Deep Presidency: Toward a Structural Theory of an Unsustainable Office in a Catastrophic World—Obama and Beyond

Abstract

Modern and postmodern theories of the presidency tend to place the American president on a continuum of power, asserting the need for either a more active or less active chief executive. From the seminal work of Richard Neustadt, celebrating the assertive president seeking to maximize power and leadership, through the contrasting view of historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and others who sought to restrict the reach of the executive, scholars have battled over the appropriate balance of power—particularly the executive-legislative scale. From an alternative critical/structural view of the office, this expansive-restrictive debate, while important, misses the central point that regardless of party, personality, or management style, all presidents seek the same structural goals. If, as Theodore Lowi has argued, the president is the “state personified,” then we need to ask how the capitalist state shapes and constrains the imperatives presidents must pursue, given our political economy and the ideology that sustains it. Two core imperatives emerge for the literature on theories of the state: the pursuit of economic growth and the provision of “national security.” This article explores debates over theories of the presidency in the light of twenty-first-century challenges to conventional definitions of “growth” and “national security.” In the face of global climate change and the decline of US military and geopolitical preeminence, can the presidency break free from its imprisonment in orthodox notions of growth and national security to forge a more sustainable path for the nation and the office? And more broadly, if our way of life in fact undermines our way of life in an unsustainable self-defeating logic, absent a cataclysmic crisis, what, if any, role can the president play in fostering a deep change of direction? By challenging the power structure of the political economy, a critical/structural theory of the presidency is best situated to address such questions.

Notes

¹ Antonia Juhasz, “Two Years Later: BP's Toxic Legacy,” The Nation, May 7, 2012. See also Naomi Klein, “Gulf Oil Spill: A Hole in the World,” The Guardian/UK, June 20, 2010. Note: the Exxon-Valdez spill occurred in 1989. For an account of the record $4.5 billion settlement between BP and the Department of Justice in November 2012, see Jason Leopold, “BP Will ‘Kill Again,’ Former EPA Officials, Attorney Warn,” Truthout, November 18, 2012.

⁴ Grover, The President as Prisoner, p. 5. See also footnote 9, p. 188.

⁷ Ibid.

² William F. Grover, The President as Prisoner: A Structural Critique of the Carter and Reagan Years (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989), p. 15, see especially Chapter 1, “The Rise and Decline of Presidency Fetishism.”

³ Ibid., 1–5. See also the discussion of Hamilton's fuller meaning in Michael A. Genovese (ed.), Contending Approaches to the American Presidency (Washington, DC: SAGE/CQ Press, 2012), pp. 12–19.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Ibid., 6.

⁸ See Genovese, Contending Approaches to the American Presidency, pp. 11–19, for a solid discussion of the framers' effort to balance Hamiltonian energy with republican safety.

⁹ See Grover, The President as Prisoner, Ch. 1, for a full account of the Expansivist-Restrictivist debate among a wider range of authors within political science. Genovese uses the language of this debate in his analysis. See Genovese, Contending Approaches to the American Presidency, p. 11.

¹⁰ Clinton Rossiter, The American Presidency, revised ed. (New York: Mentor Books, 1960), p. 14.

¹² Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1980), p. 136.

¹¹ Grover, The President as Prisoner, pp. 32–39. Among many accounts, see also Thomas E. Cronin and Michael A. Genovese, The Paradoxes of the American Presidency, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 107–115; Stephen Skowronek, “Mission Accomplished,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 39:4 (2009), pp. 795–804; and Michael Nelson, “Neustadt's ‘Presidential Power’ at 50,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 28, 2010.

¹³ Lori Cox Han, New Directions in the American Presidency (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 4.

¹⁴ For an account of this crisis of the office, see Grover, The President as Prisoner, pp. 39–61.

¹⁵ Edward S. Corwin, The President: Office and Powers, 4th ed. (New York: NYU Press, 1957).

¹⁶ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (New York: Popular Library, 1974). See also, Grover, The President as Prisoner, pp. 42–49.

¹⁷ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., War and the American Presidency (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004). See especially Ch. 3, “The Imperial Presidency Redux.”

¹⁸ Thomas E. Cronin, The State of the Presidency, 2nd ed. (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1980); Cronin and Genovese, The Paradoxes of the American Presidency, especially Ch. 1; and Theodore J. Lowi, The Personal President (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).

¹⁹ W.F. Grover and J.G. Peschek (eds), Voices of Dissent: Critical Readings in American Politics, 8th ed. (New York: Pearson, 2010), p. 4.

