AP American Government
Unit 5: Media (6) and The Executive Branch (11)
Mr. Andrew Conneen aconneen@d125.org
Fall 2011
Unit 5 Syllabus: ................................................................................................................................................................................ 2
Bad News ..................................................................... 2
Ch. 6: The Media Questions: ........................................................................................................................ 2
What we want in a President ............................................................................................................................................................. 2
Presidential Resume.......................................................................................................................................................................... 2
How the Electoral College works ..................................................................................................................................................... 2
Ch. 11: The Presidency (1-11): ..................................................................................................................... 2
Presidential Cartoon Analysis: .......................................................................................................................................................... 2
The Roles of the President: ............................................................................................................................................................... 2
Quiz--Presidential Powers: ............................................................................................................................................................... 2
Notes--Presidential Powers: .............................................................................................................................................................. 2
The Modern American Presidency ................................................................................................................................................... 2
The Case for the Strong Executive ............................... 2
Is the Imperial Presidency Inevitable?.......................... 2
Ch. 11: The Presidency (12-19):................................... 2
TKO--To Know Objectives: ............................................................................................................................................................. 2
Unit 5 Syllabus:
For Monday, Nov. 7: Read “Bad News;” Complete Think Tank;
For Tuesday, Nov. 8: Ch. 5 Reading Questions Due
For Wednesday, Nov. 9: Rd. What we want in a President; Presidential Qualities Due
For Thursday, Nov. 10: Presidential Resume Due
For Monday, Nov. 14: Read “How the Electoral College Works” and answer questions
For Tuesday, Nov. 15: Ch. 11 questions 1-11 (pages 393-409)
For Wed, Nov. 16: Presidential Powers Quiz and Presidential Cartoon analysis
For Thur, Nov. 17: Read (with Think Tanks) Modern American Presidency; Case for the Strong
Executive; Is the Imperial Presidency Inevitable?
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For Mon, Nov. 21: Presidential Approval Data due
For Tue, Nov. 22: Ch. 11 questions 12-19
For Wed, Nov. 23: Ch. 6+ 11 Test
Bad News
RICHARD A. POSNER New York Times July 31, 2005
THE conventional news media are embattled. Attacked
by both left and right in book after book, rocked by
scandals, challenged by upstart bloggers, they have
become a focus of controversy and concern. Their
audience is in decline, their credibility with the public
in shreds. In a recent poll conducted by the Annenberg
Public Policy Center, 65 percent of the respondents
thought that most news organizations, if they discover
they've made a mistake, try to ignore it or cover it up,
and 79 percent opined that a media company would
hesitate to carry negative stories about a corporation
from which it received substantial advertising revenues.
television news channel), Rush Limbaugh's radio talk
show and right-wing blogs by Matt Drudge and
others. But they do not spare the mainstream media,
which, they contend, provide in the name of balance
an echo chamber for the right. To these critics, the
deterioration of journalism is exemplified by the
attack of the ''Swift boat'' Vietnam veterans on
Senator John Kerry during the 2004 election
campaign. The critics describe the attack as consisting
of lies propagated by the new right-wing media and
reported as news by mainstream media made supine
by anxiety over their declining fortunes.
The industry's critics agree that the function of the news
is to inform people about social, political, cultural,
ethical and economic issues so that they can vote and
otherwise express themselves as responsible citizens.
They agree on the related point that journalism is a
profession rather than just a trade and therefore that
journalists and their employers must not allow profit
considerations to dominate, but must acknowledge an
ethical duty to report the news accurately, soberly,
without bias, reserving the expression of political
preferences for the editorial page and its radio and
television counterparts. The critics further agree, as
they must, that 30 years ago news reporting was
dominated by newspapers and by television network
news and that the audiences for these media have
declined with the rise of competing sources, notably
cable television and the Web.
Critics on the right applaud the rise of the
conservative media as a long-overdue corrective to
the liberal bias of the mainstream media, which,
according to Jim A. Kuypers, the author of ''Press
Bias and Politics,'' are ''a partisan collective which
both consciously and unconsciously attempts to
persuade the public to accept its interpretation of the
world as true.'' Fourteen percent of Americans
describe themselves as liberals, and 26 percent as
conservatives. The corresponding figures for
journalists are 56 percent and 18 percent. This means
that of all journalists who consider themselves either
liberal or conservative, 76 percent consider
themselves liberal, compared with only 35 percent of
the public that has a stated political position.
The audience decline is potentially fatal for
newspapers. Not only has their daily readership
dropped from 52.6 percent of adults in 1990 to 37.5
percent in 2000, but the drop is much steeper in the 20to-49-year-old cohort, a generation that is, and as it
ages will remain, much more comfortable with
electronic media in general and the Web in particular
than the current elderly are.
At this point the diagnosis splits along political lines.
Liberals, including most journalists (because most
journalists are liberals), believe that the decline of the
formerly dominant ''mainstream'' media has caused a
deterioration in quality. They attribute this decline to
the rise of irresponsible journalism on the right, typified
by the Fox News Channel (the most-watched cable
So politically one-sided are the mainstream media,
the right complains (while sliding over the fact that
the owners and executives, as distinct from the
working journalists, tend to be far less liberal), that
not only do they slant the news in a liberal direction;
they will stop at nothing to defeat conservative
politicians and causes. The right points to the ''60
Minutes II'' broadcast in which Dan Rather paraded
what were probably forged documents concerning
George W. Bush's National Guard service, and to
Newsweek's erroneous report, based on a single
anonymous source, that an American interrogator had
flushed a copy of the Koran down the toilet (a
physical impossibility, one would have thought).
Strip these critiques of their indignation, treat them as
descriptions rather than as denunciations, and one
sees that they are consistent with one another and
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basically correct. The mainstream media are
predominantly liberal - in fact, more liberal than they
used to be. But not because the politics of journalists
have changed. Rather, because the rise of new media,
itself mainly an economic rather than a political
phenomenon, has caused polarization, pushing the
already liberal media farther left.
The news media have also become more sensational,
more prone to scandal and possibly less accurate. But
note the tension between sensationalism and
polarization: the trial of Michael Jackson got
tremendous coverage, displacing a lot of political
coverage, but it had no political valence.
The interesting questions are, first, the why of these
trends, and, second, so what?
The why is the vertiginous decline in the cost of
electronic communication and the relaxation of
regulatory barriers to entry, leading to the proliferation
of consumer choices. Thirty years ago the average
number of television channels that Americans could
receive was seven; today, with the rise of cable and
satellite television, it is 71. Thirty years ago there was
no Internet, therefore no Web, hence no online
newspapers and magazines, no blogs. The public's
consumption of news and opinion used to be like
sucking on a straw; now it's like being sprayed by a fire
hose.
To see what difference the elimination of a
communications bottleneck can make, consider a town
that before the advent of television or even radio had
just two newspapers because economies of scale made
it impossible for a newspaper with a small circulation to
break even. Each of the two, to increase its advertising
revenues, would try to maximize circulation by pitching
its news to the median reader, for that reader would not
be attracted to a newspaper that flaunted extreme
political views. There would be the same tendency to
political convergence that is characteristic of two-party
political systems, and for the same reason - attracting
the least committed is the key to obtaining a majority.
One of the two newspapers would probably be liberal
and have a loyal readership of liberal readers, and the
other conservative and have a loyal conservative
readership. That would leave a middle range. To snag
readers in that range, the liberal newspaper could not
afford to be too liberal or the conservative one too
conservative. The former would strive to be just liberal
enough to hold its liberal readers, and the latter just
conservative enough to hold its conservative readers. If
either moved too close to its political extreme, it would
lose readers in the middle without gaining readers
from the extreme, since it had them already.
But suppose cost conditions change, enabling a
newspaper to break even with many fewer readers
than before. Now the liberal newspaper has to worry
that any temporizing of its message in an effort to
attract moderates may cause it to lose its most liberal
readers to a new, more liberal newspaper; for with
small-scale entry into the market now economical, the
incumbents no longer have a secure base. So the
liberal newspaper will tend to become even more
liberal and, by the same process, the conservative
newspaper more conservative. (If economies of scale
increase, and as a result the number of newspapers
grows, the opposite ideological change will be
observed, as happened in the 19th century. The
introduction of the ''penny press'' in the 1830's
enabled newspapers to obtain large circulations and
thus finance themselves by selling advertising; no
longer did they have to depend on political
patronage.)
The current tendency to political polarization in news
reporting is thus a consequence of changes not in
underlying political opinions but in costs, specifically
the falling costs of new entrants. The rise of the
conservative Fox News Channel caused CNN to shift
to the left. CNN was going to lose many of its
conservative viewers to Fox anyway, so it made sense
to increase its appeal to its remaining viewers by
catering more assiduously to their political
preferences.
The tendency to greater sensationalism in reporting is
a parallel phenomenon. The more news sources there
are, the more intense the struggle for an audience.
One tactic is to occupy an overlooked niche - peeling
away from the broad-based media a segment of the
consuming public whose interests were not catered to
previously. That is the tactic that produces
polarization. Another is to ''shout louder'' than the
competitors, where shouting takes the form of a
sensational, attention-grabbing discovery, accusation,
claim or photograph. According to James T. Hamilton
in his valuable book ''All the News That's Fit to Sell,''
this even explains why the salaries paid news anchors
have soared: the more competition there is for an
audience, the more valuable is a celebrity newscaster.
The argument that competition increases polarization
assumes that liberals want to read liberal newspapers
and conservatives conservative ones. Natural as that
assumption is, it conflicts with one of the points on
which left and right agree - that people consume news
and opinion in order to become well informed about
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public issues. Were this true, liberals would read
conservative newspapers, and conservatives liberal
newspapers, just as scientists test their hypotheses by
confronting them with data that may refute them. But
that is not how ordinary people (or, for that matter,
scientists) approach political and social issues. The
issues are too numerous, uncertain and complex, and
the benefit to an individual of becoming well informed
about them too slight, to invite sustained, disinterested
attention. Moreover, people don't like being in a state of
doubt, so they look for information that will support
rather than undermine their existing beliefs. They're
also uncomfortable seeing their beliefs challenged on
issues that are bound up with their economic welfare,
physical safety or religious and moral views.
So why do people consume news and opinion? In part it
is to learn of facts that bear directly and immediately on
their lives - hence the greater attention paid to local
than to national and international news. They also want
to be entertained, and they find scandals, violence,
crime, the foibles of celebrities and the antics of the
powerful all mightily entertaining. And they want to be
confirmed in their beliefs by seeing them echoed and
elaborated by more articulate, authoritative and
prestigious voices. So they accept, and many relish, a
partisan press. Forty-three percent of the respondents in
the poll by the Annenberg Public Policy Center thought
it ''a good thing if some news organizations have a
decidedly political point of view in their coverage of
the news.''
Being profit-driven, the media respond to the actual
demands of their audience rather than to the idealized
''thirst for knowledge'' demand posited by public
intellectuals and deans of journalism schools. They
serve up what the consumer wants, and the more
intense the competitive pressure, the better they do it.
We see this in the media's coverage of political
campaigns. Relatively little attention is paid to issues.
Fundamental questions, like the actual difference in
policies that might result if one candidate rather than
the other won, get little play. The focus instead is on
who's ahead, viewed as a function of campaign tactics,
which are meticulously reported. Candidates'
statements are evaluated not for their truth but for their
adroitness; it is assumed, without a hint of
embarrassment, that a political candidate who levels
with voters disqualifies himself from being taken
seriously, like a racehorse that tries to hug the outside
of the track. News coverage of a political campaign is
oriented to a public that enjoys competitive sports, not
to one that is civic-minded.
