By Jamelle Bouie
The American presidency is a strange office.
It is the most powerful elected position in the world. To hold the position is to lead a nation of more than 330 million people with a vast and intricate government that touches every aspect of daily life. You are responsible for trillions of dollars in spending, and you must manage the actions of countless civil servants, from your direct appointees — who number in the thousands — to their subordinates. You wield the full might of the U.S. military and have direct access to a device that could, with the press of a few keys, end life as we know it.
From the moment you open your eyes to begin a new day to the moment you close them for a few hours of slumber, your conscious mind is occupied by an endless storm of crises and concerns. You decide which need your direct attention and which can go to the relevant aide or secretary. You must find the time — your most precious resource — to plan, prioritize and categorize the problems and opportunities that come your way. And you will be judged for the success or failure of your administration on any number of issues — whether or not you were responsible, whether or not you had any control over them.
The buck, after all, has to stop somewhere.
But here is where it gets strange. All that power comes with limits so hard that it can feel, at times, like you don’t have any at all. You can spend only what Congress allows you to spend. You have discretion to execute the law but that can be curbed, even erased, by a vote of the Supreme Court.
There are things you can do by fiat — otherwise known as executive orders — but those can be overturned by a court or reversed by the next administration or resisted outright by hostile state governments. Lasting change, if that’s what you want, requires a vote of the legislature, which is to say that you have to put your goals in the hands of people who may not have your interests in mind, whether or not you share the same party. You can be a towering figure abroad — leading the nations of the free world in a crusade against aggression — and a fumbling, even weak one at home. Our constitutional order may be unbalanced, with an executive and judiciary whose influence seems to outstrip that of the legislature, but the checks and balances that do exist can still stymie the plans of an ambitious president.
Those of us who observe and study American politics are more than aware of all this when we try to analyze and explain a given president. But rarely does the reality of the office ever factor into our quadrennial struggle over which man or woman will hold it.
Consider the most recent presidential debate. The moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis of ABC News, pressed the candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, on a number of policy questions. Topics included the economy, inflation, immigration, border security, the war in Ukraine and Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip. The moderators — perhaps following the concerns of undecided voters who say they want more specificity — scrutinized the candidates on their plans and, when appropriate, asked for details.
But missing from this long menu of questions was anything about the day-to-day experience of the job — of managing the executive branch, of dealing with crises, of negotiating with Congress, of, in a word, governing. This despite the fact that these candidates have intimate experience with all of the above, one by virtue of serving as vice president and seeing the position up close, the other by virtue of having been president.
To the extent that these issues were raised at all, they came as asides. Trump, for example, briefly mentioned that he fired a number of officials in his administration. “I fired most of those people,” he said, referring to his former national security adviser and secretary of defense, who now oppose his candidacy. “Not so graciously. They did bad things or a bad job. I fired them.” He then hit Harris and Joe Biden for not firing anyone. “They never fired one person.”
Trump was mostly ranting at this point. Still, it was a missed opportunity to discuss each candidate’s respective vision of the power of the presidency. Is the White House working if the president has to fire, on an almost regular basis, high-level officials? What does it say about his judgment? What process, if any, does he have for hiring subordinates?
If you were one of the more than 67 million Americans who watched the debate on Tuesday, you learned about Harris’ proposal to give tax credits to young families and small business owners. You heard Trump blame migrants and refugees for every problem facing the United States. You heard them talk about plans and “concepts of plans.” But for all the back and forth between the two candidates, there was little said about how either of them would actually make decisions — of how they would be president.
The most you could do, as a viewer, was glean generalities from how they presented themselves. Trump, it’s clear, would govern as an authoritarian with little interest in the rule of law. And Harris, it appears, would continue the Biden approach of governing, as much as possible, with an eye toward consensus and coalition building.
Americans deserve a much fuller conversation than they ever get about the actual job at hand. Yes, it is important to know the goals and priorities of the people running for president. They should, when appropriate, talk about policy. But the fact of the matter is that a successful presidency is much more about organization, vision and values than it is the scope of a given legislative package.
The contingencies of politics are such that policies will change depending on everything from the size of the governing party’s congressional majority — or lack thereof — to the particular interests of the particular lawmakers. To answer the qualitative questions, on the other hand, is to get a good, more durable sense of how one candidate or the other might perform when the pressure is on or how they might prioritize when the pressure is off.
The presidency, as I said, is a strange office. Our presidential campaigns should probably be more focused on how candidates deal with what makes it so.
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