Reason Magazine - Topics > Presidential History

The Public Spinmeisters

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

The release of former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan's tell-all memoir has Washington buzzing, though there's a certain Capt. Renault-like phoniness to all the indignation: Are we really all that surprised that this administration—or for that matter, any administration—would ask its press secretary to lie, mislead, or dissemble in front of the media?

Should we really be shocked-shocked! that the White House might also keep its press secretary out of the loop when it comes to brewing political scandals, so he can convincingly feign ignorance when the press queries him about them?

While ostensibly serving as a liaison between the press and the president, White House press secretaries serve really only one function: to boost the president's image. White House press offices are little more than public relations machines for the administration they're serving.

They're wells of information when the president's announcing a new federal program or policy or when he's doing well in the polls—when the tone and tenor of the political climate. But at the first hint of controversy, they shut down. Presidents by now know to keep damning information as far from their press offices as possible.

When the tough questions come, press secretaries can then credibly assert that they "have no knowledge" or that they "weren't briefed" on the nasty stuff. For historical examples, see Clinton spokesmen Mike McCurry or Joe Lockhart during the sexual harassment scandals and, later, the impeachment trial. Or Reagan press secretaries Larry Speakes and Marlon Fitzwater during Iran Contra.

Perhaps the last truly honorable press secretary was Jerald terHorst, who resigned from the Ford administration after just a month in office. terHorst had strong objections to Ford's pardoning of Richard Nixon, and felt he could no longer in good conscience defend Ford's policies to the media. So he stepped down.

Bush's most widely praised press secretaries thus far have been Tony Snow and Ari Fleischer. But they aren't praised for their efforts at getting important, impartial information to the public. They're praised for the way they were able to flack with conviction—to be evasive without actually sounding evasive. The best press secretaries can spin like dervishes while having you believe you're getting it straight.

When under fire, the best press spokesmen thrive by appearing to communicate with us-while actually saying nothing substantive at all. In other words, the best presidential secretaries aren't notable for their public service, but for their talents at misleading the public.

So why are we paying for all of this? Why are taxpayers asked to foot the bill for the president's public relations machine?

Granted, in the grand scheme of things, it isn't that much money. The press secretary makes around $165,000 per year, deputies $70,000 to $130,000. Still, it's the principle of it all. We shouldn't be paying a White House press staff and press office whose main objective is to lie to us (of course, you could make a good argument that we pay most politicians to do the same thing, but that's another matter.)

I say we stop up the spigot. No more tax dollars for political flacks. If the president, his cabinet, and their staffs want press spokesmen, let them pay for them with campaign funds, or out of their own pockets. The purpose of a political campaign, after all, is to sell a candidate to the public.

The president's press office's job is to sell the president to the public. They serve the same purpose. It's insulting that what essentially are campaign staff are paid with taxpayer dollars under the false and farcical guise of "transparency." Fact is, when a press office is most important-during a scandal, or allegations of corruption or abuse of power-its main objective is obfuscation, the opposite of transparency.

While we're at it, we shouldn't be using public funds to pay the press secretaries and communications officers on House and Senate staff, either. They aren't nearly as prominent as the White House press spokesmen and women, but here too, their job isn't to give the public access to its lawmakers so much as it is to tout and promote the lawmakers themselves.

Taxpayer-funded press offices also contribute to an incumbency advantage. Yes, there's supposed to be a hard and fast line between a politician's campaign press and his official-duties press. But let's be honest. Touting the latest federal earmark for the water sanitation plant back home in a press release wins votes. Challengers have to pay for all of their press work from campaign funds. Incumbents should, too.

I suppose some would argue that without press offices, our politicians would be even less answerable and accountable to the public than they already are. I'll concede that my plan certainly wouldn't make them more accountable. But I doubt it will make them much less accountable, either. Politicians will still want to distribute information about how wonderful they are. Congressional representatives will still want their home districts to know how much federal pork they've procured for the local college, police department, and public works project. They'll still find a way to get that information out.

In other words, we'd still have press offices, and they'd still be doing much of the same thing they do today-touting the wisdom, good looks, and selfless public service of the boss. The main difference is that instead of pushing on taxpayers the indignity of forcing us to pay for being propagandized to, the agitprop would come from a campaign office, and be paid for with campaign money.

No one else gets a well-oiled PR machine at taxpayer expense. Why should politicians?

Radley Balko is a senior editor for reason and maintains at Web log at TheAgitator.com. This article originally appeared at Foxnews.com

The Age of Nixon

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 07:00:00 EDT

A Liberal Like No Other

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 07:00:00 EDT

I was just getting used to the idea that Barack Obama is an America-hating left-winger bent on socialism and surrender. Then along comes Ralph Nader, who says the problem with Obama is that he's an obedient steward of the status quo, doing the bidding of greedy corporations. Naderites, conservatives, and many others agree he's a menace. They just can't agree on why.

Obama has said, in reference to his broad appeal, "I am like a Rorschach test"—meaning that his admirers have a knack for seeing in him exactly what they want to find. But the inkblots work the other way, too: People who dislike him have detected a multitude of reasons to justify their animus.

To Hillary Clinton's supporters, he was always a dreamy innocent who would be ground up by the Republican attack machine. To some critics, he's a sleazy Chicago pol. When he ran for Congress against a black incumbent, he lost because some voters thought he was too white. In some primary states this year, some voters thought he was, well, not too white.

By the time this campaign is over, he'll be called everything but a child of God. Some of it will be true, some of it will be false, and much of it won't matter.

One of the favorite Republican themes will be labeling him the most liberal senator, as ranked by the National Journal. Now, it's true that Obama—how to put it?—votes eerily like a Democrat. But it's hard to believe he's really more liberal than Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Chuck Schumer, Barbara Boxer, Russ Feingold, or Bernie Sanders.

By more comprehensive measures, he's not. According to one scholarly analysis of all non-unanimous votes, Obama is only the 10th most liberal senator. Still, there is no doubt he's a liberal of one shade or another. If he's elected, you should not expect a reduction in taxes, spending, regulation, federal power, or Birkenstock sales.

Obama insists his views are more complicated than simple labels convey. But while McCain has often defied his own party's orthodoxy, Obama has declined to do so.

As liberals go, however, opponents of Big Government could do worse. On economic matters, like the mortgage crisis, he's more respectful of property rights and free markets than, say, Clinton. His health care plan rankles many liberals because it doesn't force everyone to buy insurance.

While Obama has criticized various free trade agreements, he's also written that in today's world, "it's hard to even imagine, much less enforce, an effective regime of protectionism."

Some of the positions that get him tagged as liberal confound traditional categories. Among the members of Congress who share his support for withdrawal from Iraq are Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who favors dismantling most of the federal government, and Democratic Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia, who was secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan.

These days, 20 percent of Republicans say we should bring the bulk of our troops home within a year. They can attest that opposing the war doesn't make you a liberal any more than eating nuts makes you a squirrel.

That's one reason the liberal label may not be quite the ball and chain Republicans hope. If "liberal" is taken to connote gay marriage, socialized medicine, and unilateral disarmament, most people won't find it appealing. But Obama does not espouse those. If it is taken to mean trying something different from the last seven years—or offering a plausible alternative to war, inflation, and a housing bust—they will be receptive.

Back in 1980, everyone knew Ronald Reagan was too conservative to win. But when non-conservatives were presented with a conservative who was likable, temperate, and occasionally eloquent, many of them found they could vote for him. What Obama has going for him, more than anything, is a quality of calm and thoughtful gravity, which offers a refreshing contrast to President Bush's inarticulate defensiveness and McCain's stubborn pugnacity.

I disagree with Obama's positions more often than not, but reducing a political leader to the sum of his positions is like judging the value of an artwork by adding up the cost of the canvas and paint. Obama didn't get where he is by being a liberal like any other. He got there by being a liberal like no other.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Rocky Road to the White House

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 07:00:00 EDT

John McCain and Barack Obama are savvy politicians who have won numerous elections and stand poised to capture the biggest office of all. So obviously, each has a good ear for what will persuade voters and what won't. But even Pavarotti sometimes missed a high note. And lately both candidates have been noticeably off-key.

McCain's bad moment came after Obama expressed bewilderment at his opposition to a new GI Bill expanding educational benefits for veterans. Instead of explaining the genuine flaws in the legislation, McCain decided to climb on his high horse. "And I will not accept from Sen. Obama, who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my regard for those who did," he said, dripping with contempt.

You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, and McCain's jibe demonstrated that his personality has an excess of acid content. Angry young men may be indulged, but angry old men tend to get dismissed.

Besides reminding voters that a McCain presidency would not spread healing balm over the body politic, his remark insulted anyone who has never been in the military—which is 90 percent of adult Americans. Just about all of them admire the former Navy pilot's heroism as a prisoner of war. But very few like to be treated as if, by not enlisting, they forfeited their right to speak or vote.

There is also something hypocritical in McCain suddenly using this issue against a political rival. Among the nominees he has voted to confirm for secretary of defense were Republicans William Cohen, who never wore a uniform, and Dick Cheney, who used five deferments to avoid the Vietnam War draft. If these lifelong civilians were entitled to run the Pentagon, why isn't another one entitled to his own opinion about veterans' benefits?

Someone should tell McCain that touting your military credentials is a proven recipe for political failure. The military sociologist (and Army veteran) Charles Moskos of Northwestern University has noted that in recent presidential elections, the candidate with the superior military record has usually fared poorly.

