Thinking about the Presidency: The Primacy of Power - Hardcover

Howell, William G.; Brent, David Milton

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691155348 ISBN 13: 9780691155340

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2013

Synopsis

All American presidents, past and present, have cared deeply about power--acquiring, protecting, and expanding it. While individual presidents obviously have other concerns, such as shaping policy or building a legacy, the primacy of power considerations--exacerbated by expectations of the presidency and the inadequacy of explicit powers in the Constitution--sets presidents apart from other political actors. Thinking about the Presidency explores presidents' preoccupation with power. Distinguished presidential scholar William Howell looks at the key aspects of executive power--political and constitutional origins, philosophical underpinnings, manifestations in contemporary political life, implications for political reform, and looming influences over the standards to which we hold those individuals elected to America's highest office. Howell shows that an appetite for power may not inform the original motivations of those who seek to become president. Rather, this need is built into the office of the presidency itself--and quickly takes hold of whoever bears the title of Chief Executive. In order to understand the modern presidency, and the degrees to which a president succeeds or fails, the acquisition, protection, and expansion of power in a president's political life must be recognized--in policy tools and legislative strategies, the posture taken before the American public, and the disregard shown to those who would counsel modesty and deference within the White House. Thinking about the Presidency assesses how the search for and defense of presidential powers informs nearly every decision made by the leader of the nation.

About this title

About the Author

William G. Howell is the Sydney Stein Professor in American Politics at the University of Chicago, where he holds appointments in the Harris School of Public Policy, the Department of Political Science, and the College. His books include While Dangers Gather and Power without Persuasion (both Princeton), as well as The Wartime President. David Milton Brent is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at Yale University.

From the Back Cover

"As one who served in the White House, I know something about the demands and dimensions of the modern presidency. In Thinking about the Presidency, William Howell contributes new and valuable insights into how the role has evolved, and what it means for our country."--David Axelrod, former senior advisor to President Barack Obama

"In this brief, well-written book, William Howell ranges widely and astutely as he encourages readers to view the presidency through the prism of its core dimension--power. This volume will be a valuable complement to courses on the presidency."--George C. Edwards III, author of Overreach: Leadership in the Obama Presidency

"Thinking about the Presidency is an important antidote to all the rhetoric, reporting, prognostication, and public discourse that focuses on presidential individuality. Focusing on commonalities across presidents, Howell looks at how the institutional and political setting influences presidential behavior. His message is important."--Jeffrey E. Cohen, Fordham University

"Howell is a formidable scholar. His informative book will be of broad interest to educated people who want to read a scholarly analysis of the presidency, as viewed through the lens of power."--James P. Pfiffner, George Mason University

"This book is a crisp take on a key topic. What makes presidents tick? What makes them succeed? It is a good moment to pare down to fundamentals, and this book will serve as a useful guide to our next chief executive--no matter who that turns out to be."--Andrew Rudalevige, Bowdoin College

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Thinking about the Presidency

The Primacy of Power

By William G. Howell, David Milton Brent

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-15534-0

Contents

Preface....................................................................
ix
Acknowledgments............................................................
xv
Chapter 1. On Being President..............................................
1
Chapter 2. Bearing Witness.................................................
20
Chapter 3. Constitutional Foundations......................................
55
Chapter 4. Contrasting Conceptions of Executive Leadership.................
71
Chapter 5. Misguided Entreaties............................................
92
Chapter 6. What Failure Looks Like.........................................
106
Chapter 7. Limits..........................................................
128
Appendix: Article II of the U.S. Constitution..............................
145
Notes......................................................................
149
Suggested Readings.........................................................
169
Index......................................................................
173

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

On Being President

What do we expect of our president? The answer is at once obviousand unbelievable: everything.

We want our president to stimulate our national economy while protectingour local ones—and we roundly condemn him when either showssigns of weakness. We call on the president to simultaneously liberate thecreative imaginations of private industry and regulate corruption within.We call on the president, as the main steward of the nation's welfare, toresuscitate our housing and car industries while reducing the nationaldebt. We bank on the president, as commander in chief, to wage our warsabroad while remaining attentive to all emergent foreign policy challengesbeyond today's battlefields. We look to the president, as the nation's figurehead,to be among the first on the scene at disasters, to offer solace tothe grieving, to assign meaning to lives lost and ruined. All this we expectpresidents can do. All this we insist they must do.

