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Latrobe, Pennsylvania 15650-2690 Volume 3 Number 2 April 1998
The following is adapted from a lecture given by Dr. Jeffrey K. Tulis, Professor of Political Science at University of Texas on November 19, 1997 as part of the Center for Economic and Policy Education’s Government and Political Education Series which is directed by Dr. Ronald J. Pestritto.
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Today’s Neo-Whig Presidency
I am really delighted to be here and grateful for the opportunity to come to St. Vincent College. What I would like to talk about this evening is a transformation in our political system that has occurred in recent years which makes familiar understandings of presidential leadership obsolete and inappropriate for our time. I am going to argue that because the understandings that we share are still operative, there is a tension between what we expect of leadership and what is possible and desirable in leadership today. I am going to talk about how what it means to succeed as a president has changed, and how we need to understand leadership in a new way if we want to know what it means to be president.
Presidents today are held to standards that are implicit in an idea that people have called the "modern presidency." This is basically the understanding of leadership that was born with Franklin Roosevelt, captured in books about American politics and about the presidency such as Richard Neustadt’s Presidential Power, and filtered down through the media by intellectual writers such as David Broder to our own consciousness and our own expectations for governance today.
Most of us think that in order for a president to be a good president the president needs to have a coherent vision for the future. We also think that the president has to express that vision in a set of fairly concrete policy alternatives for the polity which can be crafted in legislation, and that the success of a president is marked by the ability to get that agenda through Congress. This notion of the modern presidency holds that the president ought to be the center of the domestic legislative process, that the president ought to be an active initiator of the legislative agenda, that the president ought to be a focal point for the political system, that the president ought to be the principle source of energy and new ideas for public policy making, and that the president ought to package these new ideas in some sort of recognizable policy whole. These are all components of our expectations for presidential leadership today, and they are all what generally make up what most ordinary Americans and most commentators on American politics think would make a good president. That is to say, presidents are judged on the extent to which they have succeeded in fashioning a legislative agenda, packaging it, and succeeding in getting it passed. When I say, by the way, that presidents are often held to the expectation that they present their agenda as some sort of package or policy whole, I simply mean things like "The Square Deal," "The New Deal," "The New Freedom," "The Fair Deal," "The Great Society," that sort of thing. Failure to meet these standards can invite ridicule. Does anybody remember Gerald Ford’s attempt, for example, to package his policy? It was called WIN. Do you know what WIN was? It didn’t really catch. Whip Inflation Now.
In any event, in the modern presidency, presidents have always been a source of some sort of energy in the political system. Presidents have always had fairly rough and ready executive powers at their disposal. Presidents have always been actively involved in foreign affairs. But what some have marked as the peculiarly modern feature of the presidency is the active initiation of domestic public policy. Now there is an older constitutional tradition, an alternative view of leadership, which suggests that this is not what a president should be doing; that older tradition is the Whig tradition in American politics. The Whig tradition is composed of two components. First, the Whig tradition is a certain view of particular kinds of public policies that Whig presidents tended to favor. Second, it is also a view of the relationship of the executive to the legislature and the relationship of the executive to governance as a whole. And it is that second component that I mean when I appeal to the Whig view of presidential leadership. Because for the Whigs it was expected that the principle responsibility for crafting legislation and for crafting domestic policy alternatives lay with Congress and it was the president’s responsibility to execute congressional will. And in that picture is a notion of what it means to be a responsible leader that is very different from the modern presidency understanding.
Now what I would like to suggest tonight is this: the modern presidency came into our political system has changed in such a way as to make propitious and, in fact, make necessary Whiggish leadership. At the same time we retain an understanding that presidents ought to behave like modern presidents. And something is going to have to give; either presidents are going to have to reconfigure their understanding of leadership to comport with the structural realities of our time, or those structural realities will have to change.