²⁰ Jennifer Van Bergen, “The ‘Unitary Executive’ and the Threat to Democratic Government,” in Grover and Peschek, Voices of Dissent, pp. 253–260. On the balance of power generally within American governmental institutions weighted toward the presidency, see Genovese, Contending Approaches to the American Presidency; Cox Han, New Directions in the American Presidency; and Schlesinger, Jr., War and the American Presidency.

²⁴ Ira Katznelson and Mark Kesselman, The Politics of Power, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 265. For a solid brief overview of similar critiques of Neustadt and the ends of power, see Cronin and Genovese, The Paradoxes of the American Presidency, pp. 111–113.

²¹ This is true even with the much more richly developed approach of “new institutionalism” via analysis of political regime changes. See Stephen Skowronek, “Presidential Leadership in Political Time,” in Michael Nelson (ed.), The Presidency and the Political System, 5th ed. (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2003), pp. 124–170; see also Skowronek, “Mission Accomplished”; and his seminal work, Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

²² Bruce Miroff, Pragmatic Illusions: The Presidential Politics of John F. Kennedy (New York: David McKay Co., 1976) p. xiii.

²³ See Lawrence R. Jacobs and Desmond S. King, “Varieties of Obamaism: Structure, Agency and the Obama Presidency,” Perspectives on Politics 8:3 (2010), pp. 794–795.

²⁵ See the celebrated works of James MacGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963); see also James MacGregor Burns, Presidential Government (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1973); and James MacGregor Burns, The Power to Lead: The Crisis of the American Presidency (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984).

²⁶ The term is from the work of Fred Block and Frances Fox Piven, as quoted in Brian Waddell, “When the Past is Not Prologue: The Wagner Act Debates and the Limits of American Political Science,” New Political Science 34:3 (2012), pp. 338–357. It is a particularly apt charge with regard to the work of Jacobs and King, “Varieties of Obamaism,” which creates the misimpression that encounters between theories of the presidency and theories of the state are quite a new development.

²⁷ Harold Laski, The American Presidency: An Interpretation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940). See also Grover, The President as Prisoner, pp. 20–25; all brief Laski quotes are cited therein.

²⁸ Lowi, The Personal President.

²⁹ The following discussion of theories of the state draws on Grover, The President as Prisoner, pp. 74–87. See also Waddell, “When the Past is Not Prologue,” for a fuller discussion of how the insights of critical/radical theories of the state are downplayed or ignored within political science generally.

³⁰ Grover, The President as Prisoner; see also G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? Challenges to Corporate and Class Dominance, 6th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010); and Joseph G. Peschek, “The Obama Presidency and the Great Recession: Political Economy, Ideology, and Public Policy,” New Political Science 33:4 (2011), pp. 429–444.

³¹ The role of capital accumulation and business confidence is discussed in Michael A. Genovese, The Presidential Dilemma: Leadership in the American System, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 2003), pp. 73–79.

³² See Miroff, Pragmatic Illusions; see also Kim McQuaid, Big Business and Presidential Power: From FDR to Reagan (New York: William Morrow, 1982); Laurence H. Shoup, The Carter Presidency and Beyond (Palo Alto, CA: Ramparts, 1982); Alan Wolfe, America's Impasse: The Rise and Fall of the Politics of Growth (New York: Pantheon, 1981); Alan Wolfe, “Presidential Power and the Crisis of Modernization,” democracy 1:2 (1981), pp. 19–32; Grover, The President as Prisoner; and Jacobs and King, “Varieties of Obamaism.” Please note that the journal democracy was always spelled with a lower case “d.”

³³ Miroff, Pragmatic Illusions, p. 272.

³⁴ Wolfe, America's Impasse, p. 237. See also his “Presidential Power and the Crisis of Modernization,” for an insightful discussion of how the presidency came to be used as the instrument through which American capitalism modernized and expanded.

³⁵ Wolfe, “Presidential Power and the Crisis of Modernization,” pp. 27–28.

³⁶ Wolfe, America's Impasse. For an account of the decline of the long wave of US expansion after World War II, see Robert Reich, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future (New York: Vintage, 2011), particularly Chs. 3 and 6.

³⁷ Charles Lindblom, “The Market as Prison,” The Journal of Politics 44:2 (1982), p. 4. See also his seminal work Politics and Markets: The World's Political and Economic Systems (New York: Basic Books, 1977), and Waddell, “When the Past is Not Prologue.”

