An Evolving Presidency

While independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s investigation of illicit sex and alleged obstruction of justice in the White House is reaching a crescendo, there is no end to the speculation about the likely political fallout and searches for the causes of the mess that President Bill Clinton, Monica S. Lewinsky and even Starr find themselves in. But whatever its ultimate outcome, we can use this imbroglio to gauge the ever-shifting role of the presidency in relation to the U.S. political system and society in general.

Ours is an era renowned for its strong presidents. Quirky as this latest “constitutional crisis” is, this scandal reminds us that the power of the modern-day president is the product of ever-changing social and political developments. Only on Mt. Rushmore is the presidency fixed in stone. Rather than asking what Clinton or Starr has done to the stature of the presidency, perhaps we should consider the ease with which that stature is demeaned as a not-so-subtle hint that the 21st-century presidency may be as different from the one we grew up with as the cramped 19th-century model.

This scandal illuminates the divergence of two seminal elements of the 20th-century presidency. The executive branch of government has grown quantitatively and qualitatively over the past 100 years. While today’s federal government is still small compared with most industrialized democracies, it dwarfs its 19th-century counterpart.

The second fundamental feature of 20th-century politics is the emergence of the presidency as the focal point of two-way democratic communication. Pushed by the need to remain close to the people and pulled by a dazzling parade of technological breakthroughs and cultural models for promoting discourse with the masses, 20th-century presidents forged a connection to voters based on intimacy. This contrived intimacy was largely intended to offset concerns about more expensive and more distant government.

These two trends--the growth of government and the evolution of the intimate style--diverged in the 1970s, when forced intimacy became a prerequisite of presidential success, while executive-branch expansion leveled off and has been under siege ever since. Stripped of the executive’s activist agenda and substantial unilateral powers granted in the name of national security, the intimacy that Clinton has perfected is hardly enough to preserve the stature of the presidency.

This scandal has exposed a challenge that presidents are likely to struggle with during the transition to a new status for the U.S. presidency: How to govern in an environment of dramatically reduced expectations about government while maintaining an affective hold over the American public. For the past 20 years, the intimate connection between president and public has served as a substitute for the more substantive bases of authority that have been stripped away by a radically pluralist political system; the general challenge to authority kindled in the 1960s, which surprisingly was embraced by the political right in the 1980s, and the end of the Cold War.

Both the rise of big government and deployment of the intimate style date to the Progressive era, were nurtured during World War I, enhanced during the Depression years of the 1930s and institutionalized when World War II turned into the Cold War. Contrasted with the 19th century, which was subsumed in the powerful mesh of partisan maneuvering, the 20th century stands out as a period when presidents developed the wherewithal to transcend local party machinery, respond directly to powerful interest groups and simultaneously respond to and shape mass public opinion.

The story of executive-branch expansion is a familiar one and requires little elaboration. In the 100 years between 1890 and 1990, public spending, as a percentage of gross national product, rose from 7% to 40%. The government grew fastest at the center, not at the periphery. The most dramatic change occurred in national security. The unsettling combination of nuclear weapons and a sharply divided bipolar world placed grave responsibilities on the shoulders of presidents and raised the stature of the office, regardless of its occupant, to new heights.

Presidents, from Theodore Roosevelt on, sought to counter Americans’ traditional distrust of central bureaucracy and offset the political distance created by the federal government’s expansion by seeking new ways to establish a direct bond with the voter. Presidents also sought first to outmaneuver and, as partisan ties weakened, then replace local parties as the link between Americans and their government. To do so, candidates and ultimately incumbents turned to the intimate style.

For practitioners like Teddy Roosevelt, this meant little more than the self-conscious exposure of his more “manly” adventures. As celebrity, epitomized by Hollywood’s star system, and the concept of “personality” took root in early 20th-century consumer culture, presidents were pressed to reveal more of themselves. Herbert Hoover, for example, when confronted by the stock-market crash and ensuing Depression, held firm to his belief that his battery of public-relations experts would make displays of personal empathy unnecessary.

