Question: My son-in-law and I are having a friendly argument and have a dinner at Olive Garden and $20 riding on this. He says that the only president to be impeached was Andrew Johnson. He claims that Andrew Johnson was president after Grant. I say that there never was a president named Andrew Johnson. There was a president named Andrew Jackson and a president named Lyndon B. Johnson. Please help straighten this out!! Thank you.
From: Susan G. of Lake Charles, LA
Date: February 10, 2005
Gleaves answers: As in so many arguments, you win on some points, and lose on others.
First: There was a president named Andrew Johnson; he was the 17th president of the United States.
Second: He became president upon the death of Abraham Lincoln, served in the White House from 1865-1869, and was succeeded by U.S. Grant.
Third: Andrew Johnson was one of two U.S. presidents who were impeached. Bill Clinton was the other. (Both were acquitted in the Senate trial.)
Looks like your son-in-law should still buy you dinner at the Olive Garden -- after you've paid him $20!
Showing posts with label 42. Bill Clinton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 42. Bill Clinton. Show all posts
Thursday, February 10, 2005
Friday, January 21, 2005
Cost of Inaugurations
Question: Can we get a comparison of presidential inauguration costs for the last 6 to 10 presidents?
From: Bob S. of Albuquerqui, New Mexico
Date: January 21, 2005
Gleaves answers: Many visitors to http://www.allpresidents.org/ have been asking this question or some variation of it. There are two primary costs of inaugurations. One is the cost of the swearing-in ceremony, which is paid for by taxpayers; the funds are appropriated by Congress; in 2001, George W. Bush's swearing-in ceremony cost $1 million. Second is the cost of the balls, the candlelight dinners, the parties, the concerts -- all the festivities that surround the swearing-in ceremony, which are paid for by private donations.
If there is criticism of how much a modern inaugural costs, it is usually directed at this latter cost, the parties and festivities, even though the burden is not borne by taxpayers. Going backward in time, from the most recent to the most distant inaugurals, here are the private-sector costs of the festivities surrounding some inaugurations:
George W. Bush's 2nd inaugural will cost in the neighborhood of $40 million. That's what the Presidential Inaugural Committee is trying to raise through private donations and ticket sales to the nine balls and three candlelight dinners.
George W. Bush's 1st inaugural in 2001 also cost nearly $40 million.
Bill Clinton's 2nd inaugural in 1997 was comparatively lean by the inaugural standards of the times, $23.6 million.
Bill Clinton's 1st inaugural in 1993 cost approximately $33 million.
George H. W. Bush's inaugural in 1989 cost approximately $30 million.
Ronald Reagan's 2nd inaugural in 1985 cost in the neighborhood of the 1981 inaugural, around $20 million.
Ronald Reagan's 1st inaugural in 1981 cost $19.4 million, significantly more than his predecessors. One reason is that inflation had been sky-high between Carter's and Reagan's inaugurations. A second reason is that several balls were added to the festivities. A third is that the swearing-in ceremony was moved to the west front of the Capitol. Because of topography, that aspect of the building is much more dramatic than the east front; it was also symbolic of Ronald Reagan's western roots.
Jimmy Carter's inaugural in 1977 cost $3.5 million. Elected in the wake of the Watergate scandal, he deliberately downplayed anything that appeared to aggrandize the presidency.
Richard Nixon's 2nd inaugural in 1973 cost $4 million. Bob Hope, a Nixon supporter, joked that the three-day extravaganza commemorated "the time when Richard I becomes Richard II."
Lyndon Johnson's inaugural in 1965 cost $1.5 million.
Woodrow Wilson's inaugural was relatively lean since on his orders there would be no ball. He disliked dances. Congress appropriated $30,000 for the event.
James Madison's inaugural ceremony in 1809 cost more than previous inaugurals in part because it was the first to include a ball. Dolley Madison, the federalist era's social maven, had also served as hostess for President Jefferson.
From: Bob S. of Albuquerqui, New Mexico
Date: January 21, 2005
Gleaves answers: Many visitors to http://www.allpresidents.org/ have been asking this question or some variation of it. There are two primary costs of inaugurations. One is the cost of the swearing-in ceremony, which is paid for by taxpayers; the funds are appropriated by Congress; in 2001, George W. Bush's swearing-in ceremony cost $1 million. Second is the cost of the balls, the candlelight dinners, the parties, the concerts -- all the festivities that surround the swearing-in ceremony, which are paid for by private donations.
If there is criticism of how much a modern inaugural costs, it is usually directed at this latter cost, the parties and festivities, even though the burden is not borne by taxpayers. Going backward in time, from the most recent to the most distant inaugurals, here are the private-sector costs of the festivities surrounding some inaugurations:
George W. Bush's 2nd inaugural will cost in the neighborhood of $40 million. That's what the Presidential Inaugural Committee is trying to raise through private donations and ticket sales to the nine balls and three candlelight dinners.
George W. Bush's 1st inaugural in 2001 also cost nearly $40 million.
Bill Clinton's 2nd inaugural in 1997 was comparatively lean by the inaugural standards of the times, $23.6 million.
Bill Clinton's 1st inaugural in 1993 cost approximately $33 million.
George H. W. Bush's inaugural in 1989 cost approximately $30 million.
Ronald Reagan's 2nd inaugural in 1985 cost in the neighborhood of the 1981 inaugural, around $20 million.
Ronald Reagan's 1st inaugural in 1981 cost $19.4 million, significantly more than his predecessors. One reason is that inflation had been sky-high between Carter's and Reagan's inaugurations. A second reason is that several balls were added to the festivities. A third is that the swearing-in ceremony was moved to the west front of the Capitol. Because of topography, that aspect of the building is much more dramatic than the east front; it was also symbolic of Ronald Reagan's western roots.
Jimmy Carter's inaugural in 1977 cost $3.5 million. Elected in the wake of the Watergate scandal, he deliberately downplayed anything that appeared to aggrandize the presidency.
Richard Nixon's 2nd inaugural in 1973 cost $4 million. Bob Hope, a Nixon supporter, joked that the three-day extravaganza commemorated "the time when Richard I becomes Richard II."
Lyndon Johnson's inaugural in 1965 cost $1.5 million.
Woodrow Wilson's inaugural was relatively lean since on his orders there would be no ball. He disliked dances. Congress appropriated $30,000 for the event.
James Madison's inaugural ceremony in 1809 cost more than previous inaugurals in part because it was the first to include a ball. Dolley Madison, the federalist era's social maven, had also served as hostess for President Jefferson.
Friday, December 31, 2004
Person of the Year
Question: President George W. Bush was just selected by Time magazine as the Person of the Year in 2003. How often have presidents been awarded this distinction?
From: Diane N. of Charleston, SC
Date: December 31, 2004
Gleaves answers: Time magazine began naming a Man or Person of the Year 77 years ago, in 1927. In 19 of those years, the sitting president or president-elect was dubbed. Another way of looking at it: Of the 14 presidents since 1927, 11 were selected Person of the Year when they were either the sitting president or president-elect. An interesting assemblage of chief executives they make: one was assassinated; one had a physical disability; one felt totally unprepared for the job; one was impeached; one would be driven from the White House in disgrace. (Remember, the Person of the Year is not always a saint. Time's list, after all, includes Hitler, Stalin, and the Ayatolluh Khomeini.)
These are the 11 U.S. presidents whom Time has named Person of the Year.
1932 -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
1934 -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
1941 -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
1945 -- Harry S. Truman
1948 -- Harry S. Truman
1959 -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
1961 -- John F. Kennedy
1964 -- Lyndon B. Johnson
1967 -- Lyndon B. Johnson
1971 -- Richard M. Nixon
1972 -- Richard M. Nixon and Henry Kissinger
1976 -- Jimmy Carter
1980 -- Ronald Reagan
1983 -- Ronald Reagan and Yuri Andropov
1990 -- George H. W. Bush
1992 -- Bill Clinton
1998 -- Bill Clinton and Kenneth Starr
2000 -- George W. Bush
2004 -- George W. Bush
As the above list shows, one president earned the distinction of being named Man of the Year three times: Franklin D. Roosevelt, in fact, holds the all-time record.
Six presidents have been named Person of the Year a total of two times. (But note this caveat: while Dwight Eisenhower received the distinction twice, the first time was in 1944, when he was supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, eight years before he was elected president.)
Four presidents have been named Person of the Year once.
Timing is important. Of the 11 presidents who achieved Person-of-the-Year status, 8 did so in their first year in office.
The only president named Man of the Year two years in a row was Richard Nixon, in 1971 and 1972; he shared the second time around with his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger. The only administration that received the nomination three years in a row was FDR's, from 1932-1934; in 1933 the administrator of the National Recovery Administration, Hugh Johnson, got the nod.
All four presidents with a Texas connection -- Eisenhower, LBJ, and the two Bushes -- have been named Person of the Year.
Since 1927 three presidents never made it onto Time magazine's cover as Man of the Year: Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Gerald R. Ford.
Yet ten additional individuals who were never themselves president were named Man of the Year because of their close association to the White House:
1929 -- Owen Young was a famous financier associated with the Hoover administration.
1933 -- Hugh Johnson was head of FDR's National Recovery Administration.
1943 -- General George Marshall oversaw the commander in chief's war effort.
1944 -- General Dwight D. Eisenhower took the offensive against Hitler's Third Reich.
1946 -- Secretary of State James F. Byrnes served under Truman.
1947 -- Secretary of State George C. Marshall also served under Truman.
1954 -- Secretary of State John Foster Dulles served under Eisenhower.
1965 -- General William Westmoreland served under Lyndon Johnson.
1972 -- Henry Kissinger was Richard Nixon's national security advisor.
1973 -- Judge John Sirica presided over the Watergate scandal proceedings.
1998 -- Kenneth Starr led the investigations against Bill Clinton.
Adding these names to the presidents, you see that our chief executives or individuals closely associated with them made Time's list on 30 occasions during the past 77 years.
For the complete list of Time magazine's Man or Person of the Year from 1927-2003, see
http://www.time.com/time/personoftheyear/archive/stories/index.html
From: Diane N. of Charleston, SC
Date: December 31, 2004
Gleaves answers: Time magazine began naming a Man or Person of the Year 77 years ago, in 1927. In 19 of those years, the sitting president or president-elect was dubbed. Another way of looking at it: Of the 14 presidents since 1927, 11 were selected Person of the Year when they were either the sitting president or president-elect. An interesting assemblage of chief executives they make: one was assassinated; one had a physical disability; one felt totally unprepared for the job; one was impeached; one would be driven from the White House in disgrace. (Remember, the Person of the Year is not always a saint. Time's list, after all, includes Hitler, Stalin, and the Ayatolluh Khomeini.)
These are the 11 U.S. presidents whom Time has named Person of the Year.
1932 -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
1934 -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
1941 -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
1945 -- Harry S. Truman
1948 -- Harry S. Truman
1959 -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
1961 -- John F. Kennedy
1964 -- Lyndon B. Johnson
1967 -- Lyndon B. Johnson
1971 -- Richard M. Nixon
1972 -- Richard M. Nixon and Henry Kissinger
1976 -- Jimmy Carter
1980 -- Ronald Reagan
1983 -- Ronald Reagan and Yuri Andropov
1990 -- George H. W. Bush
1992 -- Bill Clinton
1998 -- Bill Clinton and Kenneth Starr
2000 -- George W. Bush
2004 -- George W. Bush
As the above list shows, one president earned the distinction of being named Man of the Year three times: Franklin D. Roosevelt, in fact, holds the all-time record.
Six presidents have been named Person of the Year a total of two times. (But note this caveat: while Dwight Eisenhower received the distinction twice, the first time was in 1944, when he was supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, eight years before he was elected president.)
Four presidents have been named Person of the Year once.
Timing is important. Of the 11 presidents who achieved Person-of-the-Year status, 8 did so in their first year in office.
The only president named Man of the Year two years in a row was Richard Nixon, in 1971 and 1972; he shared the second time around with his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger. The only administration that received the nomination three years in a row was FDR's, from 1932-1934; in 1933 the administrator of the National Recovery Administration, Hugh Johnson, got the nod.
All four presidents with a Texas connection -- Eisenhower, LBJ, and the two Bushes -- have been named Person of the Year.
Since 1927 three presidents never made it onto Time magazine's cover as Man of the Year: Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Gerald R. Ford.