We saw this in the coverage of the selection of Justice
Sandra Day O'Connor's successor. It was played as an
election campaign; one article even described the
jockeying for the nomination by President Bush as the
''primary election'' and the fight to get the nominee
confirmed by the Senate the ''general election''
campaign. With only a few exceptions, no attention
was paid to the ability of the people being considered
for the job or the actual consequences that the
appointment was likely to have for the nation.
Does this mean that the news media were better
before competition polarized them? Not at all. A
market gives people what they want, whether they
want the same thing or different things. Challenging
areas of social consensus, however dumb or even
vicious the consensus, is largely off limits for the
media, because it wins no friends among the general
public. The mainstream media do not kick sacred
cows like religion and patriotism.
Not that the media lie about the news they report; in
fact, they have strong incentives not to lie. Instead,
there is selection, slanting, decisions as to how much
or how little prominence to give a particular news
item. Giving a liberal spin to equivocal economic data
when conservatives are in power is, as the Harvard
economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Andrei Shleifer
point out, a matter of describing the glass as half
empty when conservatives would describe it as half
full.
Journalists are reluctant to confess to pandering to
their customers' biases; it challenges their self-image
as servants of the general interest, unsullied by
commerce. They want to think they inform the public,
rather than just satisfying a consumer demand no
more elevated or consequential than the demand for
cosmetic surgery in Brazil or bullfights in Spain.
They believe in ''deliberative democracy'' democracy as the system in which the people
determine policy through deliberation on the issues.
In his preface to ''The Future of Media'' (a collection
of articles edited by Robert W. McChesney, Russell
Newman and Ben Scott), Bill Moyers writes that
''democracy can't exist without an informed public.'' If
this is true, the United States is not a democracy
(which may be Moyers's dyspeptic view). Only
members of the intelligentsia, a tiny slice of the
population, deliberate on public issues.
The public's interest in factual accuracy is less an
interest in truth than a delight in the unmasking of the
opposition's errors. Conservatives were
unembarrassed by the errors of the Swift Boat
veterans, while taking gleeful satisfaction in the
exposure of the forgeries on which Dan Rather had
apparently relied, and in his resulting fall from grace.
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They reveled in Newsweek's retracting its story about
flushing the Koran down a toilet yet would prefer that
American abuse of prisoners be concealed. Still,
because there is a market demand for correcting the
errors and ferreting out the misdeeds of one's enemies,
the media exercise an important oversight function,
creating accountability and deterring wrongdoing. That,
rather than educating the public about the deep issues,
is their great social mission. It shows how a market
produces a social good as an unintended byproduct of
self-interested behavior.
Journalists minimize offense, preserve an aura of
objectivity and cater to the popular taste for conflict
and contests by - in the name of ''balance'' - reporting
both sides of an issue, even when there aren't two
sides. So ''intelligent design,'' formerly called by the
oxymoron ''creation science,'' though it is religious
dogma thinly disguised, gets almost equal billing with
the theory of evolution. If journalists admitted that the
economic imperatives of their industry overrode their
political beliefs, they would weaken the right's
critique of liberal media bias.
The limited consumer interest in the truth is the key to
understanding why both left and right can plausibly
denounce the same media for being biased in favor of
the other. Journalists are writing to meet a consumer
demand that is not a demand for uncomfortable truths.
So a newspaper that appeals to liberal readers will
avoid exposés of bad behavior by blacks or
homosexuals, as William McGowan charges in
''Coloring the News''; similarly, Daniel Okrent, the first
ombudsman of The New York Times, said that the
news pages of The Times ''present the social and
cultural aspects of same-sex marriage in a tone that
approaches cheerleading.'' Not only would such exposés
offend liberal readers who are not black or homosexual;
many blacks and homosexuals are customers of liberal
newspapers, and no business wants to offend a
customer.
The latest, and perhaps gravest, challenge to the
journalistic establishment is the blog. Journalists
accuse bloggers of having lowered standards. But
their real concern is less high-minded - it is the threat
that bloggers, who are mostly amateurs, pose to
professional journalists and their principal employers,
the conventional news media. A serious newspaper,
like The Times, is a large, hierarchical commercial
enterprise that interposes layers of review, revision
and correction between the reporter and the published
report and that to finance its large staff depends on
advertising revenues and hence on the good will of
advertisers and (because advertising revenues depend
to a great extent on circulation) readers. These
dependences constrain a newspaper in a variety of
ways. But in addition, with its reputation heavily
invested in accuracy, so that every serious error is a
potential scandal, a newspaper not only has to delay
publication of many stories to permit adequate
checking but also has to institute rules for avoiding
error - like requiring more than a single source for a
story or limiting its reporters' reliance on anonymous
sources - that cost it many scoops.
But the same liberal newspaper or television news
channel will pull some of its punches when it comes to
reporting on the activities of government, even in
Republican administrations, thus giving credence to the
left critique, as in Michael Massing's ''Now They Tell
Us,'' about the reporting of the war in Iraq. A
newspaper depends on access to officials for much of
its information about what government is doing and
planning, and is reluctant to bite too hard the hand that
feeds it. Nevertheless, it is hyperbole for Eric Alterman
to claim in ''What Liberal Media?'' that ''liberals are
fighting a near-hopeless battle in which they are
enormously outmatched by most measures'' by the
conservative media, or for Bill Moyers to say that ''the
marketplace of political ideas'' is dominated by a
''quasi-official partisan press ideologically linked to an
authoritarian administration.'' In a sample of 23 leading
newspapers and newsmagazines, the liberal ones had
twice the circulation of the conservative. The bias in
some of the reporting in the liberal media,
acknowledged by Okrent, is well documented by
McGowan, as well as by Bernard Goldberg in ''Bias''
and L. Brent Bozell III in ''Weapons of Mass
Distortion.''
Blogs don't have these worries. Their only cost is the
time of the blogger, and that cost may actually be
negative if the blogger can use the publicity that he
obtains from blogging to generate lecture fees and
book royalties. Having no staff, the blogger is not
expected to be accurate. Having no advertisers
(though this is changing), he has no reason to pull his
punches. And not needing a large circulation to cover
costs, he can target a segment of the reading public
much narrower than a newspaper or a television news
channel could aim for. He may even be able to pry
that segment away from the conventional media.
Blogs pick off the mainstream media's customers one
by one, as it were.
And bloggers thus can specialize in particular topics
to an extent that few journalists employed by media
companies can, since the more that journalists
specialized, the more of them the company would
have to hire in order to be able to cover all bases. A
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newspaper will not hire a journalist for his knowledge
of old typewriters, but plenty of people in the
blogosphere have that esoteric knowledge, and it was
they who brought down Dan Rather. Similarly, not
being commercially constrained, a blogger can stick
with and dig into a story longer and deeper than the
conventional media dare to, lest their readers become
bored. It was the bloggers' dogged persistence in
pursuing a story that the conventional media had tired
of that forced Trent Lott to resign as Senate majority
leader.
What really sticks in the craw of conventional
journalists is that although individual blogs have no
warrant of accuracy, the blogosphere as a whole has a
better error-correction machinery than the conventional
media do. The rapidity with which vast masses of
information are pooled and sifted leaves the
conventional media in the dust. Not only are there
millions of blogs, and thousands of bloggers who
specialize, but, what is more, readers post comments
that augment the blogs, and the information in those
comments, as in the blogs themselves, zips around
blogland at the speed of electronic transmission.
This means that corrections in blogs are also
disseminated virtually instantaneously, whereas when a
member of the mainstream media catches a mistake, it
may take weeks to communicate a retraction to the
public. This is true not only of newspaper retractions usually printed inconspicuously and in any event rarely
read, because readers have forgotten the article being
corrected - but also of network television news. It took
CBS so long to acknowledge Dan Rather's mistake
because there are so many people involved in the
production and supervision of a program like ''60
Minutes II'' who have to be consulted.
The charge by mainstream journalists that blogging
lacks checks and balances is obtuse. The blogosphere
has more checks and balances than the conventional
media; only they are different. The model is Friedrich
Hayek's classic analysis of how the economic market
pools enormous quantities of information efficiently
despite its decentralized character, its lack of a master
coordinator or regulator, and the very limited
knowledge possessed by each of its participants.
In effect, the blogosphere is a collective enterprise - not
12 million separate enterprises, but one enterprise with
12 million reporters, feature writers and editorialists,
yet with almost no costs. It's as if The Associated Press
or Reuters had millions of reporters, many of them
experts, all working with no salary for free newspapers
that carried no advertising.
How can the conventional news media hope to
compete? Especially when the competition is not
entirely fair. The bloggers are parasitical on the
conventional media. They copy the news and opinion
generated by the conventional media, often at
considerable expense, without picking up any of the
tab. The degree of parasitism is striking in the case of
those blogs that provide their readers with links to
newspaper articles. The links enable the audience to
read the articles without buying the newspaper. The
legitimate gripe of the conventional media is not that
bloggers undermine the overall accuracy of news
reporting, but that they are free riders who may in the
long run undermine the ability of the conventional
media to finance the very reporting on which bloggers
depend.
Some critics worry that ''unfiltered'' media like blogs
exacerbate social tensions by handing a powerful
electronic platform to extremists at no charge. Bad
people find one another in cyberspace and so gain
confidence in their crazy ideas. The conventional
media filter out extreme views to avoid offending
readers, viewers and advertisers; most bloggers have
no such inhibition.
The argument for filtering is an argument for
censorship. (That it is made by liberals is evidence
that everyone secretly favors censorship of the
opinions he fears.) But probably there is little harm
and some good in unfiltered media. They enable
unorthodox views to get a hearing. They get 12
million people to write rather than just stare passively
at a screen. In an age of specialization and
professionalism, they give amateurs a platform. They
allow people to blow off steam who might otherwise
adopt more dangerous forms of self-expression. They
even enable the authorities to keep tabs on potential
troublemakers; intelligence and law enforcement
agencies devote substantial resources to monitoring
blogs and Internet chat rooms.
And most people are sensible enough to distrust
communications in an unfiltered medium. They know
that anyone can create a blog at essentially zero cost,
that most bloggers are uncredentialed amateurs, that
bloggers don't employ fact checkers and don't have
editors and that a blogger can hide behind a
pseudonym. They know, in short, that until a
blogger's assertions are validated (as when the
mainstream media acknowledge an error discovered
by a blogger), there is no reason to repose confidence
in what he says. The mainstream media, by contrast,
assure their public that they make strenuous efforts to
prevent errors from creeping into their articles and
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broadcasts. They ask the public to trust them, and that is
why their serious errors are scandals.
A survey by the National Opinion Research Center
finds that the public's confidence in the press declined
from about 85 percent in 1973 to 59 percent in 2002,
with most of the decline occurring since 1991. Over
both the longer and the shorter period, there was little
change in public confidence in other major institutions.
So it seems there are special factors eroding trust in the
news industry. One is that the blogs have exposed
errors by the mainstream media that might otherwise
have gone undiscovered or received less publicity.
Another is that competition by the blogs, as well as by
the other new media, has pushed the established media
to get their stories out faster, which has placed pressure
on them to cut corners. So while the blogosphere is a
marvelous system for prompt error correction, it is not
clear whether its net effect is to reduce the amount of
error in the media as a whole.
