Archives for the 'Cult of the Presidency' Category
Cynics for Obama
Here’s a bumper-sticker sentiment that appeals to me. Reminds me of one of Lowi’s Laws:
The Law of Succession: Each president contributes to the upgrading of his predecessors.
And its corollary:
This [i.e., making his predecessor look good] is the only certain contribution each president will make.
Sales Pitch
I doubt I’ll have any other speaking opportunities in the near future that involve shouting at the top of my lungs in a crowded bar. (Which is a shame). So I thought I’d reproduce for posterity the tail end of my remarks Thursday evening:
And I also say, buy my book. It’s a book that is many things:
it is an arrow against tyrants, and a barbaric yawp from one man’s couch;
in a campaign season dominated by mindless crap, it is a cleansing high colonic for the mind;
and it, perhaps more than anything, a love song. A love song for the beautiful losers, the Gerald Fords and the Calvin Coolidges, the Tafts and the Harrisons and the Hardings. For the presidents who get no respect from historians and talking heads, because they didn’t do enough, they didn’t blow enough stuff up, they offered no New Deals, no New Frontiers, no Great Societies, no nuthin’. They were presidents who were content to preside over peace and prosperity without screwing it all up. It’s a love song to them. It sings, where have you gone Warren Harding? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Woo ooh ooh. Woo woo woo.
All that for 10 bucks. You can’t go wrong.
Yawp.
Book Signing and Happy Hour
If you’re in DC, swing by the Rocket Bar in Chinatown at 6 PM for the America’s Future Foundation Happy Hour, featuring brief remarks by me, and a book signing. I will be pertinent, but I promise not to be sobering.
Situational Constitutionalism on the Right
Sam Tanenhaus has a sidebar in today’s NYT Week in Review section called “When Reining in an Imperial President Was the Conservatives’ Cause.” “Odd though it may seem, ideological conservatives used to be fierce critics of “executive supremacy,” he writes.
Tanenhaus, a longtime student of conservative intellectual history, is absolutely right. In Cult, I have a section entitled “How Conservatives Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Imperial Presidency,” that covers the ideological shift in detail. For a taste, click here.
The right-wing intellectuals who coalesced around William F. Buckley’s National Review associated powerful presidents with activist liberalism: the New Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society. Therre was a time when you could hear conservative heroes like Barry Goldwater say the sort of things that would get Sean Hannity to call for treason trials today. Goldwater wrote in 1964 that:
Some of the current worship of powerful executives may come from those who admire strength and accomplishment of any sort. Others hail the display of Presidential strength … simply because they approve of the result reached by the use of power. This is nothing less than the totalitarian philosophy that the end justifies the means…. If ever there was a philosophy of government totally at war with that of the Founding Fathers, it is this one.
Heck, it wasn’t too long ago that you could hear John Yoo complain about “The Imperial President Abroad” in the Clinton years.
Half a Cheer for Carter
The obvious answer to John McCain’s recent, lame, anti-Obama soundbite, “Carter’s Second Term,” is that while Carter was no Gerald Ford, at least the man wasn’t as bad as Richard Nixon, the nearest recent historical parallel to George W. Bush. Though even that may be unfair to Nixon, who after all did not start the Vietnam War, and at least made peace with China. Moreover, despite his extravagant theories of executive power, Nixon at least disclaimed the right to lock up American citizens without charges or a trial, signing the Non-Detention Act of 1971. For the story behind that act, which the Bush legal team considers unconstitutional, see this piece [.pdf] by the indispensible Louis Fisher.
That said, the whole episode puts me in mind of Jim Henley’s tentative libertarian case for Jimmy Carter (see here, here, and here). As Jim wrote two years ago:
His administration deregulated trucking and air travel, market-friendly reforms that had huge, beneficial effects on American economy and life. (I’m old enough to remember when flight was for business travelers and the rich.) He appointed Paul Volcker to the Fed and backed his tight-money policies right through an election year.