Yet ten additional individuals who were never themselves president were named Man of the Year because of their close association to the White House:
1929 -- Owen Young was a famous financier associated with the Hoover administration.
1933 -- Hugh Johnson was head of FDR's National Recovery Administration.
1943 -- General George Marshall oversaw the commander in chief's war effort.
1944 -- General Dwight D. Eisenhower took the offensive against Hitler's Third Reich.
1946 -- Secretary of State James F. Byrnes served under Truman.
1947 -- Secretary of State George C. Marshall also served under Truman.
1954 -- Secretary of State John Foster Dulles served under Eisenhower.
1965 -- General William Westmoreland served under Lyndon Johnson.
1972 -- Henry Kissinger was Richard Nixon's national security advisor.
1973 -- Judge John Sirica presided over the Watergate scandal proceedings.
1998 -- Kenneth Starr led the investigations against Bill Clinton.
Adding these names to the presidents, you see that our chief executives or individuals closely associated with them made Time's list on 30 occasions during the past 77 years.
For the complete list of Time magazine's Man or Person of the Year from 1927-2003, see
http://www.time.com/time/personoftheyear/archive/stories/index.html
Saturday, December 18, 2004
Christmas at the White House
Question: How have the holidays been celebrated by our presidents?
From: Hauenstein Center staff and friends, Grand Rapids, MI
Date: December 18, 2004
Gleaves answers: To our visitors, holiday greetings from the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies! Around Grand Valley I have run into several people who have asked if there would be something on the website talking about how our presidents have traditionally celebrated the holidays.
It surprises many Americans to learn that Christmas was not celebrated by every community in the early years of the United States. Some descendents of the New England Puritans, for example, avoided placing special emphasis on the Yuletide season. But in states like Virginia, Christmas enjoyed more popularity. At Mount Vernon on Christmas morning, the festivities organized by George and Martha Washington began at daybreak with a fox hunt. A hearty midday feast followed in a celebration that included Christmas pie, music, dancing, and visits with friends and relatives that sometimes continued for a week.
One of the most unusual Christmas celebrations was hosted by James Buchanan, our nation’s lone bachelor president. In 1857 he threw a party for 30 American Indians representing the Ponca, Pawnee, and Pottawatomie tribes. An eyewitness account reported that while the Pottawatomie arrived in “citizen’s dress,” the Pawnee and Ponca “were in their grandest attire, and more than profuse of paint and feathers.”
Half a century later, Theodore Roosevelt almost forbade bringing a Christmas tree into the White House. A staunch conservationist, TR didn’t believe in cutting down conifers for decoration. Two of his boys, Theodore Jr. and Kermit, got into a bit of trouble when their father caught them dragging two small trees into their rooms. After the incident, Roosevelt spoke with Gifford Pinchot, the famous forester, who persuaded TR that selectively cutting down trees helped forests thrive. That was enough for TR, and the first family kept the trees Theodore Jr. and Kermit had dragged in, and every year thereafter brought a Christmas tree into the White House.
In 1923 First Lady Grace Coolidge accepted the gift of a large Christmas tree given by the District of Columbia Public Schools, and it became the first cut tree ever displayed on the grounds outside the White House. The balsam fir was decorated and displayed on the South Lawn. To dazzle citizens with new technology, President and Mrs. Coolidge were able to light the tree by merely pushing a button – a feat that we take for granted today but that caused wonderment then!
The idea of having themes for official White House Christmas trees was championed by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in 1961. A tree decorated with ornaments reminiscent of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite stood in the Blue Room. Some of the ornaments were reused on the next year’s tree and included brightly wrapped packages, candy canes, gingerbread cookies, and straw ornaments crafted by disabled persons and older citizens from all over the United States.
With the growth of the environmental movement in the late 1960s and early ’70s, President Richard Nixon took an environmentally friendly step. In 1972 he planted a Colorado blue spruce on the Ellipse south of the White House. By 1978 the spruce was large enough and sturdy enough to be designated the National Christmas Tree. It is lit up every year in early December and tended by the National Park Service.
Back in the residence, topping the official White House Christmas tree has become another holiday tradition, and that feat has been accomplished by former First Lady Barbara Bush a record twelve times. She had the honor from 1981 to 1992, during President Reagan’s and her husband’s combined three terms.
Increasingly, American presidents have been sensitive to the fact that the holiday season is not just celebrated by Christians, but by believers of other faiths and people from other traditions. For instance, several presidents – among them Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton – have participated in Hanukkah celebrations. In 1998 President Clinton joined Israel’s President Weizman in Jerusalem to light the first candle of Hanukkah. And this year a 100-year old menorah, borrowed from the collection of the Jewish Museum in New York, was lit in the White House residence for the first time. President and Mrs. George W. Bush celebrated the holiday with staff members and their families by lighting the second candle on December 10th.
As Americans, we have much to celebrate this holiday season among our family, friends, and colleagues, and we at the Hauenstein Center wish you a happy holiday and productive 2005.
From: Hauenstein Center staff and friends, Grand Rapids, MI
Date: December 18, 2004
Gleaves answers: To our visitors, holiday greetings from the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies! Around Grand Valley I have run into several people who have asked if there would be something on the website talking about how our presidents have traditionally celebrated the holidays.
It surprises many Americans to learn that Christmas was not celebrated by every community in the early years of the United States. Some descendents of the New England Puritans, for example, avoided placing special emphasis on the Yuletide season. But in states like Virginia, Christmas enjoyed more popularity. At Mount Vernon on Christmas morning, the festivities organized by George and Martha Washington began at daybreak with a fox hunt. A hearty midday feast followed in a celebration that included Christmas pie, music, dancing, and visits with friends and relatives that sometimes continued for a week.
One of the most unusual Christmas celebrations was hosted by James Buchanan, our nation’s lone bachelor president. In 1857 he threw a party for 30 American Indians representing the Ponca, Pawnee, and Pottawatomie tribes. An eyewitness account reported that while the Pottawatomie arrived in “citizen’s dress,” the Pawnee and Ponca “were in their grandest attire, and more than profuse of paint and feathers.”
Half a century later, Theodore Roosevelt almost forbade bringing a Christmas tree into the White House. A staunch conservationist, TR didn’t believe in cutting down conifers for decoration. Two of his boys, Theodore Jr. and Kermit, got into a bit of trouble when their father caught them dragging two small trees into their rooms. After the incident, Roosevelt spoke with Gifford Pinchot, the famous forester, who persuaded TR that selectively cutting down trees helped forests thrive. That was enough for TR, and the first family kept the trees Theodore Jr. and Kermit had dragged in, and every year thereafter brought a Christmas tree into the White House.
In 1923 First Lady Grace Coolidge accepted the gift of a large Christmas tree given by the District of Columbia Public Schools, and it became the first cut tree ever displayed on the grounds outside the White House. The balsam fir was decorated and displayed on the South Lawn. To dazzle citizens with new technology, President and Mrs. Coolidge were able to light the tree by merely pushing a button – a feat that we take for granted today but that caused wonderment then!
The idea of having themes for official White House Christmas trees was championed by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in 1961. A tree decorated with ornaments reminiscent of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite stood in the Blue Room. Some of the ornaments were reused on the next year’s tree and included brightly wrapped packages, candy canes, gingerbread cookies, and straw ornaments crafted by disabled persons and older citizens from all over the United States.
With the growth of the environmental movement in the late 1960s and early ’70s, President Richard Nixon took an environmentally friendly step. In 1972 he planted a Colorado blue spruce on the Ellipse south of the White House. By 1978 the spruce was large enough and sturdy enough to be designated the National Christmas Tree. It is lit up every year in early December and tended by the National Park Service.
Back in the residence, topping the official White House Christmas tree has become another holiday tradition, and that feat has been accomplished by former First Lady Barbara Bush a record twelve times. She had the honor from 1981 to 1992, during President Reagan’s and her husband’s combined three terms.
Increasingly, American presidents have been sensitive to the fact that the holiday season is not just celebrated by Christians, but by believers of other faiths and people from other traditions. For instance, several presidents – among them Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton – have participated in Hanukkah celebrations. In 1998 President Clinton joined Israel’s President Weizman in Jerusalem to light the first candle of Hanukkah. And this year a 100-year old menorah, borrowed from the collection of the Jewish Museum in New York, was lit in the White House residence for the first time. President and Mrs. George W. Bush celebrated the holiday with staff members and their families by lighting the second candle on December 10th.
As Americans, we have much to celebrate this holiday season among our family, friends, and colleagues, and we at the Hauenstein Center wish you a happy holiday and productive 2005.
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
Cabinet members from the opposing party
Question: With all the talk about Bush's cabinet leaving or changing posts, I was wondering how often a president reaches out to the other party to fill vacancies.
From: Rachel R. of Salt Lake City, UT
Date: November 9, 2004 [revised January 20, 2005]
Gleaves answers: As a nation we will probably never again achieve the balance that George Washington did when there were just three cabinet members. He hired the nation's brilliant Federalist, Alexander Hamilton, to serve as secretary of the Treasury at the same time that he had the nation's stellar Democratic-Republican, Thomas Jefferson, come on board as secretary of state. That was an era -- brief in duration -- when a lid was kept on openly partisan politics because Washington willed it so.
Washington's precedent of trying to bridge factional differences has held up symbolically. It is not unusual for a president to nominate a cabinet secretary from the opposing party, even in the harsh climate of modern politics. For example, Republican Dwight Eisenhower had Democrat James P. Mitchell serve as secretary of labor. Because of his efforts on behalf of migrant laborers and other working people, Mitchell was called "the social conscience of the Republican party."
Democrat John F. Kennedy had Republican C. Douglas Dillon serve as secretary of the Treasury. Dillon had previously been in the Eisenhower administration and was known as a strong advocate of tax cuts. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, kept Dillon on.
Democrat Bill Clinton had Republican William Cohen serve as secretary of defense during his second term.
Republican George W. Bush has had Democrat Norm Mineta serving in the top spot at the U.S. Department of Transportation. Prior to that post, Mineta served as secretary of Commerce in the Clinton administration.
As you suggest, the question at the beginning of the second term is whether President Bush is inclined to expand the Democratic roster among his cabinet. David Frum puts the matter in historical perspective: "The only president to have derived political benefit from naming members of the opposing party to his cabinet was Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, when he named Henry Stimson secretary of war and Frank Knox secretary of the Navy. But Roosevelt was accepting a tough bargain: Bidding for an unprecedented and shocking third presidential term, he tried to allay Republican fears by handing operational control over the pending war in Europe to the leading GOP foreign-policy figure of the day and over the pending war in the Pacific to the most recent Republican nominee for vice president. It would be as if George W. Bush made Richard Holbrooke secretary of state and John Edwards secretary of defense."[1]
Much of the post-election discussion over the composition of the cabinet is symbolic, in any case. As Thomas Patterson points out, "Although the cabinet once served as the president's main advisory group, it has not played this role since Herbert Hoover's administration. As national issues have become increasingly complex, the cabinet has become outmoded as a policymaking forum: department heads are likely to understand issues only in their respective policy areas. Cabinet meetings have been larely reduced to gatherings at which only the most general matters are discussed."[2]
Looking further back in American history, we see that there was an attempt to elevate the status of the cabinet in the nineteenth century. Bret Stephens briskly observes in the Wall Street Journal: "Although the administration of William Henry Harrison isn't the most acclaimed in American history, it did contribute one intriguing idea to the theory of executive government. According to historian John Baker of Louisiana State University, 'Harrison had agreed that executive decisions would be based on a majority vote among members of the cabinet, with the president having one vote.' As fate would have it, Old Tippecanoe died within a month of taking office and his successor, John Tyler, promptly did away with the cabinet government concept. Good thing, too: Had Abraham Lincoln allowed his cabinet to govern with him (or for him) the Union would probably have gone to war against Great Britain, per the suggestion of his Secretary of State William Seward, instead of the Confederacy."[3]
In the end, having cabinet members from the opposing political party or contrary viewpoints must not mask a chief requirement of the presidency -- that "the executive office must be single -- that is, occupied by only one person -- to guarantee the necessary executive power and responsibility." This follows from Alexander Hamilton's defense of the presidency in Federalist 70, where he called for "energy in the executive."[4]
CABINET TURNOVER
According to presidential historian Richard Shenkman, 60 percent of George W. Bush's cabinet had changed over by Inauguration Day -- the highest over the past century. The average is about 50 percent.
