Center for Distance and Independent Study
Political Science 4150: The American Presidency

Fundamental Questions

Figure 1.1. This is the official seal of the President of the United States. Click on the image to view a larger version.

In this course, all of our inquiries are guided by a few fundamental questions: What is the presidency for? Why do we need it? What are the criteria for judging presidents? It may be an impossible, even silly, exercise, but we all rank the presidents. We do this because the president is the central actor in our system. The president is the most visible player in the government. If times are good, people credit the president. If times are bad, people blame the president. So, it is important to understand how the presidency is structured and organized, how it relates to the other institutions of government, and how it differs from the way it was designed by the framers of the Constitution to function and relate to the other institutions of government.

There is considerable confusion, both among scholars and American citizens, about how we should think about the presidency. Some see the president as being just the individual who serves in the presidency. If the proper person is elected, everything will be alright. This view suggests that the president is the most important person in the government, and all that matters is what the president wants and whether he or she is using the best strategy to attain it. From this perspective, the proper person as president can be a kind of savior for the country. Scholars, such as Clinton Rossiter, Edward Corwin, and Richard Neustadt, view the president as a central figure who wears many different hats in the course of being president. These hats include commander-in-chief, legislative leader, chief executive, and political leader.

Those who study the presidency from the perspective that the president is the only actor in American politics ignore that the presidency is one part of three branches of a government that was constitutionally designed to divide and share the powers of government. Often what the president wants is irrelevant, or unattainable, or both.

Others emphasize the presidency as an institution, rather than an individual. In other words, they see the presidency as an institution that is bigger than the more than forty individuals who have been president. It is too complex to be controlled by just one person. It is, in fact, often controlled by events that are out of the control of the person we call president. This view implies that the individual presidents do not matter nearly as much, as scholar Ted Lowi's modern presidency thesis argued. This view leads some to treat all presidents as though they were created equal, leading them to evaluate all presidents by one standard; however this is not always the case. An individual president is a product of both their abilities and the specific circumstances they face.

In reality, the presidency is both part of a larger system and is redefined, to an extent, by each individual who serves as president. The president's roles include the hats described by Corwin and Rossiter, but the fact that the president wears those hats does not make the president all-powerful. What is the president's real role in our system?

The president is the country's chief troubleshooter. We expect the president to deal with the unexpected and with problems for which there are no pre-programmed solutions. The president benefits from the fact that he or she is the only elected official in the federal government with a national constituency and, thus, a national perspective. Presidents are elected by the entire population, whereas members of the Congress are elected by local constituencies. The consequence of this is that representatives and senators are quite often focused not on the national interest but on the concerns of the people who elected them. The only official who answers to the nation as a whole is the president. We therefore look to the president to solve problems that cannot be solved at lower levels of government.

There are four presidential functions that add up to a presidential imperative to serve as our only nationally elected leader and to help the citizens of the nation cope with the unexpected. Every aspect of the presidency is a reflection of at least one of these four functions.

• Symbol—The president is a human being who represents something intangible. The president represents the values, desires, and goals of the American people. From the beginning of our nationhood, the ties that bind us have been fragile, so we have a need for community. We have a need for someone in the center to mobilize us, give us resolve, inspire us, and rally us. Presidents who are effective in this role can translate their symbolic leadership into high approval ratings and the successful pursuit of their policy agendas. This kind of effectiveness, however, is rare.
• Policy advocate—In general, the pursuit of a policy agenda is incompatible with the symbolic role. In our system, we combine the roles of head of state and head of government. The head of state and head of government are generally two different people in most countries. In Great Britain, for example, the symbolic head of state is the queen or king. The head of government, on the other hand, is the prime minister. In most parliamentary systems, the roles of head of state and head of government are separated. Combining the two roles complicates the role of the president because heads of government are policy advocates and policy advocates are naturally partisan. Being partisan can make it difficult to also be a symbol of unity.
• Mediator—As the only elected official with a national constituency, it often falls to presidents to compromise and reconcile different interests among members of Congress, groups in society, and even groups in the international arena. No one else in this system can have the president's perspective (and, of course, presidents do not always think and act with the interests of the entire nation in mind either).
• Crisis manager—Beginning with George Washington, Americans have always turned to presidents to lead the country in times of crisis, no matter the nature of the crisis. Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan are all examples of presidents to whom the people of the nation looked for guidance in times of trouble.