What do I mean by those structural realities? The modern presidency came out of four features of our political system. First, it came out of the New Deal political order. By this, I mean the entire range of policies that Franklin Roosevelt fashioned in the critical realignment of the 1930s, the critical elections which turned the country into basically a Democratic polity. And the Democratic polity was, as Republicans are now fond of saying, "A big government, big policy, social interventionist, regulatory state, large bureaucracy" kind of polity. That kind of polity required an active presidency in the domestic sphere to not only monitor the policies that were made, but to actually add on to them, supplement them, critique them, and develop them. Until Ronald Reagan, presidents operated in the New Deal order and therefore were to some extent fulfilling its promises by being the kind of presidents that New Deal presidents were expected to be. But we have had a critical realignment recently of another sort, and that is the Reagan Revolution. I say critical realignment of another sort because students of electoral politics sometimes confine the notion of critical realignment to counting up how many people register for one party or the other. And if you do that there is a great deal of question as to whether we have had a realignment or if realignment is possible given the number of people that do not align with either party. But what is absolutely certain is that Reagan’s victory signaled a change in the agenda of viable and legitimate public policies in this country. Big government was no longer a good thing; an activist, social-interventionist national government was no longer as good as it once was, and all of the things that you are familiar with that I will just summarize as being the Reagan Revolution. You know that there has been a critical realignment of this second sort in the Reagan Revolution because Democrats now talk like Republicans. When one party talks like the other party a realignment has occurred. And so when people say that Clinton talks like a Republican, it’s true, he does, and that is because Reagan was so successful. But what that means for presidential leadership is that the prop that the New Deal order provided for a certain notion of leadership itself has been dismantled. If you take away big government you do not need the same kind of big domestic presidency.
Second, and also connected with the Reagan Revolution, is the end of the Cold War era. I am referring to the collapse of the bi-polar world order and the end of the Cold War as we used to know it. This change is so stunning to me and to many people of my generation that we sometimes cannot even realize how stunning it is. It is amazing to me how we take this for granted, but I am actually old enough to remember fallout shelters and all that sort of thing. I remember having drills in the aisles of public schools for nuclear attack. Well, that’s over with, and when you take away the drills for nuclear attack you take away another principle prop for an activist president who is at the center of the political system and to whom all the other institutions of the polity are naturally disposed to look. Moreover, and more importantly, domestic politics tends to supplant or replace foreign policy as that which becomes most primary in the consciousness of Americans. War and foreign policy crises were legitimately the province of activist, energetic presidential leadership. They still are, but they simply do not take up as much space in our political consciousness. And so because of that, foreign policy no longer drives the president’s activist involvement in domestic policy. Quite the contrary, our investment in domestic policy tends to crimp or cramp the president’s ability in foreign policy. With respect to that point about foreign policy driving domestic policy, consider that in Eisenhower’s administration, for example, initiatives to build highways as well as put money into schools were in fact generated by a kind of foreign policy crisis even though they were domestic initiatives. And the president, of course, was at the head of it all. The New Deal order is gone, the bi-polar Cold War business is gone.
Third, in a development that I find most interesting, the president’s place in the constitutional order has changed. A very good argument can be had and made that the constitutional order itself privileges the president as a domestic policy leader, that it puts the president in a place from which he can supply energy to what would be otherwise a lethargic process. That is a good thing. That is one of the reasons why Congress was designed to be deliberative and the president designed to be only one person with certain kinds of terms, certain kinds of powers, independently elected and all the things you have learned about in R.J. Pestritto’s class on the presidency. All those things are designed to actually make it possible for a president to be an active domestic policy energizer. And the reason the Constitution may privilege the president in this way is to overcome an excessively deliberative congress. Deliberation is a good thing, but you can be too deliberative. A president might be the institutional mechanism by which we focus Congress’s attention on the policies that need to be decided upon and energize the Congress.
