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By Marc Landy
When, early in the first American presidential
term, Vice President John Adams proposed to George Washington that he
be addressed as "His Highness the President of the United States
and Protector of Their Liberties," Washington rejected that regal-sounding
mouthful and asked to be called, simply, the President of the United
States. Washington was no shrinking violet. He had great ambitions for
himself, and, more importantly, for the nation he was so pivotal in
founding. But by rejecting the trappings as well as the substance of
monarchy he was determined to set a new standard for what Americans
should expect from those who lead them. Before Washington, greatness
had been a word fit only for kings. Alexander, Catherine, and Frederick
were all "Great," but they hardly set a pattern for presidential
conduct. Washington wrapped greatness in a republican cloak.
Washington was not a democrat. His idea of greatness
was to foster strong executive leadership within the strictures of the
U.S. Constitution. He did not consider himself answerable to public
opinion, as presidents who came after him did. But those who followed
built upon the precedents he established to create an essentially democratic
American presidency.
Democratic leadership differs from other kinds
of leadership because it involves the interdependence of leader and
led. Unlike military command, for example, it requires that leaders
remain answerable to their followers. When a president takes bold initiatives
and ignores public opinion in the short run, he still must enable his
followers to hold him accountable in ways that are practicable and timely.
Even so, leadership can never be fully egalitarian.
Leaders inevitably exert direction and control over their followers.
Presidential leadership can redeem itself democratically only if its
overall impact on citizens is to make them better able to govern themselves.
True democratic leadership is parental as well as accountable. Good
parents encourage their children to become independent and responsible,
not to remain submissive and willful. Just as parents are held responsible
for the moral and practical education of their children, so a president
bears a large share of responsibility for the public's civic education.
Too often, the bully pulpit has produced just plain bull. But a great
civic educator enlivens the populace, increases its sense of obligation,
and improves its understanding of how the political world works.
My own list of great presidents includes Washington,
who founded republican presidential leadership, and four democrats—Thomas
Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
All five presided over essential transformations in politics and public
policy. The last four did so democratically. They were devoted civic
educators. They taught the public how to accept major political, social,
and economic transformations and how to keep those changes from overspilling
proper constitutional bounds. They were also founders—or re-founders—of
political parties. They were builders and disciplinarians of the only
institution capable of preserving political accountability in a mass
democracy, the political party. In sum, they were conservative revolutionaries,
championing fundamental political change while making sure it remained
within the American constitutional grain.
My nominees for greatness are controversial but
not arbitrary. Greatness is not goodness, which is why I don't include
Harry Truman. He brought a level of integrity and common sense to his
presidency that places him among the very best. But he was not a revolutionary.
He was a stabilizer, not an innovator. He maintained and marginally
expanded the New Deal policies of his predecessor, FDR. Teddy Roosevelt
misses the list for similar reasons. TR is considered a revolutionary
because of the progressive themes he enunciated in the 1912 campaign,
four years after he left office. His actual tenure in office was humdrum.
Indeed, his zeal to run in 1912 was largely due to his regret at having
wasted his earlier opportunity to govern. Woodrow Wilson's domestic
record was equally tame. His claim to greatness rests on his foreign
policy vision. But the wreckage of Versailles and the failure of the
League of Nations hardly validate that claim.
Greatness is not charisma. John F. Kennedy brought
dignity and immense charm to the presidency, but his tragically brief
tenure in office did not allow him to embark on projects of the breadth
and depth to comprise a conservative revolution.
Had LBJ contented himself with the monumental
achievements of his first years in office—the 1964 and 1965 Civil
Rights Acts and Medicare—he might well have been a contender.
But the subsequent war on poverty and the war in Vietnam were two sides
of the same counterfeit coin. His domestic "war" was lost
because he adopted policies just powerful enough to offend entrenched
interests but far too feckless to do much real good. His approach to
the gradually worsening situation in Southeast Asia was eerily similar,
as he opted for military policies so mild and ineffectual that they
invited the scorn of hawks and doves alike. LBJ's decision not to run
for reelection reflected his own recognition of his failure to educate
the public into acceptance of his foreign and domestic wars.