Al Gore and John Kerry, who served in Vietnam, came in second to George W. Bush, who didn't. Draft-evader Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, who both saw combat in World War II. Jimmy Carter, whose seven years in the Navy included service aboard a nuclear submarine, lost to Ronald Reagan, who spent World War II in the Army making training movies here at home.

So Obama should not expect to be penalized at the polls merely because McCain disapproves of him for bypassing military service. But the Illinois senator may pay a price for his disdain of the economic ethos that fuels our vibrant economy and complements our love of freedom.

In his recent commencement address at Wesleyan University, Obama practically sneered at any students in the audience who would "take your diploma, walk off this stage, and chase only after the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should buy." He warned the graduates that "fulfilling your immediate wants and needs" indicates "a poverty of ambition."

He urged them to disregard the grubby pursuit of profit in favor of, say, joining the Peace Corps or helping "lead a green revolution" to promote conservation and renewable energy.

What he neglected to mention is that American corporations investing and selling abroad, and American consumers buying foreign-made goods, have done far more to raise living standards in poor countries than all the Peace Corps volunteers who ever lived. As for the "green revolution," Obama doesn't seem to realize that when breakthroughs come, they will most likely come from capitalists intent on making money, not from selfless social workers or community activists.

He may forget that most of his fellow citizens see nothing contemptible in laboring at a mundane job to achieve material success for themselves and their loved ones. On the contrary, Americans generally respect people who work hard and take responsibility for their own welfare. And they understand that what profits those individuals generally benefits the rest of us as well.

McCain should be proud of his military career and Obama of his work as a community organizer. But if only to avoid alienating those who have chosen a different course, they might want to admit there are other ways to live a useful life.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

"This is not the Scott we knew"

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:10:00 EDT

The White House has issued a non-response response to former press secretary Scott McClellan's blockbuster tell-all about just how fucking in the dark he was during those years in which he was, you know, the president's spokesman. If nothing else, McClellan's book, titled What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, is arguably the most colonically challenged political memoir in recent history (certainly he has added to the great tradition of bad punctuation around his titular phrase; for earlier examples, see The Byrds' song "What's Happening?!?!" and the TV show What's Happening!!). According to press reports, McClellan says that the Bush administration lied to him about everything, all the time. Which sounds about right, though one gets to wondering either just how clever McClellan is or how dumb he is that it took him so long to figure that out.

Anyhoo, here's the official Bush line for now and probably forever:

"Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House. For those of us who fully supported him, before, during and after he was press secretary, we are puzzled. It is sad—this is not the Scott we knew," Dana Perino, one of his successors at the podium, says in a statement to reporters.
"The book, as reported by the press, has been described to the president. I do not expect a comment from him on it—he has more pressing matters than to spend time commenting on books by former staffers," she says.

More here.

What has Bush been up to lately? According to the White House website, he's toured a cable company and met with NCAA football coaches, among other things. So he really does have a full plate.

Via Romenesko.

Goldwater Unfiltered

mccarthydp@gmail.com (Daniel McCarthy) — Tue, 27 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Pure Goldwater, edited by Barry M. Goldwater Jr. and John W. Dean, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 416 pages, $27.95

Even though the names on the cover of Pure Goldwater are those of Barry Goldwater Jr. (son of the senator) and John W. Dean (military academy friend of Barry Jr. and later a key Watergate figure), this book is not written by either of them. In fact, it’s that rarest of artifacts within the vast body of literature by and about the 1964 presidential candidate—a book that, unlike more famous works such as The Conscience of a Conservative, was actually written by Sen. Barry Goldwater himself. Well, sort of.

Starting in 1939, when Barry Jr. was born, Goldwater pere intermittently kept a private journal. At first the idea was that the stray thoughts he recorded might be of some use to his son: a guide to business matters in case Goldwater died before his offspring could learn the family trade of managing a chain of Arizona department stores. From the beginning, though, Goldwater included much more than just business advice. He filled the journal with his observations and feelings about the land and people of Arizona. He recorded his experiences as a pilot in World War II. Most important for history, he put down his inner thoughts about his political career: 28 years in the U.S. Senate, interrupted by the most influential failed presidential bid in American history.

Goldwater’s 1964 campaign transformed America more profoundly than many a successful White House run. It propelled the conservative movement into national politics (putting to rout the GOP’s big-government Rockefeller wing) and won the senator a place second only to Ronald Reagan in conservatives’ hearts. Not a few libertarians got their start in the 1964 campaign as well. If they sometimes blanched at Goldwater’s saber-rattling Cold War stances, they nonetheless admired his anti-socialist, small-government rhetoric, which was backed up—not always, but often enough—by his Senate votes.

Goldwater was for liberty, as he conceived of it. “Our country, of course, was born on the very simple idea that freedom is our only cause,” he wrote in his journal, “and that freedom was not given to us by government.” In another entry, he declared, “The American economic system could only work well, and at its best, when it was unhampered by government and was allowed to be controlled only by the marketplace.… Thus, the core of my economic philosophy is the free market system—when it is working as it should.”

John Dean and Barry Goldwater Jr. have excerpted the journal and packaged their selections with a smattering of Goldwater’s letters, speeches, and other literary remains. Pure Goldwater is so called because it presents Goldwater’s own words, unscripted and (mostly) unpolished. The book also includes lengthy passages from Goldwater’s testimony in the 1968 libel suit he brought against the journalist Ralph Ginzburg, who in 1964 had published a psychiatric survey that purported to find the senator paranoid, sexually insecure, suicidal, and “grossly psychotic.” (Goldwater won the suit, although the jury awarded damages that covered only his legal fees.) In their introduction, Dean and Goldwater Jr. describe Pure Goldwater as “a scrap book of important thoughts; it is more nuggets than narrative.”

That’s all too true. Goldwater’s journal doesn’t cover every key period of his life; there is virtually nothing in it about the 1964 campaign, for example. Dean and Goldwater Jr. do not plug this astonishing gap with much supplemental material: There are just two items here from 1964, a letter and a press statement, both of them complaining about the media’s biased reporting. For the rest of the story, the editors suggest books like What Happened to Goldwater?, by Goldwater adviser Stephen Shadegg, and A Glorious Disaster, by campaign treasurer J. William Middendorf II. As abundant as the literature about the ’64 race may be, that campaign is a hell of a thing to omit from any book about Barry Goldwater.

Despite the fragmentary nature of the journals, a bare-bones narrative does emerge. Pure Goldwater opens with a 1923 letter the 14-year-old Goldwater wrote to Thomas Edison telling the inventor about his interests in radios and electricity—interests that would prove to be lifelong. Selections from later recollections fill in the picture of Goldwater’s youth: his work in the family department store as a boy; his father’s death in 1929, which led the 20-year-old Goldwater to abandon his studies at the University of Arizona and return to work; his marriage in 1934 to Peggy Johnson, a young woman he met in the department store. The journal itself begins in 1938, when Goldwater was 29. Around the same time, he began writing guest editorials for the Phoenix Gazette, which reveal a confident young businessman adamantly opposed to the New Deal. “The worst thing about your labor plan,” Goldwater wrote in an op-ed addressed directly to Franklin Roosevelt, “has been that you have turned over to the racketeering practices of ill-organized unions the future of the working man. Witness the chaos they are creating in the eastern cities. Witness the men thrown out of work, the riots, the bloodshed, and the ill feeling between labor and capital.” That’s pure Goldwater all right.

The early journal entries are less polemical, more personal. In 1939 Goldwater was glad when he could get away from business and politics, escaping into a weeks-long tour of the Arizona desert. Several sources (not just Ralph Ginzburg) have suggested that Goldwater suffered a nervous breakdown before embarking on this desert odyssey. Maybe it was nothing as dramatic as that, but in his journal Goldwater writes of getting himself “into such a stew that this trip became a necessity.” In 1941 Goldwater, who had been an Army reservist since 1930, enlisted in the Army Air Corps, and a dozen journal entries from 1943 tell of his flight across the Atlantic from Delaware to Scotland by way of Greenland and Iceland in a single-engine P-47, part of an operation to fly fighters to Britain. Goldwater didn’t see combat, but his trans-Atlantic jaunt and later Air Corps service in Asia had risks enough of their own.

After the war, Goldwater launched his career in politics, getting elected to the Phoenix City Council in 1949, managing the successful gubernatorial campaign of John Pyle the following year, and defeating Democratic Sen. Ernest McFarland, the Senate majority leader, in 1952. A 1949 journal entry expresses Goldwater’s belief that campaigning and governing could be, and should be, “clean”: “I think…that politics can be governed by the same set of laws or rules that govern our actions towards each other. I believe that things can be done outright and not on the sly cloak and dagger treatment politics have always carried. I think that people who work under [city] politicians, the clerks, the police, the engineers and all the others, they will work for men and women that they admire and trust much better than for those they fear and distrust.”

“Clean politics” meant, among other things, that in 1964 Goldwater would not make a campaign issue out of Lyndon Johnson aide Walter Jenkins, who was arrested for homosexual activity in a YMCA bathroom. In the 1980s, the cause of clean politics led Goldwater to call for strict campaign spending limits; he even went so far as to propose a constitutional amendment to get around the Supreme Court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, which held that Congress could not place limits on federal campaign spending. “The Court held that such a campaign lid is an invasion of the opportunity of individuals and organizations to exercise free speech,” he said in a 1983 Senate floor speech included in Pure Goldwater. “My answer is that we should try again.… The success of our national experiment in self-rule is on the line.” That’s not to say Goldwater would have seen eye to eye with his Senate successor, John McCain, on campaign finance. For one thing, Goldwater opposed public financing of elections, warning “it could lead to a loss of all freedom, with the government gaining power to manipulate elections.”

