Posted on 05/28/2015 9:49:43 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Former Texas governor Rick Perry is gearing up for another presidential run and recently fired a shot across the bow of some of his competitors. In an interview with The Weekly Standard, Perry said that while he had “great respect” for senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul, they were not ready to be president:
I’ve had more than one individual say, “You know what, if you want to be the president of the United States, you ought to go back to your home state and be the governor and get that executive experience before you go lead this country.”
Perry’s record as governor of the Lone Star State is impressive. During his tenure, Texas was an economic dynamo while the rest of the country lagged behind. Republican voters will no doubt give him a careful look this time around.
Regardless, his suggestion is wrong. There is no correlation between presidential greatness and professional background.
Presidents are almost always governors, senators, or generals. We have seen good and bad versions of each. Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter were both governors; the former had an intuitive feel for the demands of the office, while the latter was out of his depth from day one. Similarly, Lyndon Johnson was a former senator who was incredibly effective at getting Congress to do what he wanted, while John F. Kennedy’s domestic program mostly stalled. George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower demonstrated a keen understanding of the political process, while Andrew Jackson and Zachary Taylor were capricious and imperial. Ulysses S. Grant was arguably the single greatest military commander this country has ever known, yet he was an inartful president.
Moreover, the country has had several polymath presidents who turned out to be disappointments. John Adams, James Monroe, Herbert Hoover, and George H. W. Bush had done a bit of everything by the time they became president. And yet none is in the top tier. Few men have been as qualified for the job as Richard Nixon, who was forced to resign because of Watergate. On the other hand, nobody has ever been elected president with as slender a résumé as Abraham Lincoln’s; nevertheless, he is widely regarded as America’s finest leader.
Political scientists have tried to explain such incongruity, but few explanations are satisfying. In the 1970s, James David Barber offered a psychological account of presidential greatness, but his approach was too reductionist and has been abandoned. More recently, Stephen Skowronek has argued that a president’s position in the broader political cycle is crucial. Yet like most analyses built on the concept of “political realignments,” this analysis falls prey to the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Presidential greatness is such a mystery because, while it depends on some predictable factors like the size of a congressional majority, a necessary ingredient is prudence. This ineffable quality enables a leader to make the best determination in light of the practical constraints he faces. Edmund Burke wrote:
Nothing universal can be rationally affirmed on any moral, or any political subject. Pure metaphysical abstraction does not belong to these matters. The lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. These exceptions and modifications are not made by the process of logic, but by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only the first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the standard of them all. Metaphysics cannot live without definition; but prudence is cautious how she defines.
Prudence is the essential virtue of presidential greatness. It is the bridge that connects the unlimited expectations we have of the president to the slender formal powers we have granted him.
Today, we expect the president to guide Congress, helm a political party, speak for the nation, oversee the bureaucracy, grow the economy, command the military, and manage our international affairs. In short, we want him to be a king in the mold of the Tudor monarchs. Yet our Founding Fathers were greatly influenced by the Glorious Revolution, which saw Englishmen hamstring their sovereign after repeated abuses by Stuart kings. In fact, there was a faction at the Constitutional Convention that did not even want executive authority embodied in a single person, so fearful were they of monarchism. A compromise produced the circumscribed magistrate outlined in Article II, whom presidential historian Richard Neustadt called a glorified clerk.
The modern president is expected to do much more than the Framers ever envisioned, yet his power to accomplish such impressive tasks is informal and extra-constitutional. In our system, a president is powerful if the other agents of government believe him to be powerful, and weak if they believe him weak.
Oftentimes, a president’s power depends heavily on the size of his congressional party, but legislative arithmetic hardly counts for everything. Jimmy Carter was inept even though Democrats had some of their biggest majorities in the postwar era, while Ronald Reagan squeezed a great deal from a Democratic House. Bill Clinton seemed most effective after the “Republican Revolution” of 1994, while George W. Bush coaxed little of substance from Congress during the four years his party controlled both chambers.
What makes the difference is prudence: the ability to perceive opportunities and make the most of them. This requires an intuitive feel for the mechanics of government, the interests of other politicians, the nature of public opinion, and most of all the different ways the president can manipulate the process to his desired end.
Consider Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. It was sweeping in part because he had large majorities in Congress. But that alone cannot explain a program like Social Security, which radically redefined the relationship between citizen and state. FDR understood that to sell the American people on it, he would have to pre-sent it just so. Thus was born the social insurance model. When his aides warned him of its fiscal impracticability, FDR waved them off, arguing that the funding mechanism was “politics all the way through. We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions. . . . With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”
There is no political science model or bullet point on a résumé that can predict such a masterful instinct as Roosevelt’s with Social Security. Similarly, there is no “mathematical” way to account for how Reagan won a Cold War that seemed destined for perpetual stalemate, how Washington kept partisan politics at bay, how Lincoln turned a sectional conflict into a referendum on the immorality of slavery, or how Teddy Roosevelt reoriented the staunchly pro-business Republican party against the trusts.
How and why these presidents developed prudence is a mystery. Some of them no doubt learned it through experience in prior positions, but they didn’t have to. One can be a reasonably successful governor, senator, or general without perfecting this virtue. The demands of those subordinate offices, while often taxing, are hardly overwhelming (Grant’s situation excepted). Again, Lincoln—our greatest statesman—occupied none of these positions.
So maybe our next great president will have been a governor from Texas, or a senator from Florida, or even a former CEO of a tech company. There really is no way to know. Presidential greatness, inevitably, is a function of prudence, and as Burke writes, “Pure metaphysical abstraction does not belong to these matters.”
The problem with this is the repeated references to a “leader”.
That’s what ruined our republic. “Leaders”. Sheep need leaders.
George Washington knew that the President is a public servant.
When you can run a legal office consisting of approx. 700 lawyers; that’s like herding cats.
You must have superior legal skills .. check .. you must have superior communication skills .. check .. you must know who you are and who your enemies are .. check ..
only one person I know is equipped for the job of President: TED CRUZ
I want trustworthiness.
“Presidential greatness, inevitably, is a function of prudence.”
I agree. Prudence is the queen of the virtues, since prudence is ability to look at options for spending (generosity), risks (courage) and sharing (justice). All leaders need prudence.
Bttt !
who has that quote from a past prez?
Something like;
“The most important quality a president needs to succeed at his post is the realization that he is probably not a great man.”
The biggest problem is the very idea that the modern president is upposed to do so much. Constitutionally ,he is not! Congress has allowed the usurpation of its authority for decades.
Very simple reason for that. If your primary goal is to be reelected, letting the president or courts take responsibility for anything that might upset voters is an excellent strategy.
The real problem is that the president always, by necessity, becomes more powerful in time of war. During the Cold War we got so used to this it became permanent and continued after the CW ended.
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