by Peter Wehner
Confounding matters even more is a great paradox at the heart of the presidency. It is, to be sure, the most powerful office in the world. But to assume events can be shaped like hot wax sets presidents and their advisors up for an endless series of frustrations. From the outset it’s important to recognize that constraints on one’s ability to shape events are far greater than most people imagine.
As president, the capacity to shape public opinion is considerable, while the capacity to change public opinion is less than you may think. Presidential scholars like George C. Edwards III have shown that the essence of successful presidential leadership is recognizing and exploiting existing opportunities, not creating them through persuasion. Edwards makes a strong case that to avoid overreaching, presidents should be alert to the limitations on their power to persuade and rigorously assess the possibilities for obtaining public and congressional support in their environments.
“A statesman who too far outruns the experience of his people will fail in achieving domestic consensus, however wise his policies,” Henry Kissinger wrote in his book, A World Restored.32 In addition, overpromising is a staple of campaigns; politicians believe that to be elected, they have to make extravagant claims. But former Nixon speechwriter William Safire warned that the politicians who promise the rain are held responsible for the drought. And droughts will come.
THE UNDERAPPRECIATED VIRTUE OF DISCERNMENT
Effective governing requires having the right principles and deciding on the right policy; but it also necessitates discernment, the ability to apply principles to particular issues in particular circumstances. Is it the right time to push a far-reaching reform of, say, an entitlement program? Is the country ready for it? Is your party? What are the odds of success? What are the opportunity costs of failure? Will other items on your agenda suffer because of it? Those are all considerations that need to be factored in.
Some examples from my own experience: In the first months of his first term, George W. Bush championed education reform (No Child Left Behind) and tax cuts. These were issues he had run on during the campaign, so they didn’t come as a surprise to anyone, and a president’s first year is usually the most productive one when it comes to the implementation of his agenda. By the summer of 2001, we had secured passage of both. Two years later, President Bush signed into law landmark Medicare reform legislation that included a prescription drug benefit, more choices for older Americans, and more control over their health care.
At the outset of George W. Bush’s second term, however, we decided to make a big push for reforming Social Security, including giving younger workers the option of directing some of their Social Security tax payments into a personal account that could be invested in broadly based index funds. (Those who were retired or nearing retirement would have seen little change.)
I believed then, and I believe now, it was a needed change. But the public (and therefore Congress) didn’t agree, and even after months of concentrated effort, we weren’t even able to get a bill out of committee, let alone get a vote on the floor of the House and Senate. As a result of going with Social Security as our first initiative in the second term, we had to delay immigration and health-care reform. By the time we got around to those, the moment was lost, and we fell just short of the votes needed for passage of immigration reform and couldn’t even get Congress to notice Bush’s health-care proposals. Had we gone with immigration ahead of Social Security, we might well have secured passage of a far-reaching and necessary reform. But because of the sequencing, neither reform saw the light of day. It’s clear in retrospect what our mistake was, but at the time there were strong arguments for what we chose to do.
Successful governing, then, requires prescience and discipline when it comes to both choosing and pushing an agenda, since so many issues vie for attention. It also requires an excellent staff, and that is not as easy to obtain as one might think.
Staffing a White House isn’t simply a matter of assembling intelligent, accomplished people. It’s also important that at least some number of them be people of good character, wise judgment, and who get along well with others. Staffing a White House with senior advisors who are brilliant but abrasive, difficult personalities can lead to dysfunction, backbiting, and chaos.
An example: For the first part of the George H. W. Bush presidency, the two most important figures on the staff were John Sununu and Richard Darman. They were men of deep knowledge but also prickly and imperious. Sununu was eventually fired; Darman managed to stay on. The staff itself—at least on the political and domestic policy side of things—never jelled, and it was costly. (The foreign policy team ran unusually smoothly.)
In the Reagan presidency, Donald Regan—who had had a successful career as chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch and was an able secretary of the treasury in the first term—turned out to be a disastrous chief of staff in Reagan’s second term, alienating, among others, First Lady Nancy Reagan. (She described Regan as “explosive and difficult to deal with.”)
But playing well with others hardly exhausts the list of qualities one needs to look for in a staff. It’s important to have aides who are willing to challenge prevailing assumptions and group think, who will cross-examine what’s being said. It was said of Richard Helms, CIA director under Nixon, that he never hesitated to warn the White House of dangers, even when his views ran counter to the preconceptions of the president or of his security advisor.
When I moved from deputy director of presidential speechwriting to head of the Office of Strategic Initiatives (OSI), I detailed in a memorandum how I envisioned the job. One element involved what I termed playing devil’s advocate.
“I’ve found it useful from time to time,” I wrote, “to prepare memoranda that anticipate (and effectively summarize) the strongest case against our position on an important issue—and then respond to it.” My experience, I added, “is that this exercise helps to clarify and refine thinking. It can help us to better defend ourselves, intellectually and politically. And once in a while it may highlight weaknesses in our own position, so we can adjust it if necessary.”
