Our Ceremonial President

...It would only be fair warning...

...The alternative is to enhance the importance of the President as chief executive...

...For years the Republican Right has tried to arouse the American public with tales of skulduggery in Arkansas, ranging from real estate scandals to murder (in the fantasies of the extreme Right...

...Already those concerned to save the House of Windsor are urging its leading members to be more active in seeking favorable publicity—in other words, to compete for popularity with the politicians even as the politicians compete with movie stars...

...One looked like a Hollywood movie star, and the other was a Hollywood movie star...

...The only role both Kennedy and Reagan excelled in was the ceremonial Presidency...

...Partisan liberals have denounced Clinton for betraying his party and its tradition...

...wrote recently...

...He was too Nixonian...

...And yet the same half-attentive citizens are likely to remember that Bill Clinton allegedly rented out the Lincoln Bedroom and that Al Gore's appearance before Buddhist monks is supposed to have been part of a financial shakedown operation...

...It is small wonder, then, that a President as intelligent as Clinton has chosen to emphasize the ceremonial head-ofstate role...

...The White House must share control over the Federal bureaucracy and national security agencies with the jealous barons of Congress and the Judiciary...

...As Thomas S. Langston of Tulane University has suggested, Nixon was a father figure, too—one more appropriate to a Time of Troubles...

...The result was that men who could not be elected today because they looked funny—Abraham Lincoln, for example, or William Howard Taft—could aspire to the highest office in the land...

...Nixon himself was probably possible only in the turmoil of the late '60s and early '70s...

...Unfortunately for the American political class, its conception of the Presidency is quite at odds with the notion of the office that has been evolving for some time among the American public...

...Clinton has been smart, butnot smart enough...

...His recent call for racial reconciliation at a University of California commencement was typical...

...More important, he specialized in ceremonial occasions where he could issue uplifting bromides...

...Tony Blair is a more appealing spokesman for Britain than Queen Elizabeth...

...The camera may be the major factor in the popularity of Presidents who are good at the head-of-state role, however incompetent they are in other respects...

...Charles Tiefer has described the Bush strategy in The SemiSovereign Presidency: The Bush Administration s Strategy for Governing Without Congress...

...Kennedy was as ineffectual as a legislative President, compared with his successor Lyndon Johnson, as Reagan was incompetent as an executive President, compared with his successor George Bush...

...We do not require our Presidents, when they are sworn in, to assume a new name to symbolize the adoption of a new identity, as though they were Popes...

...A number of European commentators have blamed television for the "presidentialization" of parliamentary democracies...

...Like the Judiciary, but unlike the Legislature, the American Presidency is elevated by ritual and setting...

...If the voters in parliamentary regimes begin thinking of the prime minister or chancellor as the symbol of the nation, rather than the leader of a party, parliamentary democracies may find themselves with two heads of state—one with popular legitimacy, and the other with purely constitutional legitimacy...

...This ceremonial President has adopted the mortarboard as his crown...

...Kennedy not only looked good on TV...

...There is a certain ironic justice in this...

...Although he ended up as the unofficial leader of the Federalist Party, George Washington did his best to act as a nonpartisan chief magistrate...

...According to a little-noted poll last year, when Americans were asked which President they wished were in the White House, the two names which came up most frequently, among both Republicans and Democrats, were John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan...

...In vain might Clinton or Gore or their defenders protest by quoting Andrew Marvell: "The same arts that did gain/A Pow'r, must it maintain...

...Often they had only a vague idea of what their candidate looked like...

...It is safe to say that most American political scholars and partisan activists want Presidents to be chief legislators or chief executives, not heads of state...

...Both were at their best performing the duties of a prince or king, like patronizing the arts or memorializing fallen soldiers...

...Harding was an immensely popular President," Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr...

...Clinton's ability to switch roles arises from the peculiarities of the U. S. Constitution...

...By all accounts Bob Dole was one of the most effective Senate majority leaders in the past half century...

...Scholars are unanimous in pronouncing him a Failure...

...Intellectuals and party loyalists find these activities much more interesting and important than greeting Scouts on the White House lawn or delivering funeral eulogies...

...Although the branches of government are of equal dignity in theory, in practice the American public holds its head of state to higher standards than the leaders of the Congress...

...The present era may be dated to 1960, when (it is said) Richard M. Nixon won the debate with Kennedy in the view of those who listened to it on radio, while Kennedy won in the opinion of those who watched it on television...

...His death provoked an outpouring of grief that observers thought unmatched since the death of Lincoln...

...He came into office in 1992 hoping to lead a revival of the Democratic Party after the era of Republican Presidential hegemony...

...Clinton received only 43 per cent of the vote in a three-way race...

...Most people who do not follow politics closely still cannot tell you what Whitewater is about...

...Nor was Clinton the leader of a unified party...

...It was an endorsement of the President as master of ceremonies for the republic...

...The significance of this response is worth pondering...

...Americans want their elected kings to dress like royals...

...It should not be thought that the phenomenon I am describing is limited to the United States...

