Constitutional basis presidential power
A. Constitutional Convention - wary of unchecked power.
B. Articles of Confederation - failed in part because of lack of a strong national executive.
C. Delegates balanced need to check the power of the presidency with the need to make it powerful enough to provide effective leadership.
D. They created an office that gave presidents power to
1. Act as administrative head of the nation.
2. Serve as commander-in-chief of the military.
3. Convene Congress.
4. Veto legislation (but Congress can override a veto).
5. Appoint top officials subject to the advice and consent of the Senate.
6. Make treaties subject to Senate approval.
7. Grant pardons.
II. Expansion of presidential power
A. Power of presidency comes from explicit powers listed in Constitution / also from expansion authority under claims of INHERENT POWERS.
1. Presidents claimed authority to do certain things / left it to Congress / Courts to stop them. / President Washington issued a proclamation of Neutrality during war between the British and French under what amounted to a claim of inherent powers.
2. Lincoln's bold claim of power during the Civil War reshaped the presidency.
B. Congress also delegated considerable power to the executive branch. During the New Deal, for example, the Congress delegated much authority to the Roosevelt administration to do what was necessary to solve the nation's problems.
C. Presidential power - determined in part by the political skills of the individual presidents.
1. "Presidential power is the power to persuade."
2. Presidents choose their issues carefully. Must calculate when to intervene - play their cards / when they need to hold back.
D. Presidents are in a better position to bargain when their public popularity is high.
1. Over time, presidential popularity usually declines.
2. Presidential popularity can be strongly affected by economic conditions, unanticipated events or crises (such as the Iranian hostage crisis), or American involvement in a war.
III. Electoral connection
A. To win an election, a presidential candidate must put together a winning coalition of a minimum of 270 electoral votes.
1. Must appeal to different groups of voters across country.
2. Candidates prefer to be vague on controversial issues / by time candidates receive nomination for president - they will have become closely identified with some issues.
B. Candidates win presidency claim they have been given a MANDATE by the voters / mandates tend to be rhetoric
C. Even a landslide at the polls does not guarantee consistent public support during a president's term.
D. A president's job is complicated when he is elected by less than a majority, such as Bill Clifton’s 43 percent victory in the three-way 1992 race.
IV. Executive branch
A. One important president's resources to president is his White House staff.
1. President has some key aides - chief of staff / national security adviser.
2. Extended White House staff - EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT. / includes OMB / Council of Economic Advisers / other specialized staff.
3. There is no "right way" for a president to organize his staff. Each president creates the structure that he thinks will work best for him. Yet sometimes there are difficulties in the way the White House is organized.
B. Vice presidents have traditionally "standby equipment." They are not usually used in a major advisory capacity. However, Al Gore has had a more public role than usual.
C. Cabinet - composed of heads of major departments in executive branch.
1. Cabinet is not used as a collective decision-making body. Cabinet meetings may not even be particularly important to the president, though he may value the advice of individual members of the cabinet.
2. Presidents do not always know cabinet secretaries very well. Cabinet secretaries may also be too concerned with the wishes of their clientele groups.
3. Growth of White House staff / Executive Office of the President / less need to rely on cabinet as an advisory body.
V. President as national leader
A. Presidents carry into office a broad political vision that reflects their ideology and priorities.
1. Lyndon Johnson saw government as a force for promoting justice / equality. Once in office, he tried to give life to that the Great Society program.
2. Ronald Reagan - saw government as part of the problem rather than as the solution. / tried to promote freedom with policies that reduced role of government
B. President's central role - can always command attention for his agenda. / Nothing guarantees that he will be successful in getting that agenda through Congress.
C. President must be a lobbyist / agenda setter. / Presidents spend considerable time working to get legislation passed in form they want it in.
1. President has a LEGISLATIVE LIAISON staff to help him.
2. White House works with interest groups to try to get them to activate members / get their Washington representative to lobby Congress.
