Presidential Leadership in Political Time - Essay Example

Presidential Leadership in Political Time - Stephen Skowronek Skowronek explains one recurring sequence in presidential history, ly the rise andfall of regimes, or governing coalitions, in terms of the passage of "political time". Three general dynamics are evident in presidential history. First is the constitutional separation of powers. It links presidents past and present in a timeless and constant struggle over the definition of their institutional prerogatives, and suggest that basic structure of presidential action has remained essentially the same. Second dynamics can be traced through the modernization of the nation, which links presidents past and present in an evolutionary sequence, and suggests that the post World War II incumbents stand apart, their shared leadership situation is distinguished from that of earlier presidents. Third dynamics is the changing shape of the political regimes, which links presidents past and present at parallel junctures in "political time". This third dynamic is the point of departure for our investigation. The dominant coalition operates the federal government and perpetuates its position through the development of a distinctive set of institutional arrangements and approaches to public policy questions. Conflicts among interest within the dominant coalition threaten to cause political disaffection and may weaken regime support. As the nation changes, the regime's traditional approach to problems appear increasingly outmoded. The government it dominates appears increasingly hostaged to sectarian interests with myopic concerns, insufferable demands, and momentary loyalties. The longer a regime survives, the more it becomes encumbered and distorted, and becomes less competent in addressing the manifest governing demands. One can distinguish many different political contexts for presidential leadership within a given historical period. Leadership situations might be characterized by the president's posture vis--vis the dominant political coalition. Leadership situation might be differentiated according to political time, that is, when in a regime sequence the president engages the political institutional order. This changing relationship between the presidency and the political system can easily be related to certain outstanding patterns in presidential leadership across American history. First, the presidents who traditionally make the historians' roster of America's greatest came to power in an abrupt break from a long-established political-institutional regime. Each led a movement of new political forces into control of the federal government. Second, after the initial break with the past and the consolidation of a new system of government control, a general decline in the political effectiveness of regime insiders is notable. Taking different regimes into account simultaneously, this essay will group presidents together on the basis of the parallel positions they hold in political time. The analysis focuses on three pairs of presidents drawn from the New Deal and Jacksonian regimes. All were Democrats and thus affiliated with the dominant coalition of their respective periods. Each aspired to great national leadership. Coming to power on the displacement of an old ruling coalition, these presidents became mired in remarkably similar political struggles. Although separated by more than a century of history, they both faced the distinctive challenge of constructing a new regime. Leadership became a matter of securing the political and institutional infrastructure of a new governmental order. All six of these presidents had to grapple with the erosion of political support that inevitably comes with executive action. New economic and social conflicts had been festering in the US since the financial panic of 1819, but Jackson's campaign gained its special meaning from the confusion and outrage unleashed by the election of 1824. In that election, the Congressional Caucus collapsed as the engine of national political unity, and the once monolithic Republican Party disintegrated into warring factions. The Adams administration was immediately and permanently engulfed in charges of conspiracy, intrigue, and profligacy in high places. In the election of 1932 the collapse of the old ruling party was overshadowed by the Great Depression. The Democratic Party of 1932 offered nothing, and in this Roosevelt's candidacy found special meaning. Thus Jackson and Roosevelt each engaged a political system cut from its moorings by a wave of popular discontent. Old commitments of ideology and interest suddenly had been through into question. Presidents are faced with the choice of either abandoning their new departure or consolidating it with structural reforms. The president as regime builder grapples with the fundamentals of political regeneration, institutional reconstruction and party building. Jackson's appeal for a return to Jefferson's original idea about government certainly posed a potent indictment of the recent state of national affairs and a clear challenge to long established interests. Jackson used the initial upheaval in governmental control to cultivate an irreproachable political position as the nation's crusader in reform. Although Jackson was personally inclined toward radical hard-money views, he recognized the dangers of impromptu tinkering with an institution so firmly entrenched in the nation's economic life. The recharter bill threw Jackson enthusiasts into a quandary and passed through Congress. The president's veto of the recharter bill clearly marked this transition. He appealed directly to the interests of the nation's farmers, mechanics, and laborers. This call to the "common man" for a defense of the republic had long been a Jacksonian theme. Jackson's victory over Clay in 1832 was certainly sweeping enough to reaffirm his leadership. The election victory drew Jackson deeper into the politics of reconstruction. The president would thus simultaneously circumvent his opponents and offer the nation an alternative banking system. The so-called Panic Session of Congress (1833-1834) posed the ultimate test of Jackson's resolve to forge a new regime. The president moved quickly to assign blame for the panic to