But probably the biggest reason for declining trust in
the media is polarization. As media companies are
pushed closer to one end of the political spectrum or the
other, the trust placed in them erodes. Their motives are
assumed to be political. This may explain recent Pew
Research Center poll data that show Republicans
increasingly regarding the media as too critical of the
government and Democrats increasingly regarding
them as not critical enough.
Thus the increase in competition in the news market
that has been brought about by lower costs of
communication (in the broadest sense) has resulted in
more variety, more polarization, more sensationalism,
more healthy skepticism and, in sum, a better matching
of supply to demand. But increased competition has not
produced a public more oriented toward public issues,
more motivated and competent to engage in genuine
self-government, because these are not the goods that
most people are seeking from the news media. They
are seeking entertainment, confirmation,
reinforcement, emotional satisfaction; and what
consumers want, a competitive market supplies, no
more, no less. Journalists express dismay that bottomline pressures are reducing the quality of news
coverage. What this actually means is that when
competition is intense, providers of a service are
forced to give the consumer what he or she wants, not
what they, as proud professionals, think the consumer
should want, or more bluntly, what they want.
Yet what of the sliver of the public that does have a
serious interest in policy issues? Are these people less
well served than in the old days? Another recent
survey by the Pew Research Center finds that serious
magazines have held their own and that serious
broadcast outlets, including that bane of the right,
National Public Radio, are attracting ever larger
audiences. And for that sliver of a sliver that invites
challenges to its biases by reading The New York
Times and The Wall Street Journal, that watches
CNN and Fox, that reads Brent Bozell and Eric
Alterman and everything in between, the increased
polarization of the media provides a richer fare than
ever before.
So when all the pluses and minuses of the impact of
technological and economic change on the news
media are toted up and compared, maybe there isn't
much to fret about.
Richard A. Posner is a judge on the United States
Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, a senior
lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School and,
along with the economist Gary Becker, the author of
The Becker-Posner Blog.
GSL Think Tank: Bad News
Extra--Identify an example of a humorous news parody. Describe a specific way this source
parodies the news and explain why you found this to be funny. Post your classroom appropriate
examples of news parody on Facebook at Parody Primer.
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I THINK….
I LEARNED….
I WONDER…
I DO NOT UNDERSTAND…
I AM CONFUSED ABOUT…..
I WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT….
I WAS MOST SURPRISED TO LEARN….
I WAS MOST IMPRESSED WITH….
Ch. 6: The Media Questions:
Directions: Read Ch. 6 and answer on a separate sheet of paper. (Be sure to
restate the vocabulary of each question.)
1. Describe horse race journalism:
2. Describe the difference between yellow journalism and muckraking:
3. Identify 3 broadcast media regulated by the Federal Communication Commission:
4. Describe why the government is allowed to regulate broadcast media but not newspapers:
5. Define the fairness doctrine:
6. Describe how the internet and cable news have changed the content of broadcast news:
7. Describe a benefit of internet news. Describe a drawback of internet news.
8. Define prior restraint:
9. Define news leak:
10. Define shield laws:
11. Identify the news source used by most Americans:
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12. Explain why Republicans believe that the media has a liberal bias:
Media Notes
Describe: the gatekeeper; scorekeeper; and watchdog functions of the media
Describe: How has the new news media
changed in recent years?
Describe: How has this change been
reminiscent of the origins of the print
media?
Describe: How does independent internet media (youdia) differ from the corporate
mainstream media?
Define: Governmental transparency—
Describe: Ways that the following can promote governmental transparency—
1. 1st Amendment
2. Freedom of Information Act
3. Open Meetings Act
Describe: Ways that the following can inhibit governmental transparency—
1. Executive Privilege
2. Libel
3. Sources can not be protected
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What we want in a President
Ruthlessness is important when it comes to foreign enemies.
Charity is essential for domestic opponents.
LAWRENCE B. LINDSEY Wall Street Journal/January 2, 2008
In the next six weeks Americans are going to
pick the two finalists in the long job search
for the most important CEO position on the
planet. As someone who has served in three
White Houses and been a Federal Reserve
governor during a fourth, I have become a
firm believer that the character traits
someone brings to the job are more
important than the issue papers or debate
sound bites that get so much attention in the
primaries.
Consider two examples. In December, Joe
Trippi, a strategist for John Edwards, noted
that polls showed a quarter of Barack
Obama's own supporters did not think he
would be qualified to be president. This says
little about Mr. Obama, but it does say a lot
about the process. These voters are not
choosing someone to lead the country; they
are trying to send a message about their own
personal frustrations, or perhaps about
another candidate.
Or consider the comments of a friend of
mine and active fund-raiser about Fred
Thompson, who is my choice. My friend
agreed that Mr. Thompson was smart and
well informed and had good judgment. But
he felt that Republicans should definitely not
nominate him because he was
temperamentally unsuited to the campaign
trail. Mr. Thompson probably would rather
discuss the nuances of issues than shake
hands or write thank-you notes to donors,
two skills very important to the running.
Polls now suggest my friend may be right. If
so, all it means is that the process of
selecting a president has little to do with the
skills needed for the job.
By its very nature, the presidency involves a
lot of on-the-job training. Some of our
presidents have had to come up to speed
quite quickly.
For example, John F. Kennedy faced the Bay
of Pigs fiasco after just a few weeks on the
job. No one would argue that he handled it
well. Some serious historians have noted the
links between that performance and our
involvement in Vietnam (having "lost" in
Cuba, he was determined not to let it happen
again), not to mention the Cuban Missile
Crisis just 18 months later. Kennedy is
remembered fondly for bringing style, grace
and humor to the White House--wedged
between the boring Eisenhower and his
graceless successors, Johnson and Nixon.
But he was still learning on the job at a time
when nuclear annihilation was a real
possibility. Still more amazingly, with 14
years in Congress, Kennedy had far more
national political experience than many now
seeking the job.
As president, there is a lot to learn both
factually and about the process of governing.
Beginning on day one, he or she will have to
confront a bureaucracy and a media
establishment that has its own agenda, to
hire expert advisers and administrators on a
whole host of foreign and domestic policy
issues, and to structure the whole operation
in a way that carries out the will of the
people. Our job as voters should be to select
someone who will (1) know what he or she
11
doesn't know, (2) get up to speed quickly,
and (3) avoid making serious mistakes in the
meantime.
A process driven by 30-second commercials
prepared by the candidates themselves, and
so-called debates that ask candidates to
explain in 60 seconds how they would bring
about world peace or national prosperity,
does not help. Nor does media coverage that
focuses on whose commercials are moving
polling points and who performed well in the
last inane debate.
But we voters can still do a respectable job
in the CEO selection process. Obviously
ideology and our visceral reactions to the
candidates matter, since they are also part of
job performance. There are, however, three
other questions about a candidate's character
that are likely to shed some light on whether
that candidate will do well in the on-the-job
training school of the Oval Office. These
questions have nothing to do with party or
ideology.
First, has the candidate faced a crisis or
overcome a major setback in his or her life?
A president's first crisis will teach two
important lessons. The first is that bad things
happen, in fact they happen on a regular
basis. The second is that the real power of
the office to affect, let alone control, events
is far less than imagined. If the occupant of
the Oval Office has faced this double
whammy--encountering a tragedy involving
events over which he or she has had little
control, yet finding a way to persevere--the
new president is far more likely to succeed.
Harry Truman, who made some of the
toughest decisions of any president,
overcame business failure. Teddy Roosevelt
lost his first wife after childbirth. On the
other hand, someone who got straight A's,
never got turned down for a date, was never
fired from a job or defeated in an election, is
going to have a very rude awakening. The
average voter can research this personal
history quite easily.
Second, has the candidate had a variety of
life experiences? The presidency is a job for
a generalist. You never know what direction
a crisis will come from: foreign threats,
economic calamity, civil unrest. It might
even be a biological pandemic that involves
all three at the same time.
A variety of life experiences or careers helps
a person to understand that actions which
make sense in one framework may have
unintended consequences elsewhere. It also
increases the chances that a president will
think creatively and not get boxed in, and
gain control of events rather than be
controlled by them.
By contrast, someone who has only been an
elected official is likely to interpret problems
only in a political context. Again, whether a
candidate has had a variety of experiences is
something the average voter can easily
discern.
Third, can the candidate tell the difference
between a foreign enemy and a political
opponent? A certain degree of ruthlessness is
a necessary attribute for any successful CEO
or president. But our liberty, which is
ultimately our nation's greatest resource,
requires that a president restrain this trait
when acting domestically.
We should seek an individual who is ruthless
about protecting us against others, but acts
with charity toward all and malice toward
none at home: a tall order. But this trait
comes out on the campaign trail, and in the
past job performances of the candidates. We
should opt for candidates who are ruthless in
debating real public policy issues but steer
12
away from attacking the personal traits of
their opponents.
No candidate is going to be perfect, and
reasonable people can differ about whether a
certain candidate possesses each of these
traits. But these are a good filter.
Johnson and Nixon would never have passed
the last two tests, and in Nixon's case, the
line about not having "Nixon to kick around
any more" was a sign he couldn't handle
setbacks well. By contrast, Reagan had a
variety of life experiences, and mastered the
difference between domestic opponents and
foreign enemies marvelously. He was also
gracious in his defeat in 1976. Franklin
Roosevelt's polio undoubtedly helped make
him a success as president; and although
ruthless, he also knew how to have a
bipartisan cabinet and war effort.
Ultimately, when we make up our minds we
should think about the qualities the candidate
would bring to the Oval Office--and not just
whether or not they would make a good
candidate.
Mr. Lindsey is author of "What a President Should
Know . . .. but Most Learn Too Late," which will be
published by Rowman & Littlefield this month.
13
Presidential Resume
Directions: Select one of the 44 presidents and research his rise to the presidency and
accomplishments. Create a resume for your president as if he was seeking the office today. The
following is a possible list of what to include following in a resume format:
• Name
• Hometown
• Description of how they became President
• Education
• Special Interests
• Professional experiences prior to the presidency
• Work as presidents categorized as foreign policy and domestic policy accomplishments
Barack Hussein Obama
Job Objective: Appointment as the next President of the United States.
Early years:
• Born in Honolulu, Hawaii 8/4/1961; Raised by his grandparents in Honolulu from age 11 until high-school graduation
• Lived in Indonesia from ages 6-10
Family:
• Wife—Michelle (m. 1992); Daughters: Malia (b. 1998) Sasha (b. 2001)
14
Education:
• Occidental College (Los Angeles) 1979-1981
• Graduated from Columbia University (New York) with a degree in political science in 1983
• Harvard Law School (Boston) 1988-1991; Editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Work Experience:
• Community Organizer (Chicago) 1985-1988 and 1992
• Lecturer and professor of constitutional law at University of Chicago 1996-2004
• Lawyer 1993-2002;
Political Experience:
• Illinois State Senator 1996-2004; U.S. Senator 2004-2008.
Presidential Election:
• Defeated Hillary Clinton for Democratic nomination (2008)
• Defeated John McCain (53%-46%; 365 electoral votes – 173) on November 4th, 2008
• First African-American elected as President.
Foreign Policy Accomplishments:
• Commander-in-chief for three wars (Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya)
• Won Nobel Peace Prize (2010)
• Withdrew troops from Iraq; increased troops in Afghanistan
• Decisions led to the killings of Osama bin Laden and Muammar Gaddafi
• Opened negotiations with Iran regarding nuclear weapons program
• Called for the closure of Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility
• Phased down Eastern European land-based nuclear missile program
Domestic Policy Accomplishments:
• Signed $800 billion stimulus bill
• Agreed to government management of General Motors and Chrysler bankruptcy
• Signed historic health-care legislation.