From the very beginning, the nation's presidents have fielded a longlitany of policy challenges. In his brief "First Annual Message to Congress"(now more popularly called the State of the Union address), GeorgeWashington talked about security, foreign affairs, immigration, innovation,infrastructure, education, and the standardization of weights, measures,and currency. With the possible exception of the last item, all the issuesthat Washington prioritized have remained on the president's agenda.

In the modern era, however, the items on this list of issue areas haveproliferated; hence, it is the modern American presidency to which thearguments of this book speak most directly. Today, presidents must offerpolicy solutions on trade, health care, the environment, research anddevelopment, government transparency and efficiency, energy, and taxation.They must clean our air and water, protect our borders, build ourinfrastructure, promote the health of our elderly, improve the literacyrates of our children, guard against everything from the effects of Midwesterndroughts to the spread of nuclear weapons—all this and more.Fundamentally, presidents are charged with striking a balance betweenthe nation's competing, often contradictory priorities: intervening abroadversus spending at home; cutting taxes versus protecting social programs;keeping Americans secure versus keeping Americans free.

There is hardly any domain of public life, and only a few of privatelife, where the president can comfortably defer to the judgments of others,where he (before long, she) can respond to some plea for assistancewith something akin to "I hear you, but I can't help you," where he caninsist that action on the matter is above his pay grade. It is difficult evento conceive of an aspect of public life wherein the president is given apass—where he can either hesitate before acting or forego action altogetherwithout incurring the media and public's wrath. Harry Truman'sdesk placard that read "the buck stops here" was not a point of vanity. Itwas a gross understatement. All bucks circulating in politics stop with thepresident. And they do so whether the president likes it or not.

Just ask Mike Kelleher, President Obama's director of presidential correspondence,about how much Americans expect from the president. Onehundred thousand e-mails, ten thousand paper letters, three thousandphone calls, and one thousand faxes arrive at his office every day. Andnearly all of these communiqués include pleas for presidential leadershipof one form or another. The president receives petitions from the elderlyto deliver their retirement benefits, appeals from business owners to stemtheir operating costs, and requests from activists of all stripes to attend tothe environment, nuclear proliferation, and foreign affairs. Though moremundane, other requests reveal the extent to which American citizens feelperfectly entitled to burden the president with personal tasks and obligations.They offer recommendations on which books he ought to read;their children pepper him with questions and advice of their own; distressedAmericans seek solutions to their emotional, psychological, andmedical issues; and the moral police deliver benedictions to ban certainvideo games.

The list of obligations put before the president continually evolves, andnearly always in expansionary ways. Presidents now offer leadership inpolicy domains for which the federal government lacks any constitutionalresponsibility. Consider, by way of example, recent presidential efforts toreform public education. The 2002 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act iswidely touted as George W. Bush's signature domestic policy achievement.And with good reason. NCLB is credited (or blamed, depending on one'sview of the matter) with introducing and fortifying accountability provisionsin all public schools, which universally include rigorous standardizedtesting provisions. Not to be outdone, Barack Obama devoted considerableefforts through his "Race to the Top" initiative to reform school governance.Through competitive grants, the president cooked up yet anothermechanism by which the federal government might further intrude intostate and local education policy—in this instance, by advancing merit payfor teachers, charter schools, the development of data systems capable oftracking student performance over time, and the establishment of clearstandards for progress. Moreover, in the last year Obama has unilaterallyoffered waivers for the most onerous provisions of NCLB to those stateswho adopt the president's preferred education policies. That public educationformally falls within the province of state (and by extension local)governments did not dissuade either Bush or Obama from taking up themantle of education reform, searching for (and often inventing) new waysto make their mark.

Yet no matter how much the president says about any particular policyissue, it is never enough to satiate the public's thirst for presidential leadership.Recall, by way of example, President Obama's 2011 State of theUnion address. Even before the big day, the requests poured in from allcorners of political life. As the New York Times chronicled, "Interest groupshave buried the White House with a barrage of unsolicited advice aboutwhat they want him to say." The wish list included stricter gun controllaws, curbs on the bullying of gay American children, protections for existingwelfare programs, and cuts to those very same programs.