___________________
[1]David Frum, "A New Style for a New Mandate," Wall Street Journal, November 9, 2004, p. A18.
[2]Thomas E. Patterson, We the People: A Concise Introduction to American Politics, 5th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2004), p. 386.
[3]Bret Stephens, "What Is a Cabinet For?" Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2004, p. A15. It should be noted that William Seward had not been thinking of threatening war just with Great Britain. Between the Inauguration and the Sumter crisis, the secretary of state wrote a letter to the new president headed, "Some Thoughts for the President's Consideration." Geoffrey Perret records that Seward "wanted Lincoln to unite the country by waging war -- or at least threatening war -- against France and Spain. The Spanish had recently seized Santo Domingo and, with French connivance, were poised to grab Haiti. This violation of the Monroe Doctrine could not be allowed to stand. Tell them to get out of our hemisphere, or else, he urged." [Geoffrey Perret, Lincoln's War: The Untold Story of America's Greatest President and Commander in Chief (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 23.
[4]Peter Woll, ed., American Government: Readings and Cases, 15th ed. (New York: Pearson Longman, 2004), p. xv.
From: Rachel R. of Salt Lake City, UT
Date: November 9, 2004 [revised January 20, 2005]
Gleaves answers: As a nation we will probably never again achieve the balance that George Washington did when there were just three cabinet members. He hired the nation's brilliant Federalist, Alexander Hamilton, to serve as secretary of the Treasury at the same time that he had the nation's stellar Democratic-Republican, Thomas Jefferson, come on board as secretary of state. That was an era -- brief in duration -- when a lid was kept on openly partisan politics because Washington willed it so.
Washington's precedent of trying to bridge factional differences has held up symbolically. It is not unusual for a president to nominate a cabinet secretary from the opposing party, even in the harsh climate of modern politics. For example, Republican Dwight Eisenhower had Democrat James P. Mitchell serve as secretary of labor. Because of his efforts on behalf of migrant laborers and other working people, Mitchell was called "the social conscience of the Republican party."
Democrat John F. Kennedy had Republican C. Douglas Dillon serve as secretary of the Treasury. Dillon had previously been in the Eisenhower administration and was known as a strong advocate of tax cuts. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, kept Dillon on.
Democrat Bill Clinton had Republican William Cohen serve as secretary of defense during his second term.
Republican George W. Bush has had Democrat Norm Mineta serving in the top spot at the U.S. Department of Transportation. Prior to that post, Mineta served as secretary of Commerce in the Clinton administration.
As you suggest, the question at the beginning of the second term is whether President Bush is inclined to expand the Democratic roster among his cabinet. David Frum puts the matter in historical perspective: "The only president to have derived political benefit from naming members of the opposing party to his cabinet was Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, when he named Henry Stimson secretary of war and Frank Knox secretary of the Navy. But Roosevelt was accepting a tough bargain: Bidding for an unprecedented and shocking third presidential term, he tried to allay Republican fears by handing operational control over the pending war in Europe to the leading GOP foreign-policy figure of the day and over the pending war in the Pacific to the most recent Republican nominee for vice president. It would be as if George W. Bush made Richard Holbrooke secretary of state and John Edwards secretary of defense."[1]
Much of the post-election discussion over the composition of the cabinet is symbolic, in any case. As Thomas Patterson points out, "Although the cabinet once served as the president's main advisory group, it has not played this role since Herbert Hoover's administration. As national issues have become increasingly complex, the cabinet has become outmoded as a policymaking forum: department heads are likely to understand issues only in their respective policy areas. Cabinet meetings have been larely reduced to gatherings at which only the most general matters are discussed."[2]
Looking further back in American history, we see that there was an attempt to elevate the status of the cabinet in the nineteenth century. Bret Stephens briskly observes in the Wall Street Journal: "Although the administration of William Henry Harrison isn't the most acclaimed in American history, it did contribute one intriguing idea to the theory of executive government. According to historian John Baker of Louisiana State University, 'Harrison had agreed that executive decisions would be based on a majority vote among members of the cabinet, with the president having one vote.' As fate would have it, Old Tippecanoe died within a month of taking office and his successor, John Tyler, promptly did away with the cabinet government concept. Good thing, too: Had Abraham Lincoln allowed his cabinet to govern with him (or for him) the Union would probably have gone to war against Great Britain, per the suggestion of his Secretary of State William Seward, instead of the Confederacy."[3]
In the end, having cabinet members from the opposing political party or contrary viewpoints must not mask a chief requirement of the presidency -- that "the executive office must be single -- that is, occupied by only one person -- to guarantee the necessary executive power and responsibility." This follows from Alexander Hamilton's defense of the presidency in Federalist 70, where he called for "energy in the executive."[4]
CABINET TURNOVER
According to presidential historian Richard Shenkman, 60 percent of George W. Bush's cabinet had changed over by Inauguration Day -- the highest over the past century. The average is about 50 percent.
___________________
[1]David Frum, "A New Style for a New Mandate," Wall Street Journal, November 9, 2004, p. A18.
[2]Thomas E. Patterson, We the People: A Concise Introduction to American Politics, 5th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2004), p. 386.
[3]Bret Stephens, "What Is a Cabinet For?" Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2004, p. A15. It should be noted that William Seward had not been thinking of threatening war just with Great Britain. Between the Inauguration and the Sumter crisis, the secretary of state wrote a letter to the new president headed, "Some Thoughts for the President's Consideration." Geoffrey Perret records that Seward "wanted Lincoln to unite the country by waging war -- or at least threatening war -- against France and Spain. The Spanish had recently seized Santo Domingo and, with French connivance, were poised to grab Haiti. This violation of the Monroe Doctrine could not be allowed to stand. Tell them to get out of our hemisphere, or else, he urged." [Geoffrey Perret, Lincoln's War: The Untold Story of America's Greatest President and Commander in Chief (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 23.
[4]Peter Woll, ed., American Government: Readings and Cases, 15th ed. (New York: Pearson Longman, 2004), p. xv.
Sunday, November 07, 2004
Election 2004 in perspective -- part I
Question: What lessons can be learned from the 2004 presidential election?
From: The editorial desk of The Detroit News (Detroit, MI)*
Date: November 7, 2004
Gleaves answers: The dust of Election 2004 is starting to settle. The Democrats are everywhere seeing red, which is giving them the blues. At this point it is helpful to take a step back from the fray and try to put the election in historical perspective. When it comes to the presidency:
1. Republicans who run as conservatives (not moderates) win. Conservatives have prevailed in four of the last seven elections. Two-term President George W. Bush calls himself a "compassionate conservative." But an earlier two-term president, Ronald Reagan, was arguably the most conservative president in the 20th century, and he won both the 1980 and 1984 elections in landslides.
Back in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower ran as a staunch conservative during his first campaign, winning by a large margin even while vowing to abolish Social Security. Richard Nixon, who early in his first term reached out to the "silent majority" of Americans in Red states, positioned himself as a conservative, and went on to be re-elected in a landslide in 1972.
Moderate Republicans typically don't do as well. Consider the ill-fated campaigns of Gerald R. Ford in 1976, George H. W. Bush in 1992,[1] and Bob Dole in 1996. Indeed, only once in the last half century -- in 1964, when Barry Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson -- has a self-consciously conservative Republican been rejected at the polls.
2. Democrats who run as liberals (not centrists) lose. The political landscape is filled with the detritus of left-of-center candidates -- George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry -- every one of them defeated at the polls.
In response to Ronald Reagan's stunning electoral success, Democrats formed the Democratic Leadership Council to champion more moderate candidates who could talk like -- well, Republicans. DLC Democrats wanted to cut taxes, reform welfare, and shrink significant sectors of the federal government. Not coincidentally, Bill Clinton, who hitched his ideological wagon to the DLC star, was the Democrats' only two-term president after Franklin Roosevelt.
California Senator Dianne Feinstein commented on the election from a Democratic perspective: "When you look at a presidential election where we lost in every age group except one, I think it's time to do some reassessment. I have noticed," she continued, "that all the gravitas [of our party] has slid to the left. All one has to do is look at the map to know that you can't win a presidential election that way. If we keep going on this way, we'll be a minority party."[2]
3. Religion, morals, and values matter. Hardly any pundits anticipated the shock fact of Election 2004: 22 percent of Americans cited moral values as the primary reason they voted the way they did; not the sluggish economy or the war in Iraq, but moral values; and 80 percent of these voters cast their ballot for Bush. Whoever occupies the office, the president has become a kind of high priest in American life; the people want the person in the Oval Office to reflect their mores.
What went wrong for the Democratic nominee was apparent. On the hustings, Kerry was clearly less comfortable talking about his faith than was Bush. Kerry also had a Senate record that included votes for partial-birth abortions. Because he supported civil unions and was supported by Hollywood liberals, he was damaged goods to evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics, who came out in droves to support Bush, the candidate with whom they could more closely identify.
As reported by Chris Matthews on MSNBC, about a week prior to the election John Kerry received a phone call from former President Bill Clinton, who advised the Democratic candidate to come out firmly against gay marriage. Kerry declined to take the advice and paid the price.
The backlash against liberals was particularly obvious in the 11 states that offered voters the chance to reaffirm the traditional definition of marriage; in all 11 the conservative position prevailed by large margins (indeed, by a 6 to 1 margin in Mississippi and by a 3 to 1 margin in Arkansas and Kentucky). The landslides even occurred in states where Bush lost the popular vote; in Michigan, voters approved constitutional amendments that upheld the traditional definition of marriage and restricted gambling. For some time now, the great cultural and political divide in this nation has been not between Protestants and Catholics -- as in decades past -- but between those who go to worship services at least once a week, and those who hardly go at all.
4. The "mainstream media" continue to get it wrong. Whether it's the anchor desk at CBS or the reporting desk at the New York Times, an unabashed bias is apparent, and Americans in the heartland reject it. It was widely observed, for example, that CNN's Judy Woodruff was visibly distressed Tuesday when Florida went to Bush. Does she know -- does she care -- how silly she looked to folks out in the Red states?
A wise commentator observed that, in Election 2004, it was not the media who were teaching Americans, but Americans who were teaching the media.
5. A final lesson: If many in the media got this election wrong, who got it right? The organization that called it right this time -- as it has in 12 of the last 13 presidential elections -- was the WRC, yes, the same WRC that publishes the Weekly Reader that surveys school kids every election year.
As reported two weeks ago, our youngest citizens predicted that Bush would beat Kerry in a landslide. More to the point, they wanted Bush to beat Kerry in a landslide.
Of course, these kids are America's future.
_________________________________
*A shorter version of this op-ed appeared in the Detroit News on Sunday, November 7, 2004.
[1]George H. W. Bush had a conservative background, gleaned from many of his early political races. When he ran for president in 1988, he also could appeal to conservatives because of his eight years of service as vice president in the Reagan administration. But Bush was abandoned by conservatives over two issues: (1) his decision to raise taxes after the famous "Read my lips -- no new taxes" pledge made at the GOP convention in New Orleans; and his nomination of David Souter to the United States Supreme Court, who proved to be more socially liberal than Main Street as well as the mainstream judiciary.
[2]Dianne Feinstein quoted in Adam Nagourney and Carl Hulse, "For Democrats in Senate, Leader of a Different Stripe: Red State Survivor for Party with the Blues," New York Times, November 14, 2004, p. A22.
From: The editorial desk of The Detroit News (Detroit, MI)*
Date: November 7, 2004
Gleaves answers: The dust of Election 2004 is starting to settle. The Democrats are everywhere seeing red, which is giving them the blues. At this point it is helpful to take a step back from the fray and try to put the election in historical perspective. When it comes to the presidency:
1. Republicans who run as conservatives (not moderates) win. Conservatives have prevailed in four of the last seven elections. Two-term President George W. Bush calls himself a "compassionate conservative." But an earlier two-term president, Ronald Reagan, was arguably the most conservative president in the 20th century, and he won both the 1980 and 1984 elections in landslides.
Back in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower ran as a staunch conservative during his first campaign, winning by a large margin even while vowing to abolish Social Security. Richard Nixon, who early in his first term reached out to the "silent majority" of Americans in Red states, positioned himself as a conservative, and went on to be re-elected in a landslide in 1972.
