Presidential Standards and Fitness

Photo by 1897 photograph, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Andrew Donaldson’s musings upon the shortcomings of modern American Presidents reminded me of a mental process of disappointment and acceptance I went through myself some time ago. For me, it had to do with the U.S. Supreme Court; for Andrew, the final step of grudging acceptance of the dreary reality is not yet complete. I should hope for his sake that it never is.

For me, studying Constitutional law and the role of the courts in transforming our society and culture was an optimistic course of study that began midway through my undergraduate years and carried through law school. What seemed to me to be a great and good shift in American history had occurred: the courts as an institution were turned into active, powerful, and forceful implementers of justice. Judges stood sentinel over our individual rights and demanded that America, as a polity and as a culture, start living up to the high ideals articulated in our founding documents and laws. Yes, the Supreme Court is a political football, but especially when I was a newly-minted lawyer I could look at the appointment of no less legendary a lawyer than Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a sign that the High Court was going to have people on it, heroic people like Thurgood Marshall, people who would make sure that law lives up to its promise. And whether I agreed with him or not, there was still another swashbuckler on SCOTUS named Antonin Scalia, whose abilities as a writer and a thinker have, possibly permanently, changed what the Court does and how it does it; here too was a larger-than-life leader, someone with a vision.¹ And they would clash, collegially but forcefully, and in this clash, competing visions of the law’s potential for justice would be on display for all to see!

Alas. that youthful idealism is mostly gone from me now. In fact, the Court has for most of its history lacked heroic figures on its bench, lacked Justices with steady, noble moral visions, lacked people able to rise above their own interests and political origins to steer the law towards a greater good. I admire the Court during the time of Earl Warren’s influence, but the Court was behaving exceptionally, not at baseline, during those years. Even Chief Justice Warren is subject to criticism; he certainly was political, although that criticism usually comes from people who think he was too political in the wrong direction, people calling themselves “conservatives.”

The dreary reality is that while it’s surely the case that most judges want to do the right thing to the extent they can most of the time, justice always takes a back seat to law, and law has ever been made the handmaiden of the powerful. And even Justice Scalia’s evangelism for a new paradigm has at least become, if not actually was all along, an appliqué upon the very elevation of political policy preferences that it purported to combat. In short, the Court is today reverting to its historical norm.

As for Presidents, we have a lot more Tylers, Pierces, Harrisons, Coolidges, and Fords in our history than either Washingtons and Lincolns on the one hand, or Nixons and Buchanans on the other. I read Andrew’s essay as his realization that petty to mid-level corruption, mendacity, and mediocrity in the Oval Office has been the historical norm, not the exception.

Here’s a thought experiment to validate that claim: rank the Presidents. All of them. You’ve got forty-five names (Grover Cleveland only gets one tile in this game because, come on, he’s Grover Cleveland). You’ll probably approach the task the way I would: first break them up into tiers, and then sort within the tiers. In the top tier are almost certainly Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, probably FDR and maybe TR and maybe one or two more. In the bottom tier would be people like Nixon and Buchanan and maybe these days Wilson and for me at least, Trump. (YMMV.) How one would tier and rank more recent Presidents likely reveals more about one’s current political identification than a more sober historical judgment — I don’t pretend immunity from this phenomenon, and you probably shouldn’t, either.

But in between your easy top five or so, and your easy bottom five or so, are about thirty-five other names. You can break them down into B-C-D tiers or just leave them all lumped into a single middle category. The game forces you to decide whether Benjamin Harrison was better or worse than Zachary Taylor, but chances are pretty good that both of them are going to be somewhere in the soupy middle. One of them was a lot more corrupt but more politically competent than the other, if you care about those sorts of things and have some principled way of comparing them. As you scan the center of the list of the Presidents you’ve just ranked, contemplate how many men in that mediocre middle you’d have rolled your eyes at had you been asked to vote for them, how few of them you’d have been genuinely excited about.

Andrew, I feel your disappointment at this realization. I feel the hollowness it leaves. A President like Joe Biden, who may be well-intentioned but is also all too human, is what we get — it’s what we almost always have got. Of course we want demigods like George Washington. Or at least, people who seem like the demigod we imagine Washington to have been, through the soft-focused lens of the passage of a sufficient amount of time and accumulation of a sufficient volume of hagiography.² The fact is, President Joe Biden is business as usual, which was certainly something we needed after his predecessor but also something that feels like a missed opportunity.

