Ali's Blog on the Presidency

The need for strong leadership to guide and unite the country has been a pervasive sentiment of the American people throughout our history. It originated with the Founding Fathers and became a principal objective of the specific constitutional structuring they cobbled together. To that end they structured the constitution with an internal counterbalance to that need for central leadership. Specifically, they included detailed arrangements whereby there would be specific checks and balances to prevent any one branch of government from overpowering the others. Under that format, it remains somewhat curious that the Founding Fathers used vague and indistinct language regarding the constituent powers granted to the Executive Branch and, more to the point, the president. As James David Barber sums it up, “The presidency is a peculiar office. The founding fathers left it extraordinarily loose in definition, partly because they trusted George Washington to invest a tradition as he went along. It is an institution made a piece at a time by successive men in the White House.” (Woll Document 47, pg. 269) Barber goes on to say how the position of president expanded, evolved and developed with every president that passed through and left his mark.
The reasons the Founding Fathers deliberately left a detailed delineation of the presidential powers unspecified can be speculated upon. Eithe they believed that responsibility would come with the acceptance of office so it wasn’t worth going into, or that it would simply evolve too much with whatever president occupied office and how that president chose to utilize his responsibilities, for “every President’s mind and demeanor has left its mark on a heritage still in lively development.” (CITE CITE CITE) The vagueness of the position of president as the denotation of the constitution provides is especially surprising, considering that the occupant of the Oval Office holds the most powerful position in the United States, even with our highly effective check and balance system. Because of this strength, (or at times, weakness - depending upon how you look at it) of our Constitution, it allows the President to provide a precise meaning of his position as fits the times, (ie. Peace, war, etc.) as well as providing a definition of what the incumbency of the Oval Office truly signifies and represents, as well as the complex network of responsibilities that come with it. In other words, the more precise American definition of a President (besides the traditional and conventional leader for America, Congress, a leader of public opinion, a role model, the Commander-in-Chief in times of peace and war and in charge of the Executive Branch) changes with the influence of whoever occupies the Oval Office and the same influence they cast over America. “The president’s main responsibilities reach far beyond administering the Executive Branch or commanding the armed forces. The White House is first and foremost a place of public leadership.” (Woll Document 47, pg. 271) Clinton Rossiter summed it up in more ‘everyman’ terms when he wrote, “people…think of him as a combination of scoutmaster, Delphic oracle, hero of the silver screen, and a father of the multitudes.” (Woll Document 45, pg. 262) The President of the United States has powers that “are given a new dimension of authority, because he is the symbol of our sovereignty, continuity and grandeur as a people.” Unfortunately, Barber takes his definition of presidential leadership and power a bit too far when he says “Finally, the president has been endowed – whether we or our friends abroad like it or not – with a global role as a leader of the free nations.” (Woll Document 45, pg. 262). The president has a certain sphere of power and influence, but certainly not as bold or consequential as Rossiter enjoys imagining when he wrote this.
The bulk of Barber’s article however, focuses most on his so-called ability to “predict” presidents – their leadership and executive performance based off of their character, personality, world view and style. “A president’s wold view consists of his primary, politically relevant beliefs, particularly his conceptions of social causality, human nature and the central moral conflicts of the time…Style is the president’s habitual way of performing his three political roles: rhetoric, personal relations, and homework…Character is the way the president orients himself towards life.” (Woll Document 47, pg. 272). When I was first reading Barber’s article, I was skeptical and doubtful of his claims that with his system of prediction, he could forecast how a president would act during their term in office. “The problem is to understand – and to state understandably – what in the personal past foreshadows the presidential future…” (Woll Document 47, pg. 278). Part of me is still dubious that he would be able to do so – is it really possible to truly predict the future successes, failures and choices of a president based off of their personal psychology and mental outlook? I feel that Barber does not take in the height of expectation that constantly surrounds the president quite enough, or the pressure to “do good” and unfailingly make the right choice, or the constant battle of wills the president is engaged in – his own, that of Congress, those of the members of the House and the Senate, that of the American public – his own citizens, as well as occasionally the citizens of foreign countries. I’m also skeptical of one of the ways that Barber claims he can “predict” the future of the presidency is by a simple categorizing process – putting the president into one of four types of presidential characters. “The five concepts – character, world view, style, power situation, and climate of expectations – run through the accounts of presidents…which cluster the presidents since Theodore Roosevelt into four types.” (Woll Document 47, pg. 275). While the examples Barber provide neatly and conveniently fit the slot into one of his categorizations, he fails to address the wide range of characters that have inhibited the Oval Office since the early 1900’s. While Barber’s system of prediction may be trustworthy and true to a point, (when we are careful to let it only regard the broad scope of a president’s time in office) I highly doubt that his claims can really predict the future successes, failures and choices of a president.