President Bush emerged last week from a two-year hiatus from the spotlight. He did so with apparent hesitance. He has studiously avoided commenting on the job his successor is doing. He seems content to disappear again when he is done publicizing his book. He is wise to do so.
A Newsweek feature story recently asked, “Is the presidency too big a job?” The subtext is: “If Obama can’t do it, can anyone?” But the question is a good one. The modern presidency, for emotional and structural reasons, is now the largest job anyone has ever had. And with each administration, it gets larger.
Gene Healy’s book The Imperial Presidency is a reasoned attempt to discern the roots and fruit of this national obsession with the presidency. His thesis, distilled to its essence, is that the presidency is the only possible resting place for the hopes and fears of the American people. The expectations are such that they are inevitably disappointed.
The response of each president is to view his term as the defining moment in history, and each event as a crisis that demands his unique attention. Then, in Healy’s words, “With great responsibility comes great power.”
No president can possibly do all that we ask of him. We expect feats of superhuman attention and compassion. We expect a president to soothe the soul and fix the deficit. We expect him to bring people together who have not agreed in decades. The perfect modern president is less an executive than a national shaman working with words and policies to put a sort of spell on the American people — a spell that makes them happy.
Interestingly, this is not a failure of either conservatives or liberals alone. Liberals, it’s true, do tend to venerate federal power, to believe more fervently in the panacean capability of government and presidents to feed, to clothe, to help, and to heal; to feel the pain of the people, and to calm their fears. This has contributed to the mythic presidency. But so too has the conservative tendency to see their presidents as men apart, tasked with the responsibility to keep Americans safe, and to inspire the nation with the force of their virtue.
Ronald Reagan is the most recent recipient of this unasked-for canonization, but it seems likely that as Bush’s tenure recedes into memory, conservatives, at least, will remember him with something approaching and eventually surpassing fondness. We were safe after Sept. 11, he appointed Supreme Court Justices to be proud of, he helped us weather a turbulent time in history, and he was a decent man. These attributes will probably linger in the memory longer than his unpopularity, and perhaps they should. He was not a perfect president. But who can be?
Both sides, too, invest the presidency with added importance when the other side is in charge. Democrats savaged Bush with angry glee. Their accusations often seemed like they were levied against a cartoon super villain — no human president could possibly have the depth of depravity and the omniscient reach necessary to do the things they accused him of doing. Republicans similarly blame Obama for all our national ills, some of which were caused by others, and many of which would exist no matter who was in charge.
There are no easy solutions here. Critics of the powerful presidency struggle to find an alternative. Even Healy admits we may be stuck with it. No one with the personality type and ambition to be president is likely to trim the impossible girth of the Executive Branch; and more importantly, even if one wanted to, we probably wouldn’t allow it.
President Bush seems, more than most, to understand the limits of the presidency. His demeanor since leaving office speaks of a man who believes he did his best with an impossible job. Bush knows how difficult President Obama’s job is, how unfair the criticism can be, and how heavy the burden of responsibility actually is.
And his expectations for his successor, tempered as they are by the weight of experience, are likely far more realistic than ours.
Reach the reporter at wmunsil@asu.edu
