The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

by John Dickerson

identified the resistance in the populace to critical thinking in politics. “It is harder to think than it is to feel,”

In campaigns, we reward candidates for behavior antithetical to the qualities, behaviors, and habits needed to perform well as a president. We encourage impulsive, winner-take-all displays of momentary flash to win a job that requires restraint, deliberation, and cooperation. After competing in an arduous multiyear struggle for their own cause, candidates are expected to switch immediately to an office in which to be successful (and consistent with the founders’ intention) they must sublimate their self-interest and ambition for the good of the country.

“One reason there are so many candidates for the Democratic nomination for President is that there is no longer much certainty about what qualifies a person for the role,”

Also, as anyone who has been on hold with customer service for half an hour knows, the rage can accumulate until it can melt glass.

Also, blaming the president means voters don’t step back and look at larger forces at work during a disaster. “We get what we deserve when we build and design our communities in ways that make us vulnerable to events where there is no credible way to respond,”

Picking the right team and retaining them long enough to build rapport are crucial in a presidency when a crisis hits.

the distance from the last catastrophe creates complacency, and complacency invites the next catastrophe.

When Congress does not address central questions on issues like healthcare, immigration, and economic policy, it lengthens the president’s to-do list. The country almost exclusively turns to the president for political solutions and blames him if he doesn’t act, so presidents scramble to meet those expectations.

If these fires of separation start to die down, media and interest groups that profit from conflagration hasten to slosh more gasoline on the floor.

Americans tell pollsters they want bipartisan cooperation, but those who actually vote don’t value that as much. (Or they define bipartisanship as acquiescence by the other party to what their party believes.)

In the 2018 midterm elections, only around 20 percent of us voted in congressional primaries, which means the most active, passionate, and extreme voters ultimately pick the party candidates.

The rise in partisan media has also diminished the power of party leaders in Congress.

Now members who can chant the best ideological liturgy hold the attention of voters

And so we have got groups here in town, members of the House and Senate here in town who whip people into a frenzy believing they can accomplish things that they know, they know are never going to happen.”

This makes Congress less effective and nastier. The minority party has no incentive to work with the majority for fear of relegating themselves to permanent minority status by adding to the lustre of the party in the majority.

The majority and minority do not work on the most important issues, but on issues that highlight differences with the other party and keep their coalitions intact.

If we examine the fate of wrecked republics throughout the world we find their first symptoms in the weakening of the legislative arm. Subservience in legislative halls is the spot where liberty and political morals commit suicide.”18

“The new tribalism is right up there with the national debt as the biggest threat to our nation.”

White House staffers in both parties describe chaos in the early days of an administration when a new staff of ambitious Type A people are thrown together without a clear organizational chart, like cats in a tumble dryer.

There was also a system in place that could respond with a plan when Bush returned from summer vacation and handed his homeland security adviser Fran Townsend John Berry’s book The Great Influenza, on the 1918 flu, and asked her to create a response should they face that kind of outbreak.

single cabinet department isn’t designed to manage and coordinate with other

agencies who feel they have a stake in the outcome. Left unattended, vanities, envies, devices, and jealousies flourish.

The difference between Kelly and Haley is about more than the etiquette of managing up, though. They are clashing over a traditional tension in the presidency between leadership and management.

The modern president arrives with a mandate to renovate, but faces opposition from the zoning commission—the media, government workers, and Washington wise owls who fashion conventional wisdom.

Conversations with Trump administration cabinet secretaries and senior Trump officials had the aspect of a man chasing the bull in the china closet, trying to catch the vases and plates before they hit the ground.

standards of the journalism declined.

That encouraged reporters to just troll for rumors, which empowered the ego of the White House staff to start leaking rumors.

The term “temperament” is the closest thing that captures a president’s ability to manage the emotional aspects of the job. The notion encompasses the grace under pressure required to make the hardest decisions and the emotional intelligence to read other human beings.

in a job that requires wearing so many different masks and playing so many different roles—sometimes just in an afternoon—and in which there are so many other people creating alternative versions of you, the hardest task for a president may be knowing who “you” is.

“Limiting the failure and achieving some good along the way—that is the best we can expect.” The office was never designed to take on what it has now been asked to tackle, and tinkering isn’t enough. “The inherited presidency is no longer the correct presidency for the twenty-first century.”3

America’s expectations of the presidency are out of alignment.

The problem, however, is that elections are a forum for all of the things that are undermining representative government and our ability to answer those larger questions: the cultural obsession with the self, the fixation on performance, and the interest in immediate action at the expense of long-term planning.

the first step to thinking about the presidency differently is changing the way we think about the office during our presidential campaigns.

an era of presidential politics focused on the momentary appeal of theatrical candidates performing for voters

Hewitt nevertheless worried that the show of politics would come to eclipse everything else. “Great night for John Kennedy,” he said. “And the worst night that ever happened in American politics.”18

the process for electing presidents focused too much on political victory and not enough on what it took to do the job. As a result, mediocre men of average intelligence blundered into a post for which they were unprepared.

“Never trust political power to anyone who seeks political power”

With standards up for grabs, candidates define the job not by the duties it requires, but by the attributes they happen to have.

“The political parties no longer have either intelligible boundaries or enforceable norms, and, as a result, renegade political behavior pays,”

Understanding that campaigning is not governing is one of the first big tests a new president faces.

Campaigns center on constant confrontation. Durable and successful governing, on the other hand, requires building coalitions through conciliation and cooperation.

Wirthlin’s Law—that advocacy for a cause can rally your opposition more than your team—kicked

Presidential rhetoric has to be so strong that the public pressure it creates is specific, and sustained enough to make lawmakers worry about their political future more than they worry about that future when they disappoint the lobbyists who are a crucial source of campaign cash that will help them get reelected.

THE DISCONNECT BETWEEN the attributes we reward in campaigns and the ones actually required in a president is widest when it comes to the quality of restraint.

Restraint in the moment is a cousin of the larger discipline required in the job, which is understanding that not everything is transactional and momentary.

As campaigns promote impulsivity and governing continues to become more like campaigning, there is little structural incentive for restraint. While restraint remains crucial in the job,

The circus surrounding the second debate got everyone’s attention, but in the same way inflight turbulence does, and bringing with it the same queasy feeling of doom.

The way we pick presidents in the digital age undermines the presidency.

Our modern disappointment with presidential campaigns has formed in the gap between our marble-statue view of the office and the low-rent sales routines increasingly employed to win it.

most important thing is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”