So, as Radley was kind enough to mention in his intro, I’m hard at work on a book about the presidency. It’s about the growth of presidential power, but more specifically about how Americans’ outsized conception of what the presidency is for have led to an enormous concentration of power in the executive branch. We’ve reached a stage (reached it long ago, actually) where mainstream elites aren’t embarassed to refer to the president as “our Consoler-in-Chief” and to declare that “in many ways, he is our national chaplain.”

The proposal went out under the working title The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Romance with Executive Power. I’m not quite happy with the title, though I’ve gotten some good suggestions for alternatives over at my own blog, and I’ll invite your suggestions, smartass or otherwise, in the comments below. No bites yet on the proposal, though I can assure you, it promises to be a mindbending work of geniuslike staggering, “a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care.” The opening pages of the proposal (minus the chapter summaries) follow below the “fold”:

The Cult of the Presidency
America’s Dangerous Romance with Executive Power
Book Proposal by Gene Healy

Every would-be author needs a short answer to the question “What’s your book about?” As friends and coworkers have asked me, mine has been, “It’s about the presidency. I’m against it.” It’s a flip answer, but it’s not far off.

What I’m against—what the book takes aim at—is the expansive modern vision of the presidency that dominates American political life. Over the course of the 20th century, both political elites and the general public came to view the president as a national father-protector—a larger-than life figure expected to “fix” all large national problems and to unite us all in the service of a higher calling. That vision of the president as national guardian and redeemer suffuses American political discourse—so ubiquitous that it goes unnoticed.

Today, politics is as bitterly partisan as it’s been in three decades, and the Bush presidency is at the center of that fight. But amid all the bitterness, it can be hard to discern that, at bottom, both Left and Right agree on the boundless nature of presidential responsibility. Neither Left nor Right sees the president as the Framers saw him: a constitutionally constrained chief executive charged with faithful execution of the laws. For both camps, it is the president’s job to “grow the economy,” to teach our children well, to rescue Americans from natural disasters, to spread democracy and American ideals abroad, and to heal cultural division and spiritual malaise—whether that takes the form of a “sleeping sickness of the soul,” as Hillary Clinton would have it, or an “if it feels good, do it” ethic, as diagnosed by George W. Bush.

That unconfined conception of presidential responsibility is the source of much of our political woe and some of the gravest threats to our liberties. If the public expects the president to solve all national problems, physical or spiritual, the president will seek—or seize—the power necessary to handle that responsibility. As a result, powers that the Constitution leaves to the states or the people increasingly flow to the center, and increasingly become concentrated in the hands of one person.

What was the point of that Revolution again?

The Bush years have justifiably revived fears of an unconstrained Imperial Presidency that threatens peace and civil liberties. Yet, as The Cult of the Presidency will show, those threats are the price of making the office the focus of our national hopes and dreams.

It may seem strange to charge that American political culture—so often derided for its cynicism—suffers from romanticization of the presidency. There’s no doubt that Americans are less starry-eyed about their presidents than they were 50 years ago, when three quarters of Americans trusted the federal government to do what is right most of the time and over 60 percent told pollsters that the president should take the lead in deciding what the country needs. Post-Watergate America is more likely to distrust any given president, and general respect for the office has declined. At the same time, the inflated expectations people have for the office—what they want from a president—remain as high as ever. A year before September 11, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government released an extensive survey on American political attitudes, summing up the results pithily: “Americans distrust government, but want it to do more.” Nearly six years after the attacks, that tension has, if anything, increased. If F. Scott Fitzgerald was right that the mark of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time, then, intellectually, the American electorate is second to none.

Is the president a tyrant or a saint? A crook or a Lincolnesque Redeemer? All of the above, if pop culture is any indication of the American mind—and what better indicator could there be? Americans’ conflicted views of the presidency play themselves out on small screens and large. The modern Hollywood president president is at turns malevolent, pathetic, and ridiculous… or righteous, heroic, and noble. He molests girl scouts and gins up a phony war to distract the public, as in 1997’s “Wag the Dog.” Or he’s a two-fisted action hero, ready to personally vanquish any foreign threat—as with Harrison Ford’s President James Marshall, who duked it out with Russian terrorists that same year in “Air Force One.” Martin Sheen’s President Josiah Bartlett never got quite as physical, but nothing from the ’50s or ’60s ever embodied the heroic view of the presidency as completely as did NBC’s hit series “The West Wing.” An activist president with a muscular foreign policy, even Bartlett’s scandals were noble, no thong-snapping involved.

