The Beleaguered Presidency

Aaron Wildavsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351485678
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since the presidency of Lyndon Johnson between 1963 and 1968, there is much reason to believe that the executive office is in trouble. For the past twenty-five years, presidents have been subject to continuing criticism, with dissatisfaction rising, approval rates falling, and demands becoming impossible to meet. Is it that Americans have become an unlucky people whose noble virtues have been undermined by the unfortunate fact that they keep nominating and electing bad presidents? Or is there a systemic reason for a beleaguered presidency in the rise of an egalitarian culture, amplified through the media which is opposed to authority? This book confronts these questions and inquires into their consequences for presidential behavior.In Wildavsky's view, the growth of political discord since the sixties-opposing views on policy matters and social issues ranged along egalitarian versus hierarchical lines-has created a demarcation between a past presidency in which national leaders had a chance to do well and present and future presidents seeking to adapt to their slim chances of leaving office with their reputations intact.Wildavsky demonstrates how various recent presidents have attempted to escape or overcome their beleaguered status by such devices as focusing on only a few issues or shedding responsibility (or blame) to other actors, or treating policy problems as if they were essentially administrative in nature. The book analyzes the wide divergence on public policy among Democratic and Republican activists and assesses the efforts of presidents from Nixon through Bush to cope, at times successfully, often not, with these divisions.The final chapters contrast the ideological presidency of Ronald Reagan with the procedural presidency of George Bush. Both are considered in the context of a governmental system that requires leadership but does not often support it. The final chapter is the first effort to make sense out of George Bush's relative lack of interest in

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“Greatness” Revisited: Evaluating the Performance of American Presidents in Terms of Cultural Dilemmas

With Richard Ellis

What is the mark of a "great" president? Will George Bush be inducted into this select class? If not a great, then how about a near-great president? Or will he be remembered as merely average, or worse still, a failure? Does he deserve a ranking higher or lower than Ronald Reagan? Jimmy Carter? Lyndon Johnson? Dwight Eisenhower? Harry Truman? How does his performance compare with that of James Madison, John Tyler, or Andrew Jackson?

Polling a panel of "experts" has become the accepted way of rendering history's judgment of presidential performance. The presidential greatness game began in earnest in 1948, when Arthur Schlesinger asked fifty-five prominent historians to grade our past presidents: A signified Great; B, Near Great; C, Average; D, Below Average; and E, Failure. Believing there to be wisdom in numbers, subsequent surveys have expanded the panel of experts from 571 in 1970 to 953 in 1983.¹

The practice of evaluating presidential performance by polling historians is a curious one. Characteristically, surveys are conducted to obtain information about the respondent, either in the form of preferences—which candidate or party do you prefer?—or beliefs about the empirical world—how many members are in the House of Representatives? We do not as a rule conduct surveys to gauge the validity of a claim. Why, then, do we do so with respect to presidential performance? The answer is that we lack agreed-upon criteria for making these judgments. If we had accepted criteria, surveys would be superfluous (and subject to corroboration); we would need only to check presidential performance against the established yardsticks.

While these surveys have yielded interesting information about the respondents—Murray and Blessing's poll, for instance, finds that American historians specializing in women's studies hold George Washington in much lower esteem than the sample as a whole—they are not a good tool to evaluate presidential performance. There is no reason to think the mean judgment of 1,000 historians more valid than the estimate of a single scholar specializing in past presidents. Insofar as our aim is to compare the performances of presidents rather than gather information about the pollees, energies should be directed to devising appropriate criteria for evaluating performance.

The original Schlesinger survey completely sidestepped the issue of criteria to be used in appraising presidential performance. The only instructions in the first poll were that "the test in each case is performance in office, omitting anything done before or after."² How one was to gauge the performance in office was left unspecified. In the absence of such criteria, the finding that president X ranked higher than president Y was difficult to interpret.

In Presidential Greatness, Stephen Bailey attempted to remedy this deficiency by identifying criteria by which presidents could be measured. He came up with forty-three yardsticks for measuring presidential greatness: achievement, administrative capacity, appointees, blunders, eloquence, industriousness, scandals, sensitivity, and many more.³ If the Schlesinger survey suffered from a lack of guidelines as to the unit of comparability, the surfeit of tests devised by Bailey left the reader with a commendably broader view of the many facets of the presidency, but equally helpless. By including everything and excluding nothing, we were no better than before at evaluating presidential performance.

Often the standard of presidential greatness employs measures such as amount of legislation passed, activity in office, or number of objectives pursued. But these criteria create a pronounced bias toward activist presidents, as indicated by Schlesinger's conclusion that the 1962 survey showed that average or mediocre presidents "believed in negative government, in self-subordination to the legislative power."⁴ Why should a contemporary activist view—the presidency is best that adds functions to government and/or the presidency—be a standard for scholars?

