We've Reached the Penultimate Jimmy Carter Moment of the Obama Presidency
Chris Cillizza made me laugh out loud last evening when I read his column, which opens with a question: "Is it possible for a president — any president — to succeed in the modern world of politics?"
There is nothing new under the sun, including this question.
On January 19, 2010, I wrote about the ungovernability of the American Republic. At that time, Barack Obama lamented the filibuster was making the nation ungovernable. Liberal commentators were up in arms over how ungovernable the nation was.
Liberal blogger Andrew Sullivan noted at the time, "[I]f America cannot grapple with its deep and real problems after electing a new president with two majorities, then America's problems are too great for Americans to tackle."
The fact of the matter is, the last time liberals and traditional media sources were asking the question, they were asking it while Jimmy Carter was President. It was the penultimate moment of the Carter Presidency when, breaking out of the echo chamber, liberals in the media began to openly ponder the ungovernability of the American Republic and whether the Presidency was too big for one man.
Turns out the Republic was just fine. It wasn't that the Presidency was too big for one man. It was that the particular occupant of the office was too small for the job. When Reagan became President, the question was rendered moot.
As my friend Josh Trevino has pointed out, this question has been raised throughout the history of our Republic in one form or another. That it is being raised again shows a lack of appreciation for our history, a misunderstanding of our constitutional order, and a constrained sense of exactly what governing success looks like.
The dirty little secret of our American Republic is that our ungovernability at the national level is a feature, not a bug. The founders intended it to be extremely difficult to pass legislation having just fought, bled, and seen friends die for a liberty they thought they already had only to see their government, of both a king and a Parliament, barter away their freedoms.
The difficulty in "good" governance is one of the last in a series of resistors designed to protect the citizens from the "good" government intentions of those they sent to Washington. It is a powerful reminder, should we pay close attention to this difficulty and resistance, that the federal government is supposed to be a government of limited powers. The difficulty and resistance reduce and largely go away when the President, for example, deals with foreign affairs. In that area, unlike the implementation of a domestic agenda, the President has much more constitutional power because his operations are not directed at the American citizens, but at other sovereign powers. At such time as his foreign policy powers might come to restrict the rights of citizens via treaty, again we see the resistors in operation with a two-thirds vote in the Senate required to approve at treaty.
In a conversation between Josh Trevino and Chris Cillizza on twitter last night, Cillizza asked , "Did the last century have the fracturing of media and social networking sites we have now?" As a matter of fact, newspapers in the eighteenth and nineteenth century were even more openly partisan than they are now. The "social networking sites" of the times were patronage positions, secret societies, and pamphleteers.
There really is nothing new under the sun, including looking at our time from the conventional wisdom of our time, ignoring ages past. Compared to our founding and the subsequent decades of expansion when, by the way, the President had fewer executive powers than he does now, the Civil War, the two world wars, and the cold war, we live in relatively inconsequential times. That anyone could look at our 236th year of existence and ask if the President can succeed in the "modern world of politics" raises a better question — have we become so shallow and vain as to think our generation and our time is more consequential than that which came before us?
It also begs one question more: if, in the "modern world of politics" the President of the United States cannot succeed because of the system our founders put in place to restrain the majority and prevent tyranny — a real concept to those who have lived or do live under it — what then shall we come to, a tyrant?
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