³⁸ Grover, The President as Prisoner, pp. 3–4.

³⁹ Cass Sunstein, a senior White House advisor on regulatory reform, as quoted in Robert Kuttner, A Presidency in Peril: The Inside Story of Obama's Promise, Wall Street's Power, and the Struggle to Control our Economic Future (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2010), pp. xvi–xvii.

⁴⁰ Peschek, “The Obama Presidency and the Great Recession,” p. 444.

⁴¹ Frank Rich, “Obama's Original Sin,” New York Magazine, July 3, 2011.

⁴² Larissa MacFarquhar, “The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming From?” The New Yorker, May 7, 2007.

⁴³ See Paul Street, “Obama, As Predicted,” ZNet, November 22, 2009. Street wrote some thirty articles detailing the likely conventional path Obama would take if elected, in preparation for his book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2009). New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman found many reasons to be skeptical of the branding of Obama as a progressive force; among them see, “The Obama Agenda,” The New York Times, June 30, 2008.

⁴⁴ Burns, The Power to Lead. See also Kuttner, A Presidency in Peril, p. xvii.

⁴⁵ Krugman, “The Obama Agenda.”

⁴⁶ Kevin Mattson, “What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?” Jimmy Carter, America's “Malaise,” and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), p. 157. For an analysis of attempts by political scientists to rehabilitate Carter's presidency, see William F. Grover and Joseph G. Peschek, “The Rehabilitation of Jimmy Carter and the Limits of Mainstream Analysis,” Polity 23:1 (1990), pp. 139–152.

⁴⁷ Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2007).

⁴⁸ See Joseph Stiglitz, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” Vanity Fair, May, 2011.

⁴⁹ Ibid. See also Joseph Stiglitz, “The Price of Inequality,” Project Syndicate, June 20, 2012.

⁵⁰ “Remarks by the President on the Economy in Osawatomie, Kansas,” The White House, December 6, 2011.

⁵¹ Bill McKibben, “Global Warming's Terrifying New Math,” Rolling Stone, August 2, 2012.

⁵² Ibid.

⁵³ Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010), p. 25.

⁵⁴ Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Cost and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2000); see also Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (New York: Henry Holt, 2006); and Chalmers Johnson, Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope (New York: Henry Holt, 2010). The 865 base figure can be found in Dismantling the Empire, p. 183, and in Katrina vanden Heuval, “Around the Globe, US Military Bases Generate Resentment, Not Security,” The Nation, June 13, 2011. It is based on the Pentagon's official 2008 inventory.

⁵⁵ See Joseph G. Peschek, “The Obama Presidency and the Politics of ‘Change’ in Foreign Policy,” New Political Science 32:2 (2010), pp. 272–278.

⁵⁶ Quoted in ibid.

⁵⁷ Andrew Bacevich, quoted in Grover and Peschek, Voices of Dissent, p. 4.

⁵⁸ Paul Street, The Empire's New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2010).

⁵⁹ Elizabeth Sanders, “Executor-in-Chief,” In These Times, January, 2013, p. 28.

⁶⁰ McKibben, Deep Economy, pp. 2–3. On the need for a sustainable economic outlook, see also Tom Wessels, The Myth of Progress: Toward a Sustainable Future (Burlington, VT: University of Vermont Press, 2006); and Steven Stoll, “The Mismeasure of All Things: How GDP Distorts Economic Reality,” Orion Magazine, September/October, 2012.

⁶¹ Quoted in Grover and Peschek, Voices of Dissent, p. 3.

⁶² Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994), p. 208.

⁶³ See Patricia Siplon and William F. Grover, “Congressional Inertia: Iron Triangles Old and New,” in Grover and Peschek, Voices of Dissent, pp. 220–228.

⁶⁴ Jacobs and King, “Varieties of Obamaism.”

⁶⁵ For a thought-provoking analysis of “spectacle” as a form of presidential persuasion that weakens democratic values, see Bruce Miroff, “The Presidential Spectacle,” in Michael Nelson (ed.), The Presidency and the Political System, 7th ed. (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006), pp. 255–282.

⁶⁶ Klein, “Gulf Oil Spill: A Hole in the World.”

⁶⁷ Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2006), p. 189.

⁶⁸ The limits and possibilities of such a sustained social movement were brought into stark relief by the Occupy Wall Street movement in the fall of 2011 when income and wealth inequality, framed as the 1% vs the 99%, and the structure of class privilege generally, entered mainstream political discourse worldwide.