The most intriguing individual left off my list
of greats is Ronald Reagan. As president, Reagan initially appeared
to offer an alternative to the bureaucratically centralized New Deal
state. People spoke of the "Reagan Revolution." But, unlike
Roosevelt, Reagan failed to capitalize on his own personal popularity
to further his broader political ends. His 1984 reelection campaign
was his prime opportunity to create the enduring electoral and congressional
Republican majority necessary to sustain his revolution. But he squandered
it. Unlike FDR, who exploited his 1936 reelection bid to mobilize support
for the entire Democratic ticket, Reagan ran an ostentatiously nonpartisan
campaign, devoid of serious political content. His theme was "Morning
in America," as if, by some obscure diurnal logic, he could back
the Democrats into endorsing the afternoon. FDR's theme song, "Happy
Days Are Here Again," which had allied Democrats during the Great
Depression, blared at the Republican convention. On the stump, Reagan
made countless laudatory references to past Democratic standard bearers
FDR, Truman, and even JFK. Unlike FDR's 1936 landslide, Reagan's triumphant
reelection was devoid of broader political meaning because it had virtually
no impact on the congressional partisan balance. The Republicans failed
to take control of the House of Representatives, picking up just 16
additional seats, 36 shy of a majority. Presaging the return of the
Senate to the Democrats in 1986, the Republicans actually lost two Senate
seats. Neither Reagan nor his successor, George Bush, could mount a
serious challenge to the New Deal because they were never able to obtain
a full-fledged congressional majority. The Reagan Revolution proved
a mere coup d'etat.
Greatness is also not saintliness. Washington,
Jefferson, and Jackson owned slaves. Lincoln revoked the writ of habeas
corpus. FDR put American citizens of Japanese descent into internment
camps. One need not canonize these men nor absolve them of their sins
to appreciate the conservative revolutions they presided over and the
character of the leadership they exercised in bringing those revolutions
about.
JAMES MADISON COMMENTED in 1789 that the person of George Washington
was the only aspect of government that really caught the people's imagination
at the outset of the newly formed nation. Indeed, the certitude that
Washington would serve as the nation's first president allayed the fears
of those Constitution writers who were reluctant to endorse the establishment
of a strong chief executive. Washington's task, therefore, was to transform
his enormous popular appeal into respect for the office he occupied
and for the Constitution he had sworn to uphold, and to do so without
raising excessive fears of incipient tyranny. He accomplished this through
a brilliant combination of assertiveness and reticence.
As his response to Adams's highfalutin salutation
demonstrated, Washington rejected the trappings of monarchy. More important,
he rejected its substance. He voluntarily stepped down after completing
his second term, thereby establishing an enduring precedent for the
peaceful and lawful relinquishment of presidential power.
Washington also demonstrated that the president
was more than a mere clerk. The Constitution does not empower the president
to address the people. Given its emphasis on the federal and representative
characters of national government, the Constitution could well be interpreted
as forbidding such direct address. Nonetheless, Washington issued a
proclamation to the American people early in his term of office in honor
of Thanksgiving Day. This seemingly innocuous move staked an audacious
claim, establishing the tradition of direct popular communication that
is the source of so much of the presidency's power and prestige.
During Washington's second term, when several
western Pennsylvania towns resisted paying federal whiskey excise tax
and a tax inspector and federal marshal were expelled from the region,
Washington responded by summoning troops to quell the uprising and assuming
command of them himself. He risked his personal prestige to affirm and
enforce the principle of national supremacy. And when he determined
that continuing an alliance with France threatened to involve America
in a new war with Britain, he issued the Neutrality Proclamation of
1793, which, in effect, abrogated the existing mutual defense treaty
with France. The letter of the Constitution gave the president no authority
to dissolve treaties. Here, Washington was making a claim for the prerogative
power, the right to violate the letter of the Constitution if necessary
to ensure its very survival.