D. Part of the president's job - lead his party. / no prescribed tasks
VI. President as world leader
A. President's priority as world leader was to contain communism from 1946 - 1991.
B. Presidents entering a new era - more emphasis on managing economic relations with rest of the world.
C. Periodically - president faces a grave situation in which conflict is imminent or a small conflict threatens to explode into a larger war.
1. How a president handles such crises can be critical to the success of his presidency. He must exercise good judgment in situations where he may have limited time to make a decision.
2. It is difficult to go beyond rather general advice in trying to design an ideal procedure for handling crises / each crisis is a unique event.
VII. Presidential character
A. A president's actions in office reflect more than political views / reflect his basic character.
1. We can examine a president's early childhood experiences to try to understand him better.
2. Difficult conclusions about relationship between childhood / adult behavior
B. Character is only one of a number of factors that go into making a successful president.
THE PRESIDENT AND HIS STAFF
One of the most important of his resources is the staff at his disposal.
I. Cabinet government
A. Although presidents will depend heavily on some members of the cabinet, they do not depend on it as an advisory body.
1. Some cabinet appointees are people he does not know well.
2. Cabinet members become ambassadors from their constituencies / Secretary of agriculture may come to feel that he represents farmers more than the president.
3. The cabinet is quite large. Top presidential aides / individuals with cabinet rank add up to over twenty people. Presidents may not find this a conducive size for decision making.
B. Cabinet meetings are non-events in which there has been a deliberate non-exchange of information as part of a process of mutual non-consultation.
C. Some individual cabinet members do become key advisers to the president.
II. Presidential decision making
A. Presidents need advisers because they must continually make policy decisions on complicated and controversial issues. They do not have time to study thoroughly each issue that comes before them.
B. Often the information on an issue will be boiled down to a memorandum for the president's reading. He may formally carry out his decision by checking a box at the end of the memo.
C. On major issues - arms control negotiations, for example – he holds talks with his major military and foreign policy advisers to go over the pros and cons of different policy options.
D. A president depends on his staff to summarize / analyze available information / The president must trust his key aides / and cabinet officials to present him with all the alternatives that are available.
III. Staff infections
A. Problems abound with the presidential advisory system.
1. Staff can shut the president off from people he should be listening to.
2. Top staffers know the president's views so well that they may anticipate what he wants to hear / may be predisposed to recommend those solutions to him. Certain options may be eliminated because it is assumed that the president will never go for them / sometimes those excluded options will be the ones that should have been followed.
3. Aides may also do a president a disservice when they work out a compromise solution to a problem and present it to the president as their consensus opinion. The chief executive might be better served if he heard the arguments for all the alternatives. The compromise solution is not necessarily the best one.
B. It is important to remember that a president makes the basic decisions about how his staff is to be structured. Some presidents don't like to hear the views of those who disagree with them. This may result in decisions flawed by lack of thorough discussion. Other presidents, such as CLINTON, want to hear so many views that the decision-making process may be terribly delayed.
C. The central problem - president does not have time to analyze thoroughly every single issue that comes before him. Limited time means that some decisions must be made on the basis of limited information.
IV. The advisory system structure
A. Presidential advisory systems structures / two basic ways in which presidents set up their inner White House staffs. The first is strong - chief-of-staff model.
B. Other approach - spokes-of-the-wheel model. / president is the hub / advisers are the spokes that spread out from the hub. Each of these "spokes" has direct access to the president.
1. The spokes-of-the-wheel model may seem best because it works against some of the problems described above. However, there are problems with it, too / the more aides there are in the White House, the greater the number of problems that will come into the White House.
2. White House staffers act as "bridges" from the bureaucracy. The more bridges that are open, the more "traffic" will come in over them / president may be caught up in making so many decisions for the executive branch that they don't have enough time to think about the big picture. Larger questions of leadership may be put aside as the imperatives of day-to-day decision making take over.
C. Presidents sometimes go outside their immediate staff or the larger executive branch establishment to ask the advice of outsiders. A president will also on occasion set up an outside task force to study a problem and recommend policy changes. (Sometimes commissions are appointed to try to defuse criticism, not because there is inadequate expertise or the lack of objective analysts within the executive branch.)
