A standing line is that a McCain Presidency would be four more years of George Bush’s policies. But I’ve long argued that it’s surprising how virtually all Presidents wind up with very close to the same policy results regardless of which party they’re in, because the system more or less mandates it (having to get stuff through Congress virtually guarantees a President will only get things that most of the country broadly agrees with) and because every President inherits the problems and challenges left by his predecessor. It is remarkable how stable the system really is as a result, as chaotic as it so often seems when you look at the day-to-day minutia (or what is sometimes called the “sausage-making process” because it may look ugly to watch made but the end result is usually a pretty predictable piece of sausage).
Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen don’t say it the way I do, but they do basically agree that a President Obama will be pretty much a continuation of Bush policies. Bush will go down in history as having established one important doctrine, and like all Presidents will have a lot of his unfinished business dealt with by his successor.
I think they said it well on page 2:
A lesson of the Bush binge is the awesome weight of the choice for president. His eight years of surprises show that you never know exactly what you’re voting for.
He ran as a compassionate conservative who promised to practice a humble foreign policy and to restrain domestic spending. Instead, he launched two big wars and oversaw the biggest expansion of federal government in history.
He was obviously shaped by big events: the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001, and now the meltdown of the nation’s financial structure. They serve as a powerful reminder that what candidates say during these campaigns usually isn’t the best guide to how they will govern in office.
No, it really isn’t a very good guide. No matter how sincere a President’s policy proposals are, events change. This is also why a lot of us argue that it’s much more sensible to vote based on character and how you broadly believe a President will govern. Which is actually how most voters do vote, and for all those snooty folks who look down on the average voter for that, I think time has shown that it works well.
By the way, I also suspect Bush will be treated well by history, and in the mind of most voters, once he’s been out of office for a while–and maybe not even all that long after he leaves office.
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This is also why a lot of us argue that it’s much more sensible to vote based on character and how you broadly believe a President will govern. Which is actually how most voters do vote, and for all those snooty folks who look down on the average voter for that, I think time has shown that it works well.
The snooty intellectual elite in me wants to know – how do we know it works well? We know it doesn’t work too badly (here we are, after all) but if that is how people have always voted, I’m not sure we have actual examples of another approach to evaluate the current method against.Â
Well, empirically speaking, we remain the strongest economic and military power in the world, and we live longer and easier lives than anyone living under non-democratic systems (which have also been proven to be the best at preventing war and famine and disease). So far if there’s some better yardstick, I don’t know what it is.
I’m pretty sure there’s a tie here to why the Delphi method works, and why they’re now successfully using predictions markets on all sorts of things that have nothing to do with making money.
I think that in aggregate, intelligence is a real quantity, and the voting process tends to smooth the errors resulting from people who are nutty and irresponsible.
But really: in short, so far so good. World still not gone from nuclear annihilation, lifespans continue to improve, and our worst financial crises of the last 100 years look like a wealthy paradise to most people living in most third-world countries (and throughout most of history). We must be doing something right, even if most of us tend to always think things are going to hell in a handbasket.
Oh, I don’t personally think that things are going to hell in a handbasket, at least not societally, and I’m not suggesting that democracy itself is broken. I just question whether we can really know that it wouldn’t improve things if candidates were more honest about their views on specific subjects and if the average voter had more knowledge about those views.
I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that, even though the position carries monikers such as “Commander in Chief†and “Leader of the Free World†, the president of the US is actually in a very weak position. Â
The only real power he has is the ability to veto legislation.  He can’t create legislation himself. So most goals or objectives can only be obtained through persuasion and consensus building with congress.Â
And even when the stars align themselves and one party controls both legs of congress and the presidency, there is usually enough disagreement (regional, social, class based, purely intellectual, etc.) to put a damper on extreme change.  And then there is always that next election looming around the corner….
…the president of the US is actually in a very weak position…
…The only real power he has is the ability to veto legislation…
I’m getting it, the
voters electoral collegeare  is actually voting for whom to bless with the power to veto legislation.And the rest is a big pile of mush (think Zell Miller), so we can end up with either a left wing liberal socialist President or a right of center maverick socialist President.
As Colin Powell once stated:
"Only the mediocre do things well consistently".
The President’s real power has always come from his very strong power as far as foreign policy goes. Treaties have to be ratified by the Senate, but even then most treaties give the President a lot of power of interpretation. Essentially, foreign policy is his to decide first and foremost. And, as Commander in Chief, he has an enormous amount of power to set military policy within the U.S. and even more outside U.S. borders. He’s very close to being a King constrained only by the purse strings of a Parliament in that regard; he can’t declare a major war, but he can order air, naval, and even troop strikes and all sorts of military action, overt and especially covert, with really surprisingly little Congress can do about a lot of it besides squawk. And some of it they’re not even allowed to squawk about publicly, or even know about if they’re not on certain select committees. (And yes, for the paranoid who haven’t paid attention, that’s been true for decades and is nothing new for the Bush administration, no matter what they told you over at Huffington Post or Daily Kos.)
This is why, while I do have faith that the system basically works pretty damn well (or has so far), and I do have a great deal of faith that on aggregate the voters usually make the right decisions and shouldn’t be looked down upon for not carefully scrutinizing minute policy proposals, I do wish more voters would take foreign policy more seriously. Because honestly, the President’s role of Commander In Chief isn’t just a fucking slogan; it’s actually where the vast majority of his real power lies, and every President uses it very extensively and often quite unilaterally.
They can bicker over tax rates if they want; the Hillary ad was right, who DO you want answering the phone at 3am? That’s not a fucking joke, that’s really what the President does most of the time.
By the way, as another point a lot of people often miss: almost all Presidents, especially since the 1940s, wind up spending the later years of their Presidency focused almost obsessively on foreign policy and trying to build a legacy there. It’s not that they lose interest, but after years of fighting with Congress and the courts, all the energy they had for those fights on domestic issues becomes draining and they realize sooner or later that no matter what their successes or failures have been domestically, on foreign policy their ability to actually affect things in a big way is vastly better.
Bush is a little unusual in that foreign policy shot to the top of his agenda and pretty much stayed there only 8 months into his first term because of 9/11. It did change everything for him. Even now, though, most of his time has obviously been spent trying to preserve his gains and minimize his losses on foreign policy; that’s really where he’s got the most room to maneuver, as is true with all Presidents, especially in their last days in office.
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