Admiration of Washington should not bind us to
the inadequacy of the model he provides for democratic presidential
leadership. Washington's success was too dependent on the absence of
rivals. Because of his extraordinary gifts and the circumstances in
which he came to rule, he enjoyed a degree of popular support that enabled
him to suppress rivalry and factionalism. But he left no legacy capable
of suppressing those centrifugal forces in his absence. Ironically,
the best means for taming factionalism and reconciling rivalry with
lawful rotation in power has proved to be an institution that Washington
and the other Founders feared and despised: the political party.
AS THE CLINTON impeachment serves to remind us, presidential accountability
has a formal constitutional aspect. But the specific devices contained
in the Constitution, most notably impeachment and the congressional
override of a presidential veto, are designed for exceptional circumstances.
The idea of democratic leadership implies a more intimate and routine
form of accountability than that envisioned by the Founders, many of
whom were not democrats and did not desire to make the president too
accountable to the people. Thomas Jefferson, the creator of the world's
first democratic political party, shared Washington's antipathy to party
politics. Like Woodrow Wilson, who fought a war to end war, Jefferson
built a party movement to end party. He expected that once his party
triumphed over the Federalists, the need for party would come to an
end and the essentially nonpartisan character of constitutional government
would be restored. Jefferson was a better politician than he was a prophet.
Although his Democratic-Republican Party went into eclipse during the
regimes of his successors James Madison and James Monroe, it retained
a corps of passionate adherents who would lead the fight to restore
and expand the party a generation later.
During the 1790s, in partnership with then-Congressman
James Madison, Jefferson devoted much of his energy, while serving in
the Federalist-dominated administrations of Washington and John Adams,
to the routine and detailed tasks of party building. Jefferson and Madison
met and corresponded with local leaders throughout the country, encouraging
them to mobilize and organize citizens in support of their new party.
And they moved these local organizations to form regional and national
networks for the purpose of influencing national elections. The culmination
of these party-building efforts was the election of 1800, which swept
the Federalists from power and installed Jefferson as president.
Although viewed by his opponents as a dangerous
radical, Jefferson in fact governed as a conservative revolutionary.
The election of 1800 had been the first popularly contested presidential
election in American history, and the turn toward democracy ushered
in what Jefferson himself called "the Revolution of 1800."
But if 1800 marked a revolution, it was an exceedingly lawful and merciful
one. Jefferson used the occasion of his First Inaugural to remind the
people, including the bloodthirsty among his followers, that "we
are all republicans, we are all federalists." In the same speech
he insisted that the principles that both his supporters and opponents
shared were far more important than their differences. Most important
of all was their mutual commitment to the constitutional order itself:
"If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve the Union
or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments
of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason
is left free to combat it."
JEFFERSON FOLLOWED THIS plea for unity with an encomium to Washington
as "our first and great revolutionary character," and with
a pledge to preserve the general government in its "whole constitutional
vigor."
Jefferson's legacy has elements of both style
and substance. In contrast to Washington, he made the president look
like a democrat. He jettisoned the presidential coach and rode his own
horse. At presidential dinners, he flouted distinctions of rank and
purposely ignored diplomatic protocol in the reception of foreign envoys.
Jefferson presided over a drastic reduction in the size of the national
government, one that would remain in force until the Civil War. Even
today, the United States retains a degree of local self- government,
a commitment to the rights of individuals, a mistrust of elites, and
a lack of centralized rule that are unique among modern democracies.
But Jefferson's efforts to decentralize and limit the power of government
were wrought in a manner consonant with fundamental constitutional principles.
Jefferson steadfastly resisted pressure from his more radical congressional
allies to destroy the constitutional system of checks and balances by
making the courts and the president subservient to Congress.
"The Revolution of 1800" could not
have occurred without Jefferson's sustained efforts at party-building
during the 1790s. As the beloved author of the Declaration of Independence,
Jefferson might well have been elected in 1800 in the absence of party.
But without party support and party discipline, he would have had to
become either a prisoner of the status quo or prey to schismatic pressures.