Judging Presidential Performance

Given the four presidential roles just discussed, we next need to think about how we would like presidents to do their jobs. What are our expectations? How should we judge presidential performance? There are three criteria by which to judge presidential actions.

Effectiveness (Results)—Is Whatever the President Doing Working?

The most common characteristic citizens value in presidents is effectiveness. Is the president getting the job done; is the president solving problems? How can we measure effectiveness? One objective way is to look at the public's reaction, as measured by presidential approval polls. Such polls have been taken for presidents going all the way back to Franklin Roosevelt and give us a way to compare presidents with each other. The disadvantages of such polls are the same disadvantages that all polls share. First, polls are not as accurate as we wish they would be. Second, public opinion is influenced by many factors that may not have anything to do with the quality of the job the president is doing.

Figure 1.2. This photo was taken in the White House's Oval Office as President Reagan and his cabinet discussed the Iran-Contra Affair.

For instance, when Ronald Reagan left office, his approval rating was 64 percent, despite that many members of his administration had been involved in the largest presidential scandal since Watergate: the Iran-Contra Affair. Members of the administration were found to have been involved in a scheme to pay for the release of hostages held by Iranian terrorists and to illegally funnel weapons to the Contras, a group of rebels leading a civil war against the communist government of Nicaragua. Reagan's high approval ratings were due largely to the strength of the economy at the time he left office, but as we will see, presidents are often overly praised for a strong economy and overly criticized for a poor one. It is the double-edged sword of being the only politician in the country with a national constituency.

Another example of the sometimes skewed nature of poll results is President Bill Clinton. When he left office in 2001, his approval rating was 65 percent, which was remarkably high considering the fact that he was only the second president in U.S. history to be impeached. The strength of the economy accounted for his high ratings, but were they really a reflection of his performance as president? Many believed that his personal life may have affected his performance as president. The consequence was that he left a weak record of policy achievement in his wake, but, similar to Reagan, people said they approved of him because the economy was strong.

Visit About.com's Historical Presidential Approval Ratings page to see a comparison of the approval ratings of Presidents Eisenhower through Clinton at the end of their terms in office.

Another objective way of judging presidential effectiveness is to look at legislative box scores. A legislative box score is a president's record of success in proposing a policy agenda and getting Congress to enact it. In the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, there were only a handful of presidents with impressive legislative box scores. For each of them, their scores were high only for part of their presidencies, and in each case those presidents benefited from certain extraordinary circumstances that made success much more likely than usual. We revisit legislative box scores later in the course.

If objective measures like presidential approval and legislative box scores are less than ideal ways of measuring presidential effectiveness, what other ways are available for us to use? Most other ways of measuring presidential effectiveness are susceptible to ideological bias. One person might think a president handled a domestic policy matter or an international crisis well, whereas another person might look at those same situations and see the president's behavior in an entirely different light. Lists that rate presidential performance, such as those regularly compiled by historians Arthur M. Schlesinger and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., are useful because they give us the consensus opinions of both scholars and the public, but even these lists are susceptible to revision over time.

Although I do not recommend using Wikipedia as a source for any information about partisan politics (i.e. never do research about politicians on Wikipedia) because of its susceptibility to editing by political partisans, the Web site offers a good summary of both scholarly and public presidential rankings. We will return to historical rankings of presidents and why we try to rank presidents in the last section of the course.