I’m not convinced, nor is Jim, entirely. He runs through some of Carter’s bad points, like his godawful energy policy and his creation of two additional cabinet departments (one more than Reagan). I’d add the Desert One operation which, to read Mark Bowden’s account, was the craziest military operation approved by a president since the Bay of Pigs. Of course, Jimmuh’s unbearable sanctimony and self-righteousness shouldn’t count, but I’m sure it’s colored my assessment. But the fact that people reflexively rank Carter among the worst of the modern presidents says something about the bias toward presidential activism that warps our public debate.
And the Nina Burleigh Award* Goes to…
…Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle for Friday’s column “Is Obama an Enlightened Being?” (answer: yes.):
Here’s where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.
The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare.
Is this guy having us on? Wikipedia refers to his “deeply satiric social commentary column,” though this one seems sincere. Hat tip: South Bend Seven.
* explanation here.
“The All-Powerful Presidency”
Friend and fellow Hoya Jerry Russello has a nice review of Cult of the Presidency at InsideCatholic.com. Jerry’s the editor of the University Bookman, and the author of the highly praised Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk.
Forked-Tongue Express
Anybody reading McCain’s answers to an executive-power questionairre published in the Boston Globe last December could be excused for thinking that a McCain administration would represent at least a slight departure from the Bush team’s extravagant theories of presidential prerogative. “I don’t think the president has the right to disobey any law,” he said when asked about FISA. Alas, it seems that McCain has lately discovered the wondrous penumbras and emanations that supposedly issue from Article II. Charlie Savage has the goods.
With a Little Help from My Friends, Cont.
Jeremy Lott references the book in his column for the Politico this week: “Obama: Peacenik or Untested Warmonger?”
Shawn Macomber has an interview with me on the American Spectator online, “Narcissists with Nukes,” and my smug-looking mug is the weekend cover.
Presidential Book Recommendations
The NYT Sunday Book Review editors asked a gaggle of writers and intellectuals to recommend books for the candidates (and, by extension, the next president). The only one that stood out to me as particularly useful was a recommendation by Steven Pinker. He offers Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), in which “renowned social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson take a compelling look into how the brain is wired for self-justification. When we make mistakes, we must calm the cognitive dissonance that jars our feelings of self-worth. And so we create fictions that absolve us of responsibility, restoring our belief that we are smart, moral, and right—a belief that often keeps us on a course that is dumb, immoral, and wrong.” And that’s true–everyone else I know is exactly like that. Anyway, I thought I’d join others in blogland and offer my own recommendations.
It would be pompous to recommend my own book (which you’ll buy if you love America even a little bit). So instead I’ll offer a few in the spirit of the Pinker rec. These are books that influenced me a lot in writing my own. And there’s at least some chance they’d help anyone taking office to keep their bearings, assuming that person isn’t delusional, which is probably not a safe assumption because if so why are they running for president.
In any event, the first is Twilight of the Presidency by former LBJ aide George Reedy. Here’s what I wrote about it in my book:
In his 1970 book The Twilight of the Presidency, George Reedy warned that the environment surrounding the chief executive was enough to make even a well-grounded person delusional. Reedy arrived at that conclusion through close observation, having served as Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary from 1964-65 and later as special assistant to the president in 1968. It seems that Reedy did not entirely enjoy the experience. As a boss, Johnson was a “colossal son of a bitch,” oscillating unpredictably between sadistic abuse and kindness. Reedy has left us a painfully honest—and, at times, bitterly funny— depiction of the sociology of power. Former Nixon aide John Dean, who knows something about the darker side of the West Wing environment, calls Twilight “the best book on the presidency.”
As Reedy writes in Twilight:
There is no position in the United States in which the isolation from equals is so complete as the presidency. To be the absolute superior in status to everyone else encountered throughout the day is an effective form of isolation…. In many respects, it is an even more effective form of isolation than physical confinement. The prisoner doing a spell in solitary knows that he is cut off from other human beings. The president, however, is surrounded by large, adoring groups that give him the illusion of human contact when all they really do is act as an echo chamber for his thoughts.
