The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

by John Dickerson

IN THE FOUR-QUADRANT system, the horizontal axis plots an item’s urgency. Is it on fire or merely smoldering? The vertical axis plots an item’s importance. Is the smoke coming from a burning family heirloom or last week’s funny papers?

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

He might have been hiding his true feelings—he often did when it came to Adams—but that, too, is the essence of the presidency: maintaining public roles that promote the health of the republic.

Donald Trump has loosened the bolts on, and dismantled much of, the apparatus, flinging parts onto the White House lawn. To understand what is vital to the office and what is vestigial to the office and to modern governance requires understanding how the presidency has become a job that is out of control.

“The modern presidency has gotten out of control,” says Leon Panetta, who has served as White House chief of staff, secretary of defense, and director of the CIA. “Presidents are caught in a crisis-by-crisis response operation that undermines the ability of any modern president to get a handle” on the office.21

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.

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.

We elect people for that magical job and are predictably disappointed when the wizard’s wand wilts against growing entitlement costs or lack of healthcare coverage or the warming of the climate.

Lyndon Johnson made the point in his earthy way: “The office is kinda like the little country boy found the hoochie-koochie show at the carnival,” he said. “Once he’d paid his dime and got inside the tent, it ain’t exactly as it was advertised.”

Previous experience in Washington is seen as a liability, but it should be considered an asset. When authenticity and campaign performance become the entire metric for judging whether a candidate should be elevated to such a high-stakes job, we’re not simply judging a book by its cover, we’re judging a bomb-defusing manual by its cover.

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.

We should probe candidates for information about how they would do the job, not just about what policies they would promote in it. Every time they boast about their plans, we should seek just as much information about how they would go about achieving them, and

We should also ask those who want the job or want to stay in it to tell a joke. Former defense secretary Robert Gates said a sense of humor may be one of the most important requirement of the presidency.34 Humor in the face of unrelenting pressure demonstrates equanimity, a crucial attribute of presidential success. It can also humanize a president, break the ice in tense situations, and win willingness to listen to a president’s point of view.

If presidents are measured against a more targeted critique of the work they do, they might have a better chance at becoming better presidents. Or voters who understand the demands and limitations of the office might look to other avenues—the private sector or Congress—for solutions to problems that have been heaped on the already overburdened president.

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.”7

Jimmy Carter is the only president since Hoover who did not have an active military engagement.

We're always at war.

Just before calling the president he learned that it was a false alarm. Software simulating a Soviet missile attack “was inexplicably transferred into the regular warning display.”13

Holy shit.

Reagan won, in part, by promising a simple and directed focus. Asked before he was president about how he would deal with Communism and the Soviet Union, he replied: “We win. They lose.”18

Sounds like Trump.

“If we’re going to do better around the world, we need to do better at home.”15

The operation that killed the latter was so detailed, the president was able to reenact it step-by-step for donors weeks later at Mar-a-Lago.18

What a sick fuck.

I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution; and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit….The lesson should be constantly enforced that though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people.

Wow.

Not long after he was elected, Roosevelt declared that “the Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That is the least of it. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.”47

If people who had every reason to be small, vengeful, and unforgiving could, through the power of God’s grace, forgive, perhaps their example could offer a lesson to heal a nation still torn over race and hatred.

“Character in many ways is everything in leadership,” said Eisenhower. “Character is really integrity. When you delegate something to a subordinate, for example, it is absolutely your responsibility, and he must understand this. You as a leader must take complete responsibility for what the subordinate does. I once said, as a sort of wisecrack, that leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.”30

When personal political survival collides with a stewardship duty, he protects the former at the expense of the latter.

His counterpart, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, felt betrayed. She explained to the room that her troops had agreed to the politically painful bailout of the Wall Street banks on the promise that both parties would hold hands and jump off the high dive together.

Stupid fucking move, Pelosi.

When investors know they will get bailed out, they make riskier investments. The bailout implanted a mindset out in the world that would only invite more behavior that required bailouts.37

They hope, despite recent experience with American politics, that cooperative governing might work again.

Their more formal name was the Conservative Democratic Forum: Democrats dedicated to demonstrating that they were not liberals. (The group no longer exists. Turns out the beetle can be eradicated.)