Moderate Republicans typically don't do as well. Consider the ill-fated campaigns of Gerald R. Ford in 1976, George H. W. Bush in 1992,[1] and Bob Dole in 1996. Indeed, only once in the last half century -- in 1964, when Barry Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson -- has a self-consciously conservative Republican been rejected at the polls.
2. Democrats who run as liberals (not centrists) lose. The political landscape is filled with the detritus of left-of-center candidates -- George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry -- every one of them defeated at the polls.
In response to Ronald Reagan's stunning electoral success, Democrats formed the Democratic Leadership Council to champion more moderate candidates who could talk like -- well, Republicans. DLC Democrats wanted to cut taxes, reform welfare, and shrink significant sectors of the federal government. Not coincidentally, Bill Clinton, who hitched his ideological wagon to the DLC star, was the Democrats' only two-term president after Franklin Roosevelt.
California Senator Dianne Feinstein commented on the election from a Democratic perspective: "When you look at a presidential election where we lost in every age group except one, I think it's time to do some reassessment. I have noticed," she continued, "that all the gravitas [of our party] has slid to the left. All one has to do is look at the map to know that you can't win a presidential election that way. If we keep going on this way, we'll be a minority party."[2]
3. Religion, morals, and values matter. Hardly any pundits anticipated the shock fact of Election 2004: 22 percent of Americans cited moral values as the primary reason they voted the way they did; not the sluggish economy or the war in Iraq, but moral values; and 80 percent of these voters cast their ballot for Bush. Whoever occupies the office, the president has become a kind of high priest in American life; the people want the person in the Oval Office to reflect their mores.
What went wrong for the Democratic nominee was apparent. On the hustings, Kerry was clearly less comfortable talking about his faith than was Bush. Kerry also had a Senate record that included votes for partial-birth abortions. Because he supported civil unions and was supported by Hollywood liberals, he was damaged goods to evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics, who came out in droves to support Bush, the candidate with whom they could more closely identify.
As reported by Chris Matthews on MSNBC, about a week prior to the election John Kerry received a phone call from former President Bill Clinton, who advised the Democratic candidate to come out firmly against gay marriage. Kerry declined to take the advice and paid the price.
The backlash against liberals was particularly obvious in the 11 states that offered voters the chance to reaffirm the traditional definition of marriage; in all 11 the conservative position prevailed by large margins (indeed, by a 6 to 1 margin in Mississippi and by a 3 to 1 margin in Arkansas and Kentucky). The landslides even occurred in states where Bush lost the popular vote; in Michigan, voters approved constitutional amendments that upheld the traditional definition of marriage and restricted gambling. For some time now, the great cultural and political divide in this nation has been not between Protestants and Catholics -- as in decades past -- but between those who go to worship services at least once a week, and those who hardly go at all.
4. The "mainstream media" continue to get it wrong. Whether it's the anchor desk at CBS or the reporting desk at the New York Times, an unabashed bias is apparent, and Americans in the heartland reject it. It was widely observed, for example, that CNN's Judy Woodruff was visibly distressed Tuesday when Florida went to Bush. Does she know -- does she care -- how silly she looked to folks out in the Red states?
A wise commentator observed that, in Election 2004, it was not the media who were teaching Americans, but Americans who were teaching the media.
5. A final lesson: If many in the media got this election wrong, who got it right? The organization that called it right this time -- as it has in 12 of the last 13 presidential elections -- was the WRC, yes, the same WRC that publishes the Weekly Reader that surveys school kids every election year.
As reported two weeks ago, our youngest citizens predicted that Bush would beat Kerry in a landslide. More to the point, they wanted Bush to beat Kerry in a landslide.
Of course, these kids are America's future.
_________________________________
*A shorter version of this op-ed appeared in the Detroit News on Sunday, November 7, 2004.
[1]George H. W. Bush had a conservative background, gleaned from many of his early political races. When he ran for president in 1988, he also could appeal to conservatives because of his eight years of service as vice president in the Reagan administration. But Bush was abandoned by conservatives over two issues: (1) his decision to raise taxes after the famous "Read my lips -- no new taxes" pledge made at the GOP convention in New Orleans; and his nomination of David Souter to the United States Supreme Court, who proved to be more socially liberal than Main Street as well as the mainstream judiciary.
[2]Dianne Feinstein quoted in Adam Nagourney and Carl Hulse, "For Democrats in Senate, Leader of a Different Stripe: Red State Survivor for Party with the Blues," New York Times, November 14, 2004, p. A22.
Saturday, October 09, 2004
Reaganomics
Question: What is Reaganomics, and did it outlive the Reagan administration?
From: Bob S. of Minneapolis, MN
Date: October 9, 2004
Gleaves answers: Reaganomics -- the economic program named after President Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) -- has been one of the most controversial programs in American politics, much mentioned but little understood since first bolting onto the scene in the early 1980s. Reagan's long-time friend and advisor Edwin Meese III observed that Reaganomics "was the most consistently attacked and most ardently defended of all the president's initiatives."[1] Another Reagan domestic and economic policy advisor, Martin Anderson, tried to explain one source of popular misunderstanding: "There is a great deal at stake in the writing of the history of the Reagan presidency. For the past 25 years most of the men and women on the political Right ... have focused their energies on creating new policies, forging political coalitions, electing presidents, and fomenting peaceful worldwide revolution. They have been successful far beyond their wildest fantasies. But while many of us have been basking in warm contentment and self-satisfaction, those who were beaten have been busily writing our history."[2]
DEFINITIONS, PERCEPTIONS
Reaganomics was the name given to the economic program of our 40th president, who championed fiscal restraint and smaller government, tax cuts for individuals and less red tape for businesses. Reaganomics is based on "supply-side economics," a counter-intuitive set of policies that aims to increase revenues by decreasing taxes. Here is how it supposedly works: Significant tax cuts can lead to greater economic activity, since people have more money to spend and invest, which in turn can lead to greater tax revenues for the government.
To middle class Americans, Reaganomics was sold primarily as a tax cut that would let families keep more of their money, impose limits on big government, and increase consumer spending, savings, and investment. It was an idea that had broad appeal to many moderate and fiscally conservative voters when it was introduced in the early 1980s. To die-hard supporters, Reaganomics was more than an economic program. It was an idea inspired by nothing less than the American founding. In an era of creeping statism, it was a moral crusade to limit government power and restore individual freedom.
To critics, by contrast, Reaganomics was not based on sound economic policy at all, premised as it was on the "trickle down" theory of how wealth spreads. Critics liked to point out that it led to high budget deficits and provided the political cover to cut taxes for the rich -- invariably "on the backs of the poor." It is telling that George H. W. Bush, when he was competing with Reagan for the Republican nomination in 1980, referred to Reagan's economic plan as "voodoo economics." By whatever name, according to critics, Reaganomics was shorthand for bogus economic policies and the greed of the 1980s.
However viewed, Reaganomics was the centerpiece of the 40th president's domestic policy, forcefully articulated by Ronald Reagan during the 1980 campaign and persistently pursued during his first years in office. As the economists who formulated it explained, Reaganomics meant:
- slowing the rate of growth in federal spending (as opposed to shrinking the size of government),
- trimming personal income tax rates,
- reducing the regulatory burden on business, and
- cooperating with the Federal Reserve System's monetary policy to encourage a stable currency and robust financial markets.[3]
Meese notes that "The economic program was the first matter the administration tackled, and it dominated discussion of domestic policy for years."[4]
ROOTS OF REAGANOMICS
There are many sources of Reaganomics, most of them drawn from the experiences of Ronald Reagan himself. In the first place, at Eureka College he had majored in economics.
Second, as his movie career took off, Reagan became increasingly dismayed by the taxes he paid to Sacramento and especially to Washington.
Third, Reagan had to stay atop economic policy throughout his eight years as California's governor. As Meese points out, "When Reagan ran for president, one of his most obvious and impressive credentials was that he had been chief executive of the largest state in the Union. It would be hard to imagine a better training ground for the managerial job at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. With over 20 million people [in the late 1960s], California was larger than 90 percent of the countries on earth; had it been a separate nation, its gross national product would have been the seventh largest in the world."[5]
A few years later, when he ran for president, Reagan assembled an estimable team of advisors, some 460 policy experts who advised the candidate on everything from atom bombs to welfare reform; 74 of these experts were detailed to 6 economic task forces focusing on the federal budget, tax policy, spending control, regulatory reform, inflation, and international monetary policy. Some of the advisors are now familiar names: Alan Greenspan, Milton Freedman, William Simon, Jack Kemp, and George Schultz, who was chairman of the campaign's Economic Policy Coordinating Committee. These advisors formed the brain trust that gave Reaganomics its shape.
The economic malaise that arose on President Carter’s watch was the ostensible bogeyman that Reaganomics set out to slay. But Reagan also set his sights on a more formidable foe -- a three-headed hydra that was part Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, part Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, and part Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. From the 1930s to the 1960s, these three Democrats pushed the size and scope of the federal government beyond anything the Founders intended, according to Reagan. The California governor set out on a quest to slow down the advance of Leviathan, realizing that it would probably only be a rear-guard action.
Reagan, it should be said, was also trying to distance himself from a previous Republican president, also from California. Richard Nixon (1969-1974) turned out to be as progressive on the domestic front as Lyndon Johnson (1963-1969) had been. For example, Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency, proposed the Family Assistance Program to guarantee a minimum income for the poor, unveiled the start of national health insurance, and imposed wage and price controls to battle inflation. Nixon's was government on offense. As presidential historian Robert Dallek observes, "Everyone mistakenly assumed Nixon would scale back the Great Society, but he actually took up many traditional liberal causes."[6] Reagan believed that the Republican party needed to be the nation's conservative party, rather than a pale shadow of the nation's other party, the home of progressive Democrats.
OPPORTUNITY
Reagan's entry onto the national political stage occurred when he spoke on behalf of Senator Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential campaign; from that point forward he was seen as a spokesman for the conservative (as opposed to Eastern Establishment) wing of the GOP. Reagan himself made a modest run for president in 1968, and launched a much more serious effort in 1976, when he challenged the Republican incumbent, Gerald R. Ford, and won a number of primaries. Both times he was turned back -- the time for his ideas was not ripe.
But the economic stresses that beset the United States during the 1970s made the public receptive to a change. After Jimmy Carter had been in the White House for four years (1977-1981), the economy "was in the midst of its worst crisis since the Great Depression. In January 1981 the unemployment rate stood at 7.4 percent, on its way up to 10 percent. Persistent double-digit inflation had pushed interest rates to an unbelievable 21 percent. Real pre-tax income of the average American family had been dropping since 1976, and -- thanks to bracket creep -- after tax income was falling even faster. The supply of oil and other raw materials seemed precarious. The outgoing president warned of a bleak economic future."[7]
It was these stresses -- and Carter's inability to manage them effectively -- that gave Reagan the opportunity to mount a serious challenge during the 1980 campaign. The movie star beat the incumbent Democrat in a landslide.
Reagan wasted no time trying to enact his economic program, the centerpiece of which was a 25 percent tax cut over three years. As I've written in another Ask Gleaves answer, although Reagan had campaigned lower taxes and leaner government, in 1981 he had to deal with a Democratic majority in the House. (In the '81 election Republicans gained control of the Senate.) True, an incoming president traditionally enjoys a honeymoon period of a hundred days or so, but in his first couple of months in office, Reagan was encountering stiff resistance among House Democrats. After Reagan proposed his Economic Recovery Plan, Speaker Tip O'Neill said, "We're not going to let them [the Republicans] tear asunder programs we've built over the years."[8]
The mood changed dramatically after John Hinckley fired his way into history. The would-be assassin shot Reagan on March 30, 1981, barely two months after the 40th president's inauguration. The president's grace and courage during the ordeal raised the esteem in which the American people held him. In such an atmosphere it was difficult for congressional Democrats to criticize the recovering president. Edmund Morris wrote of this critical period in Reagan's presidency:
"By April 24, [Reagan] was well enough to walk to the West Wing and chair a full Cabinet meeting. And four days later, live on prime time, he made the most dramatic presidential appearance in Congress since Franklin Roosevelt's return from Yalta.
"The millions watching saw a large and splendid man, literally death-defying, appear at the threshold of the House as the doorkeeper roared the traditional 'The President of the United States!' All members rose as required, but their respect on this occasion verged on reverence -- and also signaled a near-helpless capitulation to the message they knew he was bringing.