the bank. Jackson had successfully repudiated the old governmental order, consolidated a new political party behind his policies, secured that party's control over the entire federal establishment, and redefined the position of the presidency in its relations with Congress, the courts, the states, and the electorate. Although Jackson had reconstructed American government and politics, he merely substituted one irresponsible and uncontrollable financial system for another. The revival of the economy had been the keynote of Roosevelt's early program. Roosevelt's program did not ignore the interests attached to and supported by the governmental arrangements of the past. The New Deal had also bestowed legitimacy on the interests of organized labor, the poor, and the unemployed. Roosevelt turned his administration toward structural reform. He began the transition from national leader to regime builder with a considerable advantage over Jackson. The result was a second round of New Deal legislation. His target was the Supreme Court. The president decided to kill his institutional opposition with kindness. He called for an increase in the size of the Court, to ease the burden on the elder justices and to increase the overall efficiency. The Court reversed course in the middle of the battle and displayed a willingness to accept the policies of the second New Deal. The Court's turnabout was a great victory for the new regime. Roosevelt pressed forward with the business of consolidating a new order. Following the precepts of Committee on Administrative Management, the president had asked for new executive offices to provide planning and direction for government operations. Rooseveltian regime building was triumphant. He thoroughly reconstructed institutional relations between state and society, but his performance as a party builder was weak. The presidencies of James K. Polk and John F. Kennedy clearly illustrate the problems and prospects of leadership that is circumscribed by the challenge of managing an established coalition. Neither Polk nor Kennedy could claim the leadership of any major party faction. There was no clear mandate for action. Polk was well aware of the circumstances of his nomination. Calculating his strategy for a political comeback in 1844, Polk made full use of his second-rank standing in high party circles. Polk submerged himself in a high-risk strategy of aggressive maintenance in which the goal was to satisfy each faction of his party enough to keep the whole from falling apart. Polk's program elaborated the theme of equal justice for all coalition interests. On the domestic side, he reached out to the South with support for a lower tariff, to the Northwest with support for land price reform, to the Northeast by endorsing a warehouse storage system advantageous to import merchants, and to the old Jackson radicals with a commitment to a return to hard money and a reinstatement of independent treasury. Driven by the dual imperatives of maintenance and leadership, Polk sought to transform the nation without changing its politics. Polk's program was much more than a laundry list of party commitments. The failure of interest management to serve the dual goals of political maintenance and policy achievement manifested itself in political disaster for the Democratic Party. Kennedy's presidential campaign harkened back to Rooseveltian images of direction and energy in government. Kennedy's leadership design had more in common with Polk's pursuits than frontier imagery. Both presidents gave primacy to foreign enthusiasms and hoped the nation would do the same, but Kennedy avoided Polk's tactics. At the heart of Kennedy's political dilemma was the long-festering issue of civil rights for black Americans. Kennedy developed a posture of "inoffensive" support to civil rights. He reached out to the offended region and identified himself with more traditional Democratic strategies. Feelings of resentment and betrayal among civil rights leaders inevitably followed the decision to forgo the bold legislative actions suggested in the party platform. Kennedy pressed executive action on behalf of civil rights with more vigor and greater effect than any of his predecessors. Kennedy liberalized the Civil Rights Commission, but he refused to endorse its controversial report, which recommended withholding federal funds from states that violated the Constitution. Executive management allowed Kennedy to juggle mutually contradictory expectations fro two years. Kennedy's approach was to press legislation as an irresistible counsel of moderation. He had struggled continually to moderate his party's liberal commitments and thus avoid a rupture on the right. Conservative reaction, party schism, and the need to hold a base in the South were foremost in the president's thinking as he embarked on his fateful trip to Texas in November 1963. Franklin Pierce and Jimmy Carter each took the term "dark horse" to new depths of obscurity. Each was a minor, local figure, far removed from the centers of party strength and interest. Each hailed from the region of greatest erosion in majority party support. Pierce's appeal within regular party circles lay first in his uniquely inoffensive availability, and second, in his potential to bring northeaster Free Soil Democrats back to the standard they had so recently branded as proslavery. With regard to Carter, to say he appealed to regular party circles would be an exaggeration. Still, Carter offered the Democrats a candidate untainted by two decades of divisive national politics, and one capable of bringing the South back to the party of liberalism. The successful reassembling of broken coalitions left Pierce and Carter to ponder the peculiar challenge of leading an enervated regime. These presidents engaged the political system at a step removed from a claim to managing coalition interests and orchestrating agenda fulfillment. Pierce carried 27 of the 31 states. As a presidential candidate, Pierce had merely endorsed the work of a bipartisan group of Senate moderates. His campaign pledged to resist any further agitation on slavery. Pierce held himself aloof from the moderate senators and set out to rebuild the political machinery of Jacksonian government under presidential auspices. His goal