Mass Politics Dictates the Power of the Presidency

Ronald Reagan is running true to the presidential pattern. Despite his vaunted luck, he has in the end not been able to escape the force that shaped his predecessors and sealed their fate. That force is not the economy, Soviet aggression or state-sponsored terrorism but the mass politics surrounding the presidency itself.

As the presidency has grown in power during the past generation, its popular base has shifted from party democracy to mass democracy. This is a source of strength and legitimacy--but also one of danger. Each President, especially Reagan, has been able to draw on the mass base to maintain national leadership, but it has made the President vulnerable to mass expectations. Mass democracy has obliterated the necessary distinction between domestic politics and foreign policy, making the presidency and diplomacy natural enemies.

The modern President speaks to his constituency through the mass media, and receives his responses largely through the polls. For better or for worse, random-sample survey polling is the latest addition to democracy’s institutions in America. Presidential power rests heavily, albeit not entirely, on the results of a key question asked on virtually every national survey each three to four weeks: “Do you approve or disapprove of the way the President is doing his job?” Presidential ratings on this question are a vote of confidence, a plebiscite on presidential performance.

The presidential pattern that Reagan has tried almost successfully to resist is the downward tendency of presidential plebiscites. For each President the pattern begins with an extremely high approval rating of nearly 70%, the honeymoon period, then drops to 40% or below. For about 30 months this pattern was exactly the same for Reagan as for his five immediate predecessors. In fact, at each point in the profile Reagan ran a few points below Jimmy Carter. Then mysteriously, in the late summer of 1983, Reagan’s performance ratings began to creep upward until they returned to the honeymoon period’s high levels. The following points may help clarify what is happening now and, more important, perhaps reveal something about the presidency’s special problems.

The profile of presidential plebiscites is not a smooth but a jagged one. The overall downward tendency for each President is punctuated by an occasional blip upward--sometimes a very significant blip. Until late 1983 this blip represented merely a temporary respite from the otherwise downward drift, which ended in presidential impotence and departure from office accompanied by varying degrees of disgrace.

A single force explains all the blips, and that force is international events associated with the President--referred to by some observers as “a rallying effect.” For example, the largest upward blips in the history of this plebiscite were the 1961 Bay of Pigs incident (presidential initiative, bad news), the Iran hostage-taking of 1979 (no initiative, bad news), the 1962 Cuba missile crisis and the 1986 bombing of Libya (initiatives, good news). With each of these, and with many other international events, there was a strong rallying effect to the President if he took the trouble to dramatize the event and associate himself strongly with it. There is a rallying effect even where a majority of the respondents disapprove of the action itself.

This pattern’s meaning should be more than a little ominous. There is a highly sensitive and predictable relationship between the President and the public, and it gives the President strong incentives to conduct hit-and-run, go-it-alone, seat-of-the-pants foreign policy--action without policy. Conversely, this pattern of incentives tends to discourage sustained relationships, negotiation, serious consultation with allies--in short, diplomacy itself.

Presidents are under pressure constantly to produce or to create the appearance of producing. The public is in effect constantly asking, “What have you done for us lately?” The ratings decline because every domestic decision that a President makes is divisive.

The only exception is the international event, but as soon as those events are over, the general downward tendency resumes. If the international event is sustained and becomes an actual issue, it becomes domesticated and thus contributes to the general downward trend. Either way, soon the President needs another international-relations fix.

But if the same force shapes all modern Presidents, why did Reagan’s performance profile go up for three years while other Presidents were lucky to get a month of temporary respite? Personal attractiveness cannot be discounted, but there is more.

Reagan has had a degree of maneuverability beyond any of his predecessors, and has been able to take more initiatives and associate himself more frequently with significant international events. Each of those events has been a go-it-alone, hit-and-run, action-without-policy type of decision: Reagan is the only President since World War II who has not committed his Administration to at least one sustained negotiation leading to a treaty.

Just compare Reagan to his immediate predecessor, whose decline in the ratings went longer and deeper than that of any other President. Jimmy Carter committed his Administration to the Panama Canal treaties, the “peace process” between Israel and Egypt, the treaty upgrading the People’s Republic of China and downgrading Taiwan, the Law of the Sea treaty and SALT II. Carter 5, Reagan 0.

This has nothing to do with the wisdom of Carter’s commitments. It suggests only that a commitment to diplomacy is a calculated risk in the struggle to maintain domestic popular support. If a President is seriously committed to diplomacy, that commitment reduces his freedom to maneuver. If he is seriously committed to negotiation on delicate matters with one or more other powers, he must send representatives who are sufficiently high ranking to indicate his seriousness, and he must take care not to do anything that could be interpreted as undermining the position of his representative.

A serious negotiation does not doom the President to silence, but it reduces the frequency and range of his actions. Conversely, a President who wants to maintain maximum maneuverability will either avoid sustained diplomacy altogether or create the appearance of commitment by sending a representative of so little importance that nothing much is lost if later actions are inconsistent with the representative’s instructions.

Thus Reagan preferred to repudiate the uncompleted SALT II and Law of the Sea negotiations rather than reshape them and complete the negotiations. He chose to send to Geneva a chief representative whose only qualification was his close friendship with Jeane Kirkpatrick. He preferred a quick Iceland summit meeting with spectacular proposals but no staff preparation, no consultation with allies, an abrupt ending and no real follow-up.

Reagan keeps an ambassador in Nicaragua but makes sporadic war against that regime. He would bomb an isolated Libya before dealing with the more plugged-in but greater villain, Syria. Apparently his only sustained commitment involving a high-ranking representative has been the deeply secret negotiation in Iran, and even there it has been with the subversive, counter-revolutionary, “moderate” elements. Whatever its success, it could not have produced a more stabilized world.

Reagan’s popular success at home confirms the general pattern, just as Carter’s popular failures did. The measure of success in diplomacy is the distance between international issues and the front page. The plebiscitary President, most of all Reagan, cannot tolerate such a state of affairs. He needs a world with events to dramatize; if there aren’t any, he has to stir them up.

But who cares about Ronald Reagan? In two years he will be gone. It is ourselves we have to care about. Reagan is merely an extreme case of a dangerous flaw in the American system, which rewards Presidents for actions contrary to international stability. Reagan’s approval ratings will probably continue to decline as long as the Iran issue refuses to go away. Iran will be his tar baby, just as it was Carter’s. The more that Iran is domesticated, the more that Reagan will lose. But, regardless of the outcome of this sorry business, we must do something to save the presidency from itself, to protect ourselves from the dangerous tendencies of presidential power.

There is no specific and dramatic solution. Only puzzles have solutions. To put Congress back more centrally into the foreign-policy picture is not a solution. That would only place greater pressure on the President to manipulate the public. Nor is the solution to give the President more power, since that only increases mass expectations and heightens the pressure on Presidents to create, like the Wizard of Oz, the appearance of productivity.

But the absence of dramatic solutions does not destroy all hope for incremental improvement, which can come from a mere change in the presidential point of view.

Just imagine how much better off we would be today if Reagan, a genuine conservative, had applied his concern for big government to the part over which he had the most control--the big presidency. The fact that he betrayed his conservatism and embraced the presidency’s most dangerous features is a tragedy of missed opportunity, but it does not doom the next President to a repetition of the same irresponsible pattern. A President who can appreciate the inherent dangers of the office has the power to resist them.

The next President could benefit immensely from a slight turn on a piece of Reagan’s favorite advice: The presidency may sometimes be part of the solution--but it also is part of the problem.