"'I walked in to an unbelievable ovation that went on for several minutes,' he wrote afterward. His speech -- a call for one hundred percent support for his Program for Economic Recovery -- was interrupted by fourteen bursts of applause and three standing ovations. 'In the 3rd of these suddenly about 40 Democrats stood and applauded. Maybe we are going to make it. It took a lot of courage for them to do that, and it sent a tingle down my spine.'
"Not forty but sixty-three Democrats subsequently joined the solid Republican minority, sending Reagan's budget to the Senate with a vote of 253-176. If not quite the total support he had dreamed of, it was a huge victory, and the first official register of his legislative power. As Speaker Tip O'Neill philosophically reminded reporters, Congress was ultimately responsible to the American people, 'and the will of the people is to go along with the President.'"[9]
All through the spring and summer of 1981, Reagan lobbied Congress to cut welfare, the food stamp program, school meals, and Medicare and Medicaid. Congress went along with most of the president's plan, passing the Economic Recovery Tax Act on July 29, 1981. Reagan signed the legislation the next month at his ranch in California, outside the house on the now-famous tax-cut table. The legislation cut taxes by $750 billion over five years, making it the largest tax cut in American history.
ECONOMIC IMPACT OF REAGANOMICS
Defenders of Reaganomics like to talk about how the bleak '70s gave way to the sunny '80s. "From 1982 to 1990 the United States experienced 96 straight months of economic growth, the longest peacetime expansion in its history [at that point]. Almost 20 million brand-new jobs, most of them high-paying jobs, were created. Inflation fell dramatically to low levels and stayed there as the American dollar once again became sound. Interest rates also fell dramatically and stayed down. The stock market soared, nearly tripling in value. Government revenues -- at the federal, state, and local levels -- nearly doubled, making possible the largest increase in social welfare spending in history. And, almost incidentally, we financed an enormous buildup in America's military power, checkmating the evil intentions of the old Soviet Empire, and ultimately causing the disintegration of Communism throughout the world."[10]
IMPACT ON THE NATION'S CLIMATE OF OPINION
Economists continue to debate the degree to which Reaganomics delivered economic recovery and prosperity. Whatever its contribution to the nation's economic recovery, there is no question of its impact on public discourse and policy. No sooner did Reagan leave office in 1989 than many of the nation's governors -- Republican and Democratic -- picked up the gauntlet and adopted the lower taxes/smaller government mantra.
Indeed, Reaganomics informed the economic thinking of the fiscally conservative New Democrats, of whom Bill Clinton was a leader. During Clinton's eight years as president, he never seriously entertained taking the nation back to the marginal tax rates of the Carter administration. In one of his State of the Union addresses, he disarmingly proclaimed, "The era of big government is over." It was because of Reaganomics.
Most recently, in the second presidential debate of the 2004 campaign, John Kerry was pressured into saying, in no uncertain terms, "I will not raise taxes" on the middle class. It was because of Reaganomics.
There is no question that economic and social debate at the state and federal level are different because of the credibility Reaganomics gained in the 1980s. "In retrospect, the initial Reagan economic program was the most ambitious attempt to change the direction of federal economic policy of any administration since the New Deal.... In the end, for various reasons, there was no 'Reagan Revolution' -- but considerable evolution occurred in economic policy during the Reagan presidency."[11]
___________________________
[1]Edwin Meese III, With Reagan: The Inside Story (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1992), p. 148.
[2]Martin Anderson, "When the Losers Write the History," National Review, August 31, 1992.
[3]Willaim Niskanen, William Poole, and Murray Weidenbaum, Introduction to the Reagan Economic Reports, in Two Revolutions in Economic Policy: The First Economic Reports of Presidents Kennedy and Reagan, ed. James Tobin and Murray Weidenbaum (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), p. 280.
[4]Meese, With Reagan, p. 148.
[5]Meese, With Reagan, p. 27.
[9]Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (New York: Modern Library, 1999), pp. 438-39.
[10]Martin Anderson, "When the Losers Write the History," National Review, August 31, 1992.
[11]Niskanen, Poole, and Weidenbaum, Introduction to the Reagan Economic Reports, in Two Revolutions, p. 289.
From: Bob S. of Minneapolis, MN
Date: October 9, 2004
Gleaves answers: Reaganomics -- the economic program named after President Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) -- has been one of the most controversial programs in American politics, much mentioned but little understood since first bolting onto the scene in the early 1980s. Reagan's long-time friend and advisor Edwin Meese III observed that Reaganomics "was the most consistently attacked and most ardently defended of all the president's initiatives."[1] Another Reagan domestic and economic policy advisor, Martin Anderson, tried to explain one source of popular misunderstanding: "There is a great deal at stake in the writing of the history of the Reagan presidency. For the past 25 years most of the men and women on the political Right ... have focused their energies on creating new policies, forging political coalitions, electing presidents, and fomenting peaceful worldwide revolution. They have been successful far beyond their wildest fantasies. But while many of us have been basking in warm contentment and self-satisfaction, those who were beaten have been busily writing our history."[2]
DEFINITIONS, PERCEPTIONS
Reaganomics was the name given to the economic program of our 40th president, who championed fiscal restraint and smaller government, tax cuts for individuals and less red tape for businesses. Reaganomics is based on "supply-side economics," a counter-intuitive set of policies that aims to increase revenues by decreasing taxes. Here is how it supposedly works: Significant tax cuts can lead to greater economic activity, since people have more money to spend and invest, which in turn can lead to greater tax revenues for the government.
To middle class Americans, Reaganomics was sold primarily as a tax cut that would let families keep more of their money, impose limits on big government, and increase consumer spending, savings, and investment. It was an idea that had broad appeal to many moderate and fiscally conservative voters when it was introduced in the early 1980s. To die-hard supporters, Reaganomics was more than an economic program. It was an idea inspired by nothing less than the American founding. In an era of creeping statism, it was a moral crusade to limit government power and restore individual freedom.
To critics, by contrast, Reaganomics was not based on sound economic policy at all, premised as it was on the "trickle down" theory of how wealth spreads. Critics liked to point out that it led to high budget deficits and provided the political cover to cut taxes for the rich -- invariably "on the backs of the poor." It is telling that George H. W. Bush, when he was competing with Reagan for the Republican nomination in 1980, referred to Reagan's economic plan as "voodoo economics." By whatever name, according to critics, Reaganomics was shorthand for bogus economic policies and the greed of the 1980s.
However viewed, Reaganomics was the centerpiece of the 40th president's domestic policy, forcefully articulated by Ronald Reagan during the 1980 campaign and persistently pursued during his first years in office. As the economists who formulated it explained, Reaganomics meant:
- slowing the rate of growth in federal spending (as opposed to shrinking the size of government),
- trimming personal income tax rates,
- reducing the regulatory burden on business, and
- cooperating with the Federal Reserve System's monetary policy to encourage a stable currency and robust financial markets.[3]
Meese notes that "The economic program was the first matter the administration tackled, and it dominated discussion of domestic policy for years."[4]
ROOTS OF REAGANOMICS
There are many sources of Reaganomics, most of them drawn from the experiences of Ronald Reagan himself. In the first place, at Eureka College he had majored in economics.
Second, as his movie career took off, Reagan became increasingly dismayed by the taxes he paid to Sacramento and especially to Washington.
Third, Reagan had to stay atop economic policy throughout his eight years as California's governor. As Meese points out, "When Reagan ran for president, one of his most obvious and impressive credentials was that he had been chief executive of the largest state in the Union. It would be hard to imagine a better training ground for the managerial job at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. With over 20 million people [in the late 1960s], California was larger than 90 percent of the countries on earth; had it been a separate nation, its gross national product would have been the seventh largest in the world."[5]
A few years later, when he ran for president, Reagan assembled an estimable team of advisors, some 460 policy experts who advised the candidate on everything from atom bombs to welfare reform; 74 of these experts were detailed to 6 economic task forces focusing on the federal budget, tax policy, spending control, regulatory reform, inflation, and international monetary policy. Some of the advisors are now familiar names: Alan Greenspan, Milton Freedman, William Simon, Jack Kemp, and George Schultz, who was chairman of the campaign's Economic Policy Coordinating Committee. These advisors formed the brain trust that gave Reaganomics its shape.
The economic malaise that arose on President Carter’s watch was the ostensible bogeyman that Reaganomics set out to slay. But Reagan also set his sights on a more formidable foe -- a three-headed hydra that was part Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, part Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, and part Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. From the 1930s to the 1960s, these three Democrats pushed the size and scope of the federal government beyond anything the Founders intended, according to Reagan. The California governor set out on a quest to slow down the advance of Leviathan, realizing that it would probably only be a rear-guard action.
Reagan, it should be said, was also trying to distance himself from a previous Republican president, also from California. Richard Nixon (1969-1974) turned out to be as progressive on the domestic front as Lyndon Johnson (1963-1969) had been. For example, Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency, proposed the Family Assistance Program to guarantee a minimum income for the poor, unveiled the start of national health insurance, and imposed wage and price controls to battle inflation. Nixon's was government on offense. As presidential historian Robert Dallek observes, "Everyone mistakenly assumed Nixon would scale back the Great Society, but he actually took up many traditional liberal causes."[6] Reagan believed that the Republican party needed to be the nation's conservative party, rather than a pale shadow of the nation's other party, the home of progressive Democrats.
OPPORTUNITY
Reagan's entry onto the national political stage occurred when he spoke on behalf of Senator Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential campaign; from that point forward he was seen as a spokesman for the conservative (as opposed to Eastern Establishment) wing of the GOP. Reagan himself made a modest run for president in 1968, and launched a much more serious effort in 1976, when he challenged the Republican incumbent, Gerald R. Ford, and won a number of primaries. Both times he was turned back -- the time for his ideas was not ripe.
But the economic stresses that beset the United States during the 1970s made the public receptive to a change. After Jimmy Carter had been in the White House for four years (1977-1981), the economy "was in the midst of its worst crisis since the Great Depression. In January 1981 the unemployment rate stood at 7.4 percent, on its way up to 10 percent. Persistent double-digit inflation had pushed interest rates to an unbelievable 21 percent. Real pre-tax income of the average American family had been dropping since 1976, and -- thanks to bracket creep -- after tax income was falling even faster. The supply of oil and other raw materials seemed precarious. The outgoing president warned of a bleak economic future."[7]
It was these stresses -- and Carter's inability to manage them effectively -- that gave Reagan the opportunity to mount a serious challenge during the 1980 campaign. The movie star beat the incumbent Democrat in a landslide.
Reagan wasted no time trying to enact his economic program, the centerpiece of which was a 25 percent tax cut over three years. As I've written in another Ask Gleaves answer, although Reagan had campaigned lower taxes and leaner government, in 1981 he had to deal with a Democratic majority in the House. (In the '81 election Republicans gained control of the Senate.) True, an incoming president traditionally enjoys a honeymoon period of a hundred days or so, but in his first couple of months in office, Reagan was encountering stiff resistance among House Democrats. After Reagan proposed his Economic Recovery Plan, Speaker Tip O'Neill said, "We're not going to let them [the Republicans] tear asunder programs we've built over the years."[8]
The mood changed dramatically after John Hinckley fired his way into history. The would-be assassin shot Reagan on March 30, 1981, barely two months after the 40th president's inauguration. The president's grace and courage during the ordeal raised the esteem in which the American people held him. In such an atmosphere it was difficult for congressional Democrats to criticize the recovering president. Edmund Morris wrote of this critical period in Reagan's presidency:
"By April 24, [Reagan] was well enough to walk to the West Wing and chair a full Cabinet meeting. And four days later, live on prime time, he made the most dramatic presidential appearance in Congress since Franklin Roosevelt's return from Yalta.
"The millions watching saw a large and splendid man, literally death-defying, appear at the threshold of the House as the doorkeeper roared the traditional 'The President of the United States!' All members rose as required, but their respect on this occasion verged on reverence -- and also signaled a near-helpless capitulation to the message they knew he was bringing.
"'I walked in to an unbelievable ovation that went on for several minutes,' he wrote afterward. His speech -- a call for one hundred percent support for his Program for Economic Recovery -- was interrupted by fourteen bursts of applause and three standing ovations. 'In the 3rd of these suddenly about 40 Democrats stood and applauded. Maybe we are going to make it. It took a lot of courage for them to do that, and it sent a tingle down my spine.'