How the Electoral
College works
Hobbies: Basketball, golf, bowling (sometimes); quit smoking (sometimes)
---The current workings of the Electoral College are the result of both design and experience. As it now operates:
· Members of Congress and employees of the
· Each State is allocated a number of Electors
federal government are prohibited from
equal to the number of its U.S. Senators
serving as an Elector in order to maintain the
(always 2) plus the number of its U.S.
balance between the legislative and
Representatives (which may change each
executive branches of the federal
decade according to the size of each State's
government.
population as determined in the Census).
· After their caucuses and primaries, the major
parties nominate their candidates for
· The political parties (or independent
candidates) in each State submit to the
president and vice president in their national
State's chief election official a list of
conventions traditionally held in the summer
individuals pledged to their candidate for
preceding the election. (Third parties and
president and equal in number to the State's
independent candidates follow different
electoral vote. Usually, the major political
procedures according to the individual State
parties select these individuals either in their
laws). The names of the duly nominated
State party conventions or through
candidates are then officially submitted to
appointment by their State party leaders
each State's chief election official so that
while third parties and independent
they might appear on the general election
candidates merely designate theirs.
ballot.
15
·
On the Tuesday following the first Monday
of November in years divisible by four, the
people in each State cast their ballots for the
party slate of Electors representing their
choice for president and vice president
(although as a matter of practice, general
election ballots normally say "Electors for"
each set of candidates rather than list the
individual Electors on each slate).
·
Whichever party slate wins the most popular
votes in the State becomes that State's
Electors-so that, in effect, whichever
presidential ticket gets the most popular
votes in a State wins all the Electors of that
State. [The two exceptions to this are Maine
and Nebraska where two Electors are chosen
by statewide popular vote and the remainder
by the popular vote within each
Congressional district].
·
On the Monday following the second
Wednesday of December (as established in
federal law) each State's Electors meet in
their respective State capitals and cast their
electoral votes-one for president and one for
vice president.
·
In order to prevent Electors from voting only
for "favorite sons" of their home State, at
least one of their votes must be for a person
from outside their State (though this is
seldom a problem since the parties have
consistently nominated presidential and vice
presidential candidates from different
States).
·
The electoral votes are then sealed and
transmitted from each State to the President
of the Senate who, on the following January
6, opens and reads them before both houses
of the Congress.
·
The candidate for president with the most
electoral votes, provided that it is an absolute
majority (one over half of the total), is
declared president. Similarly, the vice
presidential candidate with the absolute
majority of electoral votes is declared vice
president.
·
In the event no one obtains an absolute
majority of electoral votes for president, the
U.S. House of Representatives (as the
chamber closest to the people) selects the
president from among the top three
contenders with each State casting only one
vote and an absolute majority of the States
being required to elect. Similarly, if no one
obtains an absolute majority for vice
president, then the U.S. Senate makes the
selection from among the top two contenders
for that office.
·
At noon on January 20, the duly elected
president and vice president are sworn into
office.
Occasionally questions arise about what would
happen if the pesidential or vice presidential
candidate died at some point in this process.For
answers to these, as well as to a number of other
"what if" questions, readers are advised to consult a
small volume entitled After the People Vote: Steps in
Choosing the President edited by Walter Berns and
published in 1983 by the American Enterprise
Institute. Similarly, further details on the history and
current functioning of the Electoral College are
available in the second edition of Congressional
Quarterly's Guide to U.S. Elections, a real goldmine
of information, maps, and statistics.
16
Understanding The Electoral College
Extra: Visit www.270towin.com. Plot a course of victory for your preferred 2012 presidential candidate. Explain how
this prediction is different from 2008’s result.
1. Describe why the framers did not want the President to be selected by Congress:
2. Describe why some framers did not want the President elected directly by the people:
3. Describe how the electors of today’s Electoral College have a different role than what was envisioned for the
Electoral College of the original Constitution:
4. Define “battleground states”:
5. All states but Maine and Nebraska select Electors on what type of basis?
6. _____________ = winning the most votes in a state. (Not necessarily the majority of the state vote.)
7. Which state has the most electoral votes? Which states have the fewest number of electoral votes?
8. How many electoral votes does Illinois have? ______House of Reps + _____Senators =
17
9. Has the number of Illinois electoral votes gone up or down in recent decades?
10. What’s the total number of electoral votes possible to win? What’s the majority number needed to win?
11. Which chamber selects the President if no candidate wins a majority of electoral votes?
12. Describe each of the three major defects in the Electoral College:
13. What type of states tend to oppose reforms to the Electoral College? Explain why:
Ch. 11: The Presidency (1-11):
Directions: Read Ch. 11 pages 393-409 and answer on a separate sheet of paper.
(Be sure to restate the vocabulary of each question.)
1. Define the president’s constitutional authority and describe an example:
2. Define the president’s statutory authority and describe an example:
3. Describe the difference between the president as head of government vs. head of state:
4. Define executive orders and describe an example:
5. Describe how Congress can restrain a president’s executive order:
6. Describe the primary restraint on the president’s power as commander in chief:
7. Describe the impact of the War Powers Resolution:
8. Describe the primary restraint on the president’s ability to make treaties:
9. Define executive agreement:
10. Explain why divided government increases the likelihood of presidential vetoes::
11. Define executive privilege and describe what SCOTUS said about executive privilege in
the case of U.S. v. Nixon:
18
Presidential Cartoon Analysis:
Directions: Select a cartoon depicting Barack Obama acting as President. You can post the
cartoon and your write up on Facebook at the group Citizenu.
1.) Label with the appropriate presidential role(s) depicted in the cartoon.
2.) Explain the artist’s perspective in 140 characters.
3.) Summarize your opinion about this cartoon in 140 characters.
The
Roles of the President:
19
Chief of State
Commander in Chief
Chief Executive
Chief Diplomat
Chief of Party
Chief Administrator
Chief Legislator
Quiz--Presidential Powers:
1. List 2 adjectives that describe Teddy Roosevelt’s
view of presidential power based on this quote:
“My view was that every executive officer…was a
steward of the people bound actively and affirmatively
to do all that he could for the people. … I declined to
adopt the view that what was imperatively necessary
for the Nation could not be done by the President
unless he could find some specific authorization to do
it.” Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, 1913.
20
“(T)he President can exercise no power which cannot
be fairly and reasonably traced to some specific grant
of power or justly implied and included within such
express grant. …Such specific grant must be either in
the Federal Constitution or in an act of Congress
passed in pursuance thereof. There is no undefined
residuum of power which he can exercise because it
seems to him to be in the public interest.” Our Chief
Magistrate and His Powers, 191
2. List 2 adjectives that describe William Howard
Taft’s view of presidential power based on this quote:
3. Directions: Match the following to the best description.
A. The power to keep executive branch information secret.
B. Senate must approve with a 2/3 majority
C. The power to enforce the law
D. Senate must approve with a simple majority
E. Agreements between foreign leaders that do not have to be approved by the Senate (but Congress must pay)
F. Presidential directives to the federal bureaucracy with the power of law
G. The power to receive diplomats from a country
H. Says President must notify Congress and get their approval for the use of combat troops
I. Can only be overturned with a 2/3 vote of each chamber of Congress
J. If the President doesn’t sign a bill at the end of a Congressional session
K. Ability to cut specific spending items from a budget
L. Length of time a President has to sign a bill
M. Legal forgiveness of violating federal laws
• Chief Executive
• Executive Orders
• Appointment of Cabinet members
• Executive privilege
• Treaties
• Appointment of Federal Judges
• Executive agreements
• Diplomatic recognition
• War Powers Resolution
• Pocket veto
• Veto
• Line item veto
• 10 days
• Presidential pardons
List four military conflicts since 1941 that were undeclared wars:
Notes--Presidential
Powers:
Formal Powers (Constitution, Article II)
21
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Informal Powers (Arguably the President’s greatest source of power)
1.
2.
3.
4.
The President of the United States....
The most powerful person in the world?
or
A pitiful helpless giant?
Reasons for the growth of the President’s power during the 20th
century:
1.
2.
22
3.
Constraints on Presidential Powers
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
The Modern American Presidency
8.
Remarks of Lewis L. Gould
The University of Texas at Austin, May 6, 2003,
on the occasion of a talk and book-signing for
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003)
23
What better place to spend a spring afternoon
than in a great historical archive? Before I turn to
my book, I need to thank a few people who made
this afternoon possible. Don Carleton and the
excellent staff of the Center for American
History went out of their way to put on this
event. Linda Peterson of the Center helped
greatly with the photographs that illustrate this
book. The work of three gifted photojournalists,
David Kennerly, Bruce Roberts, and Dirck
Halstead add much to the story I am trying to
tell.
Two more individuals deserve mention. I am
indebted to Richard Norton Smith for his very
kind introduction which sets up my narrative in a
felicitous and insightful way. And to Chris Hiers,
who did the magical cover, I can only say that
few authors have been the beneficiaries of such a
funny, perceptive, and brilliant work of art.
As a book, The Modern American Presidency
began in the mind of the director of the
University Press of Kansas, Fred Woodward. It
was said of George Gershwin that he wrote
songs like trees give apples. Fred Woodward is
almost as prolific with ideas as Gershwin was
with tunes. He has made the University Press of
Kansas into the best press in the country for
historians and political scientists interested in
American government. In fact, one might call
Fred the Maxwell Perkins of books on American
politics.
Four years ago Fred mentioned to me a
conversation he had recently had with a scholar
at a convention. The academic had said to him
that a one-volume history of the modern
presidency was badly needed for both the
general reader and students in courses. In
response to Fred’s suggestion that I might do the
book, I volunteered to take on the assignment.
The goal was to offer a concise, readable, and
provocative narrative in a book of that would be
designed for readers who wanted useful
information about the presidency. We agreed
that prospective readers should not have to make
their way through one of those thousand page
blockbusters that many start and perhaps few
finish. If successful, the book would supply a
sense of how and why the presidency has
developed as it has over the past century.
There now arose the question of how I should do
the book. Mastering even a small part of the
information available about each of the 20th
century presidents would be clearly a daunting
task. Even an entire career might not be
sufficient time to get the job done. After all,
some distinguished historians such as Arthur S.
Link on Woodrow Wilson and Frank Freidel on
Franklin D. Roosevelt had spent their
professional lives exploring the dimensions of a
single president. On the other hand, I had been
teaching and writing about presidents for more
than three decades, and I had amassed some
thoughts of my own about how the institution
should be understood. More reading would be
necessary for each chief executive, but it was not
a matter of starting from scratch to learn
everything about every person who had been
president since 1901.
At that point, my wife made a wise and
constructive suggestion. She said: “Get writing.”
The advice was cogent. I had a general sense of
what I wanted to say about the presidency in
hand. Postponing the moment of actual writing
would only make the more difficult. So I started.
The result of research and writing is the book
that the University Press of Kansas has published
this spring. It traces the evolution of the
presidential office from the days of William
McKinley from 1897 to 1901 and his gifted
secretary, George B. Cortelyou. Though his
name is virtually unknown outside specialists in
the presidency, Cortelyou was the first true
presidential staff member and in many ways the
architect of the modern White House.
The narrative then takes the reader from
McKinley’s small, personal presidency in 1901
through the massive institution over which Bill
Clinton presided from 1993 to 2001. The story
tries to identify the significant features of the
presidency and to explain why the office
operates as it does today.
Somewhat to my surprise, the story of the
modern presidency turned out to be a cautionary
24
tale rather than an American success saga. I
came out of the book convinced that the
presidency badly needs rethinking and
fundamental reorientation. As it stands now, the
institution is beset with intractable problems.