But the Gingrich revolution suggests that something unusual has happened in American politics. What happens in a constitutional order like ours if the problem is not that we need an energetic president to improve a too-deliberative congress, but that we have in fact an energetic Congress, a too-energetic Congress? A too-energetic Congress is the Congress I would characterize as the Contract with America Congress, the Gingrich Congress. Why too energetic? It is energetic in that it developed its own agenda; and that is not necessarily a bad thing, that is a good thing. In a republican regime like ours what is wrong with a legislature developing its own agenda? The too energetic part is the idea that you elect people who have never been to Congress on the basis of the Contract with America and those candidates pledge themselves to vote on all sorts of bills without debating them. That was the deal, by the way, and that is why all these freshmen congressmen generated reasonable enmity on the part of congressmen who had been there for a long time. They just were not interested in debating, negotiating, and doing all the things congressmen do. They ran on the Contract with America and they got to Congress and there was no point to deliberating because the campaign had set the agenda.
Congresses are supposed to deliberate. That does not mean that the Contract with America cannot be the basis of a campaign or the agenda for Congress, but presumably we want the legislation that comes out to be good legislation and the only way that you can get good legislation is to have people kick it around, consider the pros and cons, consider the ups and downs, consider the trade-offs, and work it out. This has been a Congress that was so ideologically driven that it has had enormous energy contrary to the prediction of our constitutional theorists, but little deliberation, which is also contrary to the prediction of our constitutional architects and constitutional theorists. Whereas presidential leadership used to be justified by the need to energize Congress and provide focus, now it seems our constitutional order requires our president to use his energy in a negative way to make Congress deliberate.
I would suggest that we conceive of the Constitution as a hierarchy of means and ends, with the lower order pieces of the Constitution being specific institutional arrangements and the higher order ones being purposes like securing rights, providing security, and reflecting popular will. And we should conceive of the intermediate stage between those two as being certain qualities of governance that we would like to achieve in order to do what we want government to do. Those qualities of governance are judgment, deliberation, and energy. We may be in a situation that, in order to preserve the Constitution, we have to alter institutional arrangements because those qualities have migrated. Energy has gone into the Congress, and so deliberation in a sense comes over to the executive. So, in the end, we get energy and deliberation together in a productive way.
Such a combination is so much the requirement of our constitutional order that it has, in fact, happened. I want to suggest that both George Bush and Bill Clinton, because of the three changes that I have just listed, have acted like Neo-Whig presidents. They have acted like presidents who have no agenda of their own, but who, when they are fulfilling their responsibilities admirably, end up making better the agenda of Congress. For example, you might remember the debate over welfare reform a couple years ago in which Clinton was criticized by some on the Left in his own party of simply being out for votes to win an election and therefore going over to the Republican side. But I think you can see that whole debate in a much different light, which is that it is the response of a president who has to face two facts. First, that he has a Congress that has a very, very strong democratic, legitimate base for its actions. Second, he is faced with the responsibility of giving some deference to a democratic claim like that but at the same time wanting it to be better than it would be if one simply let it go unimproved. And so he vetoed a couple of bills until finally Congress came back with a bill, that if the president didn’t like, at least he could live with and could claim that he had done his job as a leader.
And indeed the Neo-Whig president will be forced to develop a new kind of institutional mechanism which you might call the conditional veto. We have a veto in the Constitution whereby the president says no to a law, it goes back to Congress, and it either does nothing or gets enough votes to override the veto and it becomes law. It takes two-thirds of Congress to override a presidential veto. A conditional veto would be the sort of situation in which a president says, "I basically disagree for partisan reasons with the Congress, but I acknowledge that the country is actually with the Congress and so my responsibility then becomes to make sure that Congress does its job. I will veto laws that Congress doesn’t debate, I will veto laws that Congress doesn’t argue about, I will veto laws that Congress simply rams through without the normal niceties of procedure that are designed to air differences of opinion and improve legislation. If, however, after the veto Congress does do its job, does debate the bill, does hear alternative perspectives, but comes up with a bill that I don’t like, that’s tough luck for me and I will actually sign it." That would be responsible leadership; that would be a kind of Neo-Whig leadership.
