CHAPTER 1

On Being President

What do we expect of our president? The answer is at once obviousand unbelievable: everything.

We want our president to stimulate our national economy while protectingour local ones—and we roundly condemn him when either showssigns of weakness. We call on the president to simultaneously liberate thecreative imaginations of private industry and regulate corruption within.We call on the president, as the main steward of the nation's welfare, toresuscitate our housing and car industries while reducing the nationaldebt. We bank on the president, as commander in chief, to wage our warsabroad while remaining attentive to all emergent foreign policy challengesbeyond today's battlefields. We look to the president, as the nation's figurehead,to be among the first on the scene at disasters, to offer solace tothe grieving, to assign meaning to lives lost and ruined. All this we expectpresidents can do. All this we insist they must do.

From the very beginning, the nation's presidents have fielded a longlitany of policy challenges. In his brief "First Annual Message to Congress"(now more popularly called the State of the Union address), GeorgeWashington talked about security, foreign affairs, immigration, innovation,infrastructure, education, and the standardization of weights, measures,and currency. With the possible exception of the last item, all the issuesthat Washington prioritized have remained on the president's agenda.

In the modern era, however, the items on this list of issue areas haveproliferated; hence, it is the modern American presidency to which thearguments of this book speak most directly. Today, presidents must offerpolicy solutions on trade, health care, the environment, research anddevelopment, government transparency and efficiency, energy, and taxation.They must clean our air and water, protect our borders, build ourinfrastructure, promote the health of our elderly, improve the literacyrates of our children, guard against everything from the effects of Midwesterndroughts to the spread of nuclear weapons—all this and more.Fundamentally, presidents are charged with striking a balance betweenthe nation's competing, often contradictory priorities: intervening abroadversus spending at home; cutting taxes versus protecting social programs;keeping Americans secure versus keeping Americans free.

There is hardly any domain of public life, and only a few of privatelife, where the president can comfortably defer to the judgments of others,where he (before long, she) can respond to some plea for assistancewith something akin to "I hear you, but I can't help you," where he caninsist that action on the matter is above his pay grade. It is difficult evento conceive of an aspect of public life wherein the president is given apass—where he can either hesitate before acting or forego action altogetherwithout incurring the media and public's wrath. Harry Truman'sdesk placard that read "the buck stops here" was not a point of vanity. Itwas a gross understatement. All bucks circulating in politics stop with thepresident. And they do so whether the president likes it or not.

Just ask Mike Kelleher, President Obama's director of presidential correspondence,about how much Americans expect from the president. Onehundred thousand e-mails, ten thousand paper letters, three thousandphone calls, and one thousand faxes arrive at his office every day. Andnearly all of these communiqués include pleas for presidential leadershipof one form or another. The president receives petitions from the elderlyto deliver their retirement benefits, appeals from business owners to stemtheir operating costs, and requests from activists of all stripes to attend tothe environment, nuclear proliferation, and foreign affairs. Though moremundane, other requests reveal the extent to which American citizens feelperfectly entitled to burden the president with personal tasks and obligations.They offer recommendations on which books he ought to read;their children pepper him with questions and advice of their own; distressedAmericans seek solutions to their emotional, psychological, andmedical issues; and the moral police deliver benedictions to ban certainvideo games.

The list of obligations put before the president continually evolves, andnearly always in expansionary ways. Presidents now offer leadership inpolicy domains for which the federal government lacks any constitutionalresponsibility. Consider, by way of example, recent presidential efforts toreform public education. The 2002 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act iswidely touted as George W. Bush's signature domestic policy achievement.And with good reason. NCLB is credited (or blamed, depending on one'sview of the matter) with introducing and fortifying accountability provisionsin all public schools, which universally include rigorous standardizedtesting provisions. Not to be outdone, Barack Obama devoted considerableefforts through his "Race to the Top" initiative to reform school governance.Through competitive grants, the president cooked up yet anothermechanism by which the federal government might further intrude intostate and local education policy—in this instance, by advancing merit payfor teachers, charter schools, the development of data systems capable oftracking student performance over time, and the establishment of clearstandards for progress. Moreover, in the last year Obama has unilaterallyoffered waivers for the most onerous provisions of NCLB to those stateswho adopt the president's preferred education policies. That public educationformally falls within the province of state (and by extension local)governments did not dissuade either Bush or Obama from taking up themantle of education reform, searching for (and often inventing) new waysto make their mark.

Yet no matter how much the president says about any particular policyissue, it is never enough to satiate the public's thirst for presidential leadership.Recall, by way of example, President...