To fairly judge presidents' performances, we must consider the economic and international conditions in which they governed, extraordinary events which occurred, and the partisan balance of Congress—was the majority in Congress of the same party as the president? We must also be aware of our own ideological leanings and those of the people who engage in the exercise of ranking presidents. It is difficult to judge presidential effectiveness, but if we consider as many elements as we can, we can have a basis for a rough comparison of presidents.

Democratic Morality—Respect for Constitutional Processes

Despite a president's effectiveness, is what a president does morally right? Should the ends justify the means? We have examples in our history where presidents have taken extreme actions that we look back on with approval, such as Lincoln's decisions to expand executive power at the expense of the Constitution during the Civil War. We also have presidents who took extreme action that we look back on with disapproval, like Johnson's conduct of the war in Vietnam and Nixon's conduct in the Watergate scandal. In general, we expect the president to follow the rules and to show respect for citizens and for the other branches of government. The ends should not always justify the means.

Political Stability—Physical Safety/Durability of Country

Is the president's action safe, prudent, and responsible? A president can destabilize or endanger the government and the country with his actions. Some argue, for instance, that John F. Kennedy was as reckless in his handling of American foreign policy as he was in his private life. Others argue that although he began his presidency making questionable foreign policy decisions, especially regarding U.S. relations with the Soviet Union, he learned quickly how to do things more effectively as his short presidency wore on. The Cuban Missile Crisis—the most serious foreign policy situation of Kennedy's presidency—is a complicated case. On one hand, Kennedy was probably reckless in baiting the Soviets, both in his early speeches and in his actions. He was the commander-in-chief who allowed the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and he also ordered U.S. troops into Vietnam.

The invasion was conceived during the Eisenhower administration, but as the new commander-in-chief, Kennedy should have been more hands-on in overseeing it. By the time the Cuban Missile Crisis came about, Kennedy had become more involved and sought more input from advisers on U.S. relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba. Many scholars give him credit for seeing the crisis through without starting a nuclear war. Although he publicly confronted Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, he also helped defuse the situation behind the scenes by negotiating the removal of some European-based U.S. missiles in return for the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. In return for Khrushchev's public promise to dismantle the missile-launch sites, Kennedy also publicly pledged that the United States would not attack Cuba. In the end, the people of the world collectively sighed with relief, and Kennedy was lauded.

However, questions remain. Did Kennedy need to go public with the confrontation? Should he have sought the counsel of members of Congress before the crisis escalated to a naval blockade of Cuba? Should he have taken such a confrontational approach with the Soviets in the early days of his administration? Did that confrontational approach help bring the crisis about in the first place? In many ways, Kennedy's actions may have needlessly provoked Soviet hawks and escalated the arms race. In the short run, Kennedy's handling of the crisis was a political success. In the long run, the relationship between the two countries remained contentious for years.

Figure 1.3. This photo was taken during a meeting of the president's cabinet during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

How Presidents Judge Themselves: The Presidential Imperative

How do presidents judge themselves? Most of them, especially those who served in the twentieth century and beyond, assess their presidencies in terms of how the public judges them. Did they win election to a second term? Did they leave office with a high (meaning greater than 50 percent) level of approval? If the answer is yes, presidents are likely to feel it is because of the way they served as president. It takes a person with a rare personality to want to go through the campaign process. These are people who care deeply about what the public thinks about them and feel that if the public loves them, it is because the public thinks they are good presidents. It is why presidents who win by a big margin claim they have a mandate to lead and why presidents with positive public approval of their performance as president claim they have political capital to spend with Congress. When a president claims an electoral mandate, the president is arguing that the public ordered Congress to follow the president's agenda by supporting the president so powerfully at the polls. When a president talks about political capital, they are saying that they have so much public support because the people have faith in the president and trust their judgment. Therefore, even though a specific policy proposal may not be especially popular, Congress should go along with the president because the public trusts the president's judgment.

Because presidents are the only elected officials in the United States who serve a national constituency, they feel an imperative (a drive, or need) to build, keep, and use public support. The support of the public is of key importance to presidents' political viability.