Eventually, of course, the president had to decide for himself what tosay. And though his speech ran the better part of an hour, the chatteringclasses still saw fit to castigate the president for neglecting their petcauses. Many criticized Obama for not focusing enough attention on thedeficit. Though Obama did propose measures to tackle the problem, hesupposedly neither offered an adequate number of solutions nor displayedsufficient leadership to ensure their passage. Other observers, meanwhile,criticized the president's lack of specificity, while still others charged thatthe president devoted too much time to the deficit, and not nearly enoughto the related issue of jobs. Some pundits even lamented the president'soversight of certain aspects of education, a topic that he indisputably discussedat length.

With all the demands competing for his attention, it is no surprise thatthe president cannot hope to get by with a light, easy work schedule. Everyminute of a president's day is scheduled, usually months and sometimeseven years in advance. On July 1, 1955, to select an entirely arbitrary day,President Eisenhower went home to his farm in Gettysburg, PA. His timeat home included two and a half hours set aside for entertaining colleaguesfrom the White House and the cabinet and their spouses. Earlierthat morning, the president's day began in Washington with breakfast witha senator, followed by ten other appointments that included discussionson world disarmament and minimum wages, a cabinet meeting, and ameet-and-greet with forty-three boy scouts. Reflecting on this mad-dashdaily schedule, Eisenhower wrote to a confidant, "These days go by attheir accustomed pace, leaving little time for the more pleasurable pursuitsof life ... by the time I get to the office I am in the midst of politics,economics, education, foreign trade, and cotton and tobacco surpluses."

Fast-forward fifty years, and we discover a president's official schedulethat is even more serried. On July 1, 2005, to pick yet another date at random,President George W. Bush held his customary intelligence briefing,received an award from the National Society of the Sons of the AmericanRevolution, oversaw a bilateral meeting with the prime minister of Kuwait,spoke at length with Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor andtwo senators, publicly announced O'Connor's resignation, visited withand subsequently presented Purple Hearts to some soldiers injured in Iraqand Afghanistan, and finally retreated to Camp David.

Presidents must attend not merely to the multitude of issues waiting ontheir desks, but those popping up around the country and world. Hence,in 2010 alone, President Obama took 65 domestic trips out of Washington.His predecessors also showed the same zeal for domestic travel, holdingan average of 649 public events outside the DC area per presidential termbetween 1989 and 2005. Internationally, Obama took 16 trips to 25 countriesin his first two years as president, while previous presidents between1989 and 2005 made dozens of trips abroad each term. Both Clinton andGeorge W. Bush tallied an impressive 75 international trips in their respectivepresidencies.

When presidents travel domestically, they do not just attend town hallmeetings or give policy speeches; when overseas, they do not merelyattend diplomatic meetings. Presidents also make commencementspeeches, attend ceremonies to commemorate the birthdays of prominenthistorical figures, and appear at disaster sites. They visit American troops,offer remarks at nongovernmental conferences, and commemorate historicalevents like the D-Day invasion.

How much of the president's travel is attributable to expectations? Justcontrast the political fallout from George W. Bush's Hurricane Katrina flyoverin 2005 (a political catastrophe that we discuss at length in chapter6) with the warm reception of his Thanksgiving visit to American troopsin Afghanistan in 2003. Perennially, the president is expected to be at theright place at the right time, no matter the distance required for travel orthe competing obligations vying for his attention.

So great are the public's expectations of the president, in fact, that mostAmericans see their entire government in the presidency. They invest inthe president their highest aspirations not just for the federal government,but for the general polity, for their communities and families, and for theirown private lives. Constantly, Americans berate their presidents to saymore, to do more, to be more. While occasionally paying homage to limitedgovernment and constitutionalism (topics that we discuss in greaterlength in chapter 5), Americans, in general—and especially when it mattersmost—beseech their presidents to take charge and lead.

The extraordinary demands placed on presidents have not eludedscholars. Richard Neustadt identifies no less than five sources of demandsfor presidential aid and service: executive officialdom, Congress, his partisans,citizens at large, and from abroad. To succeed, presidents must findways of placating all of these interested parties, no matter how unreasonabletheir individual demands, or how inconsistent their collective claims.

By Clinton Rossiter's account, presidents are men of many "hats," afamiliar but strained metaphor given that presidents cannot ever returnany of their responsibilities to the rack. By constitutional mandate, Rossiterrecognizes, presidents serve as chief of state, chief executive, commanderin chief, chief diplomat, and chief legislator. But their responsibilities donot end there. Presidents also serve as chief of party, voice of the people,protector of the peace, manager of prosperity, and world leader. The burdenof these ten functions, Rossiter insists, is nothing short of "staggering,"even "monstrous."