Though acutely aware of the limitations of presidential ratings as presently conducted, we do not accept the claim that "comparing eminent figures is only a game," or that "each [president] operated within a unique political environment."⁵ By taking aim at the easy target of presidential ratings, attention is deflected away from what we contend is a more significant defect—the tendency to wrap each president and his times in a unique cocoon, thereby reducing the study of the presidency to political biography. The result, as James McGregor Burns correctly pointed out two decades ago, is that "We know everything about the Presidents and nothing about the Presidency."⁶ It would be both ironic and unfortunate for the most well-known effort to compare presidencies to discredit the laudable, indeed essential, goal of making comparisons among administrations. The presidential greatness game remains popular precisely because it holds up the tantalizing prospect of comparing presidencies. Our aim is to do just that.

Resolving Cultural Dilemmas: A Mark of Greatness

All presidents face cultural dilemmas, albeit of different kinds and intensities. Their ability to resolve these dilemmas, we believe, provides a criterion for evaluating their performance. Our hypothesis is that presidencies can be evaluated in terms of dilemmas confronted, evaded, created, or overcome. "Great" presidents are those who provide solutions to culturally induced dilemmas.

By political culture we do not mean national customs. Nor are cultures countries. All those residing in America are not, as we use the term, adherents of the same political culture. Rather, we analyze politics from a perspective of cultural dissensus, i.e., the conflict between cultures or ways of life. We posit the existence of three competing political cultures: hierarchical, individualist, and egalitarian.⁷ The type of leadership preferred and feared, and the kinds of support given to, and demands made upon, leaders vary according to political culture.

The individualist regime is organized to maximize the scope of individual autonomy and thus minimize the need for authority. Individualist regimes perform delicate balancing acts between having leaders when they want them and getting rid of them when they do not. Ideally, they give up only as much autonomy as the immediate engagement requires. Individualists dread most the leader who overstays his welcome. Adherents of individualist regimes know that from the leader flows the hierarchy, and among its multitudinous ranks are found policemen and tax collectors. Not wanting the one, they choose not to have the other any longer than absolutely necessary. Following Groucho Marx, they believe that any leader strong enough to help them is too strong to be trusted.

Egalitarians are dedicated to diminishing differences among people. Would-be egalitarian leaders are thus in trouble before they start, for authority is a prima-facie instance of inequality. Followership, to egalitarians, implies subordination of one person to another. If they push themselves forward, attempting to lead rather than merely convening or facilitating discussion, leaders will be attacked for attempting to lord it over others. Aspiring leaders must therefore dissemble, at once persuasive about the right course to follow and self-effacing, as if they were not leading at all.

Exercising leadership in a hierarchical regime is much easier. Prospective leaders are expected to lead; authority inheres in position. The regime that guides and constrains them gives consistent advice: leadership is necessary and, therefore, should be supported. Fearing disorder, hierarchies shore up authority in every way they can. While sharing in the credit, leaders are generally absolved from blame. Differences in prestige or privilege that accompany positions of authority in a hierarchy are legitimized by the greater sacrifices required of the superior in the name of the whole. Errors are attributed to the deviance of subordinates. Because they give so much backing to leaders, however, hierarchies fear the charismatic leader who, instead of working through the hierarchy and obeying its notions of reciprocal restraints, substitutes himself for the law, thereby breaking down all previous distinctions.

Cultural theory is not a substitute for historical analysis. The instruments of policy emerge in interaction with historical experience. Believing that government was a source of inequality, for instance, egalitarians in the early republic sought to limit the central government's ability to interfere with the natural equality generated by American conditions. After the rise of corporate capitalism and the depression of the 1930s, by contrast, egalitarians came to believe that the national government was a potential source of greater equality. Historical experience had altered their beliefs about the desirability of government action, but their objective—increased equality—remained the same. Similarly, the Federalist alliance of individualism and hierarchy wanted a more active national government to counter egalitarian tendencies; in the modern era, however, their Republican successors have sought a less interventionist government because of a belief that it would engage in redistributive policies.

America has been characterized by relatively strong individualism, weak hierarchy, and waxing and waning egalitarianism. This means exactly what Alexis de Tocqueville and Louis Hartz and Samuel Huntington have said it does: support for authority is relatively weak in America.⁸ With egalitarians rejecting authority, individualists trying to escape from it, and hierarchical forces too weak to impose it, presidents seeking to rely on formal authority alone are in a precarious position. This antiauthority cultural context justifies Richard Neustadt's emphasis on persuasion,⁹ for that is what presidents must do when they cannot rely on the authority inherent in their position.