I went on to say, “On certain key issues, I have found it useful to analyze them carefully and thoroughly—and in some cases, I have engaged in a back-and-forth, a sic et non [yes and no], in the same memorandum.” I did that on several issues, including a long document in the summer of 2001 stating the case for and against embryonic stem cell research, which helped form the basis of President Bush’s first prime-time speech, announcing his policy on embryonic stem cell research. If I had to do it over again, I’d do this kind of thing more often, on more issues. I would press, and press again, and press a third time.
THE NEED FOR TRUTH TELLERS
It also helps to have people around a president who have the courage to tell him when he’s wrong, who will convey bad news in unvarnished ways, and who refuse to indulge his worst instincts.
One of the reasons for the fall of Richard Nixon is that he didn’t have enough people around him who challenged his paranoia, his petty resentments and insecurity, his get-even mindset. Watergate had its roots in the sense of being under siege and in the “us-versus-them” mentality that existed in the Nixon White House.
Charles Colson, who was a senior political advisor to Nixon, described in a 1992 interview what it was like on election night 1972, when Richard Nixon won the largest landslide in American history. President Nixon watched the returns with Colson and the White House chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman. “I couldn’t feel any sense of jubilation,” Colson admitted. “Here we were, supposedly winning, and it was more like we’d lost.”
“The attitude was, ‘Well, we showed them, we got even with our enemies and we beat them,’ instead of ‘We’ve been given a wonderful mandate to rule over the next four years,’” Colson said. “We were reduced to our petty worst on the night of what should have been our greatest triumph.”33 Nixon needed people to check his most destructive qualities; in many cases, however, he surrou
nded himself with people who accentuated them.
Yet the task of governing well doesn’t end with embracing wise policies and having a first-rate staff. There is still the need to build a political coalition that can turn good ideas into actual laws. To get legislation passed requires trade-offs, wheeling and dealing, and backroom agreements. Barack Obama ran for president in 2008 promising that lobbyists and special interests would be banned from influencing legislation—but when crunch time came and he needed to secure the votes for passage of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), drug industry lobbyists worked with Democratic staffers to write the bill.34
Certain provisions may be added to a bill that are important to win support of key members of Congress—provisions that might help the constituents in those members’ districts (whom the member is elected to represent, after all) but might also make the bill in question more costly. It may look to all the world like a legal buy-off for a vote—“If you vote with us, you’ll get money appropriated to build that highway in your district or fund that community health center or public works project you’ve been asking for.” The provision itself may not be defensible—but supporting it might well be defensible to get a good, if imperfect, bill turned into law.
Even if one is able to build a successful coalition, however, the work is still not yet done. There remains the challenge of gaining control over the permanent bureaucracy that is responsible for carrying out policy, which even the most adept presidents have found difficult to contend with. The permanent bureaucracy is filled with career public servants, many of whom are quite able but are also wedded to the status quo, often risk averse and resistant to change, and skilled at creating roadblocks when it comes to implementation. Translating policies into action, then, isn’t easy; there are countless ways civil servants can impede the agenda of presidents, cabinet members, and members of Congress.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan was one of the extraordinary figures in modern American politics. A lifelong Democrat, he served in the administrations of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, was ambassador to India and the United Nations, and represented New York in the US Senate for four terms. Moynihan was also an intellectual of the first rank.
In writing about the Great Society, which he was largely sympathetic to, Moynihan wrote, “One of the anomalies of the 1960’s is that a period of such extraordinary effort at social improvement should have concluded in a miasma, some would say a maelstrom, of social dissatisfaction.” He added:
During the 1960’s a quite extraordinary commitment was made by the national government to put an end to poverty. Yet the effort to do so went forward in entirely too fragmented a manner. In effect, a collection of programs was put together and it was hoped these would somehow add up to a policy. I don’t believe they did.35
It was not because of lack of effort or good intentions. Nor were the architects of this massive undertaking unintelligent; quite the opposite. Many of them were highly accomplished. But as I’ve tried to show, governing can be hard, the problems lawmakers are trying to solve are often complex and intractable, and the consequences of one set of actions may result in an entirely new set of problems.
This isn’t an argument for throwing up our hands in despair; it’s an argument for understanding that the case for politics needs to have at its very core the case for policy and problem solving. The job of politics is inseparable from the job of governing, and if we treat our politics as theater, then our government will degenerate into theater.
I understand that the theatrical and performative side of politics is easier—that it is easier to treat issues like immigration, crime, abortion, race, welfare, and religious liberties as part of a broader ideological war than as problems to be thoughtfully addressed—but in the end, treating politics as a form of self-expression derails the serious work of governing. And that work can save millions of lives.