"Not forty but sixty-three Democrats subsequently joined the solid Republican minority, sending Reagan's budget to the Senate with a vote of 253-176. If not quite the total support he had dreamed of, it was a huge victory, and the first official register of his legislative power. As Speaker Tip O'Neill philosophically reminded reporters, Congress was ultimately responsible to the American people, 'and the will of the people is to go along with the President.'"[9]
All through the spring and summer of 1981, Reagan lobbied Congress to cut welfare, the food stamp program, school meals, and Medicare and Medicaid. Congress went along with most of the president's plan, passing the Economic Recovery Tax Act on July 29, 1981. Reagan signed the legislation the next month at his ranch in California, outside the house on the now-famous tax-cut table. The legislation cut taxes by $750 billion over five years, making it the largest tax cut in American history.
ECONOMIC IMPACT OF REAGANOMICS
Defenders of Reaganomics like to talk about how the bleak '70s gave way to the sunny '80s. "From 1982 to 1990 the United States experienced 96 straight months of economic growth, the longest peacetime expansion in its history [at that point]. Almost 20 million brand-new jobs, most of them high-paying jobs, were created. Inflation fell dramatically to low levels and stayed there as the American dollar once again became sound. Interest rates also fell dramatically and stayed down. The stock market soared, nearly tripling in value. Government revenues -- at the federal, state, and local levels -- nearly doubled, making possible the largest increase in social welfare spending in history. And, almost incidentally, we financed an enormous buildup in America's military power, checkmating the evil intentions of the old Soviet Empire, and ultimately causing the disintegration of Communism throughout the world."[10]
IMPACT ON THE NATION'S CLIMATE OF OPINION
Economists continue to debate the degree to which Reaganomics delivered economic recovery and prosperity. Whatever its contribution to the nation's economic recovery, there is no question of its impact on public discourse and policy. No sooner did Reagan leave office in 1989 than many of the nation's governors -- Republican and Democratic -- picked up the gauntlet and adopted the lower taxes/smaller government mantra.
Indeed, Reaganomics informed the economic thinking of the fiscally conservative New Democrats, of whom Bill Clinton was a leader. During Clinton's eight years as president, he never seriously entertained taking the nation back to the marginal tax rates of the Carter administration. In one of his State of the Union addresses, he disarmingly proclaimed, "The era of big government is over." It was because of Reaganomics.
Most recently, in the second presidential debate of the 2004 campaign, John Kerry was pressured into saying, in no uncertain terms, "I will not raise taxes" on the middle class. It was because of Reaganomics.
There is no question that economic and social debate at the state and federal level are different because of the credibility Reaganomics gained in the 1980s. "In retrospect, the initial Reagan economic program was the most ambitious attempt to change the direction of federal economic policy of any administration since the New Deal.... In the end, for various reasons, there was no 'Reagan Revolution' -- but considerable evolution occurred in economic policy during the Reagan presidency."[11]
___________________________
[1]Edwin Meese III, With Reagan: The Inside Story (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1992), p. 148.
[2]Martin Anderson, "When the Losers Write the History," National Review, August 31, 1992.
[3]Willaim Niskanen, William Poole, and Murray Weidenbaum, Introduction to the Reagan Economic Reports, in Two Revolutions in Economic Policy: The First Economic Reports of Presidents Kennedy and Reagan, ed. James Tobin and Murray Weidenbaum (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), p. 280.
[4]Meese, With Reagan, p. 148.
[5]Meese, With Reagan, p. 27.
[6]Robert Dallek, To Lead a Nation: The Presidency in the Twentieth Century (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004), p. 75.
[7]Ed Rubenstein, Introduction to "The Real Reagan Record," National Review, August 31, 1992.
[8]Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), p. 203.[9]Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (New York: Modern Library, 1999), pp. 438-39.
[10]Martin Anderson, "When the Losers Write the History," National Review, August 31, 1992.
[11]Niskanen, Poole, and Weidenbaum, Introduction to the Reagan Economic Reports, in Two Revolutions, p. 289.
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Presidents and jobs
Question: As a follow-up to my previous question, which recent presidents have had the best record of job growth?
From: Sherry J., Phoenix, AZ
Date: September 15, 2004
Gleaves answers: This answer is going to surprise many people, especially if they are partisan and have a dog in the fight. Going back to 1929 and the Hoover administration, following are the presidents who presided over the most job growth (expressed as a percentage).
1. Bill Clinton -- 11.6 percent increase in jobs during his first term (1993-1996).
2. Bill Clinton -- 11.4 percent increase in jobs during his second term (1997-2000).
3. Ronald Reagan -- 10.8 percent increase in jobs during his second term (1985-1988).
4. Jimmy Carter -- 10.5 percent increase in jobs while in office (1977-1980).
5. Lyndon Johnson -- 9.8 percent increase in jobs during his one full term (1965-1968).
6. Franklin Roosevelt -- 7.7 percent increase in jobs during his third term ((1941-1944).
The winner, in five of the top six instances, was a Democrat.
Going back to 1929 and the Hoover administration, following are the presidents who presided over the least job growth (expressed as a percentage):
1. Herbert Hoover -- 6.4 percent decrease in jobs while in office (1929-1932).
2. George W. Bush -- 1.2 percent decrease in jobs during his first 3 and 1/2 years in office.
3. Dwight Eisenhower -- 0.8 percent increase during his second term (1957-1960).
4. George H. W. Bush -- 2.5 percent increase while in office (1989-1992).
5. Dwight Eisenhower -- 2.8 percent increase during his first term (1953-1956).
The least impressive performances, in all five cases, were those of Republicans.
The other presidents -- Truman, Kennedy, Nixon, Ford -- occupied the Oval Office when the Help Wanted ads expanded between 3 and 6 percent.
ECONOMIC STEWARDSHIP
Technically presidents don't create jobs; what they really do is help create the conditions in which jobs are added to or subtracted from the economy. That's why one of a president's chief tasks is economic stewardship. Presidential stewardship of the economy has a storied past, going back to the beginning of our nation, when George Washington hired Alexander Hamilton to be Treasury secretary. Hamilton wrote a series of perceptive reports and proved to be a brilliant architect of economic growth that has influenced presidents and policymakers to this day.
How do presidents carry out the task of economic stewardship? First, foremost, and hopefully by doing no harm. Presidents have to watch what they say because their words can make the stock market rise or fall. They have to think through their fiscal policy since it usually involves changes in tax policy, the regulatory burden, a budget surplus or deficit, and the national debt. Whether they sign or veto the legislation sent to their desk from Capitol Hill can similarly have an impact, as can the trade agreements they negotiate. And since the president is the commander in chief, do not forget the impact of war, which usually has an enormous impact on the economy.
Presidents have historically taken quite different tacks to influence the economy. Those in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt spoke of "stimulus packages" -- i.e., government programs -- to pump money into the economy to try to create jobs. Those in the tradition of Ronald Reagan have spoken of tax and regulatory cuts to stimulate the economy. Whatever their economic approach, by word and deed modern presidents can have an impact on trade, outsourcing, income, savings, investment, the gross domestic product, consumer confidence, home ownership, business expansion, and job growth.
Now, since presidents are constrained by the Constitution, Congress, Supreme Court, the bureaucracy, public opinion, election year politics, term limits, and custom, there are limits to their power over the economy. Moreover, they exercise economic leverage through fiscal policy, not monetary policy, which is the province of the Federal Reserve Board.
How is the economic stewardship of any given administration measured? One measure is the percentage change in jobs, which your question seeks to plumb. Two other common measures are the unemployment rate and inflation rate. These two can be added up to reckon the Misery Index, devised by Jimmy Carter's campaign in 1976 to criticize President Gerald R. Ford's economic performance. Four years later, Ronald Reagan turned the Misery Index against its creator to discredit Jimmy Carter's economic stewardship.
This answer started with some surprise facts. But over the past several decades, polls have consistently shown that voters regard Republican presidents as better economic stewards than Democratic presidents. Republicans tend to run as fiscal conservatives. Most voters and a good many economists believe that fiscal conservatism -- lower tax rates, a balanced budget, fewer regulations -- leads to better conditions for job growth than the alternative -- higher taxes, budget deficits, and more regulations. However they are measured, virtually all modern presidents want to be remembered as good stewards of the nation's economy.
From: Sherry J., Phoenix, AZ
Date: September 15, 2004
Gleaves answers: This answer is going to surprise many people, especially if they are partisan and have a dog in the fight. Going back to 1929 and the Hoover administration, following are the presidents who presided over the most job growth (expressed as a percentage).
1. Bill Clinton -- 11.6 percent increase in jobs during his first term (1993-1996).
2. Bill Clinton -- 11.4 percent increase in jobs during his second term (1997-2000).
3. Ronald Reagan -- 10.8 percent increase in jobs during his second term (1985-1988).
4. Jimmy Carter -- 10.5 percent increase in jobs while in office (1977-1980).
5. Lyndon Johnson -- 9.8 percent increase in jobs during his one full term (1965-1968).
6. Franklin Roosevelt -- 7.7 percent increase in jobs during his third term ((1941-1944).
The winner, in five of the top six instances, was a Democrat.
Going back to 1929 and the Hoover administration, following are the presidents who presided over the least job growth (expressed as a percentage):
1. Herbert Hoover -- 6.4 percent decrease in jobs while in office (1929-1932).
2. George W. Bush -- 1.2 percent decrease in jobs during his first 3 and 1/2 years in office.
3. Dwight Eisenhower -- 0.8 percent increase during his second term (1957-1960).
4. George H. W. Bush -- 2.5 percent increase while in office (1989-1992).
5. Dwight Eisenhower -- 2.8 percent increase during his first term (1953-1956).
The least impressive performances, in all five cases, were those of Republicans.
The other presidents -- Truman, Kennedy, Nixon, Ford -- occupied the Oval Office when the Help Wanted ads expanded between 3 and 6 percent.
ECONOMIC STEWARDSHIP
Technically presidents don't create jobs; what they really do is help create the conditions in which jobs are added to or subtracted from the economy. That's why one of a president's chief tasks is economic stewardship. Presidential stewardship of the economy has a storied past, going back to the beginning of our nation, when George Washington hired Alexander Hamilton to be Treasury secretary. Hamilton wrote a series of perceptive reports and proved to be a brilliant architect of economic growth that has influenced presidents and policymakers to this day.
How do presidents carry out the task of economic stewardship? First, foremost, and hopefully by doing no harm. Presidents have to watch what they say because their words can make the stock market rise or fall. They have to think through their fiscal policy since it usually involves changes in tax policy, the regulatory burden, a budget surplus or deficit, and the national debt. Whether they sign or veto the legislation sent to their desk from Capitol Hill can similarly have an impact, as can the trade agreements they negotiate. And since the president is the commander in chief, do not forget the impact of war, which usually has an enormous impact on the economy.
Presidents have historically taken quite different tacks to influence the economy. Those in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt spoke of "stimulus packages" -- i.e., government programs -- to pump money into the economy to try to create jobs. Those in the tradition of Ronald Reagan have spoken of tax and regulatory cuts to stimulate the economy. Whatever their economic approach, by word and deed modern presidents can have an impact on trade, outsourcing, income, savings, investment, the gross domestic product, consumer confidence, home ownership, business expansion, and job growth.
Now, since presidents are constrained by the Constitution, Congress, Supreme Court, the bureaucracy, public opinion, election year politics, term limits, and custom, there are limits to their power over the economy. Moreover, they exercise economic leverage through fiscal policy, not monetary policy, which is the province of the Federal Reserve Board.
How is the economic stewardship of any given administration measured? One measure is the percentage change in jobs, which your question seeks to plumb. Two other common measures are the unemployment rate and inflation rate. These two can be added up to reckon the Misery Index, devised by Jimmy Carter's campaign in 1976 to criticize President Gerald R. Ford's economic performance. Four years later, Ronald Reagan turned the Misery Index against its creator to discredit Jimmy Carter's economic stewardship.