National political parties, like other complex social organizations, are composed of more than one political culture. The Democratic party under Andrew Jackson, for example, constituted an alliance of individualism and egalitarianism. United by its opposition to hierarchy, this coalition was virulently antiauthority. The Jacksonian alliance was kept together by a belief that minimal government intervention in individual lives would increase equality of condition. Despite their shared distrust of hierarchy, however, the individualist alliance with egalitarianism is problematic, for individualists may find egalitarian opposition to inequality constrains their preference for personal gain through risk taking.

Joint rule by individualism and hierarchy, a cultural combination known in current parlance as "the establishment," is an option open to those individualists who find the alliance with egalitarianism undesirable. Individualists get sufficient order to carry on bidding and bargaining, while hierarchy gains the growth and flexibility it might otherwise lack. Despite these mutual benefits, the establishment alliance, too, suffers from disagreements. If individualists find the egalitarian benchmark of equality of conditions constricting, they may also be frustrated by hierarchy's penchant for rules and regulations.

The following examples are drawn from a larger project that applies this cultural analysis to all presidents from Washington through Lincoln. We have focused on early presidents in part because the passions of yesteryear have cooled sufficiently so that these presidencies are more likely to be treated dispassionately. Were we concerned with evaluating the performance of recent presidents, we fear that disagreement with the policies of these presidents would interfere with the purpose of evaluating and comparing presidencies. To those who doubt this proposition, we remind them of the angry reaction that Carter's low ranking in a recent greatness poll drew from Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, who accused the raters of "insensitive elitism."¹⁰ Speaking ill of John Adams or James Polk, we trust, will not engender the same reaction.

Four Great Presidents: Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln

We propose two primary categories of cultural dilemmas. The first involves the president with some blend of egalitarian and individualist cultural propensities. All Jeffersonian and Jacksonian presidents labored, with varying degrees of success, to square their own and their followers' antiauthority principles with the exercise of executive authority. The second type is the president of hierarchical cultural propensities. While the precise contours of the dilemma varied with the historical situation and configuration of cultures, all hierarchical presidents struggled, in one form or another, to reconcile their, and their party's, hierarchical cultural preferences with the antihierarchical ethos dominant in the society and polity. This conflict animated the presidencies of George Washington, John Adams, and John Quincy Adams, as well as hamstringing Whig leaders such as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, who aspired to the presidency. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson provided solutions to cultural dilemmas of the first type, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to the second type.

George Washington

President-raters agree that George Washington was a great president. But wherein lies Washington's greatness? Stripping away the myths surrounding "the godlike Washington" has left the basis of his preeminence unclear. If, as Marcus Cunliffe concludes, he was "a good man, not a saint; a competent soldier, not a great one; an honest administrator, not a statesman of genius!" what made him "an exceptional figure?"¹¹ How can good, competent, and honest—a characterization that well describes Jimmy Carter—add up to a great president?

The deepest fear of an individualist political culture, we have suggested, is the leader who overstays his welcome. Acutely conscious of this fear, Washington continually reassured his countrymen of his desire to step down immediately after he had completed his assigned task. Before assuming command of the Revolutionary armies, he told the Continental Congress that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. "Greatness" Revisited: Evaluating the Performance of American Presidents in Terms of Cultural Dilemmas
• 2. The Two Presidencies
• 3. The Two Presidencies Thesis Revisited at a Time of Political Dissensus
• 4. The Past and Future Presidency
• 5. Putting the Presidency on Automatic Pilot
• 6. The Prophylactic Presidency
• 7. The Party of Government, the Party of Opposition, and the Party of Balance: An American View of the Consequences of the 1980 Election
• 8. The Turtle Theory, or Why Has the Democratic Party Lost Five Out of the Last Six Presidential Elections, yet Retained Strong Control of the House, Won Majorities in the Senate, and Retained Three-Fifths of State Houses and Most Governorships?
• 9. Richard Nixon, President of the United States
• 10. System Is to Politics as Morality Is to Man: A Sermon on Watergate and the Nixon Presidency
• 11. Jimmy Carter's Theory of Governing
• 12. Reagan as a Political Strategist
• 13. What the Hell is Going On? Reagan, Iran, and the Presidency
• 14. Presidential Succession and Disability: Policy Analysis for Unique Cases
• 15. The Plebiscitary Presidency, or Politics without Intermediaries
• 16. The Human Side of Government
• 17. Making The Process Work: The Procedural Presidency of George Bush
• Index