Clean politics is not a theme anyone would associate with Richard Nixon, but Nixon had campaigned loyally for Goldwater in 1964, and Goldwater returned the favor in 1968 and 1972. But the senator brooded extensively on the 37th president, well before Watergate. “Nixon was the most prevalent subject in his private journal,” Dean and Goldwater Jr. note, “suggest[ing] that Richard Nixon was something of a puzzle to Goldwater, which he continued to work on until he gave up in disgust.”

Goldwater was frustrated by President Nixon’s reluctance to consult him for advice. Whenever the two did meet, Goldwater always told Nixon the same thing: The president had to rid the State Department and other government agencies of Kennedy and Johnson holdovers who were preventing Nixon from implementing conservative policies. Nixon, in turn, would always tell Goldwater that he wanted to meet with him more regularly, but he never did.

By the time the Watergate scandal erupted, Goldwater’s patience with Nixon had frayed. At first he blamed the press and Nixon’s staff for the affair, but he soon came to suspect Nixon as well. He wondered in his journal whether Nixon had engineered the downfall of his vice president, Spiro Agnew, who resigned after being accused of taking bribes. “Many of us in Washington have felt for some time that someone was out to get the vice president,” he wrote. “That someone could well be the president of the United States wanting to get rid of Agnew so he could replace him with either [Texas Sen. John] Connally or [former New York Gov. Nelson] Rockefeller…as the person to succeed him.”

Still, as late as the summer of 1974, Goldwater did not believe Nixon should step down over Watergate. But on August 7, Goldwater and the Republican leaders in the House and Senate, Rep. John Rhodes of Arizona and Sen. Hugh Scott of Tennessee, told the president what he could expect from impeachment proceedings. “I told him I doubted if he would get as many as fifteen votes” in the Senate, Goldwater recorded in his journal, noting that he was unsure how he himself would vote. Shortly after their meeting, Nixon resigned.

Prior to Watergate, Goldwater had planned to retire from the Senate in 1974, and Nixon had offered to make him ambassador to Mexico—one of a few minor revelations contained in Pure Goldwater. Another nugget is that when Gerald Ford became president, he asked Goldwater whether he should appoint an African American or a woman as vice president—or even Goldwater himself. A black V.P. might work, Goldwater replied, if Ford “could find a competent black Republican,” but the country wasn’t ready for a female vice president, even though “women are excellent in politics.” Goldwater, who elected to stay in the Senate post-Watergate to be a force of stability, didn’t want the job himself. According to his journal, his desire to ensure stability was why he supported Ford over the more conservative Ronald Reagan in the 1976 Republican primaries.

Regrettably, Pure Goldwater tells us little about the senator’s relationship with Reagan. The book’s historical sequence breaks off after the Ford administration, and the last three chapters survey, in scattershot fashion, Goldwater’s views on a handful of controversial issues: foreign policy, abortion, homosexuality, immigration, and campaign finance. The policy thought on display here and throughout the book will by turns delight and infuriate every part of the political spectrum. When he first came to the Senate, Goldwater abhorred France’s colonial meddling in Indochina. “It seemed rather inconsistent to me, inconsistent certainly with the principles of this Republic,” he wrote in his journal, “that we, who have fought so hard for freedom against Britain, would now be supporting openly a country like France with colonizing ambitions.” Later he ardently supported the U.S. war in Vietnam—in the name of anticommunism rather than colonialism—urging Nixon to mine the harbors and bomb the dikes of North Vietnam.

His business experience and military service taught Goldwater to be skeptical of government spending, especially military spending. In his first Senate run, his statement of principles included a plank declaring, “The military is the greatest waster of money and manpower we have. They must be made to conduct their affairs in a businesslike manner.” But during the Nixon years, Goldwater became a fierce advocate for a civilian aeronautical boondoggle: federal aid for the development of an American supersonic transport to rival the British-French Concorde and (believe it or not) a Soviet commercial SST. Goldwater’s reaction upon seeing the instrumentation in the Russian prototype is a vintage slice of Cold War paranoia: “What I saw in the Russian 144 appeared to be very old and extremely unsophisticated but, frankly, no one knows what they had hiding under the floor.”

Today’s conservatives will balk at Goldwater’s social views. He initially welcomed the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. “I think that abortion should be legalized,” he wrote to a constituent in 1973, “because whether it is legal or not, women are going to have it done.” He quickly adopted a vaguer stance, dropping his talk about legalization and telling constituents “the issue [is] squarely up to each state legislature.” After leaving the Senate in 1986, however, he came out explicitly in favor of abortion rights. He also became an outspoken advocate of gay rights, not only calling for an end to the ban on homosexuals in the military but endorsing anti-discrimination legislation as well.

Decades earlier, Goldwater had voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act precisely on the grounds that its anti-discrimination clauses would infringe on states’ rights and individual property rights. His turnaround on anti-discrimination legislation has never been fully explained, though a 1994 statement included in Pure Goldwater supports the idea that his reasons were more personal than philosophical. “My grandchildren and great-grandchildren are growing up in Arizona,” he said. “Some of them are gay, some of them aren’t. But because Arizona doesn’t have a law barring discrimination based on sexual orientation, they may not all get a fair shake.”

From any vantage point, Barry Goldwater was far from perfect and far from perfectly consistent. Yet he still finds admirers among conservatives, libertarians, and even liberals. If everyone can find something to object to in his record, nearly everyone also can find something to like. And imperfect though he was, Goldwater at least tried to live up to his ideal of clean politics. He wasn’t always candid, but he shot from the hip often enough that voters could tell themselves they were hearing something like the truth.

No Goldwater fan can do without a copy of Pure Goldwater; but no one who isn’t already a fan will get much out of it. This book is a stopgap at best, until the journal itself is published—assuming there’s any more substance to it than what’s on display here, which may or may not be the case. An edition of collected letters is much needed as well. But until those come along, readers can get their fix of the unscripted, unghosted conscience of a conservative from Pure Goldwater.

Daniel McCarthy is associate editor of The American Conservative.

Will on Healy

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 27 May 2008 09:34:00 EDT

In this week's Newsweek, George Will lets loose with some resounding praise for Gene Healy and his book The Cult of the Presidency, calling it "the year's most pertinent and sobering public affairs book." Will then gushes:

Healy's dissection of the delusions of "redemption through presidential politics" comes at a moment when liberals, for reasons of liberalism, and conservatives, because they have forgotten their raison d'être, "agree on the boundless nature of presidential responsibility." Liberals think boundless government is beneficent. Conservatives practice situational constitutionalism, favoring what Healy calls "Caesaropapism" as long as the Caesar-cum-Pope wields his anti constitutional powers in the service of things these faux conservatives favor.

Will—easily the most intellectually honest conservative pundit in the business—has been known to tease out his inner libertarian from time to time.

An ~~excerpt~~ adaptation from Healy's book ran as the cover story in our June issue.

My Kinda Platform

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 26 May 2008 20:20:00 EDT

Another electoral alternative:

I created my own party. It's called the Sloth and Indolence Party, and I am running as an anarchist candidate in the best sense of that word. I have studied the presidency carefully; I have seen that our best presidents were the do-nothing presidents: Millard Fillmore, Warren G. Harding. When you have a president who does things, we are all in serious trouble. If he does anything at all -- if he gets up at night to go to the bathroom -- somehow, mystically, trouble will ensue. I guarantee that if I am elected, I will take over the White House, hang out, shoot pool, scratch my ass, and not do a damn thing. Which is to say, if you want something done, don't come to me to do it for you; you got to get together and figure out how to do it yourselves. Is that a deal?

That's the folksinger Utah Phillips talking, a few elections ago. He won't be running this time, alas -- he just died at age 73.

Presidential Power-Tripping

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 22 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

In our history and civics classes, we're taught that the genius of the Constitution is the checks and balances it imposes on the three branches of government. The founders understood that each branch—the president, the Congress and the courts—would seek to expand its power. They then set up a system that not only acknowledges man's desire to accumulate power but also one that harnesses that desire and uses it to keep any one branch from becoming too influential.

That system has mostly served us well. But an important new book details how the delicate balance of power in the federal government has been unraveling for nearly a century now, and underscores how important it is that we elect a president this November who understands the constitutional boundaries of the office.

Unfortunately, that isn't likely to happen.

The Cult of the Presidency by the Cato Institute's Gene Healy (I should disclose that Healy is a friend and former colleague) provides a history of the office of the presidency. It's a fascinating narrative of how the office that was meant to be little more than an administrator of the nation's laws (George Washington referred to it as "chief magistrate") has grown into the equivalent of an elected monarch.

It's a curious thing in America that each July we celebrate how the founding fathers threw off the shackles of an oppressive monarchy, that we favorably compare our republican system of governance with the world's tyrants, dictatorships and monarchies (and rightly so)—and yet we then celebrate those American presidents who most behaved like tyrants, monarchs and dictators.

Presidents like Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman are regularly put at the top of lists of America's greatest presidents. This is true when both historians and the American public at large are polled. Yet these are presidents who did everything they could to expand the power of their offices, to extend the sphere of influence of the federal government and to bully through policies that met inconvenient hurdles otherwise known as checks and balances.

