JAMES TARANTO: HILARIOUS EXCUSES FOR PRESIDENTIAL FAILURE
http://online.wsj.com/articles/best-of-the-web-today-least-likely-to-succeed-1406145276
“It’s Virtually Impossible to Be a Successful Modern President” declares the headline of a blog post by the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza. The post has drawn a great deal of ridicule, but to our mind most of the critics fail to appreciate just how feeble an effort it is. Our aim is to correct that.
Cillizza’s argument is based on four observations: First, the presidency is a difficult job. Second, the “bully pulpit” isn’t what it used to be. Third, the electorate and elected officials have become more ideologically polarized. Fourth, the “mainstream media” are no longer a coherent and powerful entity, in part because of the rise of social media.
These utterly banal observations add up to a causal claim: that because of the last three factors, it has become impossible for a president to succeed. Well, no, not impossible, he admits at the very end, and the headline does include the weasel word virtually. “But failure is far, far more likely. Ask Barack Obama. Or George W. Bush.”
One suspects if asked, either Obama or Bush would dispute the premise that he is a failure. But rather than argue over specific cases, let’s ask Cillizza to define his terms. What constitutes a failed presidency? Here’s his answer: “A president who [sic] a majority of the country disapproves of and a country even more split along ideological lines on, well, everything.”
The second component of this definition begs the question. Cillizza claims ideological polarization causes presidential failure, which he defines in part as ideological polarization. So ideological polarization causes ideological polarization. At the end of the post, Cillizza tries to isolate disapproval from polarization and comes up with this:
I was talking to a Democratic pollster recently about President Obama’s weak job approval ratings and what it might mean for Democrats on the ballot this fall. I asked how Obama could move his numbers up and what a “good place” for him might look like. The pollster responded that the political world needed to change its definition of what being a popular president entails in this day and age. His point was that if Obama could somehow crawl back to 50 percent approval before November, that would be a huge success. Obama’s ceiling–almost no matter what he said or did–was around 52 or 53 percent, the pollster argued.
Of course that goes both ways: A polarized electorate means that a president’s approval rating has a floor (in Obama’s case a bit below 40%) as well as a ceiling. But in any case, if contemporaneous approval ratings were the measure of presidential success, Truman would be considered a failure and Harding would be on Mount Rushmore.
The causal factors Cillizza identifies are considerably less novel than he seems to realize. True, the country is ideologically polarized now when compared with recent decades. But it isn’t more polarized than ever. In the 1860s it actually split in two and fought a civil war–and the president at the time is now regarded as one of the greatest (and his predecessor as one of the worst).
44, 43, 42 Associated Press
The “mainstream media,” which Cillizza sees in decline, is a relatively recent phenomenon. In past eras, the press was far more partisan than in the decades after World War II. And while it’s true that what we call “social media” are new, innovations in communication are a centuries-old story. “Can you imagine what Bill Clinton’s presidency would have been like if Twitter existed?” Cillizza asks breathlessly. Well, can you imagine what Lincoln’s presidency would have been like if radio existed? How about FDR’s and television, or Reagan’s and the World Wide Web?
Cillizza’s claims about these trends are purely impressionistic, with no data to back up his assertions. That in itself isn’t necessarily a flaw, but his statements are so imprecise as to be laughable, and ultimately self-contradictory. He writes: “The similarities between the Bush presidency and Obama’s tenure are striking in that the trends–rank partisanship, the decline of the bully pulpit–that Clinton had only to grapple with toward the end of his time in office have accelerated exponentially over the past 14 years.”
If something is accelerating exponentially, that means not just that its speed is increasing, but that the rate at which its speed is increasing is increasing. In physics, this is called “jerk.” (Think of the way a car jerks when you slam on the gas.) Cillizza seems to be using “exponentially” to mean something like “a lot.”
Later, however, he informs us that the Obama presidency “began at a time not only of unprecedented polarization in Congress and the country but also at a moment in which a president’s ability to bend the country to his will had reached a low ebb.” Assuming “a president’s ability to bend the country to his will” means the same thing as “the bully pulpit,” Cillizza is claiming it reached a low ebb in 2009 and has continued declining exponentially ever since. That is quite simply nonsense.
Another question: How do you distinguish between a declining bully pulpit and an inept bully? Cillizza concedes that Obama’s “belief in his own powers of persuasion–to the Congress and the country–were [sic] also heavily overrated.” In the same paragraph, he faults Obama for “his underestimation of just how polarized the country and the Congress have become.” These both seem like shortcomings that would make Obama particularly ill-suited for leadership at this time.