Although Jackson is usually considered to be the founder of the spoils
system, it was actually Jefferson who initiated the practice of replacing
incumbent federal officials with party loyalists. He disciplined his
followers by appealing to their loyalty and party spirit, but also by
manipulating the supply of federal patronage. He used his party leadership
both to keep Republican moderates committed to major reforms of the
judiciary, public finance, and administration, and to keep party radicals
from undermining the form and substance of the Constitution.
NEVER WAS AN ERA MORE inappropriately named than the so-called Era of
Good Feelings following the Jefferson presidency in the Union's third
decade. During the War of 1812 large areas of the nation's capital were
burned, and the charred remains of the White House stood as a stark
symbol of the national government's decline in strength, a decline that
continued even after the British retreated. Not until Andrew Jackson
and his political partner Martin Van Buren resurrected the Democratic
Party in the election of 1828 did popular allegiance to the national
government revive. Unlike Jefferson, political aspirants Jackson and
Van Buren harbored no illusion that the refurbished Democrats would
be a "party to end party." They built a Democratic Party designed
for the long haul. In their view, the party should be a permanent bulwark
of decentralization. It should be made up of localized political associations
that could establish a vital link between the people and the national
government and exert popular control of executive power.
Emulation is the sincerest form of flattery.
The Democrats' great success inspired their opponents to create a similar
national confederation of state and local party organizations. Van Buren's
defeat by the Whig Party in 1840 ushered in a true two-party system.
Grafted onto the country's antipartisan political rootstock, and leaving
the integrity of the original Constitution undisturbed, this new system
imbued American politics with hybrid democratic vigor.
Jackson would seem a poor candidate for conservative
revolutionary. As a young lawyer and soldier he was bold to the point
of recklessness. His resentments regularly threatened to overwhelm his
good sense, as evidenced by the many duels he fought. The bullets that
opposing duelists lodged in his body caused him to suffer continual
pain and illness his whole adult life.
Like Washington, Jackson was a great military
hero. But the nature of his heroism was not sufficient to inspire confidence
in his political judgment or reliability. Washington was a political
general. Like Eisenhower, his greatest military achievement was to maintain
the cohesion of his forces in the face of powerful centrifugal pressures.
Jackson was like Patton, a warrior. His victory at New Orleans in 1814
was the first truly decisive battle in American history. It forced the
British to give up the dream of reannexing the United States—a
dream neither the Revolutionary War nor the War of 1812, which had formally
ended prior to the Battle of New Orleans, had completely extinguished.
Jackson nearly won the election of 1824 without
the support of a political party. He won the most popular and the most
electoral votes but failed to obtain an absolute majority of electoral
votes. Therefore, as the Constitution provides, the election was settled
in the House of Representatives. For the first and only time in U.S.
history, a presidential election was won by a candidate, John Quincy
Adams, who had not won the electoral majority. Jackson denounced Adams's
victory as a "corrupt bargain" struck with the Speaker of
the House, Henry Clay, whom Adams subsequently appointed Secretary of
State.
As the 1828 election loomed, Martin Van Buren,
the powerful New York politician, recognized that only the discipline
of party could appropriately temper the political ambitions of a "man
on horseback" like Jackson. He set about reestablishing the inter-regional
alliance of the Jeffersonians, anchored by the two largest states, New
York and Virginia, then he offered Jackson national support in return
for his pledge to conform to Jeffersonian party principles. Jackson
accepted the offer. Of course he could have broken with the party after
winning the election. But, to his own surprise, he found the mutual
consultation and loyalty instilled through party to be so beneficial
that he willingly succumbed to its discipline.
The Democrats held the first major party national
convention in 1836. Initially, this national presence existed solely
for the purpose of winning presidential elections. But as the parties
persevered, their national attachment became more than pragmatic. Intense
emotional bonds among party loyalists from different regions were forged
in the heat of national partisan combat. Both Whigs and Democrats flourished
in the South, the West, and the North. The national party ties that
developed provided the strongest political counterweight to the sectionalism
that continually threatened to tear the country apart. The party provided
the president with a national constituency to which he was accountable.