Woodrow Wilson ran for president on a peace platform, then dragged us through the bloody trench carnage of World War I. Oh, and he imprisoned thousands of critics and war protesters in the process. Teddy Roosevelt once lamented that he didn't have a war during his administration to make him great, and compared the stakes of his third-party run for the White House to the rapture and second coming of Jesus Christ.

Franklin Roosevelt broke the tradition set by George Washington of serving just two terms. When the Supreme Court rebuffed his attempts to pass unconstitutional legislation, he tried to expand the number of justices on the Court to ensure a friendly majority. Harry Truman was the first president to pull America into a protracted war without first consulting Congress. He then sought to nationalize private companies to ensure that war was properly outfitted.

These are odd men to call heroes.

Inexplicably, the presidents who knew and understood their constitutional limits, who respected those limits and who generally took a more laissez-faire approach to government get short shrift—even derision—from historians.

Men like Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding, Rutherford B. Hayes and Grover Cleveland merely exhibited what Healy calls "stolid, boring competence." Historians loathe them, Healy writes, because they had the audacity to "content themselves simply with presiding over peace and prosperity" and not seek to remake the world in their own image. The nerve of them.

Today, the president oversees 1.8 million federal employees. The federal government is America's largest employer. Moreover, we today expect much more from the president than merely to enforce the nation's laws. We expect him to console us in times of tragedy or natural disaster, to inspire us in times of war. Some even look to the president for spiritual guidance. The enormity of the office grows more unsettling when you consider the set of skills and traits it takes to get elected. As Healy explains, the long, brutal, expensive primary and general election process selects people with massive egos, people willing to subject themselves to all sorts of abuse in the pursuit of power and people willing to accept favors from all sorts of interests as they ascend from office to office—favors from people who generally expect to be repaid.

George Washington set perhaps the most important precedent in the history of the idea of a constitutional republic when he declined to seek a third term. He could have been a king if he'd so chosen. Despite achieving myth-like reverence and adulation while still in office, Washington had the humility and the foresight to understand the importance of leaving power on the table. Doing so not only limited his own power but began the voluntary two-term tradition that lasted 140 years.

While both Barack Obama and John McCain have in some way acknowledged that the Bush administration has dangerously pushed the limits of executive power, neither has indicated exactly what powers, if elected, he would give back or what steps he'd take to make sure those powers aren't later invoked by a successor.

Perhaps it's too much to hope for another George Washington. Instead, this November, it looks as if our choices are a man who styles himself after John F. Kennedy and a man who idolizes Teddy Roosevelt.

That doesn't bode well for the next four years, or for the imperial presidency's continuing threat to American democracy.

Radley Balko is a senior editor for reason. A version of this article originally appeared at FoxNews.com.

Question Time With the Republican President Who Will Appoint Democrats and Reject the Unitary Executive

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 15 May 2008 17:58:00 EDT

John McCain gave an interesting speech this morning dreaming out loud what the world will look like in January 2013, after the first four years of his administration. The headlines from it will mostly (and inaccurately) be about "Troops Home From Iraq by 2013: McCain," on which more from me here, but there are some more concrete, semi-radical promises of interest in the speech. For instance:

I will ask Democrats to serve in my administration. My administration will set a new standard for transparency and accountability. I will hold weekly press conferences. I will regularly brief the American people on the progress our policies have made and the setbacks we have encountered. When we make errors, I will confess them readily, and explain what we intend to do to correct them. I will ask Congress to grant me the privilege of coming before both houses to take questions, and address criticism, much the same as the Prime Minister of Great Britain appears regularly before the House of Commons.

Wowza! While I am a huge fan of Question Time With the Redcoats, I would worry somewhat that the Rolling Fireside Chat Revue would place even more "bull" in the Bully Pulpit, aggrandizing an already inflated office in which (as Gene Healy taught us in this month's cover story) presidents before Woodrow Wilson thought it a bit too presumptuous to deliver the State of the Union in person.

More from McCain today, on that question of executive power:

The powers of the presidency are rightly checked by the other branches of government, and I will not attempt to acquire powers our founders saw fit to grant Congress. I will exercise my veto if I believe legislation passed by Congress is not in the nation's best interests, but I will not subvert the purpose of legislation I have signed by making statements that indicate I will enforce only the parts of it I like.

Besides being a direct (and welcome) rebuke to George W. Bush and the Unitary Executive theory, this also somewhat contradicts McCain's long track record of supporting a line-item veto, which the Supreme Court ruled in 1998 gave the executive branch powers our founders did not see fit to include in the Constitution. And more relevantly, it would seem to be in contradiction of McCain's own longstanding belief that presidents have too little power vis-a-vis Congress in the planning of foreign policy and the waging of war. Here are some of his thoughts on that subject, from his 2002 political memoir Worth the Fighting For:

My disdain of congressional interference in the conduct of the war in Vietnam made all the stronger my natural antipathy to the notion of 535 self-styled secretaries of defense second-guessing and hamstringing the president's authority in national security matters.
*
At timies, my despair [about Bill Clinton's feckless foreign policy], and the disdain it provoked, caused me to doubt principles I had held for a lifetime about the president's preeminence over Congress in the conduct of foreign policy and the imperative that American power never retreat in response to an inferior adversary's provocation.
*
On October 14, 1993, eleven days after the ambush of our rangers in Mogadishu, I offered an amendment on the Senate floor restricting funds for American forces in Somalia to the purpose of their "prompt and orderly withdrawal." [...] [I]t was an encroachment on presidential authorrity and a retreat in the face of aggression from an inferior foe that I would never have contemplated in the past. [...] In hindsight, I wish I had not undertaken so drastic a step.
*
[Theodore Roosevelt] invented the modern presidency by liberally interpreting the constitutional authority of the office to redress the imbalance of power between the executive and legislative branches that had tilted decisively toward Congress in the half century since the Civil War.

McCain ain't no John Yoo, but he agrees with Dick Cheney that the War Powers Act is unconstitutional, and he won't lightly brook any shackles on his ability to move troops hither and yon.

Oh yeah: Here's McCain's terrible 2013 ad:

Here's a better version:

The Cult of the Presidency

info@reason.com (Gene Healy) — Mon, 12 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

“I ain’t running for preacher,” Republican presidential candidate Phil Gramm snarled to religious right activists in 1995 when they urged him to run a campaign stressing moral themes. Several months later, despite Gramm’s fund raising prowess, the Texas conservative finished a desultory fifth place in the Iowa caucuses and quickly dropped out of the race. Since then, few candidates have made Gramm’s mistake. Serious contenders for the office recognize that the role and scope of the modern presidency cannot be so narrowly confined. Today’s candidates are running enthusiastically for national preacher—and much else besides.

In the revival tent atmosphere of Barack Obama’s campaign, the preferred hosanna of hope is “Yes we can!” We can, the Democratic front-runner promises, not only create “a new kind of politics” but “transform this country,” “change the world,” and even “create a Kingdom right here on earth.” With the presidency, all things are possible.

Even though Republican nominee John McCain tends to eschew rainbows and uplift in favor of the grim satisfaction that comes from serving a “cause greater than self-interest,” he too sees the presidency as a font of miracles and the wellspring of national redemption. A president who wants to achieve greatness, McCain suggests, should emulate Teddy Roosevelt, who “liberally interpreted the constitutional authority of the office” and “nourished the soul of a great nation.” President George W. Bush, when passing the GOP torch to his former rival in March, declared that the Arizona senator “will bring determination to defeat an enemy and a heart big enough to love those who hurt.” Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, suggests she is “ready on Day 1 to be commander in chief of our economy.”

The chief executive of the United States is no longer a mere constitutional officer charged with faithful execution of the laws. He is a soul nourisher, a hope giver, a living American talisman against hurricanes, terrorism, economic downturns, and spiritual malaise. He—or she—is the one who answers the phone at 3 a.m. to keep our children safe from harm. The modern president is America’s shrink, a social worker, our very own national talk show host. He’s also the Supreme Warlord of the Earth.

This messianic campaign rhetoric merely reflects what the office has evolved into after decades of public clamoring. The vision of the president as national guardian and spiritual redeemer is so ubiquitous it goes virtually unnoticed. Americans, left, right, and other, think of the “commander in chief” as a superhero, responsible for swooping to the rescue when danger strikes. And with great responsibility comes great power.

It’s difficult for 21st-century Americans to imagine things any other way. The United States appears stuck with an imperial presidency, an office that concentrates enormous power in the hands of whichever professional politician manages to claw his way to the top. Americans appear deeply ambivalent about the results, alternately cursing the king and pining for Camelot. But executive power will continue to grow, and threats to civil liberties increase, until citizens reconsider the incentives we have given to a post that started out so humble.

Minimum Leader
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The modern vision of the presidency couldn’t be further from the Framers’ view of the chief executive’s role. In an age long before distrust of power was condemned as cynicism, the Founding Fathers designed a presidency of modest authority and limited responsibilities. The Constitution’s architects never conceived of the president as the man in charge of national destiny. They worked amid the living memory of monarchy, and for them the very notion of “national leadership” raised the possibility of authoritarian rule by a demagogue ready to create an atmosphere of crisis in order to enhance his power.

The constitutional office they designed gave the president an important role, but he’d have “no particle of spiritual jurisdiction,” the 69th essay of The Federalist Papers tells us. In Federalist No. 48, James Madison assured Americans that under the proposed Constitution the “executive magistracy is carefully limited, both in the extent and the duration of its powers.” Indeed, the very pseudonym the Federalist’s authors chose, “Publius,” says something about how hostile Founding-generation Americans were to the idea of one-man rule. Publius Valerius Poplicola, a hero of the Roman revolution in the 5th century B.C., was famous in part for passing a law providing that anyone suspected of seeking kingship could be summarily executed.