Like other Americans, historians prefer a cinematic presidency. Not for them the stolid and competent Tafts and Coolidges: when doling out history’s accolades, presidential scholars reward those who dream big and attempt great things—even when they leave wreckage in their wake. That’s nowhere clearer than in the periodic polls of scholars ranking the presidents, a practice introduced by Arthur Schlesinger Sr. in 1948 and repeated by his son and namesake, the author of 1973’s The Imperial Presidency, a powerful critique of executive aggrandizement and the decline of Congress. It’s ironic, then, that the rankings have tended to heavily favor imperial presidents.

Summing up the results of his 1962 survey, Schlesinger Sr. noted that “Mediocre Presidents believed in negative government, in self-subordination to the legislative power.” And scholars continue to see it that way today. Thus, in Schlesinger Jr.’s 1996 survey, five of the top ten presidents were war leaders, including James K. Polk, whose major distinction is an unconstitutional war of conquest; Woodrow Wilson, who, despite being reelected as a peace candidate, in his second term brought America into a war most historians view as pointless carnage; and Harry S. Truman, who launched our first major undeclared war and was rebuked by the Supreme Court for claiming that his powers as commander in chief allowed him to seize American companies. Coming in dead last is poor Warren G. Harding, who pardoned the dissenters Wilson imprisoned and ushered in an era of prosperous “normalcy.” Whether they’re conservative or liberal, America’s professors prefer presidents who centralize power and start wars. By that perverse metric, maybe George W. Bush will end up doing a lot better in their polls than his current, massive unpopularity would suggest.

Presidents themselves encourage the public to expect salvation from the presidency – or pay for it when they don’t. Our unglamorous 27th president, William Howard Taft—a man never mistaken for an action hero—told Americans that they shouldn’t expect the president to be a world saver. After all, as he put it in a reelection-campaign speech in 1912, the president “cannot create good times… cannot make the rain to fall, the sun to shine, or the crops to grow.” Of course, Taft lost.

Few presidents since then have tried to lower public expectations for the presidency. Political scientists who have tracked the evolution of presidential rhetoric through two centuries note an increasing lack of humility on the part of the president, as well as declining references to the Constitution, which were quite prevalent in the 19th century. We demand extraordinary things from our president, and presidents encourage us to demand even more. But no one person, however powerful, can meet responsibilities so vast. Thus, we should not be surprised that presidential approval ratings have been in a steady 40-year decline. The office, as it has evolved, is set up to fail. Worse, the incentives for the officeholder are to seek still more power as a result of the failure.

George W. Bush will head back to the ranch in 2008, but the power-centralizing dynamic started in the 20th Century and accelerated through his administration will remain, enhanced by the atmosphere of permanent emergency accompanying the war on terror. And future presidents will respond to the public’s demand for protection by enhancing their power, becoming loved and admired, then hated and feared, in the binge-and-purge cycle that characterizes the American public’s dysfunctional relationship with the presidency.

Despite repeated disappointment, many Americans continue to believe in the promise of redemption through presidential politics. In his keynote address to the 2004 Democratic Convention and in his popular book, Senator Obama celebrated that faith, calling it “the Audacity of Hope.” But is “audacity” the right word for the perennial triumph of hope over experience? Is it bold and brave to believe in what cannot be? Or is it something worse?

The Cult of the Presidency argues that the Audacity of Hope leads inexorably to the Arrogance of Power. When looking to the presidency, it’s wiser by far to limit one’s expectations. In an October 2000 “exit interview” with the New Yorker, Bill Clinton allowed that his tenure may have served to “demystify the job” of the presidency—and that may be “not such a bad thing.” “Demystifying the job” was a wonderful euphemism for alternately amusing and dismaying Americans with the image of a president with his trousers around his ankles. But a demystification of the presidency is sorely needed.

That is what CP hopes to provide. A culture derided for cynicism isn’t cynical enough when it comes to the promise of the presidency. Our conception of the office—what it’s for, what it’s capable of—needs to change. Only then will we begin to right the constitutional balance and return the presidency to its proper role….

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 1:27 pm by Gene Healy and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.