By Robert E.L. Walters
Image From onbeyondz.net
Well,it's the final countdown. Two weeks from this coming Tuesday (if all goes well) we will have a new President and Vice President elect of the United States. However it breaks, it's going to be historic.
On the one hand, we have a female of mixed race who is by far the most statist candidate for president the U.S. has ever seen coupled with a governor of near lock-step political identity. On the other, we have a former president, who if he succeeds, will accomplish what only one other president has done so far (Grover Cleveland) and won a second non-consecutive term, let alone winning one after two impeachments and countless indictments, coupled with an earthy author turned senator running mate who has a bit of a Jacksonian edge. It really is breathtaking.
Except, it really isn't.
For all the angst and attention we Americans foist on our presidential elections, the actual office itself is quite circumspect in power. True, a sitting U.S. President can order the deaths of millions by launching a nuclear war, or starve people through pulling the strings and pushing the levers of foreign aid and trade embargoes, but in the day to day affairs of his (or her) own country, presidents are pretty much powerless beyond the purview of their bureaucracy, which incidentally, may or may not do what he (or she) want or even order.
Real executive power in the United States has always rested with the governors in varying degrees by state. Whether their state constitution has a strong executive, a weak executive, or something in between, most Americans are way more affected by their state and local governments than they are by the President of the United States by design. Consider this: although the President of the United States is both the Head of State and the Head of Government, up until the 1930s, there wasn't much federal government for the president to be the head of. When Abraham Lincoln was prosecuting the U.S. Civil War, ostensibly the greatest existential threat to the survival of the United States, he had a staff of four and a cabinet of seven. By Franklin Roosevelt's administration, the three-plus term president had an ever-fluctuating staff of dozens and a cabinet of eleven. Currently the Executive Office of the President employees thousands and we have a cabinet of twenty-six.
Clearly in our postbellum world, the central government has accrued a great deal more power than it had amassed before, or at least it has justified to Congress the creating of more staff and departments to infer that power whether real or imagined. For a recent example, look at the Covid-19 debacle. For all the posturing made about what "the government" should be doing to address the crises, in reality there wasn't much the "government" (meaning the federal government) could do about it, since again, most executive power in the United States rests with the individual state governors.
So why do we Americans have such angst over our presidency? Why does half the country morbidly dread the accent to power of a Chief Executive whose prospective policies and personal philosophies are severely curtailed, not only by the office itself, but by the other two branches of government. And really, not just the other two branches of government. For a president to really have anything approaching the power people project and dread, he (or she) would need to win the presidency with a sizable mandate, both houses of Congress, and arrive at a time when the Supreme Court was closely aligned to their worldview. Although possible, this is usually very, very improbable.
There is one power however that a president possesses that it traditional and implied, that of the Bully Pulpit.
Coined by Teddy Roosevelt, the "Bully Pulpit" is the influence a president has by virtue of his (or her) visibility in office. From Roosevelt's perspective "bully" was a good thing since "bully" was an exclamation equating more or less to to "awesome" in today's vernacular. However as language will do, the meaning in this case shifted to a verb, and that verb really offers insight as to why we get so wrapped around the axle of presidential politics. As media became faster and more intimate, so accrued the power of the bully pulpit.
Teddy's distant cousin FDR is a great example of this. A master of meter and rhetoric, Roosevelt used radio as a powerful tool in promoting his vision to the voters who in turn, put pressure on their congressmen. Since then, every president who's mastered the media has had a good shot at running the table in promoting their views. Naturally, when those views are in keeping with a sitting president's political base, those same views alarm (if not horrify) the constituency of the opposition. In an era when rhetoric and media mastery is not only instantaneous but egalitarian, the opposition backlash to the bully pulpit can be quick, fierce and savage as we see every day today.
And here we have two candidates particularly ill-suited for a bully pulpit. When Mr. Trump speaks of mass deportation for example, he thrills his base and horrifies the opposition, regardless of the logical question of how that could ever be accomplished within the powers of the presidency. He may say he's going to deploy military forces within state confines, but actually doing that (as we saw in the Covid-19 epidemic) is unlikely in the extreme because, as we've already established, governors have more executive power than presidents in their states.
Likewise when Ms. Harris class-baits about the rich paying "their fair share" (which by-the-way would be to lower taxes on the rich since "the rich" already pay a disproportionate share of taxes thanks to our "progressive" income tax scheme) and promising grants here and jubilees there to garner (or buy if you prefer) votes, her base swoons and the opposition fumes, even though the likelihood of any of these things passing into existence is negligible at best.
How negligible? For either of these bullies to effectively affect the changes they posit from their pulpits, they would first have win a significant portion of the electoral college, a so-called "mandate" which if current polling is to be believed, is not doable. A mandate is important even when coupled with the next hurdle, Congress. Having a mandate means nothing if you don't have at least a ten-seat majority in the House of Representatives (to allow wiggle room for the Speaker and the Whip) and sixty-six like-minded Senators in the Senate. I say "like-minded" because party affiliation can only carry you so far in the Senate, as the Democrats learned the hard way during several legislative travails during the outgoing administration's term.
For Mr. Trump, he is only a little luckier if he wins the"Mandate, House and Senate" trifecta. The fail safe of all fail safes in our government of checks and balances is the Supreme Court, and we currently have a "strict constructionist" court, which means it veers more to the views of Thomas Jefferson's that the constitution is inviolable unless amended versus Alexander Hamilton's view that constitutional clauses are akin to legal Silly Putty. A more conservative president should (in theory) benefit from a strict constructionist court, but even here Mr. Trump's luck is limited, since a strict constructionist court will not be keen on expanding federal powers (as they repeatedly demonstrate) like sending troops into state or local venues where they clearly have no business being.
As we probably learned in elementary school, bullies and their toadies (and in the context of U.S. Presidential politics, is any office more perfectly suited to the stereotypical toady than the vice presidency?) can only be defeated by confronting their bullying. In the context of an electorate, that means filtering out all the blustering and braggadocio of the bully pulpit (yes Ms. Harris that includes you too) and realizing that whoever wins in a few weeks, its all more smoke than fire for four more years.
The other thing we can do as an electorate is educate ourselves. Bullies are powerless over the confident, and the well-informed are generally confident. Mute political ads. Ignore "tidbytes" as I like to call them (not a typo) from X formerly Twitter, that are usually something from twenty-years ago posted as current. And turn-off news channels who's livelihood comes from addicting you to the bully's bullying (see this excellent piece from The Hill which underscores this concept). News channels really are the ultimate toadies to the bully pulpit. Honestly, can't you picture these candidates in middle school tossing a few pennies of your lunch money to pimple-faced Fox News or MSNBC acolytes? I can.
Politics is chemistry as demonstrated by Teddy Roosevelt in this week's cartoon. Mixing the volatile and the stable into a productive tincture and hopefully getting it down the throats of an accepting electorate. That is unless, the whole lab explodes in the process. Let's keep our fingers crossed as the next few weeks unfold.
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