Now I have said that presidents Clinton and Bush, because of the changed political circumstances I’ve described, have found themselves almost forced to act like Neo-Whig presidents. They do not, in fact, understand themselves as this kind of leader. And that brings me to the fourth component of the modern presidency which has not changed. Since World War II we have developed, in addition to the actual New Deal, the Cold War, and the ongoing constitutional order, a series of understandings of what presidents ought to be like captured in books like Richard Neustadt’s Presidential Power, James McGregor Burns’ Presidential Government, and writings by Arthur Schlessinger. Many people have written about what it means to be a strong, terrific, wonderful leader. And these books all have as a kind of common theme the notion that a president should be at the center of domestic initiatives. And what I would like to suggest is that could be considered a kind of doctrine or understanding of governance that presidents have and citizens have of presidents; there are expectations that citizens have of presidents. FDR began to articulate this understanding of leadership and then it became academicized and then popularized into a kind of modern doctrine of governance. That has not changed and so the situation we have today is presidents who are both inclined by their circumstances and disposed to be what I have called Neo-Whig presidents, but who think of themselves as having to be modern presidents.
This understanding is why Clinton is always worrying about someone coming up with a vision for him, and bringing people out to Camp David to come up with some ideas to package his speech. Clinton tries to be the kind of president he is told that he is supposed to be, but at the same time he actually has to act in this new fashion of the Neo-Whig president. And the same thing, of course, was true with Bush. Remember Bush was worried about the vision thing and all that. Now Clinton and Bush both understand that they can build libraries as big as they want at College Station or Little Rock. If they don’t have some tangible accomplishment they will not have a legacy; they will not have the kind of fame that presidents tend to seek. But both presidents think that that legacy and that fame need adhere in a set of domestic public policies or a policy package or a policy agenda. The New-Whig president would understand that that legacy could inhere in defining and describing a new doctrine of governance for our time. This would be a president who actually articulated the Neo-Whig understanding of the presidency and acted on it rather than one who articulates the modern understanding and acts as a Neo-Whig. Such a president’s legacy would be the same kind of legacy that Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, and Teddy Roosevelt had, all of whom are marked as much by their understandings of leadership as they are by the particular policies that they supported and successfully achieved.
My substantive conclusion is this: There is a tension between the three big things that have changed in American politics and the one big thing that hasn’t changed. And something has got to give. It may be the case that the Congress will revert to its old lethargic ways and we will require the modern president once again. Or it may be that presidents have to develop a new understanding of governance. But if it stays the way it is now we will have a kind of really serious credibility problem where presidents speak in ways that do not reflect the ways they must act, or they act in ways that do not reflect the way they speak.
The two points I would like to end with, however, have to do with the theoretical payoff of this sort of argument. It concerns two subjects: thinking about presidential leadership and thinking about constitutions. With respect to thinking about presidential leadership, throughout American history people have presumed that there is an ideal presidency appropriate for all circumstances. The remarks that I’ve given you this evening reinforce a thought that has been developed by others like Stephen Skowronek who suggest that there might be different kinds of leadership appropriate for different kinds of circumstances. I don’t mean just different actions appropriate, but different understandings of what a leader ought to be. That suggests a different understanding of a constitution as well because it means that our constitution does not actually incline towards any single kind of institutional quality or institutional arrangement, but may actually permit, as I said earlier, institutional qualities to migrate in the service of higher order purposes. Now the key point here is that these qualities are in the service of higher order constitutional purposes. The reason that’s a key point is that I am not saying that the Constitution’s meaning changes at all over time. A constitution can mean different things in different circumstances without being a living constitution that just reflects felt necessities or is whatever anybody wants it to say. I would suggest to you that our circumstances open up the possibility of more nuanced and sophisticated understandings of presidential leadership on one hand and more nuanced and more sophisticated understandings of what a constitution is on the other.
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