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What Makes for a Strong President?

by Jeffrey Bell

Mr. Bell is a principal of Capital City Partners, a Washington consulting firm.

Just before the recent elections, I half-attentively watched Norman Ornstein explaining to a television interviewer that President Bush was taking an enormous risk by campaigning for so many marginal Republican candidates. The reason I was half-attentive is that it wasn't the first such analysis I'd heard.

The premise of such interviews, though never quite stated, was that Bush was a bit of a dunce for not realizing that he would get blamed if a number of these GOP candidates were to lose. A corollary offered by a number of other analysts (the one I best recall is Larry Sabato) was that Bush would really be better off in 2004 if Congress (or at least the Senate) were in Democratic hands, for then he would have a more plausible scapegoat when things go wrong. If Bush were just a little smarter, he would realize his surest path to reelection is the one followed by Bill Clinton in 1995-96, and he'd be working a little less hard at electing Republicans in 2002.

Though this kind of analysis is, in its own terms, shrewd and intelligent--political leaders really do get blamed for backing losers, and it is undeniably more plausible to spread blame if one's adversaries are seen to share power--it badly misses the mood and feel of the Bush presidency.

Regardless of agreement or disagreement with the objectives of George W. Bush, it should be obvious by now that this is the first strong presidency since the 1980s. The Reagan era was two decades ago, so maybe some of us have forgotten what strong presidencies are like. Maybe some of us didn't even recognize how strong a president Ronald Reagan was at the time. He did have a habit of doing unexpected things that seemed crude and naive, like firing every air traffic controller in the country in his first months in office because he didn't think they should go on strike. Only much later--when we had forgotten the enormous risks Reagan took, and the fears and doubts they generated had lifted--were such acts written up as strength.

So here are a few modest rules of thumb for understanding strong presidents:

(1) Strong presidents seek political power to accomplish specific goals, not to make themselves look good or even to acquire power, or the perception of power, as an end in itself. Strong presidents have nothing against being reelected, but the thought of abdicating a share of power for two precious years to Tom Daschle (in Reagan's day, the roughly equivalent figures were Tip O'Neill and Robert Byrd), on the grounds that such abdication might enhance one's electability, would make a strong president physically ill.

(2) Because strong presidents think in terms of specific goals, they devote a lot of their time to building political support for their goals. Sometimes this takes the form of wooing legislators, including legislators of another political party or ideological persuasion. When polarization and partisanship make such wooing hard if not impossible, that same ambition is likely to take the form of aiding the election of candidates who can be counted on to support one's goals. The differing political climates of Austin 1995 and Washington 2001 fully account for the seeming contradiction between the legendary bipartisanship of Governor Bush and the fierce, relentless, highly effective partisanship we witnessed in the President Bush of the 2002 off-year election cycle.

(3) While strong presidents are hardly oblivious to calculations of risk and lost prestige, their orientation toward specific goals makes them far more interested in building loyalty. Undoubtedly there were strong arguments against the president's multiple appearances for candidates thought very likely to lose. But the other side of the coin is this: Try to picture a future time or situation when the president will be refused the help of Senator Wayne Allard of Colorado.

(4) Strong presidencies are not generated by the nature of the times they live in or the problems they deal with. William McKinley was a strong president who bequeathed an enhanced foreign and domestic hand to his successor, Theodore Roosevelt. But because Roosevelt was from his first moment in office a strong president, he took that strong hand and found ways to make it even stronger. As for George W. Bush, the vital signs of a strong presidency were evident well before 9/11, when against all the expectations of his 50-50 election, he demanded from Congress and largely got a sizable tax cut as his first order of business rather than the watered-down version everyone assumed he would settle for.

(5) Strong presidents tend to be selective in their agenda at any given point of their presidency. They greatly value focus. They are hard to divert from any issue or task they have decided is their center of gravity, as has so obviously been the case with Bush in regard to the war on terrorism in the last 14 months. In Isaiah Berlin's typology, a strong president is far more likely to be a hedgehog than a fox (the infinitely knowledgeable and voluble Bill Clinton is the epitome of a fox).

(6) The critics and political opponents of strong presidents often mistake their hedgehog-like methods and focus for a kind of tunnel vision. In the past year, for example, it might have been plausible for Tom Daschle to assume that, because the majority leader and most Democrats avoided obstructionist tactics on anything directly relating to the war, he could pretty well have his way, or at least exert an absolute veto, on almost everything else. Bush did little, directly, to disabuse him of this assumption, other than quietly lay the groundwork for the most elaborate, most comprehensive, and most partisan intervention by a president in an off-year election in American history.

Strong presidents tend not to get visibly mad, and are even willing to look weak and ineffectual for extended periods of preparation. But in cases where they feel their power to achieve their goals is in danger of being called into question, they do have their ways of altering the playing field. It's a lesson Minority Leader Daschle will not soon forget.