These difficulties, I believe arise from the
interaction of three main forces–the increase in
size of the presidency, the rise of what has been
called “continuous campaigning,” and the impact
of the twin pressures of celebrity and show
business. One key structural change in the
Constitution, the Twenty-Second amendment,
completed the emergence of the presidency as
we know it.
The growth in the size of the presidency is a
well-recognized phenomenon. McKinley’s small
staff of Cortelyou and six stenographers in 1901
has exploded into thousands of people who serve
the president directly or indirectly. The real
expansion of the institution came in the 1950s
and 1960s at the height of the Cold War. Here
the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower was
key, as under his management the chief-of-staff
form of presidential administration appeared and
grew. Despite regular campaign promises from
many presidents to reduce the size of the White
House staff, the number of individuals who work
there has steadily grown.
The other two forces operating on the presidency
had more serious effects than just the growth in
size. What struck me from the beginning in
writing the book was the way that the
entertainment industry helped to shape the
modern presidency.
One way to see this phenomenon is to consider
the presidential press conference which did not
exist in 1901. Under McKinley from 1897
onward the press was brought into the White
House proper with tables allocated to reporters
on the second floor outside the president’s
office. Theodore Roosevelt’s years brought a
separate press room, and under Woodrow
Wilson the press conference itself began and
then stopped. During the Harding and Coolidge
presidencies, regular weekly press conferences
became a norm and this ritual reached a peak
during Franklin D. Roosevelt with more than
nine hundred such sessions. The reporters
crowded around the president’s desk, the
president could not be quoted directly, and the
event was not open to the public.
Over the next two decades, first radio, then
television came into the press conferences, until
under Jack Kennedy the press sessions became
popular prime-time entertainment. Then
commenced a slow decline in the number of
such conferences under Lyndon Johnson and
Richard Nixon accompanied by a more elaborate
staging of them as media events. Now such press
conferences, when they occur, are spectacles
that presidents hold as rarely as possible. Their
purpose is no longer to make news or convey
information but to portray the president as on top
of his job. The White House manages the
proceedings with choreography worthy of a
ballet, journalists have their seating arranged
with great care, and recalcitrant journalists are
punished for impertinent queries.
Why did all this occur? In my judgment, the
emergence of television and the mass media,
with their premiums on simplicity and brevity of
issues, the short attention span of a television
audience, and the need to pursue high ratings
from other programming made the press
conference and other news-gathering procedures
too slow and dull for modern audiences. The
presidency had to turn itself into an arm of showbusiness to retain its allure.
Press conferences are thus but one way that the
presidency has become, as I say in the book, “a
perennial campaign, combined with the essential
features of a television network and a Hollywood
studio.” I might also have said “a theme park.”
Presidential events are produced with meticulous
thoroughness, as President Bush’s trip last week
to the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln attested.
The elaborate stagecraft involved, from the
airplane landing to the careful navigation of the
vessel to avoid showing the California coastline
in the distance during Bush’s speech, was
worthy of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer at the height
of its success.
Lastly, we come to the “continuous campaign,”
the term now applied to the political operations
of the presidency. Though every president had
25
been mindful of re-election, it was under Richard
Nixon that the idea of perpetual campaigning
really took root. Nixon believed that he faced
ruthless political enemies out to destroy him and
his administration and a continuous campaign
effort was needed to thwart them. “The staff
doesn’t understand that we are in a continuous
campaign,” he told H.R. Haldeman in March
1971.
Such a strategy serves the function of having the
incumbent re-elected but its effect is felt
throughout the presidency from the first day in
office. Since every decision that the president
makes has a potential impact on the voters, it
becomes almost impossible to consider an issue
outside an electoral context. Round-the-clock
polling insures that the political operatives can
always inform the president how some judgment,
in the words of a Nixon aide, will play in Peoria,
Illinois with rank and file Americans.
As politicians, presidents should be aware of
how their judgments will affect citizens, but
deciding every issue on the basis of how it might
sway a current or future campaign has over time
made difficult decisions that will serve the
national interest but entail sacrifice or pain less
likely.
Forming a context for these events is a related
structural problem. The Twenty-second
Amendment, adopted after World War II, limits
each president to two elective terms. More
important, the amendment creates a framework
within which the president must concentrate on
re-election to be eligible for greatness. Once reelected, however, the remaining days are
numbered and the fickle public, spurred by the
media, looks to the next presidential election for
excitement. Presidencies have become the
political equivalent of situation comedies—there
is an initial burst of energy and excitement
during the first three years, a suspenseful show
in the fourth as the main character faces
cancellation, and once renewed by re-election
there are three more years of declining audiences
before the show ends after eight seasons.
The result of these interacting forces is a
presidency that, whether occupied by a
Republican or a Democrat, places a greater
reliance on the mechanisms of celebrity than on
the business of running the nation. Continuous
campaigning drains away valuable time and
energy from the president and his staff. The
obsession with reelection distorts governance.
Brilliantly operated as a kind of political
spectacle, the presidency is no longer welldesigned to address the country’s intractable
problems. The ways in which these sobering
trends developed over time, and how different
presidents engaged them are described in the
book. Seen in light of these considerations, the
emergence of the modern presidency takes on a
coherence and unity that makes our current
predicaments with the institution more
understandable and even more human.
Could things have turned out in different way?
Has the modern presidency become modern in
the only way possible? Impressed as I am with
the intoxicating and seductive capacity of the
large media and show business to shape our
lives, I am doubtful that substance could ever
have won out over glitz and glitter. But it is clear
that becoming more like a television network
and a game show is not the way to run the
country. Nor are perpetual political campaigns a
way to engage tough decisions. So what should
we do?
Having written a narrative that traced the
emergence of the presidency through the
twentieth century and diagnosed its ills, it is
appropriate for you to ask me: Okay, wise guy
historian far removed from the Oval Office and
the burdens of political responsibility, what
would you now suggest should be done? That is
the purpose of the remainder of this talk.
First and foremost, I would endorse the repeal of
the Twenty-Second Amendment mandating only
two elected terms for any successful president.
Passed after World War II largely with
Republican support, it was designed to make it
impossible for any other politician, and
presumably a Democrat, to serve three terms as
Franklin D. Roosevelt did and then to be elected
to a fourth. The amendment achieved that
purpose, of course, and will operate against
President Bush if he is reelected in 2004. There
26
is at least one congressman now, Jose Serrano of
New York, a Democrat, who wants to repeal the
Twenty-Second Amendment, but his initiative is
unlikely to go anywhere.
Why should the amendment be discarded? The
first weakness is that it limits the right of the
American people to elect a president for a third
term if they wish to do so. More important, it
places an institutional barrier to the effective
working of the presidency. Knowing that the
president must leave office by a certain date
reduces the ability of the incumbent to support
legislation, influence Congress, and shape the
national debate. Press attention shifts to the new
contenders for the presidency, and the holder of
the office slides into limbo. The last two or three
years of a two-term presidency have the
atmosphere of a farewell tour.
What the amendment was designed to protect
against is unlikely ever to happen again anyway.
The three presidents whom it affected–Dwight
D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and Bill
Clinton–would have not been viable candidates
for a third term even without the constraint of the
Twenty-Second Amendment.
Now my second proposal may seem to be in
utter contradiction to the first, but I don’t think
so. Most presidents should resolve in their own
minds to serve only one term and resist with all
their power the empty promise of reelection. Get
done what you can in a single term, Mr. or Mrs.
President, and get off the stage. This prescription
should not be written into law, but aspiring
presidents would be wise to observe its dictates.
This judgment reflects historical circumstances.
Even with the Twenty-Second Amendment
removed, presidents would still likely have
difficulties during their second terms. Consider
these examples from the 20th century before the
22nd Amendment went into effect. Woodrow
Wilson, narrowly reelected in 1916 over Charles
Evans Hughes, took the nation through World
War I, but saw the Democratic electoral majority
collapse, the postwar era decline into social
upheaval and political reaction,, and his own
disabling illness doom his party to a dramatic
election defeat in 1920. He left office a
repudiated president. “History will soften the
verdict rendered by the votes last November on
the Administration of Woodrow Wilson, but is
not likely to reverse it,” said one editor in March
1921.
Because World War II won him a third term, it is
often forgotten how many problems Franklin D.
Roosevelt had in his second–the Supreme Court
Fight, the 1937 recession, the Republican
election victory in 1938. Had the Nazis not
conquered western Europe in the spring of 1940,
Roosevelt would have left office in 1941 rating
better than Grover Cleveland and Woodrow
Wilson among Democratic chief executives but
not stamped with greatness.
Similarly, Harry S. Truman, after his surprise
election victory in 1948, encountered heavy
weather in his second term–McCarthyism,
Korea, scandals, Congressional opposition, and a
slide in the polls. Retrospective rehabilitation has
come to Truman, but most of it arises from his
creative first term.
The list can be continued even after the TwentySecond Amendment. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s
second term had a recession, a Democratic
sweep in the 1958 elections, the U-2 incident,
and a sense, on which John F. Kennedy
capitalized in 1960, that the nation was adrift.
Richard Nixon’s second term troubles with
Watergate need no recounting. That large legal,
constitutional, and political crisis now has boiled
down to a single burning issue: Was Fred
Fielding “Deep Throat?”
Ronald Reagan went through the trauma of IranContra, and Bill Clinton faced impeachment in
their second terms. In all these instances, the
historical reputations of these presidents would
have been no worse and probably would have
been better had they declared in their fourth year
that they would not seek reelection.
Certainly for the one-term presidents of the 20th
century, such a self-denying ordinance would
have helped their historical standing–William
Howard Taft in 1912, Herbert Hoover in 1932,
Gerald Ford in 1976, Jimmy Carter in 1980, and
George H.W. Bush in 1992. Since each would
27
have left office voluntarily, historians might
have predicted their defeat had they run for
reelection, but enough doubt would have
remained about their fate that it would have
worked to the advantage of their historical
reputations.
So presidents, if they think about history, should
agree with Richard Nixon that “most second
terms have been disastrous.” The corollary of
that point is that presidents would be welladvised to concentrate all their energies on
making their first term successful, and then be
prepared to step aside in the winter or spring of
their fourth year. Obviously, they should not
declare their intentions until then but keep in
their minds that they really have only four years
to achieve tangible accomplishments.
With such a record of difficulty, why do
incumbents presidents decide to run for a second
term at all? Several elements come into play.
Once elected president, a politician realizes that
his record in office will soon be judged by
historians and political scientists against the
other chief executives in the perennial rating
game of deciding presidential greatness. Having
little sense of history going into the job, they
suddenly want to know how they will stack up
against their predecessors. Will the president be
“great,” “near great,” competent, or worst of all
“inadequate” or even “poor?”
To be eligible for the great or near great
category, two terms seem mandatory. So, since
one-term greatness is elusive, winning a second
is required. In the most recent issue of Time
magazine, discussing Bush’s reelection plans,
the authors note that Karl Rove has planned for
two Bush terms from 1998 onward “because reelection is what defines a successful presidency.”
In their words, the process is not just a
continuing campaign, it is “the never-ending
campaign.”
Other pressures come from consultants, allies,
lobbyists, and friends who sing the siren song
that only by winning a second term can the
promise of the first term be redeemed. Moreover,
the party and its candidates need the drawing
power of the incumbent in fund-raising, the
country requires his services, and the victory of
the opposition would, of course, ruin the nation.