Neustadt and Rossiter offered these reflections in the mid-twentiethcentury, decades before Arthur Schlesinger decried the emergence of an"imperial presidency"; before George W. Bush initiated and then BarackObama continued a largely clandestine war on terror; and before CharlieSavage sounded the alarm bells over the president's presumptive "takeover"of the national security apparatus. If the scope of presidential functionswas monstrous before, in the last half-century it has grown exponentiallymore fearsome.

Because of the tremendous growth in responsibilities and expectationsput before them, contemporary presidents must demonstrate fluency inpolicy domains that utterly eluded the attention of presidents who heldoffice just a generation or two ago. Today, if any branch of government isinvolved in a policy domain, then so is the president.

An Imperative to Act

In every policy domain, presidents must not only demonstrate involvement,they must act—and they must do so for all to see, visibly, forthrightly,and expediently. Deliberation must not substitute for action. Presidentsare free to think and talk, but they absolutely must do.

To reap the praise of today's public and tomorrow's historians, the twoaudiences who matter most to presidents, executive actions must havethree qualities. First, they must be open for all to see. The public naturallydistrusts the president who works behind the scenes, who recoils frompublic view in order to cavort with advisors and plot a way forward. Thepublic demands a commander in chief, not a manager in chief. And thosepresidents who are perceived, fairly or not, to assume the latter mantle—thinkJimmy Carter or Dwight Eisenhower—cannot expect to keep companywith the greats.

The president's actions also must be decisive and, whenever possible,swift. The less light that shines between an observed challenge and thepresident's response, the better. Equivocation, particularly in the face ofcrisis, will never do. Even when justified, delay reliably invites criticisms(recall the browbeating Barack Obama received in the summer and earlyfall of 2009, when he and his advisors contemplated the merits of expandingthe U.S. military presence in Afghanistan). And nothing more reliablyinduces snickering from the opposing camp than appearing caught offguard (recall the mockery to which George W. Bush was subject when, onSeptember 11, 2001, he did not spring to his feet and start issuing ordersafter an aide whispered in his ear that the nation was under attack). Whilethey need not meet challenges instantaneously, presidents must conveyto the public from the get-go that they have a plan ready to be set intomotion.

Finally, presidential actions must be demonstrative. Facing extraordinaryproblems, presidents must gather their resolve and press onward. Thewords "but for" must not enter their vocabulary, as the excuses that follow,no matter how authentic, almost never resonate. Presidents must eschew adefensive posture. They must never concede the peoples' fate to anythingexcept their own making. Even amidst military catastrophe and economicruin, presidents must insist that the nation's brightest days lie ahead, thatthe industry and imagination of the American people shall not be squandered,that the shining city upon a hill, as Ronald Reagan put it, awaits usstill. Hence, in their finest moments, presidents stand tall and issue calls toarms (as George W. Bush did, through a megaphone no less, atop the rubbleof twin towers), defy international convention in the service of somelarger good (as Barack Obama did when ordering a surgical strike to takeout Osama bin Laden without informing the Pakistani government), andinsist the federal government can act, must act, in the face of utter calamity(as Franklin Roosevelt did twice, first in the aftermath of the GreatDepression and then in response to the imperialistic designs of totalitarianregimes in Europe). Such presidents in such moments appear—how elseto put this?—distinctly presidential.

Through their actions, in short, presidents must appear nothing lessthan masters of their environments. They must orchestrate not only thepolitical universe, but the material world that surrounds them. They mustappear in command. They must lean forward into the headwinds. Andthey must appear utterly unflappable: George Patton, John Wayne, andTiger Woods (circa 2001!) all rolled into one.

Constitutional Limitations

Such is what we expect of our presidents. How, then, are they to meet suchextraordinary demands? What formal powers do they have at their disposal?The answer, especially in the modern era, has been "not enough."To make good on the avalanche of expectations laid before them, particularlysince the early twentieth century, presidents must grapple with aConstitution that does not grant them nearly enough explicit powers. AsClinton Rossiter puts it, the president's "authority over the administrationis in no way equal to his responsibility for its performance."

(Continues...)

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0691155348
• ISBN 13: 9780691155340
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 208