Gerald Ford recognized that Groupthink and the Arrogance of Power were threats to a sanely administered presidency, and required that his top staffers read the book as a cautionary tale. Alas, given that two of his top staffers were Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, it seems not to have worked.
My second recommendation is hard to find: Bruce Buchanan’s The Presidential Experience: What the Office Does to the Man (1978). The psychological analysis in it is dated, long-distance, and not performed by a psychiatrist. But it’s an interesting exploration into/speculation about, the various pathologies that can accompany becoming “the most powerful man in the world” and still finding yourself powerless to meet expectations.
Finally, Theodore J. Lowi’s The Personal President: Power Invested, Promise Unfulfilled (1985). I hadn’t read Lowi’s book until halfway through my own, and discovered that he’d said almost everything that needed to be said about the modern presidency. Luckily he’d said it over two decades ago. Here’s a good summary of Lowi’s thesis:
In his new book Mr. Lowi shrewdly describes the Presidency as an increasingly ”plebiscitary” office. Its occupant uses television and polls to commune directly with the masses, bypassing such mediating institutions as Congress and the political parties. Having given our Presidents big power, we expect big things of them - especially in terms of ‘’service delivery,” which, Mr. Lowi writes, has displaced representation as the test of democracy and legitimacy. Despite the aggrandizement of the executive branch at Congress’s expense, though, there are still ”built-in barriers to presidents’ delivering on their promises.” The result is a dangerous cycle - substantive failure, followed by frantic White House efforts to create false images of success, followed by adventurism abroad, followed by further public disillusion - all of which forces the next President to turn the rhetorical heat up even higher.
Is it really too much to ask the candidates to check out these three books? I don’t think so. After all, our current prez reads around 90 books a year!
Show Me You Love Me
… or at least that you think my book is okay. Join the Facebook fan club for Cult of the Presidency.
I resisted social networking sites for a long time. Part of me still wants to, because grown men shouldn’t be “throwing sheep” at each other or doing anything that involves the verb “twitter,” and because even the sign-up page for Facebook is irksome, using “utility” as a noun. But resistance is useless. You will be assimilated.
Damnit
How did I miss this quote while researching the book? It’s perfect. Remarks to the Maryland General Assembly in Annapolis, Maryland - Pres. Bill Clinton speech - Transcript Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Feb 17, 1997:
And it’s hard when you’re not threatened by a foreign enemy to whip people up to a fever pitch of common, intense, sustained, disciplined endeavor. But that is what we must do, my fellow Americans. That is what we must do.
Let’s not.
“Body Man”
It probably doesn’t detract from Obama’s coolness quotient that his personal assistant is actually named “Reggie Love.” But the NYT feature story on Mr. Love makes you appreciate the absurdity of the American demand that the president has to understand ordinary people’s problems. Remember the flap in the 1992 campaign when it became clear that H.W. had never seen a supermarket scanner before, and didn’t know what household staples cost? If Obama or McCain or Hillary know what a gallon of gas or a gallon of milk costs, it’s because some savvy aide put it in a briefing book for them. How many people do you know, after all, who have a “body man”? No double entendres please.
When Mr. Obama makes calls to woo superdelegates, Mr. Love is at his side with a briefing book, dialing the numbers. When an outdoor speech ended on a windy day in Noblesville, Ind., he appeared behind Mr. Obama as he shook hands on the rope line. “Jacket?” he asked, a coat draped at the ready over his arm.
When Mr. Obama dropped food on his tie while eating in the car between stops, Mr. Love was ready with a Tide pen. He always carries one, along with ballpoint pens, and has turned himself into a walking dispensary of Sharpies, stationery, protein bars, throat lozenges, water, tea, Advil, Tylenol, Purell and emergency Nicorette, not to mention his ever-present iPhone, BlackBerry and Canon Rebel XT digital camera.