This answer started with some surprise facts. But over the past several decades, polls have consistently shown that voters regard Republican presidents as better economic stewards than Democratic presidents. Republicans tend to run as fiscal conservatives. Most voters and a good many economists believe that fiscal conservatism -- lower tax rates, a balanced budget, fewer regulations -- leads to better conditions for job growth than the alternative -- higher taxes, budget deficits, and more regulations. However they are measured, virtually all modern presidents want to be remembered as good stewards of the nation's economy.
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Job growth and elections
Question: Is strong job growth the best predictor of an incumbent president's re-election chances? Likewise, is weak job growth the best predictor of a challenger's chances to unseat an incumbent?
From: Sherry J. of Phoenix, AZ
Date: September 14, 2004
Gleaves answers: Yes and no -- how do you like that for an answer?
Seriously, the answer is more complex than many voters may realize.[1] The conventional wisdom is that if presidents are in office when there is double-digit job growth, they or their hand-picked successor will win re-election. We are constantly told that people vote their pocketbook. But tell that to Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, and Lyndon Johnson, each of whom lost following double-digit job growth.
The truth is that pocketbook issues are extraordinarily complex; job growth is just part of the calculus that involves inflation, interest rates, consumer confidence, consumer debt, home ownership numbers, and other factors.
The best that can be said is that some presidents who presided over double-digit job growth won re-election. This is true of Bill Clinton, who owns the record; there was 11.6 percent job growth during his first term (1993-1996), and he handily beat back challenger Bob Dole in 1996. Similarly, Vice President George H. W. Bush did quite well because of Ronald Reagan's legacy; there was 10.8 percent job growth during Reagan's second term (1985-1988), and Bush easily defeated Michael Dukakis in 1988.
On the other hand, double-digit job growth did not insure victory for others who had been in office. There was 11.4 percent job growth during Bill Clinton's second term (1997-2000), but it did not secure Vice President Al Gore's victory over George W. Bush in 2000. Likewise, the fact that jobs grew by 10.5 percent during Jimmy Carter's term (1977-1980) -- a statistic that really surprises people -- did not guarantee his being returned to office when Ronald Reagan challenged him.
So: twice in recent times the electorate rewarded incumbents after double-digit job growth, and twice the electorate turned them out.
It is hard to discern a meaningful political pattern based on robust or anemic job growth. During Dwight D. Eisenhower's first term (1953-1956), there was only 2.8 percent job growth, yet he was easily returned to office. During Lyndon B. Johnson's term (1965-1968), there was 9.8 percent job growth, but his successor was defeated.
And think about this. Franklin D. Roosevelt became president during the depths of the Great Depression, when one in four workers was unemployed -- there was nowhere to go but up. Yet he was re-elected when there was 5.5 percent job growth in his first term (1933-1936), 3.3 percent growth in his second term (1937-1940), and 7.7 percent growth in his third term (1941-1944), when the nation was totally mobilized for war. Hardly exceptional numbers, any of them.
Not that job performance is irrelevant to one's chances of re-election. Consider poor Herbert Hoover: the nation's economy lost 6.4 percent of its jobs during his term (1929-1933), and the Great Enginneer failed to win re-election. Is there a causal link? Absolutely.
So what about the current president, George W. Bush? Based on data through July of 2004, it appears that Bush will be the first president since Hoover to reside in the White House when there is a net job loss; there are 1.2 percent fewer jobs today than in 2000. Come November 2, will there be a causal link between the economic fact and the political performance? Yes. Will it be enough of a link to determine the outcome of the election? Not likely. As of this writing, Bush is ahead of rival John Kerry in the polls.
What to make of such a statistical hodge podge? Only this: In the end, many factors determine who wins presidential elections. It is not always true -- as was said in 1992 -- that "It's the economy, stupid!" The context of the times is always a factor. If the nation is at war, then the country is judging the candidates as commanders in chief. If the nation is grappling with past wrongs, then citizens are judging candidates' sense of justice. If the nation is impatient for reform, then voters are sizing up candidates' relations with Congress, and whether they have the ability to get legislation passed and signed.
Citizens are sensitive to many dimensions of the people who run for high office: vision, character, personality, sense of justice, political skills, communication skills, economic stewardship, administrative skills, international relations, leadership in a crisis -- all play a role. In the end, the choice often seems to be a mystery.
_________________________________________________________________
[1]For the data used in this answer, I am indebted to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bloomberg Financial Markets, and Dylan Loeb McClain, "In Elections, It's Not Always about Jobs," New York Times, August 8, 2004, p. 2 of Week in Review.
From: Sherry J. of Phoenix, AZ
Date: September 14, 2004
Gleaves answers: Yes and no -- how do you like that for an answer?
Seriously, the answer is more complex than many voters may realize.[1] The conventional wisdom is that if presidents are in office when there is double-digit job growth, they or their hand-picked successor will win re-election. We are constantly told that people vote their pocketbook. But tell that to Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, and Lyndon Johnson, each of whom lost following double-digit job growth.
The truth is that pocketbook issues are extraordinarily complex; job growth is just part of the calculus that involves inflation, interest rates, consumer confidence, consumer debt, home ownership numbers, and other factors.
The best that can be said is that some presidents who presided over double-digit job growth won re-election. This is true of Bill Clinton, who owns the record; there was 11.6 percent job growth during his first term (1993-1996), and he handily beat back challenger Bob Dole in 1996. Similarly, Vice President George H. W. Bush did quite well because of Ronald Reagan's legacy; there was 10.8 percent job growth during Reagan's second term (1985-1988), and Bush easily defeated Michael Dukakis in 1988.
On the other hand, double-digit job growth did not insure victory for others who had been in office. There was 11.4 percent job growth during Bill Clinton's second term (1997-2000), but it did not secure Vice President Al Gore's victory over George W. Bush in 2000. Likewise, the fact that jobs grew by 10.5 percent during Jimmy Carter's term (1977-1980) -- a statistic that really surprises people -- did not guarantee his being returned to office when Ronald Reagan challenged him.
So: twice in recent times the electorate rewarded incumbents after double-digit job growth, and twice the electorate turned them out.
It is hard to discern a meaningful political pattern based on robust or anemic job growth. During Dwight D. Eisenhower's first term (1953-1956), there was only 2.8 percent job growth, yet he was easily returned to office. During Lyndon B. Johnson's term (1965-1968), there was 9.8 percent job growth, but his successor was defeated.
And think about this. Franklin D. Roosevelt became president during the depths of the Great Depression, when one in four workers was unemployed -- there was nowhere to go but up. Yet he was re-elected when there was 5.5 percent job growth in his first term (1933-1936), 3.3 percent growth in his second term (1937-1940), and 7.7 percent growth in his third term (1941-1944), when the nation was totally mobilized for war. Hardly exceptional numbers, any of them.
Not that job performance is irrelevant to one's chances of re-election. Consider poor Herbert Hoover: the nation's economy lost 6.4 percent of its jobs during his term (1929-1933), and the Great Enginneer failed to win re-election. Is there a causal link? Absolutely.
So what about the current president, George W. Bush? Based on data through July of 2004, it appears that Bush will be the first president since Hoover to reside in the White House when there is a net job loss; there are 1.2 percent fewer jobs today than in 2000. Come November 2, will there be a causal link between the economic fact and the political performance? Yes. Will it be enough of a link to determine the outcome of the election? Not likely. As of this writing, Bush is ahead of rival John Kerry in the polls.
What to make of such a statistical hodge podge? Only this: In the end, many factors determine who wins presidential elections. It is not always true -- as was said in 1992 -- that "It's the economy, stupid!" The context of the times is always a factor. If the nation is at war, then the country is judging the candidates as commanders in chief. If the nation is grappling with past wrongs, then citizens are judging candidates' sense of justice. If the nation is impatient for reform, then voters are sizing up candidates' relations with Congress, and whether they have the ability to get legislation passed and signed.
Citizens are sensitive to many dimensions of the people who run for high office: vision, character, personality, sense of justice, political skills, communication skills, economic stewardship, administrative skills, international relations, leadership in a crisis -- all play a role. In the end, the choice often seems to be a mystery.
_________________________________________________________________
[1]For the data used in this answer, I am indebted to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bloomberg Financial Markets, and Dylan Loeb McClain, "In Elections, It's Not Always about Jobs," New York Times, August 8, 2004, p. 2 of Week in Review.
Saturday, September 11, 2004
9/11 and the presidency
Question: How did 9/11 change what we look for in a president?
From: Monica P. of Colorado Springs, CO
Date: September 11, 2004
Gleaves answers: In short and above all: we want a commander in chief more than an economic manager.
That was hardly the case a few short years ago. We Americans live in interesting times. Our nation has experienced three distinctly different eras during the last five presidential election cycles. We have gone from the Cold War to peacetime to the war on terror. You'd be hard pressed to find a comparable period in our history when the challenges have been so differently defined. Election cycles reflect those changing challenges.
WANTED IN 1988: A RETIRING COMMANDER IN CHIEF
In 1988, when Vice President George H. W. Bush ran against Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, we were dialing down our nation's epochal struggle against the Soviet Union. Yet there were lingering dangers with all those missiles pointed at us, so foreign policy was still high on our list of political priorities. Bush struck most people as the better man for the job.
Dukakis, in retrospect, hardly stood a chance. No image better encapsulates his failed bid for the White House than the one of him riding around in a tank in Warren, Michigan, an oversized helmet on his head. The diminuitive governor hardly looked like the stuff of which commanders in chief are made, and he was practically laughed out of his campaign.
In the public imagination, the phony photo-op of Dukakis riding around in a tank was juxtaposed to something authentic: the grainy film clip of fighter pilot George H. W. Bush being rescued by a submarine after a dangerous mission in the Pacific during World War II. Americans wanted the Real Thing. Is there any question who looked more suited to finish the Cold War?
Now, it didn't hurt that Bush proposed steering the ship of state out of choppy seas and back to calmer waters where the nation could be its "kinder, gentler" self. Bush did have a domestic dimension to him; he had majored in economics at Yale University. But the habits of the Cold War were still very much with us in 1988, and that is why Bush won.
WANTED IN 1992, 1996, 2000: ECONOMIC MANAGER
Yet the times they were a changin'. Once the Berlin Wall fell in 1989; once the Soviet empire collapsed in 1991; once the exuberance of those heady days faded; Americans lost interest in a man who represented an older generation and its heroic role in the last "good war." Although Bush was known for his exploits during World War II, for his outstanding foreign policy experience, and for his stunning victory in the Persian Gulf War, during which he forged an alliance of more than 50 nations, the voters were predisposed for a change. Bill Clinton was the change.
By 1992 the U.S. was basking in the post-Cold War peace dividend. Intellectuals were bloviating about "the end of history." America was the undisputed king of the jungle. The nation's economy was emerging from a recession. Peace and prosperity stretched to the horizon. Americans basically wanted their president to be a competent economic manager. Little attention was paid to foreign policy -- or to Bill Clinton's crafty avoidance of serving in the armed forces during the Vietnam War. That's why the Democrats' slogan in '92 -- "It's the economy, stupid!" -- captured the zeitgeist, and with it Clinton captured the White House.
In retrospect, the emphasis on the economy also helps explain why Clinton so easily turned back challenger Bob Dole -- another World War II veteran -- in 1996. The majority of Americans may have disapproved of Clinton's personal behavior, but they clearly were all right with his presidential performance, especially when it came to economic management.
This emphasis on things economic also helps us understand why, in 2000, both major candidates ran on their domestic vision. It is interesting to speculate whether Senator John McCain would have beaten out George W. Bush in the Republican primaries had 9/11 occurred before the 2000 contest.
Of course, 9/11 had not occurred, and when voters had a choice between two younger men who had Ivy League credentials but little foreign policy experience, the election was a toss-up. Al Gore won the popular vote, but George W. Bush won the vote that counts -- in the Electoral College.
WANTED IN 2004: COMMANDER IN CHIEF
9/11 totally redefined the challenges of our day and the Bush presidency along with it. Today our national challenges are somewhat different from either the four decades of Cold War or the one decade of hot stocks. The greatest effect of 9/11 on our national politics is that we don't just want an economic manager in the White House; we want a commander in chief. Our highest priority is preventing another terrorist attack by jihadists on our soil. So we want in our president a leader who will increase security at home, forge anti-jihadist alliances abroad, and take the battle to the terrorists who would destroy us.
