There was a kerfuffle last week when Gov Palin answered a question from a seven year old in which she said the Vice President was "in charge" of the Senate. There are too many other reasons to disqualify Gov Palin from the vice presidency that parsing what she meant by this, or whether she was employing a way of speaking to a child that was not in keeping with the generally accepted view of the vice-presidency.
My question is a bit more serious. What is it that the President does?
Maybe it is because I am a New Englander by birth, maybe slightly more sensitive to what New Englanders put into motion at Bunker Hill or Concord and Lexington. The idea was to abolish the monarchy in this part of the world. I have nothing against the monarchy. I think it works well in England to separate the ceremonial needs of a country from the obligations of the government. And it is hard to ignore the yearning in this country for a restoration of the monarchy in a supposedly independent country that uses the words "the Queen" to mean, exclusively the Queen of England, and whose obsession with royalty knows no bounds (even if we used the incorrect name "Princess Diana" so much that it spread even back to England, where, presumably, it was understood that she could be "the Princess of Wales" or even "Diana, the Princess of Wales" but not that other name.
Our revolution, however, was supposed to end all of that here. I am not sure why the pull continues or why it concerns me, but as we enter a period of gross economic difficulties, there can be no question that the desire for a "strong leader" can lead to trouble.
I heard a cable tv weekend cutie pie try to discuss Prime Minister Brown's response to the current crisis and what the incoming U.S. President would do, and she described all of this in the context of the "reign" of both, comparing what begins on January 20 as the beginning of a "reign" similar to that which began when President Clinton and the current fool took office.
The word, my young dumbbell, is, of course, "term." It is set in stone. Four years. (The Prime Minister's is not, of course, quite as fixed, but not a "reign" either. The Queen reigns, presumably, until her death. The PM does not.)
But it is not just that. Both Senator McCain and Senator Obama steadfastly use the first person singular in announcing what "I will do." "I will cut your taxes." "I will help the middle class."
But they cannot, "cut my taxes" any more than they can take us to war. We are, as Franklin famously said, a Republic, which we ought to try to keep. I would like to repeal the two limit which is arbitrary and not democratic, but Washington was wise to establish the tradition of two terms, just as President Roosevelt was wise in dispensing with the tradition, with war on the way, and, then, peacetime beckoning in 1944. He died in office, not because of the twelve years in office, but because of heart failure and the country should not be punished for that forever.
But two terms should normally be enough and a president who was allowed to run for a third term should have a huge burden to overcome before trying to get elected since, as Washington understood, it sounds like a monarchy.
What president's do, in my opinion, is propose and lead. The great AMC program Mad Men showed part of President Kennedy's Cuban missile speech last night, and a bit about how Americans reacted. They did not see the crisis as something President Kennedy had to "resolve" but a dangerous situation in which he would try to lead us into safety but which, in the meantime, gave the rest of us things to do, and to think about. I was ten years old that week, and a lot of how scary a time it was escaped me then, but not all of it. But the president told us what was going on and why, and what our government was trying to do about it.
In fact his very first words that horrible evening were to address us a his "fellow citizens" and to say
This Government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military build-up on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive Missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.
Upon receiving the first preliminary hard information of this nature last Tuesday morning at 9 a.m., I directed that our surveillance be stepped up. And having now confirmed and completed our evaluation of the evidence and our decision on a course of action, this Government feels obliged to report this new crisis to you in fullest detail.
This is what I did, and having done this, I am obligated to tell you about it and why because in a Republic, that is what the president does. He does not have the right to simply "trust his gut instinct" as we have been told about the current president and what at least one candidate wants us to rely upon now.
These are serious questions and introduced by the imperial presidency of Nixon, who absolutely though himself to be king (telling David Frost, even after his removal from office, that the President cannot actually violate the law, since, he is the law, a concept that Cheney/Bush have embraced).
In his wake, cabinet officers are no longer seen as servants of the country, but adjuncts of the president: hence, Janet Reno was "President Clinton's Attorney General" and Colin Powell "George W. Bush's Secretary of State." Barbara Walters, famously, asked the incoming President Carter to "be wise with us [and b]e good to us" as if he were ascending to some throne, perhaps with supernatural, if not just royal powers (a comment she instantly regretted, to be fair). This is dangerous nonsense, but has permeated the way we talk these days.
If you think President Roosevelt came close to such a thing, read some history or just think back to the court packing proposal, or his difficulties in preparing an isolationist country for the war he knew we would have to fight. He knew himself not to be a king, but a president.
Let's try to keep it that way.