Winning the Presidency 2008

William J. Crotty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317248903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

The presidential election of 2008 is unique in a history of memorable campaigns for the highest office in the U.S. Never before has an African American captured the nomination of a major political party. Never before have the Republicans nominated a woman for vice president. Never before has a woman come so close to capturing the nomination of a major party. And with at once one of the oldest and youngest candidates contending for the office, never before has the campaign been stretched over such a range of voters and issues. Add to that the multiple threats to the U.S. economy and the longest war the country has ever waged and the electoral context is set. This book is the first to describe and assess these monumental developments with original analysis by an all-star cast of contributors. No other book captures both the range and depth of this one in its early look at the meaning of the most significant election in years-one with unprecedented institutional, constitutional, and policy consequences for all of us.

CHAPTER 1
The Bush Presidency and the 2008 Presidential Election

Context and Imprint

WILLIAM J. CROTTY

We need to be able to read the page before we turn it.

—SENATOR PATRICK J. LEAHY calling for a truth commission to investigate the Bush administration

This chapter focuses on the factors leading up to the 2008 presidential election, those that combined to set the environment in which the presidential race would be fought. It serves as an introduction to the analyses to come in each of the following chapters and provides an overview and context for understanding the 2008 presidential race.

The Bush-Cheney Presidency: Setting an Agenda for the 2008 Race

The actions and policies of the Bush administration established, directly and indirectly, the agenda for the presidential campaign. The accomplishments, failures, and ambitions of the Bush administration were the baseline from which all else flowed. Given the controversial and historically pathbreaking actions of the administration in a number of areas, it constituted a level of significance that is difficult to summarize. The issues generated by the Bush-Cheney years raised questions about the nation’s constitutional design as well as the wars in progress, the relevance of established legal procedures, and, most markedly for the 2008 race, an economy in deep trouble. How such concerns were to be addressed and their impact on the presidential contest and its outcome are questions at the heart of the 2008 presidential contest.

With this as prelude we turn to a discussion of governance—policy, administration, and law during the Bush-Cheney years. The canvas is exceptionally broad—academicians, legal analysts, foreign and domestic policy experts, and the courts will be debating and dealing with the issues raised as well as their budgetary and social consequences and America’s relations with the international community for decades and generations to come. The Bush presidency was in a very real sense a transitional presidency, one that set an agenda for the 2008 campaign and one the incoming Obama administration must address in its many multilayered facets.

The Expansion of Presidential Power

A reconstituted and substantially more powerful presidency may prove to be Bush’s most permanent legacy. The concept of the “imperial presidency” has been with us for generations (Schlesinger 1974). The empowerment of the “unitary presidency” took it to an entirely new level. The idea had been around for decades, advocated by a minority of neoconservatives. Within the Bush administration, Vice President Dick Cheney became its chief architect and most fervent proponent. Under these auspices, Bush was successful in using a succession of immediate rationales (national security needs, the war in Iraq, the fight against terrorism) to institute the unitary presidency at great cost to the separation of powers, checks and balances, and legal constraints and established constitutional processes more generally.

Compared to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the failure of the economy, the institution of the unitary presidency received little to no attention in the 2008 presidential race. In large part, this is because the complexity and subtlety of the issues involved are difficult to encapsulate in catchy slogans or 30-second TV ads directed at a mass audience. The impact of a redesigned presidential office on voters is far from obvious and involves seemingly abstract and remote conceptions of governance, not the stuff of campaigns. Yet the depth of the changes in the powers and operations of the chief executive explains what and why the Bush administration did what it did. The consequences will be hard to deal with by the Obama administration and by future generations of Americans. That is why we will take some time to explore this phenomenon as the key backdrop to the 2008 election.

The concept of the unitary presidency originated prior to Bush’s first election and then was put into operation most expressly in the wake of 9/11. The idea of a unitary president is not based on any constitutional theory of American government. Quite the opposite is the case. It is a direct counter to the Constitution’s emphasis on shared power among three branches, restricted in scope and answerable to the public. It emerged from a neoconservative reading of the lessons of the Vietnam era. It was Cheney’s belief in particular that the Congress and the public had weakened the president in his ability to conduct the war and in the exercise of his role as commander in chief, leading to the loss of Vietnam to the North Vietnamese Communists. Cheney’s belief was an interpretation of the war in Southeast Asia that others disputed, seeing it in the perspective of an assertive nationalism directed against centuries of colonial rule that the United States had put itself in the position of defending. Whatever the contrasting interpretations, Cheney and other neoconservatives who held the same ideological commitment to a strong executive believed a president should be free to do as he thought best in advancing the national interest, a position of a particularly acute necessity in wartime situations.