Why Approval Matters

Presidents see approval as important in many ways, including the following:

• Dealings with Congress. Congress is less likely to defy the president if it knows the president enjoys broad public support. When Congress tries to defy a popular president, either because the members of the leadership in Congress think they have higher approval or because they have misjudged the president's popularity with voters, the consequences for the leadership in Congress can be negative.
• International relations. Foreign perception of public support is important for dealing with other nations. For example, George W. Bush had more difficulty dealing with the leaders of other countries as his approval levels dropped in the latter part of his presidency.
• Media. Media outlets take cues from public opinion. For example, my own research on the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and George Herbert Walker Bush shows that press coverage of presidents is more positive when their approval ratings are high than when they are low.
• Policy experts in Washington. There are many think tanks and interest groups in Washington, and there will always be some that support presidential initiatives and some that oppose them. However, higher approval ratings can help presidential initiatives get a better reception—initiatives that might not otherwise have the support of policy experts. For example, Ronald Reagan's economic plan in the early 1980s called for large cuts in tax rates, especially in the wealthiest tax brackets. The theory behind this plan was that money saved on taxes would be invested in the economy and spur economic growth. The benefits of that growth would then find their way down the socioeconomic ladder to the working class and the poor. Many economists were skeptical this plan would work, but Reagan's high level of popularity early in his term made many policy experts more respectful of his ideas—at least publicly—than they might otherwise have been.
• The president as a human being. Presidents do a better job if they are liked. Being skilled at management is not sufficient to become president. A president needs to court public opinion and to care what the people think. Low approval is a weight on presidents. It affects their ability to pursue policy goals, and, as their terms come to a close they worry about the effect it will have on their legacy (what historians write about them and how people remember them). Presidents with high approval are more upbeat and they seem to make better decisions. Presidents with low approval seem to make decisions based on what they think will improve their approval scores. This is not necessarily what is best for the country.

So, if approval is a presidential imperative, what does it take to maintain adequate support? In large measure, it depends on the attitude of the public. This can be frustrating for presidents because most of the time the public is disinterested in politics and civically disconnected. The only consistent factor is a general dislike for politicians. This civic disconnection has a negative effect on presidential behavior. Faced with a disinterested audience, presidents and presidential candidates feel an imperative to get the public's attention. This leads to pandering to the public, over-promising to the public, and attacking the opposition. This is a political Catch-22. The perception that voters do not care leads presidents and presidential candidates to try to get their attention. This leads them to attack their opponents and make too many promises. When presidents cannot deliver on their promises, which they typically can't, the public's discontent and low opinion of them is reinforced, and discontented voters generally respond by deciding not to pay attention.

Views of the Presidency

Scholarly thought about the presidency and its place in the American system is full of competing views. We will now examine three views of the presidency, beginning with that of President William Howard Taft, who espoused a literalist (or traditionalist) theory of the presidency.

William Taft's Theory

Figure 1.4. William Howard Taft was president from 1909–1913, succeeding Teddy Roosevelt.

William Taft formulated his view of the presidency in a series of lectures that were published in 1916 under the title Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers. Taft was a constitutional scholar. This is highlighted by the fact that when he left the presidency he became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He is the only president to have also served on the Supreme Court, and his view of the Constitution clearly influenced his understanding of the proper role for the president.

Taft argued that each branch of the government has its own specific function and jurisdiction, but that they also need to cooperate with each other. Taft's "true view of the Executive functions" was that "the president can exercise no power which cannot be fairly and reasonably traced to some specific grant of power or justly implied and included within such express grant as proper and necessary to its exercise. Such specific grant must be either in the Federal Constitution or in an act of Congress passed in pursuance thereof" (Nelson 2008). To Taft, presidential power had to be in the Constitution or had to be given to the president by Congress. He acknowledged the idea that a kind of general executive power does exist, but he argued "there is no undefined residuum of power which can be exercised because it seems to him to be in the public interest" (Nelson 2008). Taft, in other words, rejected the notion that presidents have an inherent special power because the president is the only public official with a national constituency.

