Sam Tanenhaus: Should we look to the president as savior?
As Americans prepare to choose a new president, it may seem a curious exercise to rehearse the manifest failures of the current one. But either Barack Obama or John McCain is going to be stuck with the burdensome legacy of the Bush years, and the rest of us will be too--possibly for a long time. The war in Iraq is still with us. So are Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan. The Wall Street cataclysm will ramify, locally and globally, for many months, perhaps years. An overwhelming majority of the public--an unprecedented 90 percent or more, according to some polls--thinks that the country is "on the wrong track."
But righting the country is something that no new president can plausibly hope to do. Too much lies outside the scope of the most powerful office in the world, all the promises and visions of the campaign notwithstanding. The truth is that even the most commanding modern presidents have often found themselves not actors but reactors, forced to respond and adapt to unexpected events over which they exert little or no control. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan succeeded, in large part, because they reacted well--in Roosevelt's case, to the approaching crisis of world war; in Reagan's, to the impending demise of the Soviet Union. In contrast, Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush were undone by their insistence on doing too much, getting bogged down in distant wars they had no clear plan how to win and at the same time foundering amid the sudden upsurge of domestic emergencies (racial strife, in Johnson's case; Hurricane Katrina and then the Wall Street implosion, in Bush's). Increasingly in the Bush years, the presidency has looked like an endless and often futile exercise in crisis management.
Yet none of this history has dislodged our national faith in presidential deliverance. After two years of campaign hucksterism, we still remain in thrall to the ideal of the "right man" who might transform failure into success, sorrow into gladness. The reasons for this are as much cultural as political. The presidency is the American institution that personifies our hopes and our beliefs--it lends itself structurally, and in hard times especially, to the illusion of a savior. The great irony is that our Constitution, and the form of government that it established, was founded on the wholly opposite principle. The Framers envisioned the head of state not as a demiurge but as an administrator--an executive, though not on the "business model." The very term "president" implies a custodial office, its purview limited to a single branch of government, in many ways weaker than the other two and rather easily checked by them. The members of the Supreme Court, with their guarantee of lifetime tenure, can limit and even overturn presidential initiatives. And the members of Congress are not only invested with the ability to make the nation's laws, but also answerable less to the president than to a narrow locality of constituents....
Read entire article at New Republic
But righting the country is something that no new president can plausibly hope to do. Too much lies outside the scope of the most powerful office in the world, all the promises and visions of the campaign notwithstanding. The truth is that even the most commanding modern presidents have often found themselves not actors but reactors, forced to respond and adapt to unexpected events over which they exert little or no control. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan succeeded, in large part, because they reacted well--in Roosevelt's case, to the approaching crisis of world war; in Reagan's, to the impending demise of the Soviet Union. In contrast, Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush were undone by their insistence on doing too much, getting bogged down in distant wars they had no clear plan how to win and at the same time foundering amid the sudden upsurge of domestic emergencies (racial strife, in Johnson's case; Hurricane Katrina and then the Wall Street implosion, in Bush's). Increasingly in the Bush years, the presidency has looked like an endless and often futile exercise in crisis management.
Yet none of this history has dislodged our national faith in presidential deliverance. After two years of campaign hucksterism, we still remain in thrall to the ideal of the "right man" who might transform failure into success, sorrow into gladness. The reasons for this are as much cultural as political. The presidency is the American institution that personifies our hopes and our beliefs--it lends itself structurally, and in hard times especially, to the illusion of a savior. The great irony is that our Constitution, and the form of government that it established, was founded on the wholly opposite principle. The Framers envisioned the head of state not as a demiurge but as an administrator--an executive, though not on the "business model." The very term "president" implies a custodial office, its purview limited to a single branch of government, in many ways weaker than the other two and rather easily checked by them. The members of the Supreme Court, with their guarantee of lifetime tenure, can limit and even overturn presidential initiatives. And the members of Congress are not only invested with the ability to make the nation's laws, but also answerable less to the president than to a narrow locality of constituents....