A history teacher of mine in college, James
Blaine Hedges, use to tell his students that it
would not have made any difference to the broad
sweep of American history who had been the
winner in any single presidential election.
Whether that generalization is true or not (and it
is harder to refute than it might seem at first
glance), it is one that more chief executives
should ponder.
However, the need to win a reelection victory
usually entails bleaching out all strong traces of
ideology and future programs. For Ronald
Reagan in 1984, the theme was “morning in
America,” with few clues to what Reagan’s
future days in office would bring. Bill Clinton in
1996 was similarly content-free. We all
remember the bridge to the Twenty-First
century. We just didn’t know that Monica
Lewinsky would be in the toll booth. In seeking
an electoral majority, the pressures of political
advertising (which does not do well with
complexity) and the need to move to the center
usually insure that blandness will triumph over
substance.
With tired staffers worn out by four years of
incumbency and a difficult campaign behind it,
the reelected administration reconstitutes itself
and tries to find the themes that the candidate
played down before the voters. The clock is
already ticking and Congress is well aware that
the president’s days are numbered. Second terms
start out with little energy and run down from
there.
So if a president cannot accomplish the
enactment of an agenda in the first term, there is
even less likelihood that the second term will be
successful. If the first term has been fruitful, the
best bet for historical approval is to step aside
and leave the promise of what might have
occurred in a second term rather than the drab
reality of what didn’t happen once the chief
executive had been returned for “four more
years.”
The relentless quest for a second term has
produced continuous campaigning. What is
28
harmful about this trend is not tht it serves
partisan interests or costs abundant sums of
money. The real downside of continuous
campaign is its impact on the capacity of the
president and his staff to think about the nation’s
problems on a sustained basis.
Putting the president out before cheering crowds
to spread his message, pressure Congress, and
raise money is not an intellectually challenging
exercise. It is simply an extension of what the
chief executive and his operatives have been
doing for several years. What it does demand is
large amounts of staff time and White House
energy. Moving the president from place to place
is the equivalent of relocating a circus on a daily
basis. These media-driven occasions are not
designed to inform or enlighten, but solely to
create pleasing pictures for the evening news and
cable television viewers. But just because these
events are easy to do should not obscure their
real cost. They come out of the small store of
time in an historical sense that any president has
to get things done.
A wise president would cut them back to a bare
minimum. Instead, they proliferate to the point
that even the State of the Union address is now a
scripted gala with hand-picked guests in the
gallery. State governors have started to imitate
presidents in their state of the state addresses.
The day after the State of the Union the president
embarks on another nation-wide junket to “win
support” for a an initiative, often one that is
forgotten within a week of the speech itself. Who
recalled three months later President Bush’s
AIDS initiative until he returned to it briefly last
week?
What do I recommend? First, the president
should reduce substantially the amount of these
contrived displays. The White House is not the
place to flee from. It is the arena in which
presidents should do their work. It is a fiction
that the president can work equally well at Camp
David or at a western White House or on Air
Force One. One hundred years ago an aide of
Theodore Roosevelt said of that president’s
traveling: “When the president is away the
Cabinet practically disbands & there is a lack of
coordination public work.”
One particular area in which presidential
traveling could be pared back without loss is in
partisan fund-raising. Since Franklin D.
Roosevelt, presidents have used their office as a
way to raise money for their party, but the
system has become self-perpetuating and
grotesque. Bill Clinton raised millions of dollars;
George W. Bush has raised hundreds of millions.
These activities are called “party-building” and
out-reach efforts by the president. In reality, they
are a tacky shakedown as well-heeled donors
cough up thousands for the chance to gain access
to the White House. If political parties cannot
raise money without having the president pass
the hat or fry the fat out of donors, then these
organizations should go out of business. It is
beneath the dignity of the president of the United
States to be putting the arm on fat cats in public,
or private for that matter.
Similarly, the White House should stop being a
prop in a constantly running movie production of
the celebrity presidency. The Rose Garden
ceremonies, the greeting of championship
athletic teams, the filming of public service
announcements, the backdrops for reporters, all
of these are innocent enough on the surface.
What is debilitating about them is the amount of
time they drain away from the serious business
of the presidency. Apologists for the White
House will say that others do the work and the
president focuses on big questions, or as the
Bush administration might put it, is “fully
engaged” with the big picture.
The notion that the movie and television
production set that the White House has become
is a place for sustained deliberative thought is a
not very good joke. Presidents now move from
one camera set-up to another in the equivalent of
the headquarters of a twenty-four hours news
channel. Literally every move that a president
makes before the cameras is scripted and
planned with all the precision of a Hollywood
sound stage from the books they carry to the
helicopter, the obligatory pause and wave at the
top of the stairs, to the slogans that appear
behind them on television.
29
Presidents present all this electronic artifice as
though it were an essential part of being a
successful chief executive. If a president wins
reelection or enjoys wide popularity, then that is
offered as justification for media manipulation
and deft staging of the incumbent’s public
image. That all of this wizardry comes out of the
president’s limited stock of time to deal with
crucial issues is usually put aside as the carping
of partisan critics.
An important collaborator in this process of
turning the presidency into an arm of show
business is the media. As the newspaper industry
at the turn of the twentieth century has morphed
into the media conglomerates of the beginning of
the twenty-first, the press has entered into codependency with the presidency. Presidents draw
viewers when properly presented, and the media
find the White House and its staged moments
irresistible subjects for coverage (at least until
the next sensational California homicide
happens).
Reporters no longer cover the White House in
the sense of pursuing news. They are there
instead as props in the domestic drama that fills
in the dead hours on cable television until
something real happens. Both sides know how to
play their parts. The reporters ask seemingly
tough questions which the White House press
secretary then declines to address. The two sides
wait until the cameras turn off and then move to
the next phase of the pre-determined coverage.
Now do any of these criticisms matter? The
current president, for example rides high in the
polls and seems on a course toward reelection.
But listen carefully to the developing scenario.
How many issues–Social Security, Medicare
changes, civil rights, environmental issues,
foreign policy concerns–are now being discussed
in terms of their hoped-for implementation “after
the next presidential election?” Soon the chorus
will sing about how just “Four More Years” will
bring the full realization of the president’s
agenda and the achievement of what the first
term did not accomplish because of terrorism,
Democratic obstruction, and the lack of a clear
popular endorsement of the Bush administration.
Assuming the reelection of George W. Bush,
another scenario is also likely in 2005-2006.
Congress will be restive after years of White
House dominance, the emphasis of publicity and
the media will have shifted to the 2008
nomination contest, and some unexpected event
will disrupt the carefully laid plans for the
second Bush term. Commentators will speak of
how Washington is anticipating how the next
president will have to deal with pressing social
issues that have been deferred, and so the cycle
will begin once again. The Modern American
Presidency will look toward what Cole Porter
called “another opening, another show” and the
nation will be suitably entertained but not well
governed.
Somewhere, however, reality will be intruding–
whether it is terrorism or an attack from a rogue
nation, a dramatic crisis in funding Social
Security and Medicare that cannot be avoided, a
severe economic downturn, an environmental
disaster, or a runaway epidemic of disease.
People will wonder how did the United States
get into this fix? They may not look to the
presidency for one explanation of why the nation
found itself in a dangerous predicament, but the
descent into show business, continuous
campaigning, and recurrent trivia will be one key
element in the problem.
Do I think the modern presidency should be
reformed to become a serious, sustained policymaking, governing institution? Absolutely. What
are the chances of this happening, given the
financially profitable and mutually useful
incestuous relationship between the White House
and the entertainment media? Precious little.
Until it is clear how broken the Modern
American Presidency has become, we will not be
inclined to repair its deficiencies. Let us hope
that the price of this failure of will and insight is
not too high for the nation to bear.
GSL Think Tank: “The Modern American President”
30
I THINK….
I LEARNED….
I WONDER…
I DO NOT UNDERSTAND…
I AM CONFUSED ABOUT…..
I WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT….
I WAS MOST SURPRISED TO LEARN….
I WAS MOST IMPRESSED WITH….The
Case for the Strong Executive
Harvey C. Mansfield
Claremont Review of Books
Spring 2007
Complaints against the "imperial presidency" are
back in vogue. With a view to President Bush,
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has expanded and
reissued the book of the same name he wrote
against Richard Nixon, and Bush critics have
taken up the phrase in a chorus. In response John
Yoo and Richard Posner (and others) have
defended the war powers of the president.
This is not the first time that a strong executive
has been attacked and defended, and it will not
be the last. Our Constitution, as long as it
continues, will suffer this debate—I would say,
give rise to it, preside over, and encourage it.
Though I want to defend the strong executive, I
mainly intend to step back from that defense to
show why the debate between the strong
executive and its adversary, the rule of law, is
necessary, good, and—under the Constitution—
never-ending. In other circumstances I could see
myself defending the rule of law. Americans are
fortunate to have a Constitution that
accommodates different circumstances. Its
flexibility keeps it in its original form and spirit a
"living constitution," ready for change, and open
to new necessities and opportunities. The "living
constitution" conceived by the Progressives
actually makes it a prisoner of ongoing events
and perceived trends. To explain the
constitutional debate between the strong
executive and the rule of law I will concentrate
on its sources in political philosophy and, for
greater clarity, ignore the constitutional law
emerging from it.
Saving Republicanism
The case for a strong executive should begin
from a study, on this occasion a quick survey, of
the American republic. The American republic
was the first to have a strong executive that was
intended to be republican as well as strong, and
31
the success, or long life, of America's
Constitution qualifies it as a possible model for
other countries. Modern political science
beginning from Machiavelli abandoned the best
regime featured by classical political science
because the best regime was utopian or
imaginary. Modern political scientists wanted a
practical solution, and by the time of Locke,
followed by Montesquieu, they learned to
substitute a model regime for the best regime;
and this was the government of England. The
model regime would not be applicable
everywhere, no doubt, because it was not
intended to be a lowest common denominator.
But it would show what could be done in the best
circumstances.
The American Founders had the ambition to
make America the model regime, taking over
from England. This is why they showed
surprising respect for English government, the
regime they had just rebelled against. America
would not only make a republic for itself, but
teach the world how to make a successful
republic and thus improve republicanism and
save the reputation of republics. For previous
republics had suffered disastrous failure,
alternating between anarchy and tyranny,
seeming to force the conclusion that orderly
government could come only from monarchy,
the enemy of republics. Previous republics had
put their faith in the rule of law as the best way
to foil one-man rule. The rule of law would keep
power in the hands of many, or at least a few,
which was safer than in the hands of one. As the
way to ensure the rule of law, Locke and
Montesquieu fixed on the separation of powers.
They were too realistic to put their faith in any
sort of higher law; the rule of law would be
maintained by a legislative process of institutions
that both cooperated and competed.
Now the rule of law has two defects, each of
which suggests the need for one-man rule. The
first is that law is always imperfect by being
universal, thus an average solution even in the
best case, that is inferior to the living intelligence
of a wise man on the spot, who can judge
particular circumstances. This defect is discussed
by Aristotle in the well-known passage in his
Politics where he considers "whether it is more
advantageous to be ruled by the best man or the
best laws." The other defect is that the law does
not know how to make itself obeyed. Law
assumes obedience, and as such seems oblivious
to resistance to the law by the "governed," as if it
were enough to require criminals to turn
themselves in. No, the law must be "enforced,"
as we say. There must be police, and the rulers
over the police must use energy (Alexander
Hamilton's term) in addition to reason. It is a
delusion to believe that governments can have
energy without ever resorting to the use of force.