It’s not impossible that George W. Bush had shortcomings, too. Thus it is preposterous to suggest that because two presidents have failed to live up to Cillizza’s standards of success (whatever they may be), it is impossible, or even “virtually” so, for anyone to do so.
Of course, as Steven Hayward notes at PowerLineBlog.com, the plaint that the presidency has become impossible is no more novel than partisan polarization or media innovation: “Whenever a Democratic president gets into trouble, the predictable chorus starts up.” Hayward quotes from his own account, in “The Age of Reagan,” of what they were saying in 1980:
The popular historian Barbara Tuchman expressed the thinking of the intellectual elite: “The job of President is too difficult for any single person because of the complexity of the problems and the size of government. Maybe some form of plural executive is needed, such as they have in Switzerland.” U.S. News and World Report wondered: “Perhaps the burdens have become so great that, over time, no President will be judged adequate in the eyes of most voters.”
Columnist Joseph Kraft wrote on election eve: “As the country goes to the polls in the 47th national election, the Presidency as an institution is in trouble. It has become, as Vice President Mondale said in a recent interview, the ‘fire hydrant of the nation.’ ” Newsweek echoed this sentiment: “The Presidency has in some measure defeated the last five men who have held it—and has persuaded some of the people who served them that it is in danger of becoming a game nobody can win. . . . The job as now constituted is or is becoming impossible, no matter who holds it.”
That’s only half of the Hayward excerpt.
Meanwhile, the New York Times’s Peter Baker has the latest in a series on how the world is falling apart, making life hard for Obama:
Rarely has a president been confronted with so many seemingly disparate foreign policy crises all at once–in Ukraine, Israel, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere–but making the current upheaval more complicated for Mr. Obama is the seemingly interlocking nature of them all. Developments in one area, like Ukraine, shape his views and choices in a crisis in another area, like the Middle East. . . .
Little wonder then that in recent days the president seems almost to be suffering geopolitical whiplash. “We live in a complex world and at a challenging time,” he said wearily last week after making a statement in which he addressed Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and Afghanistan, all in the space of seven minutes. “And none of these challenges lend themselves to quick or easy solutions.”
As with Cillizza’s theory, one has to ask: To what extent are the crises Baker enumerates the causes of Obama’s problems as opposed to the effects? Here is how Obama summed up the state of the world in a Seattle fundraising speech just yesterday:
Part of people’s concern is just the sense that around the world the old order isn’t holding and we’re not quite yet to where we need to be in terms of a new order that’s based on a different set of principles, that’s based on a sense of common humanity, that’s based on economies that work for all people.
“A few months back, Mr. Obama argued that foreign relations is not a chess game,” Baker notes, adding: “But at times, it seems like three-dimensional chess.” Maybe the world would be a bit less disorderly if its lone superpower’s leader were not so simpleminded and soft-headed.
If You Like Your Pizza, You Can Keep Your Pizza
TheWire.com notes an analogy Judge Andre Davis used in his opinion concurring with yesterday’s Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling upholding ObamaCare subsidies on federal exchanges, in contravention of the law’s text:
If I ask for pizza from Pizza Hut for lunch but clarify that I would be fine with a pizza from Domino’s, and I then specify that I want ham and pepperoni on my pizza from Pizza Hut, my friend who returns from Domino’s with a ham and pepperoni pizza has still complied with a literal construction of my lunch order.
Judge Davis completely botched the analogy. The Obama administration’s position is the equivalent of giving your friend a Pizza Hut coupon and demanding that he reimburse you for it after he buys a pizza at Domino’s.
(Note: TheWire inaccurately attributes the analogy to Judge Roger Gregory, who wrote the majority opinion.)
Metaphor Alert
“When writing about politics, it’s all too frequent to use terminology that often obscures more than elucidates. That’s especially true when it comes to the word ‘wave‘–shorthand for a landslide victory for the winning party.”–Josh Kraushaar, NationalJournal.com, July 22
We Blame George W. Bush
- “Comcast’s ‘Retention’ Policies Take the Blame for That Customer Service Call From Hell”–headline, VultureBeat.com, July 22
- “Russian Media on Downed Airliner: The CIA Did It”–headline, CNBC.com, July 21
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