The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

by John Dickerson

The American presidency is in trouble. It is overburdened, misunderstood, an almost impossible job to do.

Successful presidents live in Quadrants One and Two, farm out Quadrant Three to their team, and brace themselves against incursions from Quadrant Four.

The fact that basic presidential qualities have become a partisan matter shows how far off the rails the office has run.

Presidential leadership today is not so much the work of an individual, it is the work of an organization, but we nevertheless obsess over the individual.22

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.

Given the distance between the talents, personal qualities, and skills required to win an election and the talents, personal qualities, and skills required to govern, it’s more like the voters are judging a football game and then putting the winning team in charge of synchronized swimming.

Fitness for office isn’t just a matter of whether a candidate can do the tasks they choose to take on, but also of whether they choose to take on the right tasks.

It is time to reclaim the office of the presidency, separate it from the presidential election campaign, and define the job’s requirements as if we were conducting a job interview, because we are.

Should Congress grant the president new staffers, they would be like children in Victorian England—seen and not heard.

Presidential time also sends a signal. It tells the rest of the administration what is important.

“The biggest shock they face is that eighty-five to ninety percent of the job is all about foreign policy, which is about five percent of the campaign,” says Elaine Kamarck, author of Why Presidents Fail.

As the nation’s moral leader, the president is the one person in the country in a position to provide guidance, meaning, and stability when events make people hungry for consolation. It is a political opportunity and a governing obligation.

“Even if you have a 1920s vision of what the American government should be, you have to believe that in moments of crisis and flux, the role of the president becomes incredibly important,” says Harvard’s Gautam Mukunda. “Having an effective government is like an airbag. When things go really, really wrong you want it to be there.”47

A person who occasionally drinks and drives is not in the same category as a person who irrigates from the keg he has installed in the passenger’s seat for his long-haul trips.

“Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent,” he wrote about the sixteenth president, “but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”