Taft's theory of presidential power was based on the Constitution, and it was a restrictive view. He saw the presidency as being what was written in the Constitution and not much more. He took a literal view of the Constitution in this regard, arguing that the president can only do what the Constitution specifically allows. His view was Whig-like in the sense that the Whig Party was formed largely by politicians who objected to what they viewed as an abuse of power by Andrew Jackson during his presidency. Taft argued for strict deference to the Constitution.

One should remember, of course, that Taft's views of the presidency were articulated after he served as president, and his experiences in that office probably influenced his perspective. He was a one-term president who had no leadership over Congress or his party, which was largely due to meddling by Theodore Roosevelt. Taft took direction from Congress, rather than lead it. He never vetoed legislation he disagreed with. He only vetoed legislation if he felt it was clearly unconstitutional. He thought the role of president was to preside over government, not direct it.

Teddy Roosevelt's Theory—Stewardship

Figure 1.5. Roosevelt served as president from 1901–1909, succeeding William McKinley, who was assassinated in the first year of his second term.

After a bitter presidential election in 1912 against William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt expressed his view of the presidency in his 1913 autobiography, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography. Roosevelt, who had been a Republican, led a third party, the Bull Moose Progressives, which splintered the Republicans and allowed the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, to win. Roosevelt held Taft in low regard and referred to him regularly in his autobiography as "puzzlewit" and "fathead."

Roosevelt saw the president as the "steward of the people." In this view, the president not only had the right, but the duty to "do anything that the needs of the nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the Constitution or by the laws." In his autobiography, Roosevelt admitted to broadening the power of the presidency during his time in office, but he argued that this did not mean that he stole power from Congress. Rather, he insisted that he "acted for the public welfare…for the common well-being of all our people, whenever and in whatever manner was necessary, unless prevented by direct constitutional or legislative prohibition" (Roosevelt 1913).

Roosevelt's presidential role models, not surprisingly, were other presidents who also expanded the power of the presidency: Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. On the other hand, the presidents he was most critical of were James Buchanan and William Howard Taft, his successor, who, in his opinion, did not use the powers of the presidency to help the people. Roosevelt attacked Taft's view of the presidency, arguing that Taft failed to use the power available to him. He wrote that Taft was "keeping his talents undamaged in a napkin," and that Taft saw the president as a servant of Congress rather than as a servant of the people. He saw Taft's view of the presidency as "narrowly legalistic" (Nelson 2008).

Taft, on the other hand, saw Roosevelt's view as an "unsafe doctrine" because he thought that a president who acted broadly in the name of the people might end up expanding presidential power while harming individual rights. He argued that Roosevelt's ideas about the presidency stemmed from the idea that the executive is responsible for the welfare of all. He accused Roosevelt of trying to play God and set everything right. He worried about how much presidential power could expand under such a doctrine. He wrote, "The wide field of action that this would give to the Executive one can hardly limit" (Nelson 2008).

Roosevelt claimed his perspective was based on a valid theory of the Constitution, which held that the president should use his best judgment in making decisions about how to be president and not make decisions based on what Congress suggests or demands. He had an expansionist view of the presidency, arguing that there are some things only the president can do. He argued for the existence of inherent powers, meaning that the president has unspecified powers to act as the representative of the nation's best interests in the face of unforeseen developments. In other words, he claimed the power of president as crisis manager. As evidence of these inherent powers, Roosevelt cited Thomas Jefferson's decision to make the Louisiana Purchase from the French and the tradition, dating back to Washington, of presidential power to use the military without a declaration of war from Congress.

As president, Teddy Roosevelt wanted to use the power he saw as inherent in the presidency, and he did use it. He attacked the trusts, advocated nature conservation, built the Panama Canal, pushed the United States onto the world stage as a military power, and regularly appealed to the public for support. We will examine Roosevelt in greater detail later in the course.