The best source of energy turns out to be the
same as the best source of reason—one man.
One man, or to use Machiavelli's expression, uno
solo, will be the greatest source of energy if he
regards it as necessary to maintaining his own
rule. Such a person will have the greatest
incentive to be watchful, and to be both cruel and
merciful in correct contrast and proportion. We
are talking about Machiavelli's prince, the man
whom in apparently unguarded moments he
called a tyrant.
The American Founders heeded both criticisms
of the rule of law when they created the
presidency. The president would be the source of
energy in government, that is, in the
administration of government, energy being a
neutral term that might include Aristotle's
discretionary virtue and Machiavelli's tyranny—
in which only partisans could discern the
difference. The founders of course accepted the
principle of the rule of law, as being required by
the republican genius of the American people.
Under this principle, the wise man or prince
becomes and is called an "executive," one who
carries out the will and instruction of others, of
the legislature that makes the law, of the people
who instruct or inspire the legislature. In this
weak sense, the dictionary definition of
"executive," the executive forbears to rule in his
own name as one man. This means that neither
one-man wisdom nor tyranny is admitted into the
Constitution as such; if there is need for either,
the need is subordinated to, or if you will,
covered over by, the republican principle of the
rule of law.
John Locke's Prerogative
32
Yet the executive subordinated to the rule of law
is in danger of being subordinate to the
legislature. This was the fault in previous
republics. When the separation of powers was
invented in 17th-century England, the purpose
was to keep the executive subordinate; but the
trouble was the weakness of a subordinate
executive. He could not do his job, or he could
do his job only by overthrowing or cowing the
legislature, as Oliver Cromwell had done. John
Locke took the task in hand, and made a strong
executive in a manner that was adopted by the
American Founders.
Locke was a careful writer, so careful that he did
not care if he appeared to be a confused writer. In
his Second Treatise of Government he announces
the supremacy of the legislature, which was the
slogan of the parliamentary side in the English
Civil War, as the principle that should govern a
well-made constitution. But as the argument
proceeds, Locke gradually "fortifies" (to use
James Madison's term) the executive. Locke adds
other related powers to the subordinate power of
executing the laws: the federative power dealing
with foreign affairs, which he presents as
conceptually distinct from the power of
executing laws but naturally allied; the veto, a
legislative function; the power to convoke the
legislature and to correct its representation
should it become corrupt; and above all, the
prerogative, defined as "the power of doing
public good without a rule." Without a rule!
Even more: "sometimes too against the direct
letter of the law." This is the very opposite of law
and the rule of law—and "prerogative" was the
slogan of the king's party in the same war.
Thus Locke combined the extraconstitutional
with the constitutional in a contradiction; besides
saying that the legislature is "the supreme power"
of the commonwealth, he speaks of "the supreme
executive power." Locke, one could say, was
acting as a good citizen, bringing peace to his
country by giving both sides in the Civil War a
place in the constitution. In doing so he ensured
that the war would continue, but it would be
peaceful because he also ensured that, there
being reason and force on both sides, neither side
could win conclusively. The American
Constitution adopted this fine idea and improved
it. The American Founders helped to settle
Locke's deliberate confusion of supremacy by
writing it into a document and ratifying it by the
people rather than merely scattering it in the
treatise of a philosopher. By being formalized the
Constitution could become a law itself, but a law
above ordinary law and thus a law above the rule
of law in the ordinary sense of laws passed by
the legislature. Thus some notion of
prerogative—though the word "prerogative" was
much too royal for American sensibilities—
could be pronounced legal inasmuch as it was
constitutional. This strong sense of executive
power would be opposed, within the
Constitution, to the rule of law in the usual, oldrepublican meaning, as represented by the two
rule-of-law powers in the Constitution, the
Congress which makes law and the judiciary
which judges by the law.
The American Constitution signifies that it has
fortified the executive by vesting the president
with "the executive power," complete and
undiluted in Article II, as opposed to the
Congress in Article I, which receives only certain
delegated and enumerated legislative powers.
The president takes an oath "to execute the
Office of President" of which only one function
is to "take care that the laws be faithfully
executed." In addition, he is commander-in-chief
of the military, makes treaties (with the Senate),
and receives ambassadors. He has the power of
pardon, a power with more than a whiff of
prerogative for the sake of a public good that
cannot be achieved, indeed that is endangered,
by executing the laws. In The Federalist, as
already noted, the executive represents the need
for energy in government, energy to complement
the need for stability, satisfied mainly in the
Senate and the judiciary.
The Test of Good Government
Energy and stability are necessary in every form
of government, but in their previous, sorry
history, republics had failed to meet these
necessities. Republican government cannot
survive, as we would say, by ideology alone. The
republican genius is dominant in America, where
there has never been much support for anything
like an ancien régime, but support for
republicanism is not enough to make a viable
33
republic. The republican spirit can actually cause
trouble for republics if it makes people think that
to be republican it is enough merely to oppose
monarchy. Such an attitude tempts a republican
people to republicanize everything so as to make
government resemble a monarchy as little as
possible. Although The Federalist made a point
of distinguishing a republic from a democracy
(by which it meant a so-called pure, nonrepresentative democracy), the urge today to
democratize everything has similar bad effects.
To counter this reactionary republican (or
democratic, in today's language) belief
characteristic of short-sighted partisans, The
Federalist made a point of holding the new, the
novel, American republic to the test of good
government as opposed merely to that of
republican government.
The test of good government was what was
necessary to all government. Necessity was put
to the fore. In the first papers of The Federalist,
necessity took the form of calling attention to the
present crisis in America, caused by the
incompetence of the republic established by the
Articles of Confederation. The crisis was both
foreign and domestic, and it was a crisis because
it was urgent. The face of necessity, the manner
in which it first appears and is most impressive,
is urgency—in Machiavelli's words, la necessità
che non da tempo (the necessity that allows no
time). And what must be the character of a
government's response to an urgent crisis?
Energy. And where do we find energy in the
government? In the executive. Actually, The
Federalist introduces the need for energy in
government considerably before it associates
energy with the executive. To soothe republican
partisans, the strong executive must be
introduced by stages.
One should not believe that a strong executive is
needed only for quick action in emergencies,
though that is the function mentioned first. A
strong executive is requisite to oppose majority
faction produced by temporary delusions in the
people. For The Federalist, a strong executive
must exercise his strength especially against the
people, not showing them "servile pliancy."
Tocqueville shared this view. Today we think
that a strong president is one who leads the
people, that is, one who takes them where they
want to go, like Andrew Jackson. But
Tocqueville contemptuously regarded Jackson as
weak for having been "the slave of the majority."
Again according to The Federalist, the American
president will likely have the virtue of
responsibility, a new political virtue, now heard
so often that it seems to be the only virtue, but
first expounded in that work.
"Responsibility" is not mere responsiveness to
the people; it means doing what the people
would want done if they were apprised of the
circumstances. Responsibility requires "personal
firmness" in one's character, and it enables those
who love fame—"the ruling passion of the
noblest minds"—to undertake "extensive and
arduous enterprises." Only a strong president can
be a great president. Americans are a republican
people but they admire their great presidents.
Those great presidents—I dare not give a
complete list—are not only those who excelled
in the emergency of war but those, like
Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt,
who also deliberately planned and executed
enterprises for shaping or reshaping the entire
politics of their country. This admiration for
presidents extends beyond politics into society,
in which Americans, as republicans, tolerate, and
appreciate, an amazing amount of one-man rule.
The CEO (chief executive officer) is found at the
summit of every corporation including
universities. I suspect that appreciation for
private executives in democratic society was
taught by the success of the Constitution's
invention of a strong executive in republican
politics.
Expanding Necessities
The case for a strong executive begins from
urgent necessity and extends to necessity in the
sense of efficacy and even greatness. It is
necessary not merely to respond to circumstances
but also in a comprehensive way to seek to
anticipate and form them. "Necessary to" the
survival of a society expands to become
"necessary for" the good life there, and indeed
we look for signs in the way a government acts
in emergencies for what it thinks to be good after
the emergency has passed. A free government
34
should show its respect for freedom even when it
has to take it away. Yet despite the expansion
inherent in necessity, the distinction between
urgent crises and quiet times remains.
Machiavelli called the latter tempi pacifici, and
he thought that governments could not take them
for granted. What works for quiet times is not
appropriate in stormy times. John Locke and the
American Founders showed a similar
understanding to Machiavelli's when they argued
for and fashioned a strong executive.
In our time, however, an opinion has sprung up
in liberal circles particularly that civil liberties
must always be kept intact regardless of
circumstances. This opinion assumes that civil
liberties have the status of natural liberties, and
are inalienable. This means that the Constitution
has the status of what was called in the 17thcentury natural public law; it is an order as
natural as the state of nature from which it
emerges. In this view liberty has just one set of
laws and institutions that must be kept inviolate,
lest it be lost. But Locke was a wiser liberal. His
institutions were "constituted," less by creation
than by modification of existing institutions in
England, but not deduced as invariable
consequences of disorder in the state of nature.
He retained the difference, and so did the
Americans, between natural liberties, inalienable
but insecure, and civil liberties, more secure but
changeable. Because civil liberties are subject to
circumstances, a free constitution needs an
institution responsive to circumstances, an
executive able to be strong when necessary.
The lesson for us should be that circumstances
are much more important for free government
than we often believe. Civil liberties are for
majorities as well as minorities, and no one
should be considered to have rights against
society whose exercise would bring society to
ruin. The usual danger in a republic is tyranny of
the majority, because the majority is the only
legitimate dominant force. But in time of war the
greater danger may be to the majority from a
minority, and the government will be a greater
friend than enemy to liberty. Vigilant citizens
must be able to adjust their view of the source of
danger, and change front if necessary. "Civil
liberties" belong to all, not only to the less
powerful or less esteemed, and the true balance
of liberty and security cannot be taken as given
without regard to the threat. Nor is it true that
free societies should be judged solely by what
they do in quiet times; they should also be
judged by the efficacy, and the honorableness, of
what they do in war in order to return to peace.
Judging Our Circumstances
The American Constitution is a formal law that
establishes an actual contention among its three
separated powers. Its formality represents the
rule of law, and the actuality arises from which
branch better promotes the common good in the
event, or in the opinion of the people. In quiet
times the rule of law will come to the fore, and
the executive can be weak. In stormy times, the
rule of law may seem to require the prudence and
force that law, or present law, cannot supply, and
the executive must be strong. In judging the
circumstances of a free society, two parties come
to be formed around these two outlooks. These
outlooks may not coincide with party principles
because they often depend on which branch a
party holds and feels obliged to defend:
Democrats today would be friendlier to executive
power if they held the presidency—and
Republicans would discover virtue in the rule of
law if they held Congress.
The terms of the disagreement over a strong
executive go back to the classic debate between
Hamilton (as Pacificus) and Madison (as
Helvidius) in 1793-94. Hamilton argued that the
executive power, representing the whole country
with the energy necessary to defend it, cannot be
limited or exhausted. Madison replied that the
executive power does not represent the whole
country but is determined by its place in the
structure of government, which is executing the
laws. If carrying on war goes beyond executing
the laws, that is all the more reason why the war
power should be construed narrowly. Today
Republicans and Democrats repeat these
arguments when the former declare that we are at
war with terrorists and the latter respond that the
danger is essentially a matter of law
enforcement.
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As to the contention that a strong executive
prompts a policy of imperialism, I would admit
the possibility, and I promise to think carefully
and prayerfully about returning Texas to Mexico.
