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Essay: Why Presidents Seem So Small

6 minute read
Charles Krauthammer

The U.S. has one of the lowest voter turnouts in the West. Everyone has his reasons: difficult voter-registration procedures, a large and apolitical underclass, a general contentment that makes people not even bother to vote. But there is another explanation: boredom. People are so disappointed with the nominees for President that they see no point in expending great effort to choose among them.

Presidential politics is afflicted with political dwarfism. The Democrats started out the year with seven dwarfs. Now there is one. Republicans say many things about George Bush. That he is a political giant is not one of them.

Presidential dwarfism, however, is not a recent condition. When F.D.R. ran for President in 1932, Walter Lippmann described him as a “highly impressionable person without a firm grasp of public affairs.”

John Kennedy’s stature is retrospectively inflated by his martyrdom. But as a candidate he was seen as a lightweight. “There are men and there are boys,” wrote Murray Kempton in 1960. “Lyndon Johnson, say of him what you will, is a man. Jack Kennedy is a boy.” %

Truman-Dewey, Carter-Ford, Dukakis-Bush. The question is always the same: How does a great country of 250 million get stuck with these guys?

But Roosevelt and Truman and Kennedy were no dwarfs. And only the historians will be able to judge Bush and Dukakis. The better question is: Why is it that candidates always appear not up to the job?

Not because they are in reality so small. But because the office looms so large. Nowhere in the Western world is the head of government more deified than in the U.S. And nowhere else is the office so feeble. Nowhere else, in other words, is the gap between its real and imagined powers so great. This sets up an impossible disparity between expectation and delivery that makes any prospective President look inadequate.

The deification of the American President begins with the Constitution. The President doubles as head of state and is thus endowed with the aura of a king. When Challenger explodes, when Marines come home dead, he is the nation. His person embodies the state, and we give him all the accoutrements: a plane, a fanfare, a mountain retreat. Even the rowdy White House press corps stands up when he enters the room. He symbolizes the power of the state, and it happens that his is the most powerful state on earth. Which makes him, so goes the syllogism, the most powerful man on earth.

The superman myth is reinforced by the fact that he can “push a button” and destroy large swaths of the globe. But that is a wholly unused and wholly unusable power. In reality, the American President is one of the least powerful chief executives in the West. He cannot even pass his own budget, a minimal attribute of governance.

It is true that in the early years, Reagan was able to get things done. But he was extraordinarily popular. Moreover, what was his major legislative achievement? Cutting taxes, a political gimme. When it came to more difficult issues — nuclear modernization, school prayer, Robert Bork — even this most popular of Presidents was stymied. Take foreign policy. The Congress compels adherence to a treaty interpretation (on antiballistic missiles) that the President rejects, prevents deployment of the MX force that the President wants, utterly undoes the Central American policy that the President covets. In most democracies, to achieve that kind of strategic reversal of a President’s agenda, you must replace him by winning an election. In the U.S., you can do it in opposition. To defeat the Trident sub in Britain, you have to throw Mrs. Thatcher out. To defeat the MX or contra policy in the U.S., you need a simple majority in Congress, sometimes in just one chamber.

And yet the President is treated like a king. If the rains don’t come, we may not yet blame the President directly but we certainly hold him responsible for making sure no mortal suffers. If the economy weakens, even early in his term when it could not possibly be his fault, he is to blame. The early ’80s saw a deep recession followed by the breaking of inflation. These were due to a combination of factors, among them Paul Volcker and the oil bust. Yet it is Reagan who got the blame for recession and credit for deflation, despite the fact that his principal contribution to the economy was a huge Keynesian tax cut that caused neither. When Herbert Hoover was blamed for the Depression, he wryly called it a “great compliment to the energies and capacities of one man.”

Harry Truman was blunter. In 1952, Richard Neustadt recounts, Truman was contemplating how frustrated Eisenhower would be should he win the presidency. “He’ll sit here,” said Truman, tapping his desk, “and he’ll say ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Ike — it won’t be a bit like the Army.”

In the Oval Office, the pleasures of command are few. Power in Washington is radically decentralized. Not just because of the 200-year-old separation of powers, but also because in this generation power has diffused additionally with the decline of the party system, the overthrow of seniority in Congress, and the rise of a fourth branch of government, a standing opposition — the media. To these new institutional developments, the Executive has not found an answer.

Yet at the same time, the President’s heightened media presence in a TV age has encouraged even greater deification. He is father, leader, TV star. We demand of him not just policy but vision and hope and uplift, the kind of spiritual role once assigned to popes and emperors.

Hence one failed presidency after the other. Given our expectations, how could it be otherwise? Even Reagan, who was supposed to have rehabilitated the office and broken the string of Johnson-Nixon-Ford-Carter failures, is now limping out of office, irrelevant and ridiculed. The presidency grows while its powers shrink. Is it any wonder that election year is the season of ennui?

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