The Scholarly View

Presidents are not the only people to think about where their presidency fits in and how much power presidents should have. Perhaps the most influential scholarly analysis of the presidency ever made comes from Richard Neustadt, a political scientist who was dominant in presidential studies from the 1960s through the 1990s.

Neustadt's Perspective—Realist

Figure 1.6. Richard Neustadt

Richard Neustadt learned about the presidency close up as an aide to President Harry Truman. His most important work on the presidency, Presidential Power, was originally written as a briefing book for the incoming Kennedy administration. In this sense, it was like Machiavelli's The Prince. It was a manual for success as president. His book is considered the most famous and influential book about the presidency in the past 50 years, and it is still read and commented on today. Many of the examples he used to make his points became rather outdated in later editions of his book, but his core arguments were still influential.

Neustadt was curious about presidential power and where it came from. In the beginning of the book, he examined presidents' command authority—their ability to make things happen based on their authority to give orders. The examples of presidential command authority he cited included Truman's firing of MacArthur as the commander of troops in Korea, Truman's seizure of steel mills to prevent a strike from interfering with the Korean War effort, and Eisenhower's ordering of troops to Little Rock, Arkansas to enforce court-ordered desegregation of the schools. Neustadt assessed what was necessary for these commands (or, as he referred to them, "self-executing" orders) to work. He argued that there had to be:

1. assurance the president has spoken;
2. clarity about his meaning;
3. publicity of the order; and
4. no doubt of his authority.

Neustadt's point was that making commands was not the way for presidents to handle most situations. The previous examples, Neustadt argued, were exceptions to the general rule and were also costly exceptions. Such situations, where the president can issue unilateral commands, are few and far between and are usually seen as last resorts or even failures on the part of the president to get things done in other ways.

To Neustadt, persuasion was the most important power presidents have. He rejected the formal powers in the Constitution as the most important source of presidential power. He argued that persuasion is the essence of the president's job and that success comes from skillful bargaining and persuasion. Command, to Neustadt, was only one part of persuasion.

Neustadt's emphasis on the importance of persuasion came from his idea that the American government was not one of separated powers but, rather, what he described as "separated institutions sharing powers" (Neustadt 1991). The difference is important. The idea of separated powers implies that Congress, the courts, and the president operate in isolation from each other and in competition with each other. The idea of separated institutions sharing powers, however, implies that the institutions of government need to cooperate with each other to get things done. The president needs to bargain with, or persuade, other political actors to get things done. For Neustadt, presidents needed to persuade Congress, others in the executive branch, the media, the public, and other governments. He wrote that presidential power "varies markedly with organization, subject matter, personality, and situation" (Neustadt 1991).

Neustadt argued that the president's job as persuader was to convince people that "what he wants of them is what their own appraisal of their own responsibilities requires them to do in their interest, not his." The key, according to Neustadt, was to convince people they were acting in their self-interest. In an extended example, he credited Truman's success in selling the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II to his ability to convince his audiences that the plan was in everyone's best self-interest.

According to Neustadt, presidential power (the president's power to bargain) comes from a combination of three things:

• Bargaining advantages (Neustadt argued that the president starts with inherent advantages, as the focal point of the government, in persuading others.)
• Expectations that the president will use those advantages skillfully (Neustadt referred to this as the president's professional reputation—do others view him as good at his job?)
• Estimates of how the public views the president and how the public would view him if he does (or does not do) what he wants (Neustadt referred to this as the president's public prestige, and he was the first scholar to suggest the idea that presidents have political capital in the form of public approval that they can "spend" to bargain with Congress.)

To Neustadt, a president's success or failure was up to the president alone. Success is determined by the president's choices. A successful president deals with the problems of today but always has an eye toward the future and what might be coming. Unlike Taft, who focused exclusively on the rules (the Constitution), Neustadt's principal focus was on the political behavior of the president. He saw power as personal, and his focus was on how presidents could get it, keep it, and lose it.