In 2003 President George W. Bush proposed, and Congress passed, a $15 billion initiative to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa. (At the time the projections were that if left unchecked, the disease would kill 68 million people by 2020.) It constituted the largest international health initiative ever to combat a specific disease. “I hoped it would serve as a medical version of the Marshall Plan,” Bush has written.36
It did, and it didn’t happen by accident. It was the product of the president’s personal commitment, the clear goals he laid out and his insistence that we be extremely ambitious, and a White House policy process that worked superbly well. It was overseen by Josh Bolten, then deputy chief of staff to the president and one of the most able individuals I have ever worked with; and it involved experts in infectious diseases and international development, the director of national AIDS policy, and top staffers from the National Security Council and the Office of Management and Budget.
When President Bush announced the initiative in his 2003 State of the Union address, he said, “Seldom has history offered a greater opportunity to do so much for so many.”
There was no domestic political payoff to the global AIDS initiative. But it was a work of mercy, and by the time Bush left office in January 2009, the global AIDS initiative supported treatment for more than 2 million people and care for more than 10 million. More than 15 million mothers and babies were protected, and nearly 60 million people had benefited from AIDS testing and counseling sessions. Africans referred to it as the Lazarus Effect, after the friend of Jesus who was raised from the dead.37
CHOOSING CITIZENSHIP OVER CYNICISM
Immediately before I served in the Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush administrations, and immediately after I left them, my IQ was about thirty points higher. Or so it seemed.
The explanation is simple: I left government and began to critique those who serve in government. It turns out that offering opinions in a New York Times column, on television, or from behind a microphone is a lot easier than actually governing. Like the rest of the world, I can watch Republicans and Democrats serving in government and, from a safe distance after things have played out, explain how things could have been done so much better and so much easier. And I can do so in nine hundred words or in five minutes on television.
The difference between governing and critiquing those who govern is similar to the difference between an NFL quarterback playing a game and a coach watching the quarterback play the game on film, running it forward and backward, seeing what opportunities were there that he didn’t take advantage of at the moment. It’s a lot easier for a quarterback to beat an all-out blitz while watching it in slow motion, frame-by-frame, than it is as his offensive line is being overwhelmed and he has two and a half seconds to make the throw.
I’m not degrading the importance of film sessions; they are valuable, and athletes can certainly learn from them. My point is that making the right decisions in real time is much harder than making good decisions after the fact, when we all know what worked and what did not. Decisions look stupid now that may have looked reasonable at the time, and we need to keep that in mind when judging politicians and lawmakers.
This isn’t meant to let lawmakers off the hook. In running for office, they assume the responsibilities of office. Politicians shouldn’t pursue the job if they don’t want to be held accountable. “If you can’t stand the heat,” Harry Truman famously said, “get out of the kitchen.”
What we need are high but realistic expectations for lawmakers. We can’t expect anything like perfection; politics is a profession of trial and error, of adjustment and readjustment, of (at times) least bad options. But we can reasonably expect from them competence, good judgment, and integrity; basic knowledge about most issues and mastery of a few; the ability to learn from mistakes; and some degree of commitment to the public interest. We should also expect to find, at least now and then, a spirit of sympathy, conciliation, and magnanimity.
In lauding the British style of government compared to the revolutionaries in France, Burke said, “We compensate, we reconcile, w
e balance. We are enabled to unite into a consistent whole the various anomalies and contending principles that are found in the minds and affairs of men.”38
The ability to compensate, reconcile, and balance various anomalies and contending principles is not a simple task, and not just anyone off the street can do it. But those we elect to high public office need to.
Which brings me back to the role of citizenship and civic responsibility, to how we think and what we do. In this instance, what we do means getting off the sidelines—refusing to be like spectators.
The qualities that the most active and engaged Americans demand in politicians is what they will get. If enough citizens lend their hands and hearts, their voices and votes to men and women who embody, even if imperfectly, intellectual rigor and wise judgment, mastery of government and moral integrity, our politics will be transformed. But we have to care enough to act. We can’t be a nation of onlookers.
The Roman poet Juvenal, writing a century after Jesus was born, satirized the corruption of the Roman citizenry. His most famous indictment of them is that the common people, who previously had not sold their vote to any man, “have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions—everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”39 By “bread and circuses,” he meant the people would be kept happy and docile by a steady diet of trivializing entertainment by those in power. Public support for political leaders ceased to be a result of demanding excellence in public life; it was instead the result of distraction, amusement, circus games. The populace was indifferent to politics, and indifference had a cost.
It still does.
We’ve stumbled into the “bread and circuses” era in American politics, with the entertainment supplied to us on a daily basis by the president above all but also by others in public office, by social media, and by commentators having frivolous screaming matches on cable news programs. The whole spectacle is dumbing us down. But we are not fated to stay where we are. We can, in the words of the novelist Flannery O’Connor, “push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you.”
