American Presidents

Grand Old Pretenders

George Will has finally written what many Republicans are thinking: these folks aren’t ready for prime time. In his Sunday column, Will laments the “vibrations of weirdness” emanating from the prospective GOP presidential field.

Exhibit A this week is Mike Huckabee, often seen as the GOP front runner in what blogger Taegan Goddard calls “the Fox News primary.” The wise New York Times columnist Tim Egan, still a hard-nosed, fact-based reporter at heart, lays bare Huckabee’s “misspeak” this week about Barack Obama’s growing up in Kenya. Of course, Huckabee got that all wrong. Obama grew up in Hawaii (still one of the 50 states), spent some time in Indonesia and didn’t visit Kenya until he was in his 20’s.

But, as Egan points out, Huckabee not only misspoke, he had a whole line of factless argument built around Obama the Kenyan. This wasn’t a slip of the tongue, but a premeditated argument aimed at driving the wedge over whether Obama is really one of us.

Even more damaging to Huckabee is Egan’s reporting on the fictions around a the case of a parolee that Huckabee never really had to explain during his short run for the GOP nomination in 2008. Read Egan’s reporting and see if this guy really has a chance.

Here’s a bet that Huckabee opts to stay on Fox as a talk show host rather than troop around in the snow in Iowa and New Hampshire. Egan’s piece will haunt him either way.

George Will, meanwhile, does not count The Huck in the five candidates – Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman, Tim Pawlenty, Haley Barbour and Mitch Daniels – that he sees as the great hope of the GOP. But, as he writes, “the nominee may emerge much diminished by involvement in a process cluttered with careless, delusional, egomaniacal, spotlight-chasing candidates to whom the sensible American majority would never entrust a lemonade stand, much less nuclear weapons.”

Exhibit B: Another piece this week, also in the Post, detailing the relationship – if that is the right word for it – between Huntsman and Romney. Reporter Jason Horowitz’s fascinating piece about the two ambitious LDS politicians says: “The respective former governors of Utah and Massachusetts have vast fortunes, silver tongues and great hair. They are also distant cousins, descended from a Mormon apostle who played a key role in the faith’s founding. The two men enjoyed the early support of powerful and devout fathers and performed the church’s missionary work – Romney in France during the Vietnam War and Huntsman in Taiwan.”

Horowitz goes on to make the case that both Huntsman and Romney wanted to run the Salt Lake City Olympics, knowing that the high profile post would help their political aspirations. When Romney won out, the two men’s personal and family connection was badly frayed. Horowitz also gets into the issue of which of the men is the “better Mormon.”

Neither the Huckabee story line this week nor the Romney-Huntsman feud can possibly be the narrative Republican strategists are hoping to develop. At this point, in the desperate race for money and attention, this kind of story line doesn’t help build momentum, but does raise questions that will linger and linger, first among the chattering classes and eventually among the voters.

Former Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus – he won his share of elections – has a favorite saying: “you can’t win a horse race with a dog.” Admittedly, it’s early, very early, in the all-too-long political nominating process. The economy and Middle East oil prices may yet be a greater threat to Obama than anyone in the Republican field but, having said that, none of these contenders is reminding anyone of Ronald Reagan, or even Howard Baker, Bob Dole or John McCain.

The weirdness is vibrating and no one is running the lemonade stand.

Two Democratic Presidents, Two Approaches to a Pivotal Mid-term

In 1934 the unemployment rate in the United States was 21.7%, just two percent lower than it had been when Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House two years earlier. The Great Depression had its claws deep into the American economy, Roosevelt’s big business and conservative opponents were on the march and the president’s Congressional allies were bracing for the mid-term elections.

Yet, amid persistent charges in 1934 that FDR was taking the country toward socialism, fascism or dictatorship and trampling on the Constitution at every turn, Democrats won a stunning victory in that year’s mid-term elections increasing their numbers in both the House and the Senate. The Senate gains were particularly impressive with Democratic numbers going from 59 to 69 seats.

Historical parallels only go so far, admittedly, but there are some striking similarities between 1934 and 2010. But it is clear now that one thing is very different. The election outcome next Tuesday will be a near historic spanking of the party in power with Democrats almost certain to lose control of the House of Representatives and find their numbers sharply reduced in the Senate. Heading into the final weekend of the campaign, it is not impossible that the GOP will take the Senate, as well.

So, the obvious question: Why was Franklin Roosevelt able to pull off his 1934 political miracle – only the second time in history a party in power in the White House increased its numbers during a mid-term – with an economy still deeply in the ditch, and why will Barack Obama spend next Wednesday trying to explain what went wrong, while welcoming new House Speaker John Boehner to the White House?

I’ll offer a simple theory to a complex question – Obama, unlike FDR, has let his opponents define him and his policies and thereby he managed to lose control of the narrative arc of his presidency. It has been said that one can go from hero to zero just like that in politics and Obama has.

There will be plenty of “what ifs” and “what might have beens” after next week, but in the simple language of communication – and this applies to a school board election or a mid-term – if you are constantly playing defense, as Obama and Democrats have been, you almost always lose.

Folks on the right who will be celebrating next week will be quick to point out that the election signals a repudiation of Obama and Democratic policies and, to some degree, they’ll be correct, but there is a deeper issue for the president and Democrats. They haven’t mounted anything approaching an effective defense of what they have done and are trying to do. You can trace this failure – the wisdom of the policies notwithstanding – back to the summer of 2009 when Congressional town hall meetings were overrun by opponents of the health care legislation and, looking back, Obama and his supporters couldn’t begin to explain how the massive bill really helps most Americans. Instead they played defense, ceding the political narrative to the media’s fascination with the Tea Party, and, I would argue, have never developed a consistent message. They also went for months acting as though passing legislation in the hothouse environment of Washington, D.C. was a substitute for a coherent explanation of what they were trying to accomplish.