Critical Responses to Neustadt's Theory

The Constitution is not mentioned at all in Presidential Power. In different ways, the Constitution was integral to Taft and Roosevelt. From Neustadt's perspective, the formal authority of the president is weak, which makes bargaining very important. To him, personal skills and abilities are more important than the Constitution.

Neustadt suffers from a problem scholars of other institutions, including Congress and the courts, often suffer from. It is called institutional partisanship. He is focused on the presidency to the total exclusion of the other institutions of government. In Neustadt's case, his institutional partisanship causes him to argue that the president's objectives and the president's success are always the most important things. Neustadt sees anything that weakens the president as bad. Also, Neustadt bills his perspective as a realist view. It is realist from the perspective of the president, but it does not address the realities other officials face, and therefore it does not offer a complete picture of how the American government functions.

Again, the Constitution is missing from Neustadt's analysis. He does not address the powers and structures of the office, the place of the presidency in the larger constitutional system, or the constitutional duties of the president.

In response to this criticism and in Neustadt's defense, it is important to remember that he was writing from the perspective of a much different presidency than existed in the nineteenth century. Neustadt learned from over the shoulder of Harry Truman, who became president after a half century of the expansion of presidential power and public prominence. The office was not the same office that the framers of the Constitution created. It had changed dramatically.

This is an appropriate time, therefore, to consider the presidency from a constitutional perspective. We will first consider the Constitution's predecessor, the Articles of Confederation. Next, we will consider the deliberation that took place at the constitutional convention. We will consider the words that appear about the presidency in the Constitution and examine how those powers have been interpreted. Finally, we will consider the arguments of scholars such as Jeff Tulis who argue that there are, in fact, two different constitutional versions of the presidency.

The presidency is the source of executive power in our system of government. Before the United States was established, executive power tended to be supplied by monarchs, emperors, and dictators in most systems of government. Our system is a representative democracy or, as the framers referred to it, a "republic," in which the last word rests with the people. The framers were worried about the role executive power would play in a democracy, and they were cautious in designing it.

Defining and Launching the Presidency: An Introduction

The Articles of Confederation

The presidency was defined and launched in response to problems with the government created by the Articles of Confederation. The Articles of Confederation were written immediately following the Revolutionary War, and they created a government that was designed to be largely ineffective. The reasons for this were good at the time—the Revolutionary War had just been fought at great cost to break free from what the new Americans felt was a tyrannical government. Although the British Parliament made most of the decisions the Americans found so offensive, King George III was a convenient scapegoat. It is George, after all, who is mentioned prominently in the Declaration of Independence. If you have never done so, you may want to read the Declaration of Independence.

Figure 1.7. The Articles of Confederation were adopted by the Second Continental Congress on November 15, 1777. Click on the image to view a larger version.

Furthermore, American ire for British rule was often directed at the royal governors who were appointed by the British crown. In the decade before the Revolutionary War, the governors were seen by the colonists as abusing their power when they enforced repressive tax and regulatory policies. The lesson that many colonists learned from this experience was that executive power is dangerous to liberty, and liberty is safeguarded by legislative power. So, in most state governments after the Revolution, legislatures were made much stronger than the executive branch. Executives were relatively weak. They were often elected by the legislatures, they served brief terms, they had few real powers, and they had no way to protect themselves against legislative abuse.

Skepticism about executive power also influenced the founders of the country after the war when they created America's first national government. When the Articles of Confederation were drafted, they did not include an executive branch of any sort. If you have never done so, you may want to read the Articles of Confederation.

Rather than having an executive branch, the Articles left it to Congress to create committees to handle various executive functions, such as those of finance, diplomacy, and the military. Eventually, Congress created several executive departments, but no entity was created to be in charge of them. Congress itself was chaired by presidents, but they were not executive officers, only presiding officers. The result was that the secretaries of departments had to report to different committees for orders; the departments were creatures of the legislature and did not make up a coherent executive branch.