That disappointing reality doesn’t mean we shouldn’t demand better, of course. But we shouldn’t be surprised that people in public service are generally of their times, not ahead of them. (This applies to the Founding Generation of Presidents too.) We ought not wonder at why the kinds of people we admire look elsewhere than public office. The Presidency comes with some good perqs like the use of Air Force One and some pretty nice long weekend digs at Camp David, but some rather less desirable parts of even seeking the job, much less doing it, include intense and lensed public scrutiny and criticism for everything that goes wrong whether you were responsible for it or not, a lack of universally appealing options to implement, hard and sometimes bloody decisions, necessary compromises with people of distastefully different opinions, and endless begging for campaign money. Especially when for a lot of people we might consider, taking the job may well involve taking a pay cut.

Is it really the case that anything less than George Washington stepping away from the Presidency is an intolerably sharp moral step down? if so, our standards for moral virtue in the Presidency are simply unrealistically high; we doom ourselves to perpetual disappointment. Part of reaching civic maturity is achieving the understanding that human beings hold political office, not angels. If we were angels, we would have no need of government; if we were governed by angels, we would not need to put controls on the way they governed us. I seem to remember reading that somewhere once upon a time.

May I suggest another thought exercise in response to Andrew’s piece then? Imagine what an ideal President for the early twenty-first century would be like. Use that vision the way an author would, and come up with your own Jeb Bartlett or James Marshall. Take a few moments with a piece of scrap paper, or your phone’s note-taking app, or whatever you have. Write down five words describing this President. Adjectives, or if not single-word adjectives, then very short descriptive phrases. Here’s mine, yours may and probably will vary.

• Good judge of other people
• Smart (defined as “assimilates new information quickly and effectively”)
• Inspirational
• Practical
• Compassionate, empathetic

I limited the list to five qualities, so “Integrity” maybe ought to be on the list, but no, I said five. Five, damnit! The point of limits on lists is to prioritize.

Now from there, take a look at who’s actually out there. We don’t really have a Thomas J. Whitmore to vote for, and we wouldn’t really want to be put into such dire straits as to need his Independence Day speech. But we do have to pick from real people, and generally speaking, people who are working their way up through the ranks of government now. People like Governors and Senators.

I’m not so sure that there aren’t plausible choices out there working their way up through the ranks of our government who possess at least several of these qualities. For the Democrats, I see some of them in people like Gretchen Whitmer, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Andy Beshear, and Raphael Warnock. I see a lot of these traits in some Republicans, too — Nikki Haley comes most immediately to mind, although I’m also starting to hear some good things about the junior Senator from Alabama, Katie Britt. If you’re a Republican you probably have a better sense of who’s on your farm team than I do.

Now, I’m not saying that all these people have all of the traits I mentioned. Empathy seems to be in particularly short supply these days, but then again I may be spending too much time on social media, which is a great sap on anyone’s empathy. And I’m not saying that I would vote for all of these people. But I am saying that these are people who seem like plausible choices, people who while flawed, don’t seem like they would be as awful as Trump (who, in my opinion, possesses zero of the leadership qualities on my list of things I’d look for in a President).

The system has given us Biden versus Trump again in 2024. That’s done, so far as I can tell. We got Biden because he’s the incumbent. Well, of course we got Biden. We got Trump because Trump has… I don’t know, imposed some sort of weird thrall over his party. I know some of the more conservative voices in the commentariat here are very unhappy about that, and they aren’t alone. So that’s a problem Republicans have to solve also, in addition to searching for real people who can exhibit the kinds of leadership traits we need in a President.

But I don’t think it’s time to despair. I think improvements happen gradually and over time. And they happen intentionally. So if you want to grumble about the lack of fitness and standards for the Presidency, I think you should start by articulating what those standards are, and even then temper those standards by an understanding that just about all of our Presidents in the past have fallen short of them, and as a nation that moves through history we’ve actually done just fine notwithstanding.

1. Here, I cite to Justice Elena Kagan’s now-famous 2015 observation that “…we are all textualists now,” although the demon of insistence upon completeness compels me to note that she walked that quip back two years ago while holding her conservative Brethren to task in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, 597 U.S. ___ (2022) (Kagan, J. dissenting, see part III).
2. Alas, George Washington himself was no demigod but rather a human being with his own moral failures and personal shortcomings. While he had the goods to deliver in terms of military prowess, he also had a very healthy ego about it; he was a slaveholder; there’s substantial circumstantial evidence that he cheated on Martha with a woman named Sally Fairfax.