It would be a presidential office not restricted by the Congress or other government institutions or, as it turned out, by the law or the Constitution (Cole and Dempsey 2006; Lichtblau 2008; Brown, ed. 2003). Declaring the fight against international terrorism a “war” after 9/11 provided the opening for a full-scale implementation of the concept. Beyond the commander in chief position, it would apply to all aspects of the chief executive’s role, leaving the president as the unquestioned and, most significantly, unrestricted force in American politics. Far from an intellectual exercise in semantics or abstractions, the approach had real-world ramifications that shaped what Bush and Cheney would attempt and how they chose to achieve their goals. As intended, it would come to impact all aspects of government and through it American society.

Signaling the implementation of his approach and the power the vice president would come to exercise, Cheney, charged with staffing the bureaucracy after Bush took office, appointed fellow ideologues who held his conception of executive authority throughout the upper reaches of the administration. These appointments provided Cheney with a network of neoconservatives with shared values, most of whom reported back to Cheney and formed the key to his success in directing policy ends.

Outside of those involved in government during the Bush years, support for such an exercise of power was at best rare. What was needed was a reinterpretation of executive power, operationalized as quickly as possible to achieve the desired goals.

The list of consequences growing out of such views of unlimited executive authority was extensive:

• engagement in an "elective" war (Iraq);
• White House authorization of state-sanctioned torture;
• domestic spying on American citizens;
• an enlarged and much empowered national security apparatus, achieved in part with congressional support;
• a redesigned government (with congressional support) including a Department of Homeland Security, the largest restructuring of the federal government since the post-World War II years with a "grant of vast new secrecy powers to the executive branch" (Savage 2007, 110);
• imprisonment at will and denial of legal rights at the discretion of the president;
• a denial of constitutional protections to those accused of terrorist activities;
• indefinite detentions without charges at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere;
• suspension of habeas corpus for those accused of terrorism;
• the creation of ad hoc military tribunals when the administration was forced by the courts to begin trials for detainees, at best even then sporadically used with rules leaving defendants with few rights;
• the illegal (at the time; criminal liability was voided by the Congress in 2008) turning over of personal bank, credit card, telephone, and other information to the government.

Once this reinterpretation of executive power had begun, there appeared to be few if any restrictions on what the government could do or the chief executive could authorize.

The Role of the Vice President

In realizing the unitary president approach, Bush allocated power on an unprecedented scale to his vice president, the “shadow president” as some referred to him. The reasons for this were many. Bush had a broad set of objectives and a definite mind-set, but little experience in the ways to achieve these. He had little tolerance for the minutiae of operating a government and little curiosity as to how the bureaucracy worked or knowledge of policy areas or the options available to achieve his objectives. He did not tolerate dissent from others regarding the positions he held. He refused to consult a variety of potential sources for information on any given subject. As a consequence, Bush did not value staff, advisors, or cabinet members who were independent thinkers or those with established records of expertise that might question or contradict his own views (Suskind 2004).

What he needed was an experienced bureaucratic infighter who shared his policy and ideological commitments and who would move effectively to achieve these, largely removing Bush from the day-to-day administration and government management. He found his man in Cheney.

Cheney in turn was a formidable figure. Experienced in Washington, he had been chief of staff in the Ford White House, secretary of defense in Bush’s father’s administration, and a congressman from Wyoming. Cheney had strong views as to what a president should do, how the government should operate, and who it should reward. And he was, as noted, the primary architect of the conception of the unitary president.

The powers ceded to Cheney by Bush included “war and peace, the economy, national resources, and negotiations with Congress . . . [and] a preeminent role . . . in nominations and appointments.” It all began during the transition period but did not end there. “Cheney’s brief, all in all, encompassed most of the core concerns of any president” (Gellman 2008, 50). No previous vice president could claim anything close to such a portfolio and no one in the administration could begin to challenge such a delegation of authority.

In addition, Cheney’s role was to determine what Bush saw and the options given to him. As New Yorker staff writer and best-selling author Jane Mayer details, “Bush would describe himself as ‘The Decider.’ Cheney had a more sophisticated understanding of how Washington works. Without drawing attention to himself, he often drastically narrowed Bush’s choices. In the White House there are two spigots controlling the president’s choices. One is the paper flow—determining what the president gets to read. The other is access—determining whom he sees and talks with. . . . Cheney had the primary role in controlling these access points to Bush and in addition Cheney almost invariably had the final word with the President” (Mayer 2008, 63).