Parties also answered a concern first expressed
by the Anti-Federalists: that the Constitution did not adequately promote
an active and competent citizenry. In a great commercial republic like
the United States, in which citizens are tempted to fix on private interests,
political parties forge civic affiliations that transcend the candidates
and issues of the moment. Party loyalty encourages citizens to honor
their public obligations even as they jealously guard their rights.
As conceived by Jackson and Van Buren, the parties provide the vitality
and solidarity necessary to complement the legalism of the Constitution.
Jackson was as much the conservative revolutionary
as were Jefferson and Washington before him. A strong defender of states'
rights, Jackson vetoed a federal subsidy of the Maysville Road in Kentucky
because the road was to be built entirely within the state and therefore
could not be justified on the basis of the federal government's constitutional
power to promote interstate commerce. But, when the Union itself was
being threatened, he acted decisively to protect federal supremacy,
and he eloquently and cogently explained his actions to the American
people.
The crisis occurred when, aggrieved by its inability
to obtain tariff relief, South Carolina passed a nullification ordinance
declaring the existing federal tariff law unenforceable within the state's
boundaries. Jackson responded with the Nullification Proclamation. It
expressly denied the premise of South Carolina's leading nullification
advocate, his own Vice President John Calhoun, that the Constitution
was nothing more than an agreement among the individual states. Jackson
held that the Union predated the Constitution. The Union was formed
as a result of the joint decision to declare independence from Great
Britain and to fight for independence as a nation—not as a coalition
of states. Moreover, since the Constitution expressly grants Congress
the right to raise revenue, Congress has the power to implement that
right, even in South Carolina. Jackson implored Calhoun and his followers:
Consider the Government, uniting in one
bond of common interest and general protection so many different states,
giving to all their inhabitants the proud title of American citizen,
protecting their commerce, securing their literature and their arts,
facilitating their intercommunication, defending their frontiers and
making their name respected in the remotest parts of the earth.
South Carolina rescinded its nullification ordinance.
But Jackson's proclamation had a broader, instructive purpose. His allies,
who were radical states'-rights democrats and therefore susceptible
to the contagion of nullification, were taught a great lesson about
the nature and purposes of union. After all, Jackson's neo-Federalist
enemies, men such as Daniel Webster and John Quincy Adams, already understood
the need to preserve federal supremacy. Jackson's aim was to teach Democrats
how to combine their zeal for limited government with an equally strong
attachment to the Union. In the Nullification Crisis of 1832 he struck
a blow for national unity and federal supremacy without which Lincoln's
later success, achieved under far more difficult circumstances, would
have been unthinkable.
IN A SERIES OF SPEECHES THAT began two years before his presidency,
during his failed senatorial bid in 1858, Abraham Lincoln explained
to the people why a house divided against itself could not endure; why
defense of the Constitution actually required a revolutionary act, the
freeing of slaves. Emancipation marked the boldest of all presidentially
inspired conservative revolutions. Justifying it was no mean feat, since
the Constitution actually contained provisions that protected slavery.
In speeches before and during his presidency, Lincoln overcame this
anomaly by first invoking the key principles of the Declaration of Independence
and then claiming that the very purpose of the Constitution was to bring
those principles to life. Drawing on a biblical verse, "a word
fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a picture of silver," Lincoln
made the Declaration's principle of "liberty for all" the
measure of American political life:
The assertion of that principle at that
time, was the word "fitly spoken" which has proved an "apple
of gold" to us. The Union, and the Constitution, are the pictures
of silver, subsequently framed around it. The picture was made not to
conceal or destroy the apple; but to adorn and preserve it.
THUS LINCOLN INCORPORATED the liberty-loving Declaration into the order
of the Constitution, rendering the latter meaningless in the absence
of the former. Seen in such a light, the "house" of Union
could not possibly endure "half slave and half free."
