Wildavsky\'s Two Presidencies When Aaron

Wildavsky's Two Presidencies

When Aaron Wildavsky refers to the Two Presidencies, his text is concerned with the precarious balance which must be established by all chief executives in navigating the space between responsibilities to the domestic population and an interest in stewarding America's role on the world state. This is to state that the domestic and international priorities which both fall under the purview of the president are often of distinctly different outlooks and will demand distinctly different approaches. Sometimes, weighing in on this balance will come a direct political cost or a direct policy cost. It is the job of the president to serve as the face to the American government on both sides of this coin.

It is within that framework that Aaron Wildavsky would compose his 1966 analysis, which touches upon the varying issues of war, taxation and especially budgetary discretion in identifying the two sides of the president.

As Wildavsky contends, "the President's normal problem with domestic policy is to get congressional support for the programs he prefers. In foreign affairs, in contrast, he can almost always get support for policies that he believes will protect the nation -- but his problem is to find a viable policy." (23)

To the latter issue, he would denote that with regard to the budgetary roles of the presidency, the 1960's were marked by a glut of social changes, stimulated by the coalescence of heightening domestic tensions, a controversial foreign policy and general political upheaval. Amidst all of these, the federal budget would come to reflect the tumult of the time, with conflicts over the appropriate expenditures of federal resource underscoring the sheer difficulty of the president's position. Specifically, the administration of Lyndon Johnson would see America into a time of paradox, with spending policies indicating a set of essentially conflictive priorities. Entangled in the costly Vietnam War, dispatching domestic security forces to quell a rising Civil Rights Movement and engaging in his own ambitious social-programs initiative, known as the Great Society, President Johnson would create so many spending requirements that he would considerably diminish the role of Congress in shaping his budget. The result would be the perception of a president who had attempted to reach to far in his ambition to shape the balance between the two priorities that direct the responsibilities of a sitting executive. According to Wildavsky though, this is an aspect of the structure of American government which tends to favor the president's foreign policy interests as the dominant force in all affairs. The controlling impact which Vietnam would bear on all aspects of its time and place is telling to this extent.

Wildavsky shows that "when refuges and immigration -- which Congress considers primarily a domestic concern -- are removed from the general foreign policy area, it is clear that Presidents prevail about 70% of the time in defense and foreign policy, compared with 40% in the domestic sphere." (24) for Johnson, a high success rate on both fronts would be pinned to the imperative of the Vietnam War and the force of necessity that this would levy over his authority to commit budgetary funds and social domestic policies to fit the needs of the war. Ultimately though, Wildavsky's point suggests that there is actually a divide in the extent of the president's power. Almost ironically, it is far more limited on American soil than it is in America's dealings beyond its own borders.

In times not just of military but also economic tumult, the challenges facing the divided executive are also clear. Here, were a weakness or vulnerability is apparent in the chief executive, domestic opponents will find the easier opportunity to undermine his influence.

For example, with the transition from Johnson's administration to Nixon/Ford and then to Carter, continued spending increases would be overshadowed by a stagnant economic growth and a trend of inflation. This would occur even as these administrations would experience a widening of the national deficit. For a president such as Jimmy Carter, for instance, Wildavsky's text was prescient, anticipating that the attempts of a president to conflict the ration of his strengths within the hierarchy of government could result in consistent defeat and the self-fulfilling prophecy of diminished credibility.

Of course, Aaron Wildavsky recognized, in 1966, that due to the challenges of mediation found when opposition is strong between Congress and the chief executive's administration, the United States had entered into a pattern of budgetary incrementalism. Herein, he argued, commitments to which the United States federal government was consistently beholden, coupled with (to that juncture), steady economic growth, determined that budget spending would experience an appropriate annual increase of a scalable degree. It would therefore be a policy to be shaped by the powerful oversight of the federal executive that would serve to dominate the process.

In the years following his supposition, however, many detractors have cited that the role which the public, the executive and Congress play in shaping the priorities of a spending bill will tend to levy political implications over the process. As a result, such hard and fast rules as that informing the theory of incrementalism may suffer from an absence of historical consistency in the approach to spending. Certainly, the absence of accurate consistency may be attributed to, among other things, the ongoing tug-of-war between the President and Congress in influencing the content of spending bills.

In 1974, with the executive authority under an unprecedented amount of scrutiny following the Watergate revelations, Congress passed a resolution that would articulate with a theretofore unseen degree of control the ways in which the legislative branch would be required to proceed in order to establish a spending blueprint, further diminished the balance of scale toward congressional rather than presidential dominance in domestic policymaking. Following the early 20th century addition of the executive to the front end of this process, the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 would be the first binding legislation to properly reinforce the Congressional role in this responsibility and would therefore serve as a vocal response to the implications of incrementalism. The concurrent review engaged by both houses; and the principle of spending limits, which subjected to subsequent reinvention, would be regulated here to resemble their current model.

Still, the battle is always ongoing for the domestic president to see his agendas through a Congress which can at times be hostile. It is therefore that Congress, in its role as the lawmaking body, has sought to respond by even further drawing back the authority of the domestic presidency. In many ways, this may be seen as a way of not just attempting to undermine executive authority in domestic affairs but also of limiting the depth of control caused to domestic policy by executive-derived foreign policies such as those related to war and defense spending. To this end, we may consider that Wildavsky's 1966 article prefigured many actual policy initiatives.

Namely, a 1985 piece of legislation, emerging from the Senate and known as the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act, was aimed at curbing an executive abuse of spending privileges which had resulted by that time in the largest deficits in U.S. history. Designed to counteract the spending excesses of President Reagan as well as to force Congress to take a bold stand in this regard, the Act would impose legal spending limitations upon programs in order to pursue a balanced budget.