Presidents sometimes fail because of their own mistakes, but often times they appear to fail because of our unrealistic expectations.
Over at Vox Ezra Klein published an absolutely must-read about the nature of the presidency. It’s an in depth look at the “Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency”, which is internet short had for the idea that in the American political system presidents are all powerful, or as Klein describes it:
According to Brendan Nyhan, the Dartmouth political scientist who coined the term, the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency is “the belief that the president can achieve any political or policy objective if only he tries hard enough or uses the right tactics.” In other words, the American president is functionally all-powerful, and whenever he can’t get something done, it’s because he’s not trying hard enough, or not trying smart enough.
The term itself is a reference to the comic book character The Green Lantern who has a “power ring” allowing him or her to do anything with only their own imagination and will power as a possible constraint. Often summed up as “Green Lanterism” this term has an interesting origin story of its own (check out Klein’s piece for details) but suffice to say it’s one of those thing that once you know about, you recognize everywhere. Klein picks our National Journal’s Ron Fournier as a great example of this school of thought but he’s hardly the only one.
The problem with Green Lanterism is that presidents simply aren’t absolute rulers of the federal government. Indeed presidents aren’t even absolute rulers of the executive branch our even their own White House. Instead in our system of government power is divided between separate institutions that share power and compete to influence each other. If other actors in our constitutional system are opposed to the president’s agenda because of ideology or partisanship or just wanting to deny the president a victory, presidents can have a very hard time overcoming that. Indeed sometimes it can be impossible.
Thus in 2009 and 2010 we had a historically active Congress that enacted a huge number of new laws. Why? Because it was controlled by Democrats who largely agreed with Obama on policy issues. But since 2011 we’ve had divided government and since Republicans by and large don’t agree with the president (in no small part because disagreeing with Obama is how the GOP largely defines itself these days) passing new laws has become a lot harder. Not because Obama forgot all of his political skills on New Year Day 2011, but because the structural realities of the system changed.
And it’s not just Obama that’s faced this problem. If you really think that gridlock in Washington is due to a lack of “leadership” I have one question for you: how do you explain how George W. Bush was unable to even get a vote on his signature proposal to privatize Social Security? Or take it back even further. Why did Reagan’s Star Wars program fail? A lack of speeches? Because Reagan was a terrible communicator?
I’ve just been talking about how presidents deal with Congress but other constraints apply to their relationships with other institutions. Presidents can influence the future of the Supreme Court by nominating new justices, but there’s basically nothing they can do in the short term to get a sitting justice to change their mind. Presidents can use their power to get the federal bureaucracy to work hard on specific things like fixing the Obamacare website, but the federal government is just too big to do that for everything. When presidents try and boss around the military things can go haywire pretty fast. And that’s just a few of the most obvious examples.
So does this mean that presidents are irrelevant? No, absolutely not, and while proponents of Green Lanternism like to portray their critics as arguing such they really aren’t. The person who sits in the White House is the single most important and influential person in our political system, but the influence of the individual doesn’t translate into universal power. Indeed presidents are pretty weak compared to the power of the British Prime Minister in the Westminster system. Instead it means that presidents must use their power and influence to bargain for their priorities inside a constitutional framework that very much constrains what they can do and accomplish.
A helpful way to think about this is to remember Steven Spielberg’s great movie “Lincoln” about passing the 13th Amendment. As the movie points out Lincoln can’t order Congress to pass the amendment, indeed since he’s not even a member of the body he can’t address them or even introduce it. In addition, he can’t even boss around members of his own party and even gets in trouble with members of his own cabinet when he keeps things like the existence of Confederate diplomatic peace feelers from them. Instead he has to rely on hired lobbyists and offers of patronage to get the job done. And in the end it still only barely passes.
The point of course isn’t that Obama is immune from criticism. It’s that if even Lincoln faced these problems during a Civil War and was almost defeated by them, why on earth do people act shocked when other presidents do as well?
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