The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

by John Dickerson

Still, Eisenhower believed he must master his impulses. “Anger cannot win,” he wrote in his diary almost a decade before becoming president. “It cannot even think clearly.”

The American presidency is in trouble. It is overburdened, misunderstood, an almost impossible job to do. President Trump is a part of that story, but he also obscures it. One of the problems with the presidency is that it has become such a celebrity office that it is defined by the personality of the occupant. But the problems with the job unfolded before Donald Trump was elected, and the challenges of governing today will confront his successors.

In 1956, the historian and political scientist Clinton Rossiter sketched the scope of the office by its chief burdens. Updating his list with subsequent burdens, the president is expected to be: Commander in Chief, Chief Executive, Chief Diplomat, Chief Legislator, Chief of Party, Chief Voice of the People, First Responder, Chief Priest, and World Leader.

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.

If a leader is judicious and focused, his team will have a clear understanding of what is important. “Priorities are like arms,” the productivity expert Merlin Mann says. “If you have more than two, you are crazy, or you’re lying.”

The first thing a new president notices upon moving into the best address in public housing is that the issues that occupy their time are not the ones they spent so much time talking about in the campaign. “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. “All of the sudden you’re having to make decisions and learn about countries and meet with world leaders and then on top of that there’s the secret world of intelligence.”

“Almost all of them have foreign policy ideas they come with,” says former Secretary of State Rice of presidential candidates. “On day one, ‘I will,’ and on day one, they don’t, because it’s so complicated. They’re almost all frustrated because the world doesn’t accord with the world that they thought they were going to be able to shape. And you really can’t see that from the outside. Then you get in there and the stuff starts flowing.”

“The urgent should not crowd out the important,” says Lisa Monaco, Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser. “But sometimes you don’t get to the important. Your day is spent just trying to prioritize the urgent. Which urgent first?”

Often presidential critics are not weighed down with experience about the matter at hand, which seems to add conviction to their opinions. Many of the most vocal in this camp have never been in a situation like the one about which they are presently so certain. Lincoln called them “newspaper generals” during the Civil War.9 Italians call them umarell, which refers to men of retirement age who pass their time watching construction projects and offering unwanted advice. This is also known as being a “sidewalk superintendent.” In America, this group is sometimes found on Twitter.

Hoover. “Liberty never dies from direct attack. No man ever arises and says ‘Down with Liberty.’ Liberty has died in 14 countries in a single score of years from weakening its safeguards, from demoralization of the moral stamina of the people….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.”

The very idea of handing power to a president was an invitation to abuse. “The first man put at the helm would be a good one,” said Franklin, referring to his friend George Washington, but “Nobody knows what sort may come afterwards. The executive will always be increasing here, as elsewhere, till it ends in a monarchy.”

A PRESIDENT WITH A YEN to reform the inefficient system finds it almost impossible, because the plane in need of repair is the one the president is flying. When Kennedy came into office, the Bay of Pigs operation was nearly under way. On inauguration day, George W. Bush briefed Barack Obama on an active computer hacking of Iranian missile systems known as Operation Olympic Games.13 Legacy items from the previous administration face every top official throughout the organization before they have a chance to hang a picture of their mother on the wall.

When an administration tries to improve, Congress ignores them. “We spent a lot of time talking about putting the ‘management’ back in the Office of Management and Budget,” says Mitch Daniels, who served as its director under George W. Bush. “It was the right thing to do to evaluate every program and rate it whether it was working or not, but Congress in the end ignored it. It didn’t matter if it was working or not. They were funding it whether it was working or not.”40

“Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable,” President Obama explained to the author Michael Lewis. “Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a thirty to forty percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can’t be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.”9 Thomas Jefferson explained this to his secretary of the treasury: “What is good in this case cannot be effected. We have, therefore, only to find out what will be least bad.”10 Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice, points to the discussion over intervention in the Syrian civil war as typical of a presidential-level decision with tough outcomes. Syria’s President Assad had killed almost two hundred thousand people and displaced three million.11, 12 “Do you intervene militarily and try to take out Assad?” she says, reeling off the set of questions. “You can’t really accomplish that from the air, so that’s a ground invasion again in the Middle East. But then if you don’t, you’ve seen what happens. [Assad continues to slaughter his people.] Do you focus on those threats that are directly threatening the United States and our allies like ISIS? Yes, that’s what we did, but then you leave other stuff unattended. I could go on and on, but the point is, that’s an example, one of many, of a case where the sins of omission and com...

