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In a NYT article, the results of a focus group of independent American voters are described. These voters did not hate politicians. They simply saw both parties, along with the media and big business, as symptoms of a larger societal ailment. The dominant theme of the focus group’s discussion, in which jobs and taxes came up only in passing, was the larger breakdown of civil society — the disappearance of common courtesy, the relentless stream of data from digital devices, the proliferation of lawsuits and the insidious influence of media on their children. For instance, a man complained about drivers who had grown increasingly hostile and inconsiderate on the roads, which drew nods of assent all around. The members of the focus group believed that politicians in Washington conduct themselves just as childishly and with the same lack of accountability as kids throwing chicken casserole in a school lunchroom.

While the results of this focus group may explain why Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both suffered party losses in their mid-term elections, what is left unexplained is why 98% of members of Congress are re-elected on average.  However, the results can explain why so many U.S. Presidents become unpopular during their term.  The obvious answer is that governing involves making choices that inevitably piss off one side, and these sides add up.  Yet there may be a deeper reason: the Presidents may not understand the nature of the office. Modern presidents win elections by promising to reform Washington, to make it more ennobling and more responsive to Americans overwhelmed by the speed of change. But once they are elected, they find themselves sucked into the capital’s partisan culture, caught up in familiar debates while the people who supported them struggle with a growing sense of chaos. For example, Bill Clinton’s rhetorical emphasis on personal responsibility resonated with many independent voters. However, once in office, Clinton immediately found himself pulled into polarizing debates (gays in the military, “Hillarycare,” and so on). The same thing ultimately happened to George W. Bush, who promised a return to civility and core values and ended up running a White House in which every issue, from wars to welfare, was heavily politicized. We can contrast these examples with the understanding of  earlier Presidents who understood their office as standing for the nation and protecting its system of governance, rather than as being primarily oriented to partisanship while governing. Washington, for example, had both Thomas Jefferson and James Hamilton in his cabinet.  The President presided, acting in what he thought to be the best interests of the United States and their general government. Being partisan in office undercuts the presiding role, and thus the credibility of the President.  The results of the focus group indicate that Americans want a President who resists the temptation to engage in partisan fighting in order to stand for things on which most of us agree, such as that American society should be more civil. The modern presidency is simply too cluttered—too busy on the little things at the expense of looking out for the viability of the common good.  Joe Hagin, George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff, observed there “was much less time [under the second Bush] to catch your breath during the day.” A constant juggling of issues—from wars to the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, often all at the same time, exhausted the White House staff. “There’s only so much bandwidth in the organization,” Hagin avers.  He further asks, “Can any single person fully meet the demands of the 21st century presidency?”  Doris Goodwin claims the growth in the number of things expected of the president has expanded expodentially since WWII. “The President’s inner circle can become stretched by the constant number of things labeled ‘crises’ that land on his desk.” Surely, the Presidency was not designed to micromanage every issue that hits the political radar screen. The proliferation of news sources has increased the pressure on the President to weigh in on more things.  President Obama delivered 57 speeches in October, 2010, alone; he had seven speechwriters at the time. Hagin notes that in the case of George W’s Presidency, struggles “over education and agriculture that had mired [his] first year in office were replaced with just one big expectation: to keep America safe.” Although occasioned by an attack and resulting in an expansion of bureaucracy in national security, this prioritizing to keeping America safe dovetails, I contend, with the nature of the office. Hagin advocates a power-shift from the White House staff to the cabinet agencies, but this would sidestep the possibility that we have been trying to fit the oval office into a square peg.  That is, the modern Presidency may well be thought of in ways contrary to how the office was designed, and thus in ways ill-suited to its nature.  The key may well be to get back to the meaning of “to preside.”  Literally, this means to sit before or in front of (from the Latin). In effect, we have cluttered it at its own expense. On June 2 in the constitutional convention, Ben Franklin referred to the proposed office as sitting “in peaceful Council … merely to preside over our civil concerns, and [to] see that our laws are duly executed.” (Madison, Notes, p. 55) Governeur Morris stated on July 19 that the President should be “a firm guardian of the people and of the public interest.” (Madison, Notes, p. 324) The office of the U.S. President is thus geared to looking over the viability of the whole, leaving the partisanship and legislating to the legislative branch. Partisanship, which is to say, taking sides on virtually every controversy that is taken up by the Congress, detracts from the credibility that the President would need to preside over the whole (as well as to see that the laws passed are executed with due process). Presiding here means standing before. It implies acting in the long-term interests of the whole rather than being partisan and oriented to every issue that comes up on the media’s radar screens.  Looking to the viability of the American economy and the US Government, a President would utilize the veto only when legislation could be expected to destroy the United States. This would involve resisting the slippery slope wherein every Congressional debate invokes the very survival of the union.

In short, a President acting in line with the office would have his or her eye on the big picture rather than getting into arguments with the leaders of the other party over every policy that is being debated in Congress. By doing less, such a President will have done more because what he or she will have done would be more in sync with the office of President. Having resisted immediate political or ideological gain from partisanship, such a President would have more credibility throughout his or her term of office.

Sources:
Daniel Stone, “Hail to the Chiefs,” Newsweek, November 22, 2010, pp. 30-33.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/us/politics/07bai.html
James Madison, Notes in the Federal Convention of 1787. New York: Norton, 1987.

On Decemer 31, 2010, a Russian judge sentenced Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian tycoon who had been imprisoned in 2003 after defying Vladimir Putin, to an additional six years. According to The New York Times, "It was a politically tinged decision that undermined President Dmitri Medvodev." Leonid Goman of the Right Cause Party in Russia agrees. "It was obviously a political, not a judicial, decision." In general terms, "corruption is endemic, government power is often abused and senior politicians are rarely, if ever, held accountable for misdeeds."  The sentence is an indication that Prime Minister Putin was still in control of Russia.  His message: wealthy businessmen should not interfere in Russian politics.  Khodorkovsky had financed opposition political parties; he was at one time the richest person in Russia, having been one of the oligarchs who bought government assets after the fall of the USSR at a fraction of their worth.

This case points to the importance of separating a judiciary from executive and legislative branches of government. The fragile nature of a judiciary's credibility is also in the mix, as it was undoubtedly diminished by the sentence. While doing the bidding of a powerful government offiical may well be in the short term interest of a judge, such a practice contributes to the downfall of a country's judiciary. The president of a country is charged with presiding over its system of government to protect it as a going concern.  Matters such as the credibility of an entire branch of government ought thus to be on a president's radar screen.  In the case of Russia, the problem was that the Prime Minister may have been running the show and tacitly undermining the president by expediently abusing the judiciary while keeping the president from acting to safeguard the long term viability of the government. Politics over leadership; short-term over long-term. All too often in many countries, presidents do not attend to the overall viability of their systems of government, preferring instead to engage in partisan politics. The Russian case illustrates the cost.

Source: Clifford Levy, "Russia Extends Prison Sentence of Tycoon 6 Years, The New York Times, December 31, 2010, p. A1.