Never were constitutional limitations more essential than when it came to using military power. Early Americans were no strangers to national security threats; in 1787 the U.S. was a small frontier republic on the edge of a continent occupied by periodically hostile great powers and Indian marauders. Yet the Constitution limited emergency powers and sharply rejected the idea that the president was above the law. “In no part of the Constitution,” Madison wrote in 1793, “is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department.” In any other arrangement, “the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man.” That sentiment crossed party lines. As Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in 1801, “the whole powers of war being by the Constitution of the United States vested in Congress, the acts of that body can alone be resorted to as our guides.”

Today Americans expect their president to pound Teddy Roosevelt’s “bully pulpit,” whipping the electorate into a frenzy to harness power against perceived threats. But the Framers viewed that sort of behavior as fundamentally illegitimate. In fact, the president wasn’t even supposed to be a popular leader. As presidential scholar Jeffrey K. Tulis has pointed out, in the Federalist the term leader is nearly always used pejoratively; the essays by Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay in defense of the Constitution begin and end with warnings about the perils of populist leadership. The first Federalist warns of “men who have overturned the liberties of republics” by “paying obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants,” and the last Federalist raises the specter of a “military despotism” orchestrated by “a victorious demagogue.”

Instead of stoking public demands for action, the chief magistrate was expected to resist “the transient impulses of the people” and use his veto to keep Congress within its constitutional bounds. That role didn’t require much speechifying. Early presidents rarely spoke directly to the public; from George Washington through Andrew Jackson, they averaged little more than three speeches per year, with those mostly confined to ceremonial addresses. In his first year in office, by comparison, President Clinton delivered 600.

In the early State of the Union addresses to Congress, presidents knew better than to adopt an imperious tone. After his third SOTU, Washington wrote that “motives of delicacy” had deterred him from “introducing any topic which relates to legislative matters, lest it should be suspected that [I] wished to influence the question” before Congress. Yet the deference shown by Washington and his successor John Adams didn’t go quite far enough for our third president, Thomas Jefferson, who thought their practice of speaking before the legislature in person smacked of the British king’s “Speech From the Throne.” Jefferson instead inaugurated a new tradition of delivering the annual message in writing. For 112 years, that Jeffersonian tradition held sway, until the power-hungry Woodrow Wilson delivered his first State of the Union in person.

The 19th century did see presidents occasionally taking independent action of enormous consequences: Jefferson purchased Louisiana without congressional approval, Madison seized West Florida in 1810, Andrew Jackson governed as an irritable populist, and Abraham Lincoln expanded presidential power dramatically throughout the course of the cataclysmic Civil War. Yet taken as a whole, the 19th-century presidency was a pale shadow of the plebiscitary office we know today.

In a 2002 study tracking word usage through two centuries of SOTUs and inaugural addresses, political scientist Elvin T. Lim noted that in the first decades under the Constitution presidents rarely mentioned poverty, and the word help did not even appear until 1859. Nor did early presidents subscribe to the modern notion that it’s all “about the children”; they rarely even mentioned the little buggers. But Lim found that “Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton made 260 of the 508 references to children in the entire speech database, invoking the government’s responsibility to and concern for children in practically every public policy area.”

George Washington did mention kids in his seventh annual message, lamenting “the frequent destruction of innocent women and children” by Indian raiders. But that was a far cry from Bill Clinton in 1997, who declared in the State of the Union that “we must also protect our children by standing firm in our determination to ban the advertising and marketing of cigarettes that endanger their lives.”

Wail to the Chief
A little-remembered vignette from the 1992 presidential race underscores how far we’ve traveled from the Framers’ unassuming “chief magistrate”—and how infantile our politics have become along the way. The scene was the campaign’s second televised debate, held in Richmond, Virginia; the format, a horrid Oprah-style arrangement in which a hand-picked audience of allegedly normal Americans got to lob questions at the candidates, who were perched on stools, trying to look warm and approachable. Up from the crowd popped a ponytailed social worker named Denton Walthall, who demanded to know what George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and H. Ross Perot were going to do for us.

“The focus of my work as a domestic mediator is meeting the needs of the children that I work with…and not the wants of their parents,” Walthall said. “And I ask the three of you, how can we, as symbolically the children of the future president, expect the three of you to meet our needs, the needs in housing and in crime and you name it.”

One wonders how some of the more irascible presidents of old would have reacted at the sight of a grown man burbling about childish necessities to the prospective national father. Yet under the hot lights of the 1992 campaign, Ross Perot said he’d cross his heart and take Walthall’s pledge to meet America’s infantile needs, whatever those were. Bill Clinton, being Bill Clinton, pandered. And Bush 41 spluttered through his answer thusly:

“I mean I—I think, in general, let’s talk about these—let’s talk about these issues; let’s talk about the programs, but in the presidency a lot goes into it. Caring is…that’s not particularly specific; strength goes into it, that’s not specific; standing up against aggression, that’s not specific in terms of a program. So I, in principle, I’ll take your point and think we ought to discuss child care—or whatever else it is.” That wasn’t just an example of the Bush family’s famous locution problems; it’s hard not to stammer when faced with the limitless and bewildering demands the public places on the presidency.

How did we go from a reticent constitutional officer to the modern commander in chief, a figure who continually shifts back and forth between gushing empathy and military bluster, often within the same speech? As Tony Soprano might have put it, whatever happened to Calvin Coolidge, the strong, silent type?

There is no single explanation for the presidency’s growth. New communication technologies such as radio and television played a role, as did growing material progress, which made Americans less willing to suffer inconveniences and more receptive to the belief that public problems could be solved with collective action. Yet in each key period of the presidency’s growth, we see a familiar pattern: expansionist ideology meeting practical opportunity in the form of successive national crises.

The 100-Year Emergency
Much of what’s wrong with American government today can be traced to the Progressive Era, that period of reformist backlash against the Industrial Revolution that dominated the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century. As the Progressives saw it, if the Constitution stood in the way of necessary reforms, then too bad for the Constitution. “We are the first Americans,” a young scholar named Woodrow Wilson wrote in 1885, “to hear our own countrymen ask whether the Constitution is still adapted to serve the purposes for which it was intended; the first to entertain any serious doubts about the superiority of our institutions as compared with the systems of Europe.”

The Progressives were “the nearest to presidential absolutists of any theorists and practitioners of the presidency,” wrote Raymond Tatalovich and Thomas S. Engeman in their 2003 book The Presidency and Political Science: Two Hundred Years of Intellectual Debate. For the new century’s reformers, power wielded for national greatness was benign, checks on such power perverse. The Progressives had no use for the restrained oratorical traditions of the 19th century; it was the president’s job to move the masses, unifying them behind calls for bold executive action.

Their model and embodiment was Teddy Roosevelt, whom the Progressive journalist and New Republic founder Herbert Croly described as a “sledgehammer in the cause of national righteousness.” When T.R. took the stage at the 1912 Progressive Party convention, he foreshadowed Obama’s quasi-religious fervor and McCain’s bellicosity, barking, “To you who strive in a spirit of brotherhood for the betterment of our Nation, to you who gird yourselves for this great new fight in the never-ending warfare for the good of humankind, I say in closing.…We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord!”

The most astute among the Progressives recognized that, given the American public’s congenital resistance to centralized rule, a sustained atmosphere of crisis would be necessary to sell the expansion of White House power. Two world wars and one Great Depression did the trick nicely. T.R.’s activist, celebrity presidency heralded the coming of a new sort of chief executive, one who would evermore be the center of national attention, the motive force behind American government. With his expanded power, Roosevelt busted trusts, carried a big stick throughout the Americas with a newly imperial U.S. Navy, and issued nearly as many executive orders as all of his predecessors combined. Woodrow Wilson then proved what Progressives had long hypothesized: that soaring rhetoric combined with the panicked atmosphere of war could concentrate massive social power in the hands of one person. Over the course of his presidency he helped create the Federal Reserve, nationalized railroads, and used the Espionage and Sedition Acts (along with more than 150,000 vigilantes) to carry out the most brutal campaign against dissent in U.S. history.

But it took FDR to eliminate the last remaining vestiges of the modest presidency. Roosevelt used Wilson’s Trading With the Enemy Act to shut down all U.S. banks in 1933, grabbed the power to approve or prescribe wages and prices for all trades and industries, and authorized the FBI to spy on suspected subversives. He changed the Supreme Court from a bulwark against presidential overreach to an enabler. By the end of his 12-year reign, FDR had firmly established the president as national protector and nurturer, one whose performance would be judged in terms of what political scientist Theodore Lowi has identified as the modern test of executive legitimacy: “service delivery.” In his 11th State of the Union address, FDR conjured up a second Bill of Rights, one whose guarantees would include “a useful and renumerative job” and the “right of every farmer to…a decent living.” Depression-era economic controls and war-driven centralization had turned the American system of government, in Lowi’s words, into “an inverted pyramid, with everything coming to rest on a presidential pinpoint.”