Lincoln's success in ending slavery and winning
the Civil War was not simply a matter of rhetoric; it was also due to
his brilliant party leadership. He presided over a broad- based popular
movement, one capable of mobilizing and sustaining public support for
a difficult and bloody enterprise. Lincoln did not found the Republican
Party. Like the Democrats and the Whigs, the Republicans emerged out
of local protest meetings and political organizations. But Lincoln steered
the Republican Party to success on a national scale, and he sustained
and nurtured it through its time of testing. The Lincolnian Republicans
kept what was best about the existing party system and infused it with
a greater sense of moral purpose.
In his famous debates with Stephen Douglas in
1858, Lincoln clarified the essential principled difference between
Democrats and Republicans. Republicans would not accept Douglas's facile
appeal to majority rule as the means for determining whether a federal
territory would adopt slavery. Just as the Jacksonians saw the Democratic
Party as an antidote to political indolence in a commercial republic,
so Lincoln forged the Republican Party into the means for overcoming
the immoral neutrality prescribed by Douglas in the face of the slavery
controversy.
Lincoln exploited the spoils system with the
same zeal and skill shown by Jefferson and Jackson. He removed Democrats
from practically every federal appointive office they held and gave
their jobs to members of all the competing Republican factions, ensuring
that a range of Republican opinion would be heard. He displayed the
same commitment to party unity in selecting and managing his cabinet.
He included both William Seward, the party's leading moderate, and Salmon
Chase, its leading anti-slavery militant. When the tension between Seward
and Chase precipitated a cabinet crisis in 1862, Lincoln handled the
dispute masterfully, maintaining the loyalty of both statesmen and of
the factions they represented. "In the process of managing"
his cabinet, as the historian Eric McKitrick has written, Lincoln was
"at the same time managing the party and fashioning it into a powerful
instrument for waging war."
FDR WAS THE LAST OF the great presidents. None has emerged in the more
than half a century that has elapsed since his death, and this is no
accident. The great conservative revolution he presided over, the New
Deal, so altered the character of American politics as to make it far
more difficult for presidential greatness to occur. FDR created perhaps
the most successful of all partisan organizations, the New Deal Democratic
Party. Like Jefferson's, his goal was essentially antipartisan, to create
the party to end party. Unlike Jefferson, he seems to have succeeded.
FDR took the moribund 1920's Democratic Party
and infused it with new life. Having placed Al Smith's name in nomination
at two previous national party conventions, he was able to appeal to
Catholics with far greater success than had any previous Protestant
politician. By championing the rights of labor to organize, he established
the American labor movement as a constituent element of the Democratic
Party and maintained that attachment even when labor's top leader, John
L. Lewis, deserted him in 1940. The inclusiveness of New Deal programs
earned the Democrats the allegiance of two previously Republican-leaning
groups, blacks and Jews. FDR's greatest electoral victory, the one that
confirmed the strength and persistence of the New Deal Democratic coalition,
occurred posthumously, in 1948. Truman would never have defeated Thomas
E. Dewey on his own, but by wrapping himself in FDR's shroud and emphasizing
his credentials as a New Deal Democrat, Truman pulled off the most astounding
electoral upset of the 20th century.
FDR did not, however, savor partisan triumph
for its own sake. He built the party to provide him with the political
tools necessary to establish an administrative state, one whose essential
aspects would operate independent of partisanship. He and his New Dealers
persuaded the American people to accept a centralized bureaucratic Leviathan
of the sort citizens had been taught to shun. By freeing the executive
branch from the constraints of localized democracy and championing it
as a nonpartisan steward, the New Deal gave rise to a more active national
state but one in which the most important means of democratic accountability
was greatly weakened.
Nonetheless, FDR was in crucial respects a conservative.
Those on the far left who chastise him for saving capitalism are essentially
correct, although their derision is gratuitous. In response to the crisis
of the Great Depression, FDR rightly shunned both the radical alternative
of socialism and the rigid constitutional formalism of his predecessor,
Herbert Hoover. He sought to preserve the essential character of the
existing economic system by finding means to make it more stable and
humane. This he accomplished in the short run through government spending
to create jobs, and in the long run by establishing various quasi-insurance
programs that protected people against the vagaries of job loss, disability,
and old age. The New Deal's hallmark program, Social Security, was aptly
named, for the key to the New Deal was its effort to make people's lives
more secure.
