The President and the Demands

The President and the Demands of the State: According to Grover The formation of the party system which today endows the United States with its leadership, its philosophy and its cultural identity would be the result of a natural process. With the diversity of ideals and realities facing the Founding Fathers, these parties would form around the need to represent such circumstances in the prescription of a Constitution, a form of government and protections for the rights of the people. The achievement of this balance would be effected by two distinct views on how America should be led. On one side, those who projected the need for a nation with strong, central elected leadership would support the empowerment of an executive who would gradually experience an upward trend in powers and flexibility. On the opposite side of the divide, leaders speaking on behalf of the general American public feared the implications of a presidential leader without sufficient responsibility to larger forces and systems in play. At its heart, this debate extends from a framework of classical political philosophy. The point and counter-point process which caused the evolution of the constitutional democracy were not necessarily two opposing forces but a reflection of the ideological discourse which existed along a continuum extending to the first murmuring for independence. This phenomenon would help to yield compromise in an otherwise structuralist setting, with the institutional principles of the federalists being checked by the ideological interests represented by the antifederalists. Today, though, with the Bush Administration using a host of opportunities to expand the reach of its own authority, the issue of presidential entitlement is once again under heavy debate. This is highlighted by the prescient 1989 text by William Grover entitled The President as Prisoner, which uses the Carter and Reagan administrations as respective case studies as it makes the argument that the president's authority is most directly limited not by the will of the people but by the priorities of state. Indeed, as we will consider in this account, the president is something of a custodian of the office, appealing to a mode of stewardship that effectively measures the will of the public against the complex pressure imposed by preexistent questions, challenges and situations. For many, it is challenging to dismiss the premise that the president is a leader of unrestrained entitlement. The inherent gravitas of the position seems to imply a degree of power which is unmatched elsewhere in our government. However, it is Grover's argument that in fact, the president steps into an intensely complex and entrenched scenario, where far too many matters of widespread and popular importance are already patterned to a certain end. The notion of what a president is, and how he might be expected to respond to a host of pre-existent situations, has seen a fundamental divide where the distinguishing factor is the president's acceptance of or resistance to the limitations placed upon his office by circumstance. The type of president that America experiences is categorized along these lines, Indeed, each presidency either comports with the presumption of the state's overarching influence or works to define himself and his administration according to the actions which diverge or differentiate from these pressures. The approach taken from this point of division will have a determinant impact on how we might understand a specific presidency. According to Grover, "used in this deeper sense of the terms, structural analysis of the presidency draws much of its sustenance from the large body of work concerned with the theory of the state." (9) This is to say that a president's ideology and presumptions, while relevant to approach and presentation, will not play a part in defining a president's key issues. These will emerge through the cycles of history, with the president occupying the office only as long as the electoral process dictates his entitlement to do so. In the course of this duration, it will be his duty to connect his ideological orientation- and that of his supporters-to the issues and structures defining the state itself. Therefore, when we consider such issues as Cold War policy, for instance, which was a dominant matter to presidents occupying the office between World War II and the end of the Reagan era, we note that philosophical distinctions proving a vast chasm between figures such as Eisenhower and Kennedy, or Carter and Reagan, would nonetheless be bridged by their collective attention to the issues of Soviet power, global nation- building and the provision of national security in a time of great rhetorical conflict. For all occupying presidents during this time, the obsessive public attention to the issue of the communist threat, the military demands which required American boots on the soil in a wide array of theatres and the systemic internal pressures from such non-executive departments as State, Defense and Intelligence would all collectively dictate a common ground amongst political figures who were most certainly bitter enemies. Indeed, as the Grover text suggests and as retrospective history might deduce, the Vietnam War was an issue that belonged to multiple presidencies, all of whom sought to balance the sense of individualized power in combating global threats and an awareness of America's prevailing sentiments concerning the role of America in the world. Ultimately, we may deduce that while Vietnam became a negative cross to bear from Presidents Johnson and Nixon, Kennedy's assassination relieved him of this onus. Indeed, the inevitability of America's Cold War policy was larger and more determinant than any one presidency. In many ways, this premise helps to reinforce Grover's main point of discussion, which is that each president is inherently formed by the issues which he inherits. Thus, the president's political philosophy will not shape the issues which are his. Instead, they will help to guide his response and his sense of his own autonomy in shaping that response. To this point, Grover contends that "two main schools of thought have dominated the discourse on the postwar presidency. One school-the expansivists-generally held sway from the time of FDR trough the late 1960s. . . The other school of thought- the restricitivsts-are a more recent phenomenon within the discipline, although they do include some theorists who wrote with FDR's years fresh in mind." (8) For the expanisivists, there is a sense that the president is given the authority by the public to act in a manner befitting of his ideological disposition, with the electoral process entitling a certain liberalism of constraint. In many ways, this is the type of executive entitlement that his been ironically fitted to the ambitions of the Bush Administration, which has awarded itself with broad and sweeping authority in the face of terrorism challenges. Contrary to Roosevelt, however, the Bush administration would use these authorities not to channel existent policies of state into necessary states of reform-as characterizes Roosevelt's New Deal-but to undermine state policies concerning military, law enforcement and economic orientation. Here, we can see the dangers in that type of liberalism. By contrast, we consider a figure such as Bill Clinton, whose office was distinguished by the initial challenges of recession and social upheaval. The philosophical approach of restricting the presidential appeal to authority would present us with a president of deeply political spots, capable of channeling compromise from the often shackling confines of the oval office, providing a modern template for the executive who recognizes the demand to guide rather than create structures qualities of the State.