D. No organizational chart, no matter how thoughtfully drawn, will save the president from being ill advised at times. In the last analysis, the president himself will decide how he will use his advisers and whose judgment he trusts the most.
E. If there is a good rule to follow, though, it is that the president should expose himself to conflicting viewpoints. He should hear those opinions from their strong advocates.
THE PRESIDENCY AND PSYCHOHISTORY
I. Examining presidential personality and character
A. When we examine the leadership qualities of presidents, it is useful to go beyond the evaluation of their abilities.
1. It is, however, a difficult and murky task to examine their personality traits.
2. The premise for studying the personalities of presidents is simple: Presidents are human beings; they have inner conflicts just like the rest of us.
B. Their neurotic tendencies are more than just interesting historical sidelight. Individual personality traits can shape a president's behavior; that is, his political decisions will be affected by his inner feelings. A president's psychological needs may be manifested in very strong ways in his public duties.
C. Indeed, their psychological needs may sometimes push them toward wrong decisions as they carry out their duties in office.
THE OFFICE AND THE PERSON
I. OFFICE of the presidency / different from the PERSON of the president.
A. Consider the design of the office according to the Constitution.
1. Presidency - a UNITARY rather than a PLURAL executive.
a. One person has sole responsibility for all executive functions.
b. Compare this situation with the standard pattern in state governments, which usually separate executive powers among a governor, secretary of state, treasurer, attorney general, and other officers who are independently elected.
c. In principle, the unitary office provides more potential for MAJORITARIAN government than a plural executive.
2. Office of president - also the HEAD OF GOVERNMENT.
a. Unlike a Prime minister, the president heads a separate but coordinate branch of government.
(1) A Prime minister heads both lawmaking and law implementing and is thus in a more effective position to command the government.
(2) Presidency clearly reflects limitations on government.
b. President - derives power as head of government from other features of the office denied prime ministers.
(1) President is in charge of the military.
(2) He is popularly elected by a national constituency.
(3) His term of office is longer than that of the popular branch of the Congress.
(4) He also has some legislative authority.
3. Unlike a Prime minister, a president has additional authority from being HEAD OF STATE.
a. The president is the nation's ceremonial leader and authority figure.
b. The president is also the national symbol and personification of the nation, especially in foreign relations.
B. The presidency has both executive and legislative functions within our governmental system.
1. As CHIEF EXECUTIVE, the president performs the ADMINISTRATIVE function of implementing laws passed by Congress, which can be called the RULE-IMPLEMENTING function.
a. The president is charged with this function by the Constitution.
b. The bureaucracy - which actually implements the laws - has become too large for the president to control easily, and the president often has to struggle to control it.
2. The president also has a LEGISLATIVE function.
a. Under the Constitution, the president is responsible for approving laws passed by Congress.
b. Presidency has developed into the main source of initiation of legislation, resulting in a reversal of the original constitution arrangement, so that the president is also described as CHIEF LEGISLATOR.
C. The presidency also exercises the function of LEADERSHIP within the political system.
1. The president is prominent in the eyes of the public.
a. Findings of the socialization literature are that children first become aware of government through the policeman and the president - who later become "benevolent" figures in politics.
b. The most admired living Americans often presidents or men connected with the presidency through candidacy.
c. The most admired American men of all ages: Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
2. Presidency is clearly the top office in American politics.
a. Some scholars attribute the perpetuation of the two-party system in the United States to the need to coalesce to win the presidency.
b. Presidents have taken the initiative in proposing legislation and in conducting foreign affairs.
c. American history is often interpreted through presidential administrations - for example, Robert Dahl discusses Washington as head of state, Jefferson as party leader, Jackson as spokesman for national major cities, Lincoln as national leader in crisis, and so on.
d. In general, people look to the president for leadership - as we do in surveying public opinion to ask citizens whether "they approve or disapprove of the way the president is handling the economy."