The royal treatment starts even before the coronation. I imagine this sort of thing is unavoidable. If you’re crazy enough to spend years constantly gladhanding your way around the campaign trail, mouthing platitudes and shielding your real opinions like nuclear secrets, you can hardly be expected to carry your own Tide pen. But I also imagine that after about six weeks of it, I’d begin to demand Van Halen-style concert riders and believe that nothing less was my due. And upon taking office, it only gets worse.
As I write in the book (buy it, damn you):
When a fellow is constantly surrounded by fawning assistants hanging on his every word—when his golden chariot is a modified 747—it might be hard for him to maintain the sense of perspective the Romans sought to instill in their military heroes.
We mortals—most of us, anyway—don’t need a designated ego-deflater to remind us of our unimportance. From the deli counter to the office, we’re confronted on a daily basis with people who don’t think we’re anything special and don’t particularly care what we think. The social environment in which the president operates is radically different, and it’s easy to appreciate how that environment might distort his judgment.
Perhaps only the fabulously wealthy and the fabulously famous live in a milieu as unnatural as does the modern president. Like the president, rock stars, movie stars, famous athletes, and corporate “Masters of the Universe” spend their lives immersed in adulation and surrounded by the trappings of wealth and power. And in 21st-century America, people who have it all should surely have their own syndrome. Thanks to Dr. Robert B. Millman, professor of psychiatry at Cornell Medical School, now they do: it’s called Acquired Situational Narcissism.
…. Standard psychology teaches that classical narcissism, with its symptoms of self-absorption, delusions of grandeur, and lack of empathy for others, originates in childhood. But as Dr. Millman sees it, “given the right situation, it [can] happen much later.” It can happen, he says, when a person rises to fame, wealth, and power—and spends an extended period of time in atmosphere of artificial deference:
“When a billionaire or a celebrity walks into a room, everyone looks at him. He’s a prince. He has the power to change your life, and everyone is very conscious of that. So they’re drawn to this person. What happens is he gets so used to everyone looking at him that he stops looking back at them.”
Which is understandable, says the doctor: “why would they feel normal when every person in the world who deals with them treats them as if they’re not?”
Think what you will of our therapeutic culture, but whatever the scientific merit of the syndromes it ceaselessly generates, it’s easy enough to imagine one’s own character getting distorted by the conditions Dr. Millman describes. And there is evidence from experimental psychology that dominance warps judgment. In a series of experiments in 2006, scholars from Northwestern, NYU, and Stanford found that “power was associated with a reduced tendency to comprehend how others see the world, how others think about the world, and how others feel about the world.”
Whatever social power celebrities have over those that surround them—and it’s considerable—the environment in which the president exists is even more unnatural. Rock stars and movie idols can order their functionaries around and buy their own planes, but they can’t send the Seventh Fleet through the Taiwan Strait or bomb Syria. And the stakes are much smaller where Russell Crowe, Lindsay Lohan, or Tom Cruise is concerned. If fame and wealth go to a celebrity’s head, he ends up jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch, no harm done to the wider world. If the president loses his grip on things, there’s rather more at stake…
I’m reminded of a charming story about Jerry Ford, our sanest recent president, and (not coincidentally) our most accidental one.
One day Ford’s dog, Liberty, made a mess on the rug in the Oval Office. A Navy steward rushed to clean it up. “I’ll do that,” Ford said. “No man should have to clean up after another man’s dog.”
Then again, it says something that Ford seemed like a great, down-to-earth guy because he didn’t expect other people to pick up after his dog.
George Will on Cult of the Presidency
From this week’s Newsweek:
[R]hetorical—and related—excesses are inherent in the modern presidency. This is so for reasons brilliantly explored in the year’s most pertinent and sobering public affairs book, “The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power,” by Gene Healy of Washington’s libertarian Cato Institute.
Wow.
With a Little Help from My Friends
Radley has a great write-up of Cult of the Presidency over at Fox News.
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