I will never forget a particular spring day in 1981, back before everyone was connected to media and social media 24/7. After spending all morning in the library, I walked to my office at the University of Minnesota, where I studied in the political science doctoral program.
Even in that short walk, I could tell something was wrong. People seemed grim. Some listened intently to radios, which provided news in the days before Apple and Google. I wondered if we were at war.
At my office, a fellow graduate student solemnly explained, "someone shot the president."
Assuming from her tone that President Reagan was mortally wounded, I replied, "That's a shame. Reagan seemed like a nice guy ... but you know, I do think that [Vice President] Bush will be a better president."
This horrified my colleague. How could I even think such a thing, much less say it? I explained that perhaps due to Sicilian roots, to me, a president is just a politician: "I mean it's not like somebody shot my dad."
America is a great nation of strong institutions and mainly decent, hardworking people whether its president is Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Jimmy Carter, or Ronald McDonald. (I should have thrown Donald Trump in the mix.)
Yet to my colleague and to most Americans, a president is not just a politician; a president symbolizes our nation, like the American flag. Attacking the president is attacking the nation in a way that assaulting a member of Congress or the U.S. Supreme Court is not. Attempting to murder an American president is like attempting to murder America. On the other side, an embarrassing president embarrasses us all.
To put this in context, my appalled colleague rarely voted Republican, and certainly never voted for Reagan. Our doctoral program had only two out-of-the-closet Reagan voters: me, and an oddball leftist convinced that Reagan would wreck the nation, paving the way for Marxist revolution. (He is now a senior professor at a prestigious university. Go figure.)
How did reasonable people, even mainstream (not oddball) political scientists come to conflate the presidency with America?
As political scientists like the late Theodore Lowi show, American infatuation with presidents grew gradually. In the early 20th century, progressive faith in expert bureaucracies and distrust of our constitutional separation of powers led intellectuals to exalt the leader of the federal bureaucracy, the president. Radio, television, and today social media allowed presidents to reach people directly in ways that 535 members of Congress and 50 governors cannot. America's rise as a superpower empowered presidents, who have more influence in defense policy than domestic policy since warfare requires unified command. As political scientist Nelson Polsby quipped, "The founding fathers never meant Congress to move fast on its 1,070 feet."
For all these reasons and more, while 19th century presidential speeches tended to be narrow and legalistic, 20th and 21st century versions resemble the Sermon on the Mount. Modern presidents promise far more than they can deliver. Yet placing so much faith in a single leader better fits communist or authoritarian systems: It seems more Cuban than American. Having an emotional attachment to a president undermines the objectivity voters need to keep politicians accountable. It fosters fake news and groupthink.
Political scientists Jeffrey Cohen and Costas Panagopoulos report survey data from the mid-2000s showing that Democratic voters were incapable of admitting that, pre-2007, the George W. Bush economy grew at a healthy pace. A few years later, the shoe was on the other foot, with Republicans unable to acknowledge strong job growth in the final Barack Obama years.
Combined with large, sycophantic presidential staffs, voter groupthink promotes presidential groupthink. President George W. Bush failed to plan the Iraq occupation, and then failed for years to acknowledge that failure. President Obama failed to even trial test the healthcare.gov website, much less recognize that reinventing a fifth of the economy might require more planning than a political campaign.
Such cluelessness isn't impeachable, but maybe it should be.
Though President Donald Trump's bark is worse than his bite, the distance between his ego and reality makes Bush and Obama seem downright humble.
On this Presidents Day, consider that we might all be better off if we emotionally compartmentalize how we view the presidency from how we view the country. The American founders intended to limit government so we can seek meaning not in some distant politician, but in our faiths, our friends, our families, and ourselves.
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Robert Maranto ([email protected]) is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and serves on his local school board. The thoughts expressed here are his alone.
Editorial on 02/19/2018