party identity upon taking office.  But no politician who has come up through the ranks of elective office can say that. McCain comes marginally closer than Obama, both because of his war hero status and because he was (formerly, at least) known as a maverick in his own party.  But that’s not enough to stick.  Obama has been trying since his 2004 DNC speech to play the role of the non-partisan, beyond left and right, uniter of America, but it’s not really working.  And that’s too bad–back in ‘04 I had hopes that it would.

7. The Common Man Who Gives a Common Performance Paradox

This one should, I think, be instantly familiar.  In America we despise elites (unless they’re athletic elites).  We distrust anyone who seems to be the uncommon man.  So candidates make great efforts to appear as regular guys.  Carter was just a peanut farmer from Georgia; Reagan was just a downhome folksy kind of guy who liked to chop wood on his ranch; Clinton was the “boy from Hope”; and George W.  is just a bubba.  The one exception here is George H.W. Bush, who couldn’t hide his blue-blood credentials.  As Ann Richards famously joked, “Poor George.  He can’t help it.  He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”  What made the quip so powerful was the unshakeable image that he had been born with a silver spoon.  Liberals have tried mightily to show that W. is in reality the privileged heir to all that wealth, but it never stuck.

Kerry came across as an upscale East Coaster, which didn’t play well in much of the country.  He tried to play regular guy by going hunting, but he looked unnatural and the public didn’t buy it.  The great irony with Obama is that in many ways he really is the common man–not born privileged or rich–and has been trying hard to get that message out; but his speaking style is so elegant and lofty that he doesn’t come across as such.  He is the anti-Bush, and it may yet doom him.  McCain’s verbal mis-steps actually help him maintain common man status despite having more houses than he can keep track of, because he sounds like we do when we say what’s on our mind.

But then we want that common man to give an uncommon performance.  In recent decades, only Reagan (again), has succeeded.  He wasn’t truly the common man by the time he became president, of course.  He was a Hollywood elite.  But he was not born rich and privileged, and he very wisely lived on a “ranch,” rather than an “estate.”  He portrayed the common touch while giving an uncommon–if imperfect–performance by virtue of his acting skills.  And that’s not a wholly comforting thought.

All this is something to keep in mind as we elect and evaluate our next president.  As we look back over the years, there are relatively few presidents who we can call very successful.  Presidential scholars generally pick Truman and Eisenhower as good, and have grudgingly come to judge Reagan as a pretty good president (based on how well he handled the job, not on their support for his policies–most of them are rather liberal), and that’s about it for the past 60 years.  Clinton had his moments, but never put together a real run of successes in the presidency.  Carter probably had the highest integrity of any president in the past half-century, but failed in the job.  H.W. left little mark on the office (and perhaps that ought to be praise), while W has indulged in an unforgiveable aggrandizement of power.  Ford and Kennedy were there too short a time to be meaningful (although Ford has also grown in the scholars’ estimation).  LBJ and Nixon each had one great accomplishment–the Civil Rights and Voting Rights act, and the opening of China, respectively–but ended in shame.

What message does this leave us?  As people, we should recognize that we have unrealistic expectations of presidents, and perhaps learn not to expect so much.  For aspiring presidents, I would say, follow the Reagan model: limit your real goals to no more than three, give lip service to enough others to get the votes, and then focus on those three goals to the near-exclusion of everything else.  Reagan’s primary goals were tax cuts, economic deregulation, and bringing down the Soviet Union.  The first was the simplest, the second had already been begun by Carter, and the third may have occurred anyway–but by pursuing them, and having all of them occur, Reagan stands alone among presidents in the last 48 years in not having failed to meet expectations.

Tags: Presidency

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