The word “chaos” comes up so frequently in interviews about Trump’s process, you’d think it was his Secret Service code name.

Innovation without execution is hallucination, they say in Silicon Valley, modifying the Japanese proverb “Vision without action is a daydream.”

Barack Obama once walked by a television on which a pundit was claiming to explain his moves and said to no one in particular, “Oh, so that’s why I did it?” He couldn’t hide the irritation, which is why Obama usually had the television tuned to ESPN. “One of the things you realize fairly quickly in this job is that there is a character people see out there called Barack Obama. That’s not you,” President Obama told Michael Lewis. “Whether it is good or bad, it is not you.”

In a campaign, candidates have to do one thing: convince voters to pick between two alternatives. All the smaller choices lead to the larger one. If you don’t like my opponent’s views on the Supreme Court, vote for me. If you don’t like the way my opponent talks, vote for me. All action focuses on a single deadline day in early November. The binary choice works as a shield, too. If, as a candidate, you face a problem, you can deflect attention from it by highlighting your opponent’s problems. Campaigns center on constant confrontation. Durable and successful governing, on the other hand, requires building coalitions through conciliation and cooperation. Campaigns offer no partial victories. In governing, durable solutions with lasting impact are partial solutions. Everyone gets something. A president or voters who demand total victories are campaigning, not governing. Victories through unilateral action are brittle. Often they can be undone by the next president.

As we run campaigns ever more devoted to the show, and presidents focus more and more on making the sale, those who succeed are likely to be better at the show and less interested in the painstaking process of governing or building relationships. This leaves the presidency exposed when reality can’t be solved by the magic of the show—whether in the form of Oval Office addresses or a never-ending Twitter stream. Having overemphasized communication at the expense of execution, presidents will find they’ll need their speechwriting teams soon enough though, to try to explain their way out of the fix they find themselves in. But, you can’t talk your way out of a crisis any more than you can talk your way out of gravity.

When we aren’t self-tailoring our experiences, or moving in line with the herd, political strategists keep us in line through narrow casting. They use sophisticated targeting techniques to identify the issues about which we are most passionate or with which we identify most closely. If the issue you care about the most is abortion, gun rights, or the contribution of fossil fuels to climate change, you will be fed a diet of awful and alarming articles on that topic. This is red meat served for one, just the way you like it. If the issue we are most passionate about is kept in the forefront, we are less likely to swerve off and examine other opinions. Or we’ll make our candidate choice based on that issue even if it is not the objectively most important issue a candidate can address in office.

If the stakes are high and personal, we’ll applaud anyone who rallies to our side, and we won’t be fastidious about the tactics they use. When the blood is up we’re not bothered if our gladiator doesn’t hue to the facts or rules. As Tufekci says, “Belonging is stronger than facts.” Or, as the political scientist Brendan Nyhan says, “partisanship is a hell of a drug.”80

Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue in The Enigma of Reason that reasoning exists not to help us gain greater knowledge, but to make us better at producing justifications and arguments to convince others of conclusions we’ve come to by emotion or impulse. In that case, the evolutionary use of reason is to embrace Whataboutism, illogic, and the other tantalizing types of online argumentation.

“To have a good character means at least two things: empathy and self-control,” he wrote in his book On Character, devoted to the topic. “Empathy refers to a willingness to take importantly into account the rights, needs, and feelings of others. Self-control refers to a willingness to take importantly into account the more distant consequences of present actions; to be in short somewhat future oriented rather than wholly present oriented.”