Contrast this failure, the months rolling by with no focused message and a fatally late start to engage, with FDR’s robust defense, packaged in terms of American ideals, that he began to mount early in 1934:

“A few timid people,” FDR said then, “who fear progress, will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing. Sometimes they will call it Fascism, sometimes Communism, sometimes Regimentation, sometimes Socialism. But in doing so, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and practical.

“I believe in practical explanations and practical policies. …that what we are doing today is a necessary fulfillment…of old and tested American ideals.”

Obama has been frantically on the stump the last few weeks, but Roosevelt was out on the hustings as early as August of 1934. In one speech he rejected the arguments of the Liberty League – an earlier day Tea Party – that contended that the New Deal was harming big business. “Sound economic improvement comes from the improved conditions of the whole population and not a small fraction thereof,” Roosevelt said.

In contrast to Barack Obama’s early start in his sprint for the White House and his determined, disciplined campaign, his PR skills have come up wanting over the last many months. He engaged his detractors too late and then ineffectively and only after he had lost any chance to stay on the offensive.

FDR’s great biographer, James MacGregor Burns, wrote of Roosevelt’s performance in 1934: “At a time when Americans wanted a man of action in the White House, he provided action or at least the appearance of action. At a time when they wanted confidence, he talked bravely, reassuringly about the future, whatever the mistakes, we were Looking Forward we were On Our Way, the title of two books he put out in 1933 and 1934. At a time when Americans wanted good cheer, he filled the White House with laughter.”

Burns said Roosevelt’s secret in 1934 was his “hold on the people,” a grasp that Obama had fleetingly, but has lost and will now struggle to retrieve.

During FDR’s pivotal second year in office, Burns has written, FDR “maintained his popularity through timely action, unfailing cheerfulness in public and private, and a masterly grasp of public opinion.”

In short, while the Great Depression still roared and two in five Americans were out of work, Roosevelt inspired confidence. “Businessmen, labor chiefs, bankers, newspaper editors, farm leaders left the White House cheered, impressed, relieved,” in Burns’ words.

Roosevelt succeeded in 1934 by giving a broad cross section of the American public a sure sense that he was one of them, looking out for them and fundamentally a champion of their cause. Such a feeling of public connection with the president helped overcome both FDR’s many detractors and the horrible economic circumstances – circumstance, like Obama, that he inherited – during the 1934 mid-term elections.

As much as this mid-term will be cast as a referendum on Barack Obama’s policies, it is also a sure sign that he has lost the confidence, the trust if you will, of a significant number of Americans. Once lost, those are qualities hard for any leader to re-establish and that helps explain why 2010 is going to be so very different than 1934.

Less Imperial, More Reactive

Robert Dallek is one of the best of the current crop of presidential historians. He’s fair-minded and a scholar, but also possesses a keen ability to link the present to the historic. It was no accident that when President Obama, not once but twice, had a small group of historians to the White House for dinner, Bob Dallek was on the guest list along with Robert Caro, Doris Kearns Goodwin and a half dozen others.

He’s also discreet. When I visited with him a few weeks ago, Dallek was carefully respecting his own ground rules for the White House salon. He said he’d gladly talk about what he had told the President, but wouldn’t attempt to interpret Obama’s response or reaction. Others in attendance, at least at the first dinner, haven’t been so careful. The brilliant and provocative Garry Wills wrote a while back about his advice to Obama and his disappointment with the president. Perhaps not surprisingly, Wills didn’t get invited back. Wills has argued that Obama is making a Kennedy/Johnson-like mistake by pursuing the path he is on in Afghanistan.

In a nutshell, Dallek said he also warned Obama about the historical quagmire that Afghanistan has been and looks like has become again.

Bob Dallek’s books about JFK and LBJ are important and enduring works and give him a perspective on Obama’s challenges that is worth attention. Dallek is on to something with his observation to the New York Times’ Matt Bai this past weekend that we are seeing “the diminished power, the diminished authority, the diminished capacity to shape events” of the Obama presidency.

Since at least 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt put his hands on the levers of presidential power, each succeeding president has attempted – many have succeeded – in expanding the authority of what the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once famously called “the imperial presidency.” We may be seeing the decline of that all powerful, too powerful perhaps, presidency.

It is, Bob Dallek says, “the presidency in eclipse.”

I tend to the historical view that the presidency has, since FDR’s day, become too powerful and that Congress has lost its way in checking that power, particularly when Congress acquiesces to foreign policy adventures cooked up by presidents of both parties. So, a pulling in of presidential power is not an altogether unwelcome turn of event, whatever the cause.

Still, there is a problem. Is it conceivable the current Congress – on both sides of the aisle – is capable of exercising more responsible authority? Can the Congress rise, while the presidency is in eclipse? Don’t hold your breath.

The days when a J. William Fulbright, a Frank Church, a Howard Baker or an Everett Dirksen could speak with moral and political authority – and often in opposition to a president – on a national or international issue seem like a distant memory. The Founders envisioned a separation of powers in the national government with each one of the three branches purposely structured to check the influence and power of the others.

If it is correct, for a variety of reasons, that Barack Obama is presiding over a shrinking presidency, then the leadership of Congress must step up their game. The balance envisioned by the Founders has to work and the responsibly for ensuring that it does is both diffused and shared.

(Note: Bob Dallek’s latest book – The Lost Peace – a history of the immediate post-war period, will be out in October.)