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Watching the O’Reilly Factor on the evening of Obama’s health-care “summit,” I was struck by an exchange by Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingrahams.   Bill stated that Barak Obama had done an adequate job in moderating the discussion.  Laura replied, “He is not a moderator; he is the President of the United States. He has a majority in both houses (of Congress).”  Later in the program, Bill admitted that “moderating is not enough in the long-run because the country wants leadership.”

I believe that Laura’s statement evinces the main problem concerning modern presidents, who want the credibility needed to effectively moderate meetings involving partisans while at the same time the presidents remaining partisans themselves.  To be simplistic, this is a case of wanting both to have the cake and eat it too.  You can’t have both, and in fact the desire (and attempts) to do so are suggestive of a sort of character that might not be sufficiently respect-worthy to preside.  If the US President stands for the US as a whole, the office is oriented to staying above the frey unless the very viability of the Union is at issue.  This is not to be partisan.  In fact, it allows the President to preside over contending parties.  Perhaps Barak Obama would have been able to forge a compromise at his health-care summit had he been neutral concerning Democratic and Republican proposals.  That is to say, he might have been able to have enough sway with Republicans to police the meeting (i.e., of grandstanding speeches) and get both sides to give on particular things.  As it was, any such suggestions were dismissed as motivated by an ulterior motive rooted in the Democratic position.

In terms of Bill’s comment regarding leadership, the sort of leadership that the Union needs (even if we don’t realize it and want less) is that which places the good of the Union first regarding means as well as ends.  For instance, we need the sort of leadership that says “this problem needs to be solved this year.”  We already have partisan leadership from the Congressional (party) leadership.  The Majority and Minority Leaders in the US House and Senate are situated to give us the partisan leadership.  To load both types of leadership on the US President is to get the partisan sort rather than the presiding sort…hence we lose the latter when we could have both.

Take the State of the Union address.  It is supposed to be on the state of the US as a Union.  Yet it has degenerated into a partisan speech.  Justice Antonin Scalia once said he no longer goes to the annual speech because the justices “sit there like bumps on a log” in an otherwise highly partisan atmosphere.  After the 2010 speech, which contained partisan language critical of the court’s decision on corporate political contributions, Justice Roberts said that the justices might not attend the address in the future.

As a model to get back to, we might look back to George Washington, whose prior achievements and sageity of age gave him the stature with which to preside.  Hamilton and Jefferson and their allies in the Congressional leadership were able to take up the mantel of partisan leadership, with the President oriented to presiding over the new system of government and the Union itself.

So, yes, we do want leaderships—meaning partisan and systemic.  The former sort contaminates the latter.  It is for the latter that I believe the US Presidency was invented.  The Electoral College, for instance, was geared to buffering the popular demand for partisan leadership from infecting the presiding-officer role of the Presidency because the electors were to be once-removed from the passions of the people.  In subjecting the office to direct popular election, we have unwittingly lost the check safeguarding the presiding role.  Hence it is no accident that we have had some modern presidents who have been relatively unaccomplished (and younger) prior to their assuming the office.  Barak Obama does not have the prior accomplishments (and age-experience, or wisdom) by which he could be respected as a presider with sufficient credibility to get both parties to compromise in a meeting.  To be sure, he has the energy of relative youth to be zealously partisan, but this condition cuts him off from being able to effectively preside, or moderate, which in turn is particularly valuable when contending parties prefer to do battle than solve a problem that is in the Union’s interest to be solved.

I do wonder: who are the accomplished men and women of such stature that they could effectively preside?  Is a long election campaign the best way to find and test them?  Test them for what?  Does effectivelyness in vote-getting have anything to do with effectiveness in presiding?  This is not to say that accomplished stature would not attract votes.  Perhaps zealousness in vote-getting is a tacit admission that there is a dearth of stature that would naturally attract votes.  How much campaigning did George Washington have to do?  Very little, I would bet.  By virtue of his accomplished stature and self-discipline when it came to partisanship, he was able to effectively preside over the Constitutional Convention of 1786.  Lest this be viewed as a minor function relative to him pushing to get his way in every debate, consider that could be counted a minor miracle that the convention did not blow up or end in a stalemate.  There being a presider with stature, the convention could withstand the infighting.  In fact, Washington was such an effective presider that he could luxuriate on the final day with a request of his own…that the electorate of a US House seat be 20,000 rather than 30,ooo so the body would be that much more democratic (i.e., the representative being that much closer to the people…that much more knowable on an in-person basis).  The problem is that weighing in on virtually every debate has become the modus operendi of every US President, so their influence on each debate (and especially in presiding) has wanned.  Perhaps the occupants represent our culture of gimme, gimme, gimme, NOW! 

Perhaps we are not looking in the right places for accomplished stature that has the internal fortitude to resist such temptation.  Perhaps our means of selecting a President is oriented to the wrong type of person for the job.  In other words, if the job was designed one way and we expect it to operate contrariwise, this could explain why we witness so many presidents fail.  So I was not very surprised in watching two hours of the health-care “summit” that it was basically political theatre.  I was not surprised that Barak Obama had trouble in moderating the discussion towards achieving an agreement.  I was not surprised that the Republicans instinctively distrusted his moderator role.  In such a climate, Barak’s presiding was doomed to failure.  It really is not his fault, I don’t think, because we have virutally remade his office into something that is ill-suited to how it was designed.  Imagine trying to use your car to drive across a river.  Unless you are James Bond 007, your car probably wasn’t designed to travel through water.  To ignore its design and make it do it anyway shows a real lack of smarts and character.  I suspect that this is how the rest of the world sees us, yet we don’t see it in ourselves.  Ultimately, this is the problem.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35790685/ns/politics/