Radio gave FDR the opportunity to explain his
project directly to the American people. In a series of "fireside
chats," he described his programs in simple, comprehensible terms.
The most comprehensive explanation of his conservative revolution came
in a campaign speech delivered to San Francisco's Commonwealth Club.
In it he declared that the time had come to recognize "new terms
of the old social contract," to take account of an economy transformed
by industrial capitalism and the ensuing concentration of economic power.
The Founders had constitutionalized government on the basis of a declaration
of political rights. Now the task of government was to constitutionalize
the economy on the basis of a declaration of economic rights. The traditional
emphasis on individual self-reliance should give way to governmental
protection from the vagaries of the marketplace. Security was to be
a new, government-guaranteed, self-evident truth. Thus FDR sought both
to protect the public from excessive economic uncertainty and to do
so within the American constitutional grain with its emphasis on the
constitutional protection of rights.
The New Deal undermined the future of presidential
greatness in two related ways. It drastically curtailed the role of
the political party and therefore diminished presidential accountability.
As the locus of political power has migrated from the states and localities
to the national government, and from partisan politicians to civil servants,
the party has lost its ability to function as a defender of provincial
liberties and a guarantor of presidential accountability. The political
party has by no means withered away. Indeed, the Republican and Democratic
national committees succeed brilliantly as centralized fund-raisers
and marketers. But the national party organization is no longer grounded
in the states and localities, and no longer has real political power
independent of the president.
What's more, the New Deal administrative state's
extraordinary political resilience has discouraged FDR's successors
from attempting new conservative revolutions. Newt Gingrich's Contract
With America seemed to be a bold anti-New Deal offensive, but it withered
in the face of Bill Clinton's brilliant ground-giving defense, and died
as a result of Clinton's 1996 electoral resurrection.
Greatness is rare and a hostage to fortune. Crisis
creates its opportunity. The greatness of Washington and Lincoln was
forged by war; the eminence of FDR by economic collapse. Jefferson and
Jackson faced quieter crises but real ones. In 1800 and again in 1824
large segments of the citizenry had become so deeply disaffected with
the national government that the very future of the Union was thrown
into doubt. Because greatness is crisis-dependent, one cannot insist
that the next president be great. All that can be reasonably expected
is that he be good. And frankly, given the obstacles, that is plenty
to ask. But the experience of the greats has much to teach those who
aspire to be good. The key elements of democratic leadership—party
leadership and civic education—are just as critical to the success
of a good president as to a great one.
Democracy is such a hard system of government
to sustain that, in a certain sense, it is perpetually in crisis. Good
times are as dangerous as bad ones because they lull the public into
false complacency and encourage its proclivity to ignore public life
altogether. Indeed, civic education is all the more difficult when the
stock market is soaring and jobs are plentiful. In 1933, with the stock
market collapsed and close to a third of the workforce unemployed, citizens
were all ears as FDR explained their predicament to them.
If the next president is to be less a slave to
fickle public opinion than his most recent predecessor, he will need
to cultivate those political gifts that most befit a democratic leader—to
rule and be ruled by party and to take the public to school. He must
find the words to help ordinary Americans make better sense of the titillating
but bewildering circumstances in which so many find themselves. He must
also find a way to resuscitate political party life in order to restore
some sense of collective responsibility and political discipline to
public affairs. Such ties liberate even as they bind. The return of
vigorous parties might even succeed in building an audience capable
of remaining attentive to the political lessons a good president has
to teach.
Marc Landy is a professor of political science at Boston College.
He is coauthor, with Sidney M. Milkis, of Presidential Greatness,
published in 2000 by the University Press of Kansas.
Photos (from top):
Washington Monument
Jefferson Memorial
Statue of Andrew Jackson, Lafayette Square
Lincoln Memorial
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial
All photos by Gary Wayne Gilbert
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