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Special Report

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TAS:Can any modern presidency be considered successful without a significant expansion of power?

GH:The presidential scholars and historians who participate in the presidential rankings surveys tend to reward presidents who dream big, seize power, and blow things up. They're less forgiving when it comes to presidents who stick to their constitutional role. But in answer to your question -- yes, if we repudiate the demented standards by which presidential "greatness" seems to be judged. There's something to be said for presidents who merely preside over peace and prosperity without screwing it all up. You might even say they're the truly "great" presidents.

TAS:Since we aren't allowed to ignore it, what is the best tack for voters who would like to see executive power ratcheted down to take?

GH:I wish I knew. History suggests that looking at the candidates' positions on the issues is next to useless. As a thought experiment, imagine you had a time machine, and imagine you couldn't think of anything better to do with it than travel back a few years and pester likely voters. Let's say you got in your magic Delorean and went back to October 1992 and told a bunch of Democrats, "Hey, I'm from the future, and you know what? The next president will expand free trade, get rid of the deficit, and end welfare as we know it." They'd be convinced that Bill Clinton lost the 1992 election. And let's say you took your time machine back to the middle of 2000's Battle of the Chad and told a bunch of Republicans, "Listen up, the next president will increase spending, carry out a bloody nation-building campaign in a country that didn't threaten us, and expand the welfare state faster than anyone since LBJ." Those Republicans would be convinced that Al Gore won the 2000 election.

So who knows? I prefer Obama's positions on civil liberties and executive power issues to McCain's, but I also think that as someone publicly perceived to be "soft on terror," Obama will be under enormous pressure to adopt something like a "Bush Lite" constitutional theory if there's another terrorist attack. Moreover, the idea that the Democrats, who invented the Imperial Presidency for crying out loud, are going to get rid of it with a guy who's running as the reincarnation of JFK strikes me as more than a little naive. To get a more restrained presidency in the post-9/11 era, you might actually need a Nixon goes to China dynamic, where a president whose "toughness" is unquestioned is free to ratchet down the atmosphere of permanent crisis. Ike did this somewhat in the early Cold War. McCain's reputation would allow him to do it as well, if he chose. I don't think there's much hope that he would, however. Judging by McCain's record and the people he's surrounded himself with, he's the dream candidate for National Greatness Conservatives who've done so much damage to America over the last seven years.

TAS:The Cult of the Presidency nevertheless ends on a hopeful note. Why do you believe it may be "a dying cult"?

GH:Conservatives -- and some libertarians -- are temperamentally inclined toward narratives of despair: "It's getting worse all the time." I'm pretty much wired that way myself. But it's worth considering the case for optimism, because that case is not nearly as bad as the pessimists might like. The fact is, Americans' orientation toward the presidency is far less cultish than it used to be. In the book, I use a quote from Nixon's chief of staff H.R. Haldeman. In the Watergate tapes, Nixon and Haldeman are discussing what to do about the leak of the Pentagon Papers, and Haldeman says that what's really bad about the release of this information is that "the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the President wants to do even though it's wrong, and the President can be wrong."

"The implicit infallibility of presidents"! No one today would use that phrase with a straight face, let alone suggest it was "an accepted thing in America." Whenever trust in government goes down, you get these earnest conferences at the Brookings Institution lamenting the "trust crisis." But surely it's a good thing that we no longer have 75 percent of Americans trusting the federal government to do what is right all or most of the time. And it's a good thing that our culture has grown far more irreverent and impious toward individual presidents, if not the presidency itself. What's unfortunate is that even though the amount of trust we invest in government has gone down to a more realistic level, the demands we place on the federal government -- and especially the presidency -- are as unhinged as ever. We still expect the president to "create jobs," teach our children well, cure our spiritual "malaise," and provide seamless protection from any conceivable foreign threat. Those demands virtually guarantee a frightening concentration of power in the executive branch.

TAS:You argue toward the end of The Cult of the Presidency that "Skepticism toward power is our constitutional birthright, and it teaches us that in politics, wherever there's a promise, there's an unspoken threat."

GH:A healthier political culture would follow the Framers not just in their skepticism toward power, but in their sense that the federal government was one of limited responsibilities and limited powers. Until we restore that sense of limits, I'm afraid that we're going to get more of the same, no matter who becomes president.

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Foreign Policy, Trade, Bill Clinton, Television, Constitution, Law, Conservatism