War was the health of the presidency during the long twilight struggle against the Soviet Union as well. “The worse matters get,” Harry Truman’s adviser Clark Clifford told him in 1948, “the more is there a sense of crisis. In times of crisis, the American citizen tends to back up his president.” During the Cold War, presidents used the all-purpose rationale of national security to justify spying on their political enemies. Richard Nixon might have been the most notorious abuser, with a series of dirty tricks and flagrant offenses that led to his downfall, but his predecessors also wielded the presidential bludgeon with gusto. When American steel companies raised prices in 1962, John F. Kennedy declared privately that “they fucked us, and now we’ve got to fuck them,” then (along with his attorney general, brother Bobby) ordered up wiretaps, Internal Revenue Service audits and early-morning raids on steel executives’ homes. During the 1964 presidential race, Lyndon Johnson used the CIA to obtain advance copies of Barry Goldwater’s campaign speeches, and the FBI to bug Goldwater’s plane.

In the pre-Watergate age of the heroic presidency, public trust in government was at its height, and mainstream scholars lauded the presidency as an earthly manifestation of the living God. As political scientist Herman Finer put it in 1960, the office was “the incarnation of the American people in a sacrament resembling that in which the wafer and the wine are seen to be the body and blood of Christ.” The president, Finer said, was “the offspring of a titan and Minerva husbanded by Mars.”

I Hate You; Don’t Leave Me
After Vietnam and Watergate, America’s intoxication with the imperial presidency ended with a crushing hangover. A newly aggressive press and assertive Congress produced serial revelations of the executive abuses that blind trust had enabled. In the bicentennial year of 1976, Idaho Sen. Frank Church’s Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities summed up the damage:

“For decades Congress and the courts as well as the press and the public have accepted the notion that the control of intelligence activities was the exclusive prerogative of the Chief Executive and his surrogates. The exercise of this power was not questioned or even inquired into by outsiders. Indeed, at times the power was seen as flowing not from the law, but as inherent, in the Presidency. Whatever the theory, the fact was that intelligence activities were essentially exempted from the normal system of checks and balances. Such executive power, not founded in law or checked by Congress or the courts, contained the seeds of abuse and its growth was to be expected.”

During the Eisenhower 1950s and the JFK/LBJ 1960s, the newly ascendant conservative movement coalescing around Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley’s National Review was the most potent source of criticism of the imperial presidency. “Others hail the display of presidential strength…simply because they approve of the result reached by the use of power,” Goldwater wrote in his 1964 campaign manifesto. “This is nothing less than the totalitarian philosophy that the end justifies the means.”

But enticed by the long-awaited prospect of an “emerging Republican majority” and turned off by the journalistic and congressional attacks on Nixon, conservatives learned to stop worrying and love the executive branch. During the post-Watergate reform era, two senior Gerald Ford White House aides named Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld fought tooth and nail against what they felt were dangerous shackles on the executive branch, supported by a conservative commentariat that refocused its ire on the Democratic Congress and the left-leaning press. “I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate,” National Review stalwart M. Stanton Evans once quipped.

Although Americans finally recovered their native skepticism toward power after Vietnam, Watergate, and the revelations of the Church committee, we never reduced our demands on the executive branch. The lesson we seemed to have learned from the legacy of abuses was to trust less, ask more. In 1998 the Pew Research Center noted that “public desire for government services and activism has remained nearly steady over the past 30 years.” Two years later, a report on a survey by NPR, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government put it pithily: “Americans distrust government, but want it to do more.” The spirit of Denton Walthall lived on in the years leading up to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Superman Returns
The Bush administration’s extraconstitutional innovations in response to those attacks are by now all too familiar. John Yoo, David Addington, and other members of the president’s legal team constructed an alternative version of the national charter, a “neoconstitution” in which the president has unlimited power to launch war, wiretap without judicial scrutiny, and even seize American citizens on American soil and hold them for the duration of the War on Terror—in other words, indefinitely—without ever having to answer to a judge.

Conventional accounts of the post-9/11 imperial presidency emphasize the role of dedicated ideologues within the administration, men and women who had long believed that post-Watergate America had swung the pendulum too far back, jeopardizing national security. There’s good reason for that emphasis, but the “cabal of neocons” narrative risks obscuring the role that public demands have played in driving the centralization of power.

In his 2007 book The Terror Presidency, Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the president’s Office of Legal Counsel, describes the prevailing atmosphere within the executive branch after 9/11, one where the president’s men were acutely aware that all eyes were on the commander in chief. What is he doing to keep us safe? What more is he prepared to do?

Goldsmith, a dissenter from the Bush administration’s absolutist theories of executive power, often clashed with Dick Cheney’s deputy David Addington, the hardest-driving supporter of those theories. But Goldsmith understood why Addington was so unrelenting: “He believed presidential power was coextensive with presidential responsibility. Since the president would be blamed for the next homeland attack, he must have the power under the Constitution to do what he deemed necessary to stop it, regardless of what Congress said.”

That dynamic can lead to enhanced presidential power even in areas far removed from the War on Terror, as was demonstrated in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In business or in government, responsibility without authority is every executive’s worst nightmare. That was the political reality facing the Bush administration in late summer 2005, when New Orleans was under water and desperate for assistance. As Colby Cosh of Canada’s National Post put it at the time, “the 49 percent of Americans who have been complaining for five years about George W. Bush being a dictator are now vexed to the point of utter incoherence because for the last fortnight he has failed to do a sufficiently convincing impression of a dictator.”

To be sure, the administration deserved plenty of blame for bungling the disaster relief tasks it had the power to carry out. But it soon became clear that the public held the Bush team responsible for performing feats above and beyond its legal authority. One almost had to feel sorry for Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown(ie), the disgraced former Federal Emergency Management Agency head, when he was obliged on Capitol Hill a month after the hurricane to inform an irate Rep. Chris Shays (R-Conn.) that in our federalist system, the FEMA chief has no power to order mandatory evacuations, or to become “this superhero that is going to step in there and suddenly take everybody out of New Orleans.” “That is just talk,” Shays responded. “Were you in contact with the military?”

For a president beleaguered by public demands, seizing new powers can be an adaptive response. Small wonder, then, that the Bush administration promptly sought enhanced authority for domestic use of the military. Although few in the media noted the historical moment, the president received that authority. On October 17, 2006, the same day he signed the Military Commissions Act denying centuries-old habeas corpus rights to “enemy combatants,” the president also signed a defense authorization bill that contained gaping new exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, the federal law that restricts the president’s power to use the standing army to enforce order at home.

The new exceptions to the act gave the president power to use U.S. armed forces to “restore public order and enforce the laws” when confronted with “natural disasters,” “public health emergencies,” and “other…incidents”—a catchall phrase that radically expands the president’s ability to use troops against his own citizens. Under it, the president can, if he chooses, fight a federal War on Hurricanes, declaring himself supreme military commander in any state where he thinks conditions warrant it. That’s the kind of executive power grab that happens when the public demands that the president protect Americans from the hazards of cyclical bad weather.

2009 and Beyond
To understand is not to excuse: No president should have the powers President Bush has sought and seized during the last seven years. But after 9/11 and Katrina, what rationally self-interested chief executive would hesitate to centralize power in anticipation of crisis? That pressure would be hard to resist, even for a president devoted to the Constitution and respectful of the limited role the office was supposed to play in our system of government.

In the current presidential race, none of the major-party candidates comes close to fitting that description. Aside from the issue of torture, there’s very little daylight between John McCain and George W. Bush on matters of executive power. For her part, Hillary Clinton claims she played a key role in her husband’s undeclared war against Serbia in 1999. “I urged him to bomb,” she told Talk magazine that year. In 2003 she told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos: “I’m a strong believer in executive authority. I wish that, when my husband was president, people in Congress had been more willing to recognize presidential authority.”

Barack Obama has done more than any candidate in memory to boost expectations for the office, which were extraordinarily high to begin with. Obama’s stated positions on civil liberties may be preferable to McCain’s, but would it matter? If and when a car bomb goes off somewhere in America, would a President Obama be able to resist resorting to warrantless wiretapping, undeclared wars, and the Bush theory of unrestrained executive power? As a Democrat without military experience, publicly perceived as weak on national security, he’d have much more to prove.

As Jack Goldsmith put it in his 2007 book, “For generations the Terror Presidency will be characterized by an unremitting fear of attack, an obsession with preventing the attack, and a proclivity to act aggressively and preemptively to do so.…If anything, the next Democratic President—having digested a few threat matrices, and acutely aware that he or she alone will be wholly responsible when thousands of Americans are killed in the next attack—will be even more anxious than the current President to thwart the threat.”

Law professors Jack Balkin of Yale and Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas at Austin are both Democrats and civil libertarians, so they take no pleasure in their prediction that “the next Democratic President will likely retain significant aspects of what the Bush administration has done.” Indeed, they write in a 2006 Fordham Law Review article, future Democratic presidents “may find that they enjoy the discretion and lack of accountability created by Bush’s unilateral gambits.”

Throughout the 20th century more and more Americans looked to the central government to deal with highly visible public problems, from labor disputes to crime waves to natural disasters. And as responsibility flowed to the center, power accrued with it. If that trend continues, responses to matters of great public concern will be increasingly federal, increasingly executive, and increasingly military.

In the years to come, many Americans will find that the results of executive action are not to their liking. And if history is any guide, they’ll respond by vilifying the officeholder and looking for another man on horseback to set things right again.

In The Road to Serfdom, economist and political philosopher F.A. Hayek chastised the “socialists of all parties” for their belief that “it is not the system we need fear, but the danger it might be run by bad men.” Today’s “presidentialists of all parties”—a phrase that describes the overwhelming majority of American voters—suffer from a similar delusion. Our system, with its unhealthy, unconstitutional concentration of power, feeds on the atavistic tendency to see the chief magistrate as our national father or mother, responsible for our economic well-being, our physical safety, and even our sense of belonging. Relimiting the presidency depends on freeing ourselves from a mind-set one century in the making. One hopes that it won’t take another Watergate and Vietnam for us to break loose from the spellbinding cult of the presidency.