They just became Republicans.

as he educated his colleagues in the win-at-all-costs mindset. One of Gingrich’s key tactics was demonizing Democrats. They weren’t just wrong, Gingrich deemed them “evil” and “enemies of normal Americans.”

But Mr. Hitler has rearranged its function. I quote him: ‘Individual members may advise but never decide; that is the exclusive prerogative of the responsible president for the time being.’ ”

“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.”18

“The doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted by the Convention of 1787, not to promote efficiency,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in 1926, “but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was not to avoid friction, but, by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribution of the governmental powers among three departments, to save the people from autocracy.”29 If future generations could maintain the system, that would protect the values encased in it.

Nowadays, instead of looking to bolster Congress’s powers and expect less from the president, we remain in thrall to the presidential habit.

Denied the chance to make up a new rule, Griffin and a group of Republican senators threatened to filibuster President Johnson’s picks, and GOP nominee Richard Nixon spoke out from the campaign trail, claiming that while he wasn’t going to weigh in on who Johnson had selected, he did not support blocking the president’s choice by filibuster.

You know you're wrong when even NIXON is on the right side of an issue.

“If you are cast away on a desert island with only a screwdriver, a hatchet, and a chisel to make a boat with, why, go make the best one you can,” advised Teddy Roosevelt. “It would be better if you had a saw, but you haven’t. So with men.”

When a president picks a congressional liaison, for example, you can tell whether the presidency will be committed to finding bipartisan solutions or to endless rounds of partisan swordplay. If the liaison, whose job is to help midwife legislation and tend relationships, is a congressional staffer with a good reputation with both parties and who understands how the system works, then it is an indication the president has put a premium on bipartisan, durable solutions. If the president picks a liaison who likes to flash his serpent teeth, then the president is planning to dominate the other party, or to clash a lot in the attempt.

“If they feel like they are a part of a team and you are working with them and listening to them, [even if] they don’t always prevail, [they feel] that you are at least giving them the benefit of being a part of the team, [and] that sense of team is important,”

Being a CEO and being a president are two very different tasks, and any CEO who wants the job of being president who doesn’t recognize the difference immediately should probably be disqualified.

To be successful, a president must do more than just disrupt the regular order of things. That may be what their voters are satisfied with, but greatness lies in replacing it with a better alternative.

Trump has called Jimmy Carter “a terrible president,” but his management style became a hypercharged version of it.66 “He has turned a presidency-centered government into an Oval Office–centered government,” says Max Stier.67

Donald Trump has transformed the office of the presidency into an office of one, whipsawed by the dictates of the chief executive even if those dictates are at odds with his own policies or verifiable fact.

“Even the most capable modern presidents are doomed to fail,” he writes. “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.”

“Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible,” he said. “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot.”9 It was a mic-dropping moment, but Roosevelt held on to the mic because he had more to say. He spoke for the next ninety minutes, reading through his fifty-page speech that had saved his life by slowing the path of the bullet. (Despite the extraordinary display of fortitude, Roosevelt lost the 1912 election.)

The founders discussed the method for picking presidents at the Constitutional Convention, but they could do no better than to settle on the clumsy workaround of the Electoral College, cobbled together in a rush to overcome an impasse in discussions and to accommodate southern slave states.5 As William Grayson, who participated in the Virginia ratifying convention, put it, the Electoral College was “rather founded on accident, than any principle of government.”

WELL WHATDYA KNOW

Hamilton didn’t see it that way, of course. Desperate to sell the underlying product, he argued in the Federalist Papers that the Electoral College guaranteed that America would have only virtuous presidents:

Hamilton you ass.

In retrospect, Hamilton sounds naive and foolish, a little too desperate to sell his product. His vision of the Electoral College, like much of the presidency itself, depended on future generations’ keeping the faith and tending the norms of the founding generation. They didn’t tend them for long. As early as the election of 1800, electors gave up on the idea of being philosophers picking the best of their lot. They picked based on faction and made their choices based on political advantage, not reason.

“They wanted an ideal man, hovering above the people,” writes Gil Troy in See How They Ran, a history of presidential campaigning. “To demonstrate virtue, a presidential candidate had to remain silent and passive, trusting his peers to choose wisely.”

Republicans had argued during the campaign that Clinton’s character faults disqualified him from office.

Hahahahahaha