The lack of a cohesive, coherent executive branch in the Articles made it difficult for the government to do anything. Although this ineffectiveness had been deliberate, it was quickly apparent that such a system might prevent the new country from surviving. The government lacked energy. There were several groups of interested individuals who wanted to create a government with more energy. These included merchants, who wanted more cohesive trade and economic powers, and patriots, who feared losing all they fought so hard to win. Many saw the need for some entity to provide steady administration of the laws, react in times of crisis, and to resist the powers of a strong legislature.

One way to bring needed energy to the government was to create an executive. An executive enforces the laws and can serve as a representative for the interests of the country, both to the country's citizens and to the rest of the world. After some deft political maneuvering, politicians like James Madison of Virginia and Alexander Hamilton of New York were able to bring about a Constitutional Convention to draft a new national government. While in Philadelphia, the framers of the Constitution looked to the presidency as one answer to the problems inherent to the Articles.

The Constitutional Convention

The framers of the Constitution came to the Convention with a great deal of ambiguity about what they wanted. They did not want a monarchy like Great Britain because they feared tyranny, but they felt that most of the examples of executive power at the state level were too weak. And, of course, the Articles of Confederation did not offer a model of an executive at all.

Figure 1.8. This painting, Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, was created by Howard Chandler Christy. Click on the image to view a larger version.

When reading the Constitution, one thing becomes apparent very quickly—Article II, which describes the presidency, is both very short and very vague. It gave power to the president, but it is unclear about what power, exactly, it gave. The vagueness of Article II resulted from political compromise. Although there were forces at the convention who strongly favored creating an executive branch with real power, there were also delegates who held firmly to their fears about executive power. The framers were simply unable to agree on many details of what the presidency should look like, so they compromised by leaving it vague with the understanding that the details of the office would work themselves out over time. This decision gave the office room to grow, which pleased advocates of a strong executive such as Alexander Hamilton. In general, most framers felt the presidency needed to be controlled, but they also wanted it to be an office that was strong enough to solve problems in a crisis. Because the government under the Articles had no executive, it was hard to form a response to crises. The advocates of a stronger national government—with an executive—used Shays's Rebellion to great effect when making the case for a convention to create a new national government.

Daniel Shays was a former Revolutionary War soldier and farmer from Massachusetts. The Massachusetts government created stiff, regressive taxes intended to raise revenue to pay off the state's war debts. Many farmers, similar to Shays, were unable to pay the taxes, and the government responded by seizing their farms. Shays and other farmers carried out armed attacks on courthouses where the property seizures were conducted. Many national leaders looked at the rebellion with great concern because they feared it would spread to other states, and they knew that if it did, the national government had no way to respond to it. Not only was there no national government, there was also no national military. A Massachusetts state militia was able to bring the rebellion to an end, but the advocates of a stronger national government were able to use the rebellion as propaganda to help bring about a constitutional convention. The argument, which was convincing to the wealthy ruling class that worried about a revolt by the masses (with the exception of Thomas Jefferson, whose famous response to Shays's rebellion was "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing" (Washington 1853), was that unless there were a stronger national government in place, the country could easily be broken up by such a rebellion.

Distrust of Power

One characteristic that many of the framers shared was a distrust of power. They distrusted the power of both the elite—those in government—and of the masses. They dealt with their fear of the elite by creating a government of separated institutions sharing power. As for citizens, the framers did not trust ordinary citizens, and they feared mob rule. This was the reason that the use of Shays's rebellion as a propaganda tool was so effective. To deal with this, the framers created a representative democracy, in which the people were kept from making direct decisions about the government. Congress is one manifestation of this. Another way of distancing the masses from the government was the electoral college. By creating Congress and the electoral college, the framers established a tradition for the masses: to be a citizen, just vote, nothing more. This remains true today, and critics of this approach, such as presidential scholar Bruce Buchanan, argue that the framers created a trained civic incapacity. In other words, one reason most people are generally disinterested in politics is because the system was deliberately set up to keep us disinterested.