Gene Healy, a senior editor at the Cato Institute, is the author of The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power (Cato), from which this essay was adapted.

The New Franklin Roosevelts

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

FDR lives!

Last night Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the speaker of the House of Representatives and the majority leader of the Senate, received the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Distinguished Public Service Award at a dinner dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the New Deal. The organizers praised the politicians for "the parallels to be drawn between their present leadership and the New Deal period, when so much important and progressive legislation was pioneered with the cooperation of Congress."

It might sound odd coming from a libertarian, but I wish the Pelosi-Reid Democrats had more in common with Franklin Roosevelt. Not the Franklin Roosevelt who occupied the White House from 1933 to 1945, but the Franklin Roosevelt who aspired to the White House in the election of 1932. The Democratic platform of that year is a remarkable document, considering the way the party's candidate went on to govern. It isn't a libertarian manifesto—it endorses several subsidies and regulations—but it hardly embraces the enormous expansion in federal power that FDR would achieve. The very first plank calls for "an immediate and drastic reduction of governmental expenditures by abolishing useless commissions and offices, consolidating departments and bureaus, and eliminating extravagance to accomplish a saving of not less than twenty-five per cent in the cost of the Federal Government." (It also asks "the states to make a zealous effort to achieve a proportionate result.") Subsequent planks demand a balanced budget, a low tariff, the repeal of Prohibition, "a sound currency to be preserved at all hazards," "no interference in the internal affairs of other nations," and "the removal of government from all fields of private enterprise except where necessary to develop public works and natural resources in the common interest." The document concludes with a quote from Andrew Jackson: "equal rights to all; special privilege to none." It sounds more like Ron Paul than Pelosi.

FDR's campaign reflected that platform. He accused Herbert Hoover of "reckless and extravagant spending," and he further denounced the Republican incumbent for believing "we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible." Even when he called for interventions in the economy, he generally couched his words in the old liberals' language of equal treatment rather than the new liberals' vision of enlightened central planning. In his famous Forgotten Man speech of April 1932—itself a sustained allusion to an essay by the pro-market sociologist William Graham Sumner—the Democratic candidate pointed to the wave of foreclosures sweeping the nation. Noting that Hoover had created a "two billion dollar fund...put at the disposal of the big banks, the railroads and the corporations of the Nation," FDR averred that the government should "provide at least as much assistance to the little fellow as it is now giving to the large banks and corporations."

Once in office, the new administration did indeed repeal Prohibition, and it eventually lowered some trade barriers as well. The rest of Roosevelt's anti-statist rhetoric resembles his actual policies about as closely as the last seven years reflect George W. Bush's promises to give us a smaller federal government and a "humble foreign policy." In 1932, a classical liberal could easily conclude that Roosevelt was closer to his views than Hoover, an old progressive who had displayed a lifelong love of central planning and government-enforced cartels, a man who bragged during the campaign that he had responded to the Depression with "the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic." Among other things, President Hoover had jacked up spending, installed agricultural price-support programs, pressured businesses to follow Washington's wage dictates, and created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. But by the time a cerebral hemorrhage cut short FDR's fourth term, the federal bureaucracy's power had grown so enormously that Hoover was widely remembered as the last apostle of laissez faire.

Seventy-six years after Roosevelt's first presidential victory, we're again faced with the task of weighing a candidate's campaign promises and wondering what, if anything, they tell us about how the politician would actually govern. This isn't simply a matter of avoiding ill-informed projection, though both Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) have a talent for attracting supporters whose views are diametrically opposed to the stated opinions of their candidate. Nor is it just a matter of sussing out dishonesty, though that's obviously a part of the equation as well: Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) has lied brazenly about everything from NAFTA to Tuzla, and it's hard to believe she's being upfront about her views on Iraq.

The truth is, would-be presidents don't always care about the issues that turn out to be most important. How did Bush flip his foreign policy views so easily? By not having strong convictions on global affairs in the first place, allowing neoconservative advisers to fill the void after the 9/11 attacks. It's easy to imagine, say, John McCain doing something similar during an economic crisis, given that he has already radically reinvented his economic philosophy twice in the last decade, shifting leftwards in 2000 and back to the right in 2008.

Come 2012, President Obama might be explaining why he is sending more troops to Tehran; or President McCain could be preparing emergency legislation to nationalize the banks. If so, our leader's former self will join Bush the humble non-interventionist and Roosevelt the budget hawk on the fringes of the nation's memory. A candidate's campaign persona: There's the true Forgotten Man.

Jesse Walker is the managing editor of reason and the author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America.

You Wait Right Here, I'll Go Get Warren

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:40:00 EDT

Ilya Somin joins the ranks of Harding revisionists:

In Sunday's New York Times, Yale historian Beverly Gage has an interesting article suggesting that Harding may have been the first "black" president in the sense that it is possible that he had a remote black ancestor. Unfortunately, Gage's article about Harding and race relations completely ignores the fact that Harding made a well-known speech advocating full legal equality for southern blacks in 1921, in Birmingham, Alabama. As W.E.B. DuBois pointed out at the time, Harding went farther in advocating equal rights for blacks than any other post-Reconstruction Republican president (the Democrats, at that time the party of southern whites, were even worse). Indeed, no president went as far as Harding in advocating equal rights for southern blacks for several decades thereafter. Harding also lobbied hard for a federal anti-lynching bill to curb the rampant lynching of blacks by whites in the South - again, the first post-Reconstruction president to do so (the bill passed the House, but died in the Senate due to the threat of Democratic filibusters). As DuBois pointed out in the linked article, Harding was not wholly free of the racism common among whites at the time. But he was a lot better than the vast majority of his contemporaries.

Nor were these Harding's only positive aspects. As Gene Healy discusses in his interesting recent book, The Cult of the Presidency, Harding is also notable for reversing the severe violations of civil and economic liberties that had proliferated under his predecessor Woodrow Wilson. It's easy to belittle Harding's campaign slogan - "Return to Normalcy." But Harding's notion of "normalcy" included an end to the imprisonment of political dissenters (such as Wilson's notorious "Palmer Raids"), abolition of wage and price controls, and the reversal of Wilson's numerous illegal seizures of private property.

I think the most palatable presidents of the 20th century were Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, and I believe Wilson was the worst chief executive in U.S. history. So I'll nod in general agreement, though I think Somin understates Du Bois' criticisms of Harding.

An aside: Harding's alleged black ancestry is a plot point in one of my favorite novels, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo.

Another aside: In the comment thread beneath Somin's post, some readers are talking up the merits of James K. Polk. Me, I don't believe that history can be reduced to simple "turning points," but if I did, I'd say the day everything went to hell came when that landgrabbing bastard beat Van Buren at the 1844 Democratic convention.

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Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:00:00 EST

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No Country for Grouchy Old Men?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 09:33:00 EST

reason contributor and Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi looks at the polling data and finds that 5 percent of voters say they won't cast a ballot for an African American, 11 percent won't vote for a woman—and a whopping 42 percent won't vote for a 72-year-old (regardless of race or gender, I'm guessing that elderly Oscar nominee Ruby Dee shouldn't be pondering a White House run anytime soon).

Is Amerika ageist on top of its other sins? Not quite, says Harsanyi:

Fact is, far from being reluctant to elect seniors, voters reliably choose them. Washington, a veritable Gerontocracy, can often resemble a Boca Raton condo association meeting.
Presently there are 26 senators over the age of 70 (23 of them older than McCain). There are six senators in their 80s and 36 in their 60s. Robert Byrd is 90.

Harsanyi also notes that back in 1980 Ronald Reagan, the oldest president ever elected, was just a year younger than McCain is now (and let's face it: 70 is the new 60!). But the reason this col spoke to me is its summary of William Henry Harrison, who was the oldest president before Reagan--and remains the shortest-serving:

At 68, William Henry Harrison was the country's second-oldest president. A war hero, "Granny Harrison," as his opponents called him, was a tough cat. After winning the presidency, he stood outside on a miserably frigid and damp Washington day to deliver the longest inaugural address - more than 8,400 words - in American history. He then joined the inaugural parade. Harrison, naturally, caught a cold, which led to pneumonia. He never recovered and died 31 days into his term.

What's not to like?

Whole col here.

The Imperial Presidency is Here to Stay

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:00:00 EST

After the United States won its independence from Britain, some soldiers had the idea that America should have a king of its own—namely George Washington, their commander. Washington promptly scotched the idea. But if he were to see some of the powers asserted by his successors, he might wonder why he bothered.

Few presidents have interpreted their authority more broadly than George W. Bush. He has claimed the right to defy a federal wiretapping law, used "signing statements" to nullify provisions of law that he dislikes, ordered Americans arrested on U.S. soil to be held as enemy combatants without access to the courts, and generally taken a view of his power that echoes Buzz Lightyear: "To infinity ... and beyond."

He has had fervent support from legal thinkers who worship at the altar of a strong executive branch. The United States signed an international convention banning torture, which is also against federal law, but former Bush Justice Department official John Yoo, asked in 2005 if the president could encourage a suspected terrorist to talk by crushing his child's genitals, didn't say no. He said, "I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that."

This indulgent approach contrasts with the thinking of conservatives 50 years ago, who thought the presidency was evolving toward virtual dictatorship. A lot of today's conservatives agree, but wish it would evolve faster.