Given the authority needed, with a compliant president reliant on his judgment and in charge of the management of key administration affairs, Cheney realized that the one thing lacking to fully operationalize the approach was a triggering event of such magnitude that it would eliminate to the extent possible realistic opposition to the imposition of the chief executive’s will. September 11 provided the rationale.

Cheney and Bush had their own explanation for the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Jane Mayer writes:

The lesson for Bush and Cheney was that terrorists had struck at the United States because they saw the country as soft[;] . . . too “materialistic, hedonistic,” and that Bin Laden “didn’t feel threatened” by it. Confronted with a new enemy and their own intelligence failure, he and Cheney turned to some familiar conservative nostrums that had preoccupied the far right wing of the Republican Party since the Watergate era. There was too much international law, too many civil liberties, too many constraints on the President’s war powers, too many rights for defendants, and too many rules against lethal covert actions. There was also too much openness and too much meddling by Congress and the press.

The extent to which Bush and Cheney would go in developing their “Unitary President” belief in relation most specifically initially to the fight against terrorism was extraordinary. In the process both existent law and government authority would be redefined. . . .

Immediately after September 11, 2001, Cheney saw to it that some of the sharpest and best-trained lawyers in the country, working in secret in the White House and the United States Department of Justice, came up with legal justifications for a vast expansion of the government’s power in waging [a] war on terror. . . .

For the first time in its history, the United States sanctioned government officials to physically and psychologically torment U.S.-held captives, making torture the official law of the land in all but name.

The lawyers also authorized other previously illegal practices including the secret capture and indefinite detention of suspects without charges . . . by designating the suspects ‘enemy combatants,’ the President could suspend the ancient writ of habeas corpus that guarantees a person the right to challenge his imprisonment in front of a fair and independent authority. Once in U.S. custody, the President’s lawyers said, these suspects could be held incommunicado, hidden from their families and international monitors . . . and subjected to unending abuse, so long as it didn’t meet the [administration’s] lawyers’ own definition of torture . . . they could be held for the duration of the war against terrorism, a struggle in which victory had never been clearly defined. (Mayer 2008, 7–8)

And,

The legal steps taken by the Bush administration in its war against terrorism were a quantum leap beyond earlier blots on the country’s history and traditions: more significant than John Adams’s Alien and Sedition Acts, than Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, than the imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. . . .

Cheney’s hand could be seen in these actions and in every important aspect of administration policy. It was Cheney for example who originated the phrase “the dark side” and then developed and implemented what this was to mean—“harsh” or “extreme” interrogations, “extraordinary renditions,” spying on American citizens, denial of basic rights, and so on. In all, the Bush Administration’s extralegal counterterrorism program presented the most dramatic, sustained, and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history.

(Mayer 2008, 8)

The vice president’s office became a power unto itself in an administration that valued secrecy and an ends-justifies-means approach to asserting its will. The results of the Cheney-Bush conception of presidential power have served to advance administration objectives but at substantial cost to America’s standing in the world community and to the rule of law.

All of this may have come to influence Cheney’s thinking about his role and that of the office of the vice presidency in governing. The “Cheney model,” as it came to be called, argued that the office of the vice president was a fourth branch of government, not subject to the rules, regulations, and laws applying to either the executive or legislative branch. This idea emerged from the vice president’s dual role in the executive branch as well as in the Congress (though the latter was limited to presiding over the Senate and casting a deciding vote in case of a tie). There was no constitutional basis for such a position. Nonetheless, it was a concept vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin endorsed in the campaign.

Congress and the Separation of Power

There was a conscious and largely successful effort by the administration to diminish the role and presence of the Congress in executing its constitutional responsibilities, turning it into an appendage of the White House. The Bush administration chose to use the Congress and its...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Boxes, Figures, and Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 The Bush Presidency and the 2008 Presidential Election: Context and Imprint
• 2 Electing Obama: The 2008 Presidential Campaign
• 3 When Democracy Works: The 2008 Presidential Nominations
• 4 The Nominating Process: Change, More Change, and Continuity
• 5 The "Invisible Primary" Becomes Visible: The Importance of the 2008 Presidential Nominations, Start to Finish
• 6 The Scope of Participation in the 2008 Presidential Race: Voter Mobilization and Electoral Success
• 7 Clinton and Obama: The Impact of Race and Sex on the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primaries
• 8 E-Politics and the 2008 Presidential Campaign: Has the Internet "Arrived"?
• 9 "Hot" and "Not-So-Hot" Buttons in the 2008 Presidential Election: Surprises from Wasilla to Wall Street
• 10 A Mandate for Change? Decisive Victory in a Time of Crisis
• 11 A Transforming Election: How Barack Obama Changed American Politics
• References
• Index
• About the Contributors
• About the Editor