Among Hoover’s misfortunes, the greatest was to be followed by the president who first mastered the intimate style and, not coincidentally, increased the size of the federal government dramatically: Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s greatest contribution to the intimate style was the fireside chat. He grasped the same insight that advertising copy writers in the 1930s promoted when they urged spokespersons to visualize their mass audience one person at a time. Historian Roland Marchand has captured the variety of radio programs built around this approach in the ‘30s, including a show called “Your Lover.” Featuring a male voice that cut through the background organ music, “Your Lover” appealed in the most intimate way to the mass audience. “Hello, young lady. Yes, I mean you . . . . It’s grand to be with you. And it’s sweet of you to let me have the thrill of talking to you.” While the message of Roosevelt’s fireside chats was far different, the style also oozed intimacy.

Given the new medium of television and the post-World War II embrace of what Phillip Rieff has called the “triumph of the therapeutic,” it was only a small step from “Your Lover” to the current iteration of the intimate connection to consumers, an approach that historian Andy Trees has dubbed “the confessional style.” These are individuals the public can identify with because they “feel your pain”--all the more if it is confessed in front of millions of viewers.

Precedents for presidential candidates appealing to the public from a position of weakness abound, back to Richard M. Nixon’s Checkers speech and Jimmy Carter’s Playboy interview, in which Carter admitted he had “committed adultery in my heart many times.” The Clintons’ appearance on “60 Minutes” in 1992, in an attempt to put the Gennifer Flowers story behind them, ranks near the top of the list.

Clinton has incorporated the confessional style into a powerful tool during his two administrations. His ability to connect with the public, whether in the “town meetings” held early in his term or the national debate on race, has become a staple of governance. Perhaps the greatest irony in the whole Lewinsky affair has been Clinton’s silence, since January, about his personal role.

Clinton has perfected the confessional style, raising (or lowering) presidential intimacy to new levels, whether playing the sax on “Arsenio” or discussing boxers versus briefs on MTV. Less voluntarily, he has dragged a trail of personal peccadilloes into the presidency.

Rarely mentioned in this context, however, is the fact that Clinton is the first president to govern a full term without the Cold War to salvage the stature of the presidency. Writing for the Financial Times, Peter Aspden noted, “President Clinton once proclaimed his envy for John F. Kennedy for being blessed with a tangible enemy against whom he could continually prove his prowess . . . . Kennedy could always rescue a bad day by making a ritual show of confrontation against the intractable foe, communism.” At home, with the exception of the health-care initiative, even Clinton’s wish list acknowledges that the age of big domestic-program building is over. His decided preference for domestic over foreign policy only underscores the diminished role of the presidency as we enter the 21st century. The trajectory of the administrative state, particularly stripped of its crisis in national security, is back toward its 19th-century origins.

The current scandal reveals the perils of governing in an age in which the intimate style has been decoupled from its original raison d’etre. Diminished expectations about government; the lowered stature of the presidency resulting from the public’s retreat from foreign-policy concerns, and the divided government that has made even a limited presidential agenda a largely rhetorical one have exposed the presidency as a position that is not so far removed from mere mortals as it once appeared. On the other hand, as a strategy crafted in response to the growth of big government, the intimate style has taken on a life of its own in the media-saturated, celebrity-crazed 1990s.

The president’s power is no longer derived from awesome decisions about war and peace or path-breaking efforts to fight domestic wars on poverty and disease. Rather, it resides in his or her personal connection to the voters. While any president would be bolstered by the booming economy, it would be a mistake to credit all of Clinton’s popularity to the economic cycle. Some is derived from the president’s ability to relate to voters. It should come as no surprise that the man occupying the post of independent counsel, a position dedicated to the principle of rooting out abuse of power, has shifted his focus to the new source of presidential power--not national security, or partisan electoral advantage, but personal and intimate affairs.*