of resuscitating the old party machinery was ideologically and programmatically vacuous. However, he succeeded in enacting the Kansas-Nebraska Act but failed miserably as a political leader. Pierce never gave up hope that his party would turn to him. But once the North had rejected his administration, the South had no more use for him, and the party Pierce had so desperately wanted to lead became increasingly eager to get rid of him. He threw his hat into the ring for a second term. Rejecting the specter of party illegitimacy and the stigma of his own irrelevance, standing firm with the establishment against the forces that would destroy it, Pierce pressed the case for his party in the nation and with it, his own case for party leadership. The party hastened to bury the memory of the man who had articulated it. Jimmy Carter called attention to moral degeneration in government and politics, made it his issue, and then compelled the political coalition that had built that government to indulge his crusade against it. He let the liberals of the Democratic Party flounder in their own disarray until it became clear that liberalism could no longer take the political offensive on its own terms. Carter's narrow victory magnified those difficulties. His reform program called for governmental reorganization, civil service reforms, and fiscal retrenchment. Carter's plan for instilling a new level of bureaucratic discipline was not the stuff to stir the enthusiasm of established Democrats. His vision of institutional efficiency dissolved in a matter of weeks into institutional confrontation. With his "strategy of symbols", the president bypassed Congress and claimed authority in government as an extension of his personal credibility in the nation at large. As relations with Congress grew tense, the president's bid for national leadership became even more dependent on public faith and confidence in his administration's integrity. Despite the difficulties, Carter still refused to abdicate to the party leaders. He did attempt to dispel disillusionment with an appeal to the neoliberal theme of consumerism. He had identified himself with consumer issues during his campaign and opened the second year of his administration with a drive to establish a consumer protection agency. But the legislation failed, and with the failure of his prospects for leadership all but collapsed. Carter's liberalism-with-a-difference simply could not stand its ground in the sectarian controversies that racked the liberal order in the 1970s. But the president detached himself from the "paralysis, stagnation, and drift" that had marked his tenure. He issued a strong denunciation of the legislative process and reasserted his campaign image as an outsider continuing the people's fight against degenerate politics. Carter again exposed himself as the one with the most paralyzing case of estrangement. The democratic party tore itself apart in a revolt against him and the sentiments he articulated. Rethinking the politics of Leadership: The politics of leadership is often pictured as a contest between the individual and the system. Although the significance of the particular person in office cannot be doubted, this individual centered perspective on leadership presents a rather one-sided view of the interplay between the presidency and the larger political system. To catch the patterns and sequences in the politics of leadership, we need to adopt a much broader view of the relevant historical experience than is customary. As the analysis of the Jacksonian and New Deal regimes has shown, successive incarnations of majority-party government produce progressively more tenuous challenges for regime managers. The exercise of presidential power drives each regime further into a crisis of legitimacy, gradually preparing the ground for another reconstructive breakthrough. The critical issue in each of the six cases reviewed has not been success or failure in enacting some momentous new program for national action. Pierce succeeded in enacting the Kansas-Nebraska Act but failed miserably as a political leader; in contrast, Roosevelt was thwarted time and again on matters of program. A president's authority over political definitions changes with the passage of political time and hinges in large measure on the relationship between the incumbent and received governing commitments. For Polk and Kennedy, whose ascension to power revived and reaffirmed commitments drawn from the recent past, leadership was quite different. It was their job to make good on long-heralded promises, to continue the work of the established regime, and to implement a robust policy agenda. Polk and Kennedy were constrained by the authority of faithful followers to challenge their particular rendition of the true meaning and implications of received commitments. Their leadership sent sectarian schisms deep into the ranks of regime supporters. In the Pierce-Carter comparison, secular changes in the organization of American government seem to have had the opposite effect. Jimmy Carter had institutional resources for independent action that Pierce could scarcely have imagined. Secular changes serve both to delimit the possibilities for a presidentially imposed reconstruction of American government and politics and to bolster the independence of those who are nominally affiliated with previously established commitments of ideology and interest. Comparisons among presidents in political time provide insight into the divergent experiences of more recent incumbents as well. Taking advantage of Carter's difficulties, Regan reclaimed the leadership stance. Regan used his authority as an opposition leader standing against discredited regime to reconstruct the terms and conditions of legitimate national government. Even Bill Clinton's leadership becomes more understandable when placed in political time. Clinton gained a measure of the political independence that Carter could only aspire to. As we reflect the experiences of our most recent incumbents back through political time, we see that these changes have yet to displace patterns that have been evident from the start. These patterns indicate the potential reach and practical limits of the presidency as a position of national political leadership. Read More