Elisabeth Bumiller: Should We Pay Any Attention to the Promises the Candidates Make?
Elisabeth Bumiller, in the NYT (oct. 26, 2004):
LYNDON JOHNSON famously declared during the 1964 presidential campaign that he was ''not about to send American boys 9,000 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing themselves.'' Woodrow Wilson campaigned for re-election in 1916, the year before the United States entered World War I, on a promise of peace and prosperity. And George W. Bush pledged in 2000 that he would have a ''humble'' foreign policy without nation-building.
As more than 100 million Americans head to the polls next Tuesday to participate in the great democratic experience of a presidential election, history prompts some tough questions:
Don't wars and terrorism overpower any president, offering what can feel like an inevitable course of action? Adding in the possibility that a president will inherit a recalcitrant Congress, or that he may even change his mind, does it really matter what the candidates say during the long months of a campaign? And if what they say about their positions doesn't matter, then is there some better way to judge how a candidate will perform in the Oval Office?
To tackle the first question first, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, would seem to make the case that unforeseen events trump the ''great man'' theory of history, meaning that individual presidents matter far less than the times in which they govern. President Bush's supporters argue that his response to the attacks was more far-reaching than the attacks themselves, and that his leadership was more important than the circumstances.
Most historians say the man and the event both matter.
''Interpreting that is the dilemma that all historians face,'' said Robert A. Caro, who is working on the last book of a four-volume study of the life of President Johnson. ''Events and the individual interact. If you think of history as I do, as an equation with a lot of factors -- economic forces, political forces -- one factor is certainly the personality of the president. Sometimes it's a large factor, sometimes it's a small one, and sometimes it's quite a large factor, as in the case of the guy I'm writing about.''
Consider whether Al Gore would have marched into Baghdad in March 2003. ''None of us believe we would be fighting in Iraq under a Gore presidency,'' said Fred I. Greenstein, a Princeton professor and the author of ''Personality and Politics.''
''Certainly we don't believe we'd have the same tax structure. Kerry and Bush will both face Iraq in a similar way, but they'll be night and day on other issues like stem cells.''
Some historians argue that who is president now matters more than ever in an era of American global dominance and a White House that has steadily amassed power from Congress.
''You don't have to subscribe to the great man theory, because it's the 'great president' theory,'' said the historian Robert Dallek, the author of a recent biography of John F. Kennedy. While the 19th century was largely a period of weak presidents who ceded authority to Congress, the years since Theodore Roosevelt have produced increasingly powerful chief executives who have set the agendas at home and waged wars overseas.
President Bush's doctrine of pre-emption and the invasion of Iraq have taken those powers to new levels; a president can clearly determine events if his policy is not to wait until events force his hand.
''Look at Bush with the Iraq war,'' Mr. Dallek said. ''The Congress was so intimidated.''
In 1940, said the historian David M. Kennedy, ''it made a whale of a difference that Franklin Roosevelt was president.'' Roosevelt spent years talking reluctant Americans into World War II, and had he not been president, scholars agree that history would have looked very different.
''That's a moment when the consequences of personality and the impact of an individual on historical events is really quite large,'' he said. ''But those moments are very rare.''
Roosevelt, on the other hand, campaigned on a promise to balance the budget, an absurd pledge with the hindsight of World War II.
"Campaign rhetoric is crazy, and people in this country kind of know it," Mr. Dallek said. "They're not stupid. When Kerry says Bush is going to have a draft and they're going to privatize Social Security, it's kind of who can out-flim-flam whom. It's all campaign nonsense.