...A legislative President or an executive President can push desirable reforms through Congress by arm-twisting and televised orations, or through the bureaucracy by executive orders...

...If you want to be Pope of the American civil religion, you cannot rent out its Vatican...

...Unfair or not, the little man behind the screen as well as the Mighty Oz in public must behave in the manner mandated for the Wizard by the expectations of the citizens of the Emerald City...

...In the less traumatic '50s and '80s, the public re-elected Republican Presidents who cultivated the image of benevolent, grandfatherly monarchs, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Reagan...

...In the United States, the ceremonial Presidency seems likely to continue to increase in importance...

...One of the first newsreel Presidents, Warren G. Harding, was thought to have movie-star good looks...

...Sooner or later, one head of state will roll...

...Beginning with the Presidency of Wilson, an academic admirer of parliamentary government, a third function, not envisioned by the Founding Fathers, has been assigned to the President: chief legislator...

...In a way, the resurgence of the ceremonial Presidency marks a return to the earliest conception of the office...

...Liberal...

...The public, however, liked the new, postpartisan Bill Clinton enough to re-elect him...

...What the whistle-stop tour was to Harry S. Truman and Woodrow Wilson, the commencement address is to Clinton...

...one on the TV screen every day, and the other on the currency...

...Liberal...

...But the timing was bad for Presidential partisanship...

...In the Old World, as in the New, television exposure may be favoring younger and better looking candidates, like Britain's John Major and Tony Blair...

...The constitutional implications of the conversion of prime ministers and chancellors into TV stars may be even more profound...

...Instead, he undertook comprehensive health care reform, as though he were Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936 or Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964...

...No doubt this is unfair to the occupant of the White House, who is allowed to campaign ruthlessly on the condition that he adopt a different and higher set of standards once he has won...

...Thinking Aloud OUR CEREMONIAL PRESIDENT By Michael Lind Of all the charges their enemies have made against President Clinton and his Vice President, the only ones that seem to stick are those having to do with the abuse of ceremonial prerogatives...

...Perhaps we should...

...After the Republican capture of Congress in 1994, Clinton reinvented himself as a postpartisan President...

...His re-election was not an endorsement of liberalism, or any -ism...

...Nixon tried this, and so did Bush...

...As a leader representing a minority faction of his party, supported only by a plurality of the electorate, Clinton should have chosen modest goals...

...Another may be the increasing assumption by telegenic prime ministers of the traditional duty of the monarch or figurehead president—symbolizing the nation and speaking on its behalf in periods of crisis...

...The qualities that enable individuals to rise to the top in the House or the Senate are not necessarily the traits the public finds desirable in a head of state, whether he is a governor or a President...

...The great age of the partisan Presidency came later, in the 19th century, when people voted the straight party ticket...

...The response of the public has been a yawn...

...The American republic has been bedeviled from its origins by the fact that the President is, at one and the same time, the head of state and the chief executive, performing functions that are separated in parliamentary regimes, where the head of state is a hereditary monarch or nonpartisan elected figure and the prime minister or chancellor is chief executive...

...The President would be reminded of popular expectations about the majesty of the office if we required its incumbents to become Washington Lincoln IX or Roosevelt Jefferson VI...

...The increasing importance of the headof-state Presidency may explain, among other things, the advantage governors have in winning the White House in modern times...

...Clinton's failure as a partisan President was inevitable under the circumstances...

...In aspiring to the role of a nonpartisan, symbolic President in the mold of Kennedy and Reagan (as they are remembered, rather than as they actually were), Clinton should have realized he was thereby limiting the kind of partisan activities he could undertake from the White House...

...The public, though, saw a stiff, frightening man barking, "Liberal...

...Nixon was the Mean Dad who protects the family by poisoning the neighbor's dog...

...One is the elevation of the prime minister from the chairman of the Cabinet to its master...

...Given the weakness of the parties, a revival of straight-ticket partisan loyalty seems unlikely—and without strong parties obeying direction from the White House, a legislative Presidency is difficult if not impossible...

...He continued his strategy of play ing against type as a New Democrat by promoting more moderate versions of reforms that Republicans favored in areas like welfare and international trade...

...Johnson, though afar greater President than either Kennedy or Reagan, was a prime minister in an era when the people wanted the President to be a king...

...Pundits have dismissed him as a chameleon...

...These trends could eventually erase the major difference between a parliamentary democracy and America's Presidential version...

...in other words, most voters were disappointed that he was elected rather than George Bush or Ross Perot...

...Jimmy Carter's insistence on wearing sweaters may have been as fatal to his legitimacy as the photograph of Weimar Germany's President Friedrich Ebert in red swimming trunks was damaging to democracy in a Germany nostalgic for monarchy...

...After all, nobody knows the advantages of the ceremonial Presidency better than Bill Clinton...

...A chief executive strategy can win victories here and there, but the United States is not France or even Britain...

...A New Democrat, he campaigned against the Old Democrats who constituted most of his party's electoral base and members of Congress...

...What was permissible for Governor Clinton to do in his effort to be elected President was not permissible for President Clinton to do in his effort to be re-elected...

...like Reagan he looked good in a tux...