What the skit captures is the suspension of disbelief at the start of most Presidencies—that moment when a good number of Americans are able to convince themselves that we might be in the presence of a great man, and that his greatness will be manifest. That this is the man who has the answers. When it becomes clear that he doesn’t, we never quite forgive him for it.
This is where we stand right now with President Obama. There are two years left in his tenure, but we are already in the process of writing him off. The Atlantic is calling him “our passé President”; at a rally in Maryland on Sunday, while Obama delivered a campaign speech, dozens of people drifted out of the auditorium. Yet he is still, of course, our President, and we still, on some level, expect heroics. Deep down, we don’t want Obama to appoint an “Ebola czar.” We want him to march into the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, set some new protocols, and put this unpleasant business behind us. Instead, to quell our Ebola freak-out, Obama “hugged and kissed … a couple of the nurses” at a hospital in Atlanta, which, really, is an assignment Joe Biden could have taken.
We are a long way from the ideal Presidency—the kind on display for fourteen hours in “The Roosevelts,” Ken Burns’s new documentary, which aired last month on PBS. Granted, any President—Warren Harding, Millard Fillmore—given the Burns treatment would emerge a monument, but the greatness of Franklin Roosevelt (and, to a lesser extent, his cousin Theodore) is beyond serious question. “Who else among his twelve successors can compete?” asks Aaron David Miller in “The End of Greatness,” a thoughtful new book on Presidential performance. “In almost every category—including longevity, impact, wartime leadership, media mastery, durability of coalition, ensuring party control—F.D.R. seems to have cornered the market.”
By Miller’s reckoning—and he is hardly alone here—F.D.R. is the last “undeniably great president” this country has seen. “Our challenges today,” he argues, “are varied and diffused, our politics too broken and dysfunctional and unforgiving to be resolved by a single or a series of heroic presidential actions.” Though Miller thinks “acts of greatness in the presidency are still possible,” he insists that “we cannot have another giant”—and “seldom need one” at this stage in our national development. It is time, he concludes, for America to “get over the greatness thing” and “come to terms with the limits of a president’s capacity to fix things.”
The current President would most likely agree. Despite the grand hopes and hype of the 2008 campaign, this tempering of ambitions, this recognition—and acceptance—of the constraints on Presidential power has been a leitmotif of the Obama Presidency. In an interview with David Remnick published earlier this year, Obama talked about “that business about the great-man theory of history. The President of the United States cannot remake our society, and that’s probably a good thing. Not ‘probably,’ ” he added. “It’s definitely a good thing.” Over the years, Obama and his advisors have issued a long string of statements to this effect: on foreign policy, “leading from behind” (2011); on the limits of executive authority, “there’s no shortcut to democracy” (2013); on civil rights, we must sometimes take “a quarter of a loaf or half a loaf” (2014).
It is both easy and fashionable to ridicule such comments (“Stop whining, Mr. President. And stop whiffing,” Maureen Dowd snarked last spring), but they are laudable in important respects. In our system of self-government, you’ve got your checks and you’ve got your balances, but there is no limit more powerful than a President’s sense of restraint. Even as they expanded the power and reach of their office, our greatest Presidents have made compromises, taken half-steps, and stayed within the boundaries prescribed by the Constitution. One of the most significant and under-acknowledged accomplishments of F.D.R. was his refusal to assume dictatorial powers in 1933, despite calls for him to do so. (“A mild species of dictatorship will help us over the roughest spots in the road ahead,” a Barron’s columnist wrote.) Americans often issue a mandate for “change,” but seldom for revolution.
So, for all our disappointment over the fact that Obama’s Presidency has been—in the parlance of the political scientists—more transactional than transformational, we should probably stop knocking him for not being Lincoln (even if it was Obama himself who encouraged the comparison). Or for not being Roosevelt, or Lyndon Baines Johnson. At the same time, Obama should stop downplaying the power of the office he holds. Every time he tamps down our expectations, it sounds like an excuse, whether for inaction or ineffectiveness or both. Obama is a realist, a grownup; in his first inaugural address, he implored the American people, “in the words of the Scripture … to set aside childish things.” Yet our persistent hope for a strong and good and even a great President is not altogether a childish thing. We might not need all of our Presidents to be great, but we can’t afford to have them stop trying.
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com/
Author: BY JEFF SHESOL
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