For those who think government powers need firm limitations, the good news is that all three prospects to replace Bush say he has overreached. The bad news is that whoever wins, things probably won't change much.

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain are on the record rejecting the supersized presidency. All three say they would curtail or abandon the use of signing statements. They believe Bush's detainment of American citizens as enemy combatants was wrong.

They agree that the president may not authorize torture. All, asked by The Boston Globe if the president could bomb Iran without congressional authorization in the absence of an imminent threat, said no.

But can they be trusted? Clinton raises doubts because her husband did not shrink from claiming the right to do as he pleased. His Justice Department insisted that the president may refuse to enforce laws he regards as unconstitutional, much as Bush has done. Clinton sent troops to Haiti, which posed no military threat, without bothering to ask Congress.

Worse still, he went to war in Kosovo even though Congress had voted down a measure authorizing it (a decision his wife urged him to make). Cato Institute policy analyst Gene Healy, in his invaluable new book The Cult of the Presidency, writes that "when it came to presidential prerogatives, Bill Clinton behaved little differently—and in some ways, more aggressively—than his Republican predecessors."

McCain doesn't always sound skeptical of executive authority. When I asked his director of foreign policy and national security, Randy Scheunemann, if McCain agreed that Bush has the right to ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to engage in warrantless eavesdropping, he replied, "I haven't ever heard him publicly challenge the president on bypassing FISA." Asked by the Globe if he thought Bush had violated constitutional restrictions on his power, the pilot of the Straight Talk Express took a detour, declining to answer.

Pledges of a less imperial presidency are a welcome change, and some, like those on torture and the detention of U.S. citizens, will most likely be kept. But it may be too much to hope that any of the candidates will really shrink the office. Presidents want to be able to do what they want to do. Sharing responsibility with Congress sounds palatable only until Congress demands something different from what the White House wants.

So the reflex of any administration is to keep—if not augment—existing powers. The terrorist threat can only strengthen that tendency, since any attack will be blamed on the president.

Even a leader who wishes Bush had less authority may easily rationalize the status quo once in office: "I wouldn't use those powers unless I really need to, so what's the harm in keeping them?" Ceding authority would be especially hard for McCain, who would face fierce opposition within his party.

But even the Democrats would be bucking history as well as self-interest. It would take a special president to voluntarily relinquish powers that could someday prove useful. And George Washington isn't coming back.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

McCain Has His Cake and Eats It, Too

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

Here's the Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that everyone in Washington knows and loves (or hates, or loves to hate): red-faced and hollering about his favorite topic, campaign finance.

Last week, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) showed signs of backing off a semi-pledge to accept public financing for the general election. His original statement was not technically a promise. "If I am the Democratic nominee," said Obama, "I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election." This week, McCain went for the jugular, proclaiming, "I committed to public financing. He committed to public financing. It is not any more complicated than that. I hope he will keep his commitment to the American people."

It's just a coincidence, of course, that McCain is throwing down on this issue right after the Obama campaign raised a massive $35 million during the last month. And when the conventional wisdom says that Obama is positioned to outspend the senator from Arizona.

Candidates who accept public funding for the general election receive a grant of about $85 million from the federal government. In exchange for that pot of gold, candidates essentially forgo all private fundraising, limiting total spending to the government grant. The money comes from citizens who have checked "yes" to contribute $3 to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund on their tax return.

McCain accuses Obama of "Washington doublespeak." But on this particular issue, McCain is a master practitioner. Leaving aside previous legislative ducks and swerves, like his 1995 vote to abolish the public financing system at the presidential level altogether, McCain has had a complex relationship with the public financing of his own campaign in this cycle alone.

There was a midsummer moment last year, now distant in the fruit-fly memories of the political commentariat, when McCain's campaign was "broke and a total joke." To keep afloat, McCain cut staff positions and took out a $3 million loan, using his fundraising lists as collateral. The bank in question, Bethesda Fidelity & Trust, has made campaign loans to many politicians in the past, including Democrat Walter Mondale and Republican Bob Dole, but McCain's particular loan came with a special caveat. He was required to obtain a life insurance policy, lest he fail to survive the campaign, a turn of events that would have drastically hampered his fundraising abilities and thus his ability to repay.

Two weeks before the New Hampshire primary, McCain needed another million, and looked to extend his loan at the same bank. The bank said the previous collateral wasn't going to cut it, and asked for additional backing. "They said, 'You've explained how you can afford to borrow more, and how you can pay us back if things go well. What happens if things go badly?' " said Trevor Potter, a McCain attorney.

At that point, McCain had $5 million coming to him through the Federal Election Commission's (FEC) public financing system for the primaries, which matches a percentage of eligilble private contributions. But McCain didn't want to accept the money, since it would have restricted future spending. So in the loan agreement, the campaign assured the bank that it would drop out of the financing system, but that it could reapply for federal matching funds anytime if things really tanked. The federal money would be waiting for McCain—he'd just have to stay in the campaign long enough to collect and make good on his obligations to the bank.

According to The Washington Post, "Under FEC rules, a candidate who uses a certification for federal funds as collateral for a loan is obligated to remain within the public financing system." McCain's campaign denies that this is what it has done, and technically that's true—he promised to drop out of the system as collateral for the loan.

When public funds are used as a guarantee for a loan being taken explicitly so that the candidate can stay out of the public financing system, surely it is time to throw in the towel. The FEC rules, like most of the byzantine campaign-finance-reform legislation that bears McCain's name, just makes more work for clever lawyers, who can always figure out a workaround (remember 527s?).

And yet there's McCain, up on stage, demagoging campaign finance as usual. The whole thing has a feeling of inevitability. As campaigns get longer and longer and more and more expensive, candidates are reluctant to accept spending caps, which is essentially what public financing amounts to. Even if there is a temporary truce—Obama and McCain might escalate this squabble until both actually do have to accept public funding to save face—there are teams already figuring out the kind of workaround that will get private money into a "publicly financed" election. Public funding has always been a chimera, and, as his campaign's tactics reveal, no one knows that better than John McCain.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor for reason.

Are We Ready for 2007 Nostalgia Yet?

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 14:06:00 EST

Eleanor Clift at Newsweek wonders: could it still be Gore for the Democratic presidential nomination? There's more than one path to a Clinton restoration, after all.

A Presidency Worth Celebrating

info@reason.com (Gene Healy) — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

Presidents Day: It's become so commercialized. But should we celebrate something other than 20 percent markdowns on clothes and furniture? However much Americans may revile individual presidents, many of us believe that the presidency itself gives us much to be thankful for.

Conservative historian Forrest McDonald expressed a common view when he wrote in 1994 that "the presidency has been responsible for less harm and more good, in the nation and the world, than perhaps any other secular institution in the world."

It's not hard to think of other institutions that better justify McDonald's praise. The independent judiciary? Market capitalism? The family? Casual Fridays? But more to the point, is the presidency still a "secular institution"?

If it is, that's hard to discern by listening to our current front-runners in the 2008 race, who talk as if they're running for a job that's a combination of guardian angel, shaman, and Supreme Warlord of the Earth.

John McCain has invoked Teddy Roosevelt as a role model, noting that the Trustbuster "liberally interpreted the constitutional authority of the office" and "nourished the soul of a great nation." Barack Obama sees soul-nourishing as part of the president's job too. As his 2004 keynote address to the Democratic Convention made clear, the "Audacity of Hope" signifies the eternal promise of redemption through presidential politics. (Is "audacity" really the right word for that kind of hope?).

Both men also see the president's corporeal responsibilities as boundless—ranging from providing liberty the world over to establishing a "Credit Card Bill of Rights" that would ban certain charges and ensure "prompt and fair crediting of cardholder payments."

Our first president had a far narrower view of the office's powers and responsibilities. And since the holiday we're enjoying is still officially known as "Washington's Birthday," perhaps there's something to be learned from his comparatively restrained view of the office.

It's common these days, especially after 9/11, to hear people call the president "our commander in chief"—as if he's the leader of society as a whole, rather than just the head of the U.S. military. But Washington didn't go around calling himself everybody's commander in chief. Most often he referred to himself as merely the "chief magistrate."

And contrary to our contemporary George W., Washington didn't think his authority as commander in chief meant he could break any law that he thought impinged on his ability to protect national security. Washington even doubted his "inherent power" to launch offensive action against hostile Indian tribes. As he put it in 1793, "The constitution vests the power of declaring war in Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure."

Nor did Washington believe that it was the chief magistrate's role to serve as "Tribune of the People," promising great works, and demanding the power to carry them out. Like other early presidents, Washington averaged only a handful of public speeches a year. The modern presidency--an office charged with providing seamless protection from physical harm or spiritual decay—is a different creature entirely.

But if we worry about the increasing concentration of power in the executive branch, we shouldn't kid ourselves that the Imperial Presidency can be blamed solely on a cabal of neoconservative ideologues and a stack of hanging chads. Our outsized conception of presidential responsibility has driven the growth of presidential power. Only by reducing those demands can we restore the presidency to its proper constitutional place: a modest office with modest powers.

That sort of restoration would be something worth celebrating.

Gene Healy is senior editor at the Cato Institute and author of the forthcoming The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power.

Discuss this article at reason's blog, Hit & Run.

You Won't Get a Mormon President, But As a Consolation Prize...

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 16:00:00 EST

If McCain manages to take the Republican nomination, this will be the first American presidential election in which both major-party candidates are sitting senators.