In its best moments, America wants to be a
model for the world, but no more. In its less good
moments, America becomes disgusted with the
rest of the world for its failure to imitate our
example and follow our advice. I believe that
America is more likely to err with isolationism
than with imperialism, and that if America is an
empire, it is the first empire that always wants an
exit strategy. I believe too that the difficulties of
the war in Iraq arise from having wished to leave
too much to the Iraqis, thus from a sense of
inhibition rather than imperial ambition.
Harvey C. Mansfield is William R. Kenan Professor of
Government at Harvard University.
GSL Think Tank: “The Case for the Strong Executive”
I THINK….
I LEARNED….
I WONDER…
I DO NOT UNDERSTAND…
I AM CONFUSED ABOUT…..
I WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT….
I WAS MOST SURPRISED TO LEARN….
I WAS MOST IMPRESSED WITH….
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Is the Imperial Presidency Inevitable?
Harvey Mansfield New York Times March 11, 2011
In “The Executive Unbound,” Eric A. Posner
and Adrian Vermeule, law professors at Chicago
and Harvard, respectively, offer with somewhat
alarming confidence the “Weimar and Nazi
legislative and judicial powers. This, Posner and
Vermeule say, is legalism because Madison
supposes that the formal separation of the three
powers in the Constitution can of itself prevent
jurist” Carl Schmitt as their candidate to succeed
James Madison for the honor of theorist of the
Constitution.
the tyranny of one of them. True, Madison
himself, in Federalist No. 48, disparaged mere
formal limitations with his famous phrase
“parchment barriers,” declaring that strong
words on fancy paper will have no power to
deter tyranny and support the rule of law. But
neither do the Constitution’s words, the authors
respond. They see little difference between mere
words of exhortation demanding good behavior
and words backed up by separate powers in the
Constitution that are intended to prevent one
power from acting alone.
THE EXECUTIVE UNBOUND
After the Madisonian Republic
Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule
249 pp. Oxford University Press. $29.95.
James Madison — until now the father of the
Constitution — a theorist of rights, the social
contract and consent of the governed, is to cede
his place to a man who when confronted with the
choice between liberal democracy, Communism
and Nazism, chose the last. Let’s see what our
authors say on behalf of this remarkable
substitution.
Madison, taken as spokesman for all the
founders, provides, they argue, the basis for
“liberal legalism,” the view that the rule of law
can be sustained by the separation of executive,
According to Posner and Vermeule, we now live
under an administrative state providing welfare
and national security through a gradual accretion
of power in executive agencies to the point of
dominance. This has happened regardless of the
separation of powers. The Constitution, they
insist, no longer corresponds to “reality.”
Congress has assumed a secondary role to the
executive, and the Supreme Court is “a marginal
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player.” In all “constitutional showdowns,” as
they put it, the powers that make and judge law
have to defer to the power that administers the
law.
Carl Schmitt enters as the one who best
understood the inevitability of unchecked
executive power in the modern administrative
state. He saw that law, which always looks to the
past, had lost out to the executive decree, which
looks to resolve present crises and ignores or
circumvents legal constraints.
But as Posner and Vermeule develop their
argument, Schmitt fades away, and is replaced
by an incongruous reliance on the rational actors
of game theory. The two authors mean to show
that although the formal separation of powers no
longer has effect, the president as a rational actor
is still constrained through public opinion and
politics; even a strong executive needs to appear
bipartisan and to worry about popularity ratings.
So there is no solid reason to fear executive
tyranny, and we should feel free to enjoy the
benefits of the administrative state.
Posner and Vermeule rest their argument on
necessity, on what could not be otherwise.
History and social science, they say, prove that
under modern conditions the administrative state
is the only way for the nation to meet the
challenges it faces. But their analysis also shows
that informal checks remain necessary: the
calculations and political maneuvering
presidents engage in to retain their credibility
replace the formal checks Madison described.
Thus the Constitution is false but works anyway.
But what about those benighted people — the
Tea Partiers, for example — who oppose the
administrative state, who believe that the cost of
increased executive power may lead to crises
brought on by defaulted debt? And is not the
administrative state of the New Deal and its
successors a fairly recent event, hardly inevitable
but chosen by the American people? Once
chosen, it is hard to change, but is change
impossible? Is it not arguable that over time the
administrative state, with its inexorable
expansion, makes itself unfeasible because of the
costs it incurs and the opposition it engenders?
To judge this book, let us return to the
Madisonian Constitution, which has one central
feature not discussed or even mentioned by
Posner and Vermeule. For Madison, the main
danger addressed by the Constitution is not
executive tyranny but majority tyranny. Any
government has to worry most about the abuse
of power by those with whom power is placed —
and in a republic, that is the people. Madison’s
fear, stated very prominently in Federalist No.
10, is about majority faction, not usurpation by a
minority or a single executive. He and Alexander
Hamilton wanted a strong executive that would
show its strength by standing up to the people,
avoiding (in the phrase of Federalist No. 71)
“servile pliancy” to their random wishes. For
them, the sort of executive we today consider
strong, in the image of Andrew Jackson and
Franklin Roosevelt, is actually weak because it
excites and furthers the majority’s possibly
tyrannical desires.
In fact, the people today both love and hate the
administrative state, and together our two parties
register that ambivalence. With regard to
welfare, Democrats are for it, Republicans
against it; with regard to national security, the
situation is reversed. We do have two recent
examples of presidents who have stood up
against majority opinion: George W. Bush with
his surge in Iraq and Barack Obama with his
health care plan. But Posner and Vermeule
would say, with reason, that both the surge and
the health care plan extended the administrative
state. For them, democracy consists in giving the
people what they want, and the test of a good
president is his credibility with the majority, not
his responsibility to the law or the Constitution.
Madison, be it noted, was one of the first to
define “responsibility” in a republic as the virtue
of officers of government toward the people. But
Posner and Vermeule have no room for this kind
of virtue in their model, no room for human
responsibility. They assume that politicians,
obeying the tenets of game theory, automatically
follow the cues of public opinion, and for that
reason their thinking is actually much more
mechanistic than Madison’s.
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My advice to the authors is, first, to toss out
Schmitt from their construction; they don’t really
believe (or know) him. Then they should
reconsider whether formal institutions like the
separation of powers in the Constitution are as
insignificant as they say. True, the president
manages his news conference to sustain his
credibility, but reporters come to it because he is
the president, not because he is a rational actor.
Posner and Vermeule belong to the school of
legal realism, now dominant in law schools,
which believes the law is always the
consequence of some power greater than the law,
in their case the rational calculation of benefit
and cost. Like most economists, they can see no
reason for resisting such calculations.
Yet Posner and Vermeule still claim to hold to
the rule of law. They do not object to being
called professors of law. Students listen to them
and readers buy their books because they teach
the law, not because they are professors of
executive domination, servants of the
administrative state. It seems that the rule of law
cannot be sustained without the formality and the
majesty of a system of law that people -respect.
Harvey Mansfield is a professor of government
at Harvard and a senior fellow at the Hoover
Institution at Stanford.
GSL Think Tank: “Is the Imperial Presidency Inevitable?”
I THINK….
I LEARNED….
I WONDER…
I DO NOT UNDERSTAND…
I AM CONFUSED ABOUT…..
I WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT….
I WAS MOST SURPRISED TO LEARN….
I WAS MOST IMPRESSED WITH….
39
Ch. 11: The Presidency (12-19):
Directions: Read Ch. 11 pages 409-425 and answer on a separate sheet of paper.
(Be sure to restate the vocabulary of each question.)
12.
Describe the president’s ability to go public with the bully pulpit:
13.
Identify the top three officers who are in the line of presidential succession:
14.
Explain why a president’s approval tends to rise during a national crisis:
15.
Describe the difference in function between the President’s Cabinet as contrasted with the
Executive Office of the President:
16.
Describe the top characteristic of a member of the EOP:
17.
Describe the vice president’s legislative role according to the Constitution:
18.
Define Presidential signing statements and explain why these are controversial:
19.
Describe the differing roles of the House and the Senate in the impeachment process:
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Extra: Visit www.whorunsgov.com. Identify 3 players (and titles) of the President’s White
House Staff (Executive Office of the President. Identify 3 secretaries (and official titles) of the
President’s Cabinet.
Presidential Approval Data:
Directions: Link to http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/presidential-approval-tracker.htm to
complete this assignment.
1. Select any president and write a 140 character summary of their approval ratings during their entire
presidency.
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2. For the president you selected in (1), write a 140 character explanation of the period of their highest
approval rating and then write a 140 character explanation of the period of their lowest approval rating.
3. Select another president and write a 280 character summary that compares the approval ratings during
these presidencies and then write a 280 character summary that contrasts the approval ratings during
these presidencies.
Unit 5--Canon Ch. 6 The Media + Ch. 11 The Executive Branch
Targets; Knowledge Points; Objectives
TKO--To Know Objectives:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
Describe the relationship between public officials and the media.
Define yellow journalism and muckraking.
Identify the role played by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Assess the Fairness Doctrine.
Identify and state the significance of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Articulate the progression of the electronic media since its origins in radio through television and
eventually to the internet, as well as why this led to a decline in party loyalties.
Define horse race journalism.
Explain the media roles of watchdog, gatekeeper, and scorekeeper.
Explain the role of the 1st Amendment in relation to the media. Define prior restraint.
Articulate the Supreme Court decision in the Pentagon Papers case.
Define libel and slander.
Identify the political ideology of the majority of the news media.
Explain why news leaks occur often.
Describe the weapons that the government uses to constrain journalists. What are shield laws?
Identify the key roles of the White House Staff and explain why the President chooses the people that
he does.
Explain the functions of the presidential veto, as well as why the line-item veto was ruled
unconstitutional for presidents.
Discuss the influence of the media on public opinion.
Describe the ways that the President influences Congress to pass legislation.
Explain why the Congress looks to the President for leadership in the area of foreign policy.
Differentiate between an executive order and an executive agreement. Why have they been used
more?
Define divided government, as well as explain its potential consequences.
Describe how a presidential candidate chooses a vice-presidential running mate.
Explain the ways that the President can influence the federal judiciary.
Assess both the formal and informal presidential powers. Explain why presidential power has
increased.
Summarize the impeachment process.
Identify and state the significance of the War Powers Act of 1973.
Identify the federal offices that require advice and consent of the Senate. Identify the powers that the
President shares with the Senate.
Define executive order and explain why their use has increased.
Define executive privilege.
What is meant by an institutionalized presidency?
Define the rule of propinquity.
Assess the roles of the Cabinet and the heads of these executive departments.
Explain why the President has relatively little power over his cabinet.
Who makes up the Executive Office and the White House Office? What makes them so powerful?
Identify and state the significance of the president’s bully pulpit.
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36. What is the significance of a presidential signing statement?
37. Define presidential coattails.
38. Summarize the trends of presidential popularity throughout presidencies.
39. Identify and state the significance of the court case U.S. v. Nixon (1974).
40. Identify and state the significance of the Budget and Impoundment Act (1974).
41. Describe the role of the Vice-President.
42. Articulate the concept of presidential succession.
The following Illinois SEL goals will govern our classroom:
1. Develop self-awareness and self-management skills to achieve school and life success.
2. Use social-awareness and interpersonal skills to establish and maintain positive relationships.
3. Demonstrate decision-making skills and responsible behaviors in personal, school, and community
contexts.
Additionally the following values will be nurtured in all citizens entering this academic arena:
Self Discipline; Compassion; Responsibility; Friendship; Work; Courage; Perseverance; Honesty; Loyalty; Faith
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