This week’s tome is The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency, by John Dickerson of CBS News. The book is fairly hefty at around 600 pages, but it is a fascinating look at how the office of the presidency has evolved over time.
Way back at the founding of the nation, the idea of the presidency was to be a co-equal branch of the government and would carry out the policies legislated by the Congress. The Chief Executive was not the Chief Legislator, so there was no expectation that he would come up with and enact his own policies and practices.
That model held for the first 80 years or so of our history. Lincoln expanded the office’s power – suspending habeas corpus was a major one – but after the Civil War, presidents went back to being a co-equal element of the governing system.
FDR’s terms expanded the powers of the presidency but he managed to use the Congress as a partner in getting needed legislation passed.
LBJ enacted all sorts of major programs – Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 which set up the War on Poverty, Elementary and Secondary Education Act which provided federal funding for education, Medicare and Medicaid to name a few. All were created as the result of legislation passed by the Congress. Because he was so good at the politics of governing, LBJ didn’t need to do executive orders.
Moving away from legislating policy. Until George H W Bush, no president had issued more than 10 executive orders. He issued 166; Clinton – 364; George W. Bush – 291; Barack Obama – 276; and Donald Trump – 165 so far. Alert readers will see a pattern here. As time went on and politics got more polarized and fractured, presidents skipped the legislation part and just wrote out administrative orders.
As the power of the presidency grew, so did the size of the office bureaucracy. FDR had to fight to get 6 administrative assistants to do clerical work. Today 418 people work in the White House and 2,000 more work in the Executive Office of the President. FDR had 11 cabinet members; today Trump has 24.
Tidbits from the book:
The president is a media star. JFK created the first celebrity image of a politician. He recognized that television had changed the electoral game.
Political parties are weak. Bernie Sanders wasn’t a Democrat and Donald Trump wasn’t a Republican. Both parties worked against Sanders and Trump. Despite strong party support, Hillary Clinton barely won, and Trump rolled the traditional Republican Party in getting the nomination.
We are a very politically polarized country. In 2016 Trump won only 12 districts represented by Democrats. In 1980, Reagan won 144 Democratic districts.
You can get along. Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill had very different ideas about what was best for the country. Despite that, they knew that conflict did not always mean irrevocable gridlock. After a day of tussling and arguing about some issue, at 6 PM they would sit down and smooth things out over drinks.
End runs are bad. Presidents historically like to act in predictable ways, carefully reviewing their options with trusted staff. That has changed with President Trump who does nothing but end runs. His closest advisers usually have no idea what he is going to do or when he is going to do it.
Trump and Carter were similar in some ways. Dickerson makes the non-intuitive case that Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump had a lot in common as president. Carter and Trump served as their own chief of staff, never a good thing. Each man set himself up as the president who would disrupt the corrupt political system. Each man saw himself as the center of the action who was smart enough not to need staff help. Carter was a one-termer.
Swamp? What swamp? 281 lobbyists have worked in the Trump administration despite his promise not to hire lobbyists.
It could be nastier. In the early 1800s, Thomas Jefferson’s attack dog political consultant wrote a 183-page pamphlet that called President John Adams a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”
Work to do. Dickerson is optimistic that we’ll revitalize our political system, but today’s media landscape is not designed for sober debate about how to move the country in a better direction.
“It is difficult to hear that glorious music of the Union through the distraction of email, Twitter, cable news, and Instagram. Social media thrives on snatching attention, which means that the very medium through which we debate politics is structured to undermine those debates by making us less attentive.”
“We are addicted to distraction. We focus on the glittering controversy of the moment. Instead of measuring candidates for the job, we let the candidates define the job. Campaign discussions center on a candidate’s personality and pie-in-the-sky programs while ignoring whether that candidate’s qualities and experiences align with the requirements of the job.
Let’s close on a hopeful note from President Truman:
“You can’t divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can’t encourage people’s prejudices. You have to appeal to people’s best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.”
I think Harry was right.