Both John Kerry and George W. Bush understand the requirements of the new zeitgeist: commander in chief is today the most important role in a president's job description. That is why, at the Democratic National Convention in July, Kerry emphasized his service in Vietnam; his argument is that his tour of duty on a Swift boat in Southeast Asia qualifies him to be a strong commander in chief in the war on terror. And it is why, at the Republican National Convention before Labor Day, Bush emphasized his leadership since the 9/11 attacks; his argument is that his actions have resulted in the terrorists having fewer bases, less money, and diminished opportunities to strike on U.S. soil.
The need for a thoughtful, decisive commander in chief -- that is the difference after 9/11. November 2nd will tell us which candidate has made the better case with the American people.
From: Monica P. of Colorado Springs, CO
Date: September 11, 2004
Gleaves answers: In short and above all: we want a commander in chief more than an economic manager.
That was hardly the case a few short years ago. We Americans live in interesting times. Our nation has experienced three distinctly different eras during the last five presidential election cycles. We have gone from the Cold War to peacetime to the war on terror. You'd be hard pressed to find a comparable period in our history when the challenges have been so differently defined. Election cycles reflect those changing challenges.
WANTED IN 1988: A RETIRING COMMANDER IN CHIEF
In 1988, when Vice President George H. W. Bush ran against Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, we were dialing down our nation's epochal struggle against the Soviet Union. Yet there were lingering dangers with all those missiles pointed at us, so foreign policy was still high on our list of political priorities. Bush struck most people as the better man for the job.
Dukakis, in retrospect, hardly stood a chance. No image better encapsulates his failed bid for the White House than the one of him riding around in a tank in Warren, Michigan, an oversized helmet on his head. The diminuitive governor hardly looked like the stuff of which commanders in chief are made, and he was practically laughed out of his campaign.
In the public imagination, the phony photo-op of Dukakis riding around in a tank was juxtaposed to something authentic: the grainy film clip of fighter pilot George H. W. Bush being rescued by a submarine after a dangerous mission in the Pacific during World War II. Americans wanted the Real Thing. Is there any question who looked more suited to finish the Cold War?
Now, it didn't hurt that Bush proposed steering the ship of state out of choppy seas and back to calmer waters where the nation could be its "kinder, gentler" self. Bush did have a domestic dimension to him; he had majored in economics at Yale University. But the habits of the Cold War were still very much with us in 1988, and that is why Bush won.
WANTED IN 1992, 1996, 2000: ECONOMIC MANAGER
Yet the times they were a changin'. Once the Berlin Wall fell in 1989; once the Soviet empire collapsed in 1991; once the exuberance of those heady days faded; Americans lost interest in a man who represented an older generation and its heroic role in the last "good war." Although Bush was known for his exploits during World War II, for his outstanding foreign policy experience, and for his stunning victory in the Persian Gulf War, during which he forged an alliance of more than 50 nations, the voters were predisposed for a change. Bill Clinton was the change.
By 1992 the U.S. was basking in the post-Cold War peace dividend. Intellectuals were bloviating about "the end of history." America was the undisputed king of the jungle. The nation's economy was emerging from a recession. Peace and prosperity stretched to the horizon. Americans basically wanted their president to be a competent economic manager. Little attention was paid to foreign policy -- or to Bill Clinton's crafty avoidance of serving in the armed forces during the Vietnam War. That's why the Democrats' slogan in '92 -- "It's the economy, stupid!" -- captured the zeitgeist, and with it Clinton captured the White House.
In retrospect, the emphasis on the economy also helps explain why Clinton so easily turned back challenger Bob Dole -- another World War II veteran -- in 1996. The majority of Americans may have disapproved of Clinton's personal behavior, but they clearly were all right with his presidential performance, especially when it came to economic management.
This emphasis on things economic also helps us understand why, in 2000, both major candidates ran on their domestic vision. It is interesting to speculate whether Senator John McCain would have beaten out George W. Bush in the Republican primaries had 9/11 occurred before the 2000 contest.
Of course, 9/11 had not occurred, and when voters had a choice between two younger men who had Ivy League credentials but little foreign policy experience, the election was a toss-up. Al Gore won the popular vote, but George W. Bush won the vote that counts -- in the Electoral College.
WANTED IN 2004: COMMANDER IN CHIEF
9/11 totally redefined the challenges of our day and the Bush presidency along with it. Today our national challenges are somewhat different from either the four decades of Cold War or the one decade of hot stocks. The greatest effect of 9/11 on our national politics is that we don't just want an economic manager in the White House; we want a commander in chief. Our highest priority is preventing another terrorist attack by jihadists on our soil. So we want in our president a leader who will increase security at home, forge anti-jihadist alliances abroad, and take the battle to the terrorists who would destroy us.
Both John Kerry and George W. Bush understand the requirements of the new zeitgeist: commander in chief is today the most important role in a president's job description. That is why, at the Democratic National Convention in July, Kerry emphasized his service in Vietnam; his argument is that his tour of duty on a Swift boat in Southeast Asia qualifies him to be a strong commander in chief in the war on terror. And it is why, at the Republican National Convention before Labor Day, Bush emphasized his leadership since the 9/11 attacks; his argument is that his actions have resulted in the terrorists having fewer bases, less money, and diminished opportunities to strike on U.S. soil.
The need for a thoughtful, decisive commander in chief -- that is the difference after 9/11. November 2nd will tell us which candidate has made the better case with the American people.
Saturday, September 04, 2004
Presidents, the economy, and domestic policy
Question: I'm a student and this is the first time I've written your column. Could you please tell me how the presidents have become increasingly involved in managing the economy and shaping domestic policy over the last hundred years?
From: Matt M., of Okemos, MI
Date: September 3, 2004
Gleaves answers: One of the most significant changes in the American presidency over the last hundred years has been the extent to which our chief executives are expected to manage the economy and to take the lead on domestic policy. It was not always the case. Since we are at the beginning of the gridiron season, let me answer your question in a way that compares the presidency to football.
LATE 19TH-CENTURY PRESIDENTS: REFEREES
During the last third of the 19th century -- between the Civil War and Spanish-American War -- our presidents did not have the power that presidents today have. Most of the power resided in Congress. To many Americans, this arrangement seemed consistent with what the framers of the U.S. Constitution had wanted. Article I set up a strong Congress or legislative branch of government whose role was to make laws that in large measure reflected the will of the people. Article II provided for a not-so-strong president when it came to domestic affairs, where his role was chiefly to sign, implement, administer, and enforce the laws passed by Congress. By this understanding of the Constitution, the president -- in peacetime, anyway -- was like a referee at a football game. He administered the rules of the game but did not himself want to be a player.
The comparison with football describes the referee role of presidents in the three decades between Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865) and Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909). During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, it did not matter which party the president belonged to. Republican presidents like Rutherford B. Hayes were as disinclined to intervene in national life as the Democratic president of the era, Grover Cleveland. They assiduously avoided intervening in the economy. In fact, when a bill to support Texas farmers suffering from a drought came to Cleveland's desk, he vetoed it, observing, "Though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people."[1]
James A. Garfield was typical of the string of referee presidents between Lincoln and TR. Garfield biographer Allan Peskin points out:
THEODORE ROOSEVELT: REFEREE-COMMISSIONER
Theodore Roosevelt, who served in the White House from 1901-1909, is regarded by many historians as the first modern president. When he became president at the beginning of the 20th century, the Progressive movement was influencing public opinion. The industrial revolution had led to much social displacement and economic imbalance, and muckrakers were drawing attention to the problems. It was increasingly debated whether the federal government should restore the balance between big business on the one hand, and workers and the public on the other. Progressive politicians sought government intervention. Their vision -- of government, the economy, and social policy being an inseparable triangle -- was the future.
TR was energetic and ambitious for himself and for the United States. He cherry-picked progressive ideas and translated them into a political agenda. Because of his strong character and charismatic personality, he was able to convince the American people that the presidency should have more influence over domestic affairs. He was especially eager to "level the playing field" so that all Americans could compete and get ahead in the marketplace. TR, using the office of the president as a bully pulpit, transformed the presidency and role of the federal government. He sought to make the president and federal government the mediator between special interests and the national interest. One way he did so was by targeting overly large concentrations of power, whether in economic monopolies or political machines. It was the era of trustbusting. He called his philosophy the Square Deal, and by it he meant to make America more truly a land of opportunity.
To translate TR's action into football, imagine a guy who no longer wants to sit in the stands. Imagine a guy so interested in the game that he wants to be down on the field. He doesn't think he can play -- the rules prohibit that -- but he at least wants to referee the game. Better yet, in his wildest dreams he wants to be commissioner of the entire sport. That was TR. He was a dominant personality who started out like a referee (think of the famous NFL referee, Jim Tunney) but decided that it would be even more fun to be commissioner (think of Pete Rozell, who forever changed the NFL). That analogy describes how TR's conception of the office changed over eight years. He had an irrepressible personality that has led some historians to call him the founder of the "charismatic presidency." He used his bigger-than-life personality and ambition to transform the office of the president and its role in domestic affairs.
Now, after progressive presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and, later, Woodrow Wilson, there was a brief ebb in presidential power. Between 1921-1929, during the Harding and Coolidge administrations and first year of the Hoover administration, there was an effort to take the presidency back to what it was during the late 19th-century, a referee in American domestic life. In Calvin Coolidge's words, "The chief business of America is business."
By the 1930s, that idea was roundly rejected.
HOOVER AND FDR: GETTING INTO THE GAME AND PLAYING DEFENSE
The idea of the referee presidency was abandoned during the Great Depression. It was Herbert Hoover's misfortune to have been in office only seven months when economic catastrophe struck. A common myth of American history is that Hoover remained essentially a spectator when confronted with the deepening crisis, that he stuck to laissez-faire principles while the people starved. This is not accurate. Indeed, before he ever became president, Hoover was no apostle of the unfettered marketplace. Already as Commerce secretary under Presidents Harding and Coolidge, he championed a closer partnership between business and government. The Wall Street Journal noted, "Never before, here or elsewhere, has a government been so completely fused with business."[5]
As the Great Depression worsened from late 1929 to 1932, Hoover accepted increasing responsibility for ending the economic crisis and doing so in a socially humane manner -- he would make the economic and social effects of the depression the federal government's problem. That was unprecedented. Historian Michael Stoff observes, "Measured against past depression presidents -- Martin Van Buren in the 1830s, Ulysses S. Grant in 1873, Grover Cleveland in 1893, Theodore Roosevelt in 1907, Warren Harding in 1921 -- Hoover was a whirlwind of activity."[6]
Nevertheless, in 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt challenged the hapless Hoover and won the first of four terms. He pledged to be an energetic executive dedicated to changing the relationship between the federal government and the American people. FDR inherited the worst depression in American history -- one-quarter of the workforce was unemployed. Within his first 100 days in office, he dramatically enlarged the scope of the federal government and initiated numerous new domestic programs. During his second term, he pushed through a program that affects virtually every American to this day: Social Security. During his third term, most of which coincided with U.S. involvement in the Second World War, he instituted rationing and price controls.
To translate all this into football, FDR wanted in on more of the action. He didn't want just to call what was fair and what was foul as so many nineteenth-century presidents had; nor did he want to be the commissioner as his cousin, TR, had. He wanted to play ball and, moreover, be an impact player, so he changed out of the zebra-stripes and into a jersey. True, FDR mostly played defense; he primarily reacted to economic and social problems, like a defensive player who reacts to where the ball is. But even in that reactive capacity, during FDR's 12 years in office the federal government assumed an unprecedented role in the nation's economy. FDR's presidency consolidated the idea that the federal government, economic policy, and social policy were an unbreakable triangle in the center of which stood the American president. His actions drew much criticism, but the precedent -- of using the government to impact the economy and society -- stuck.
FDR died in 1945, but not his impact. The Employment Act of 1946 -- passed by a Republican Congress -- ratified the trend toward more federal intervention. It committed the federal government to use its economic might to achieve "maximum employment, production, and purchasing power." While specific policies were not mandated, the president was to work with Congress to foster "free competitive enterprise and the general welfare." As James Tobin and Murray Weidenbaum have observed, "The Act was an important bipartisan declaration of federal responsibility for the nation's economic performance. The electorate takes this responsibility for granted nowadays, but it was by no means generally acknowledged before World War II."[7]
It is revealing to see how difficult it is for later presidents to revert to a less active role once a greater role is carved out for the federal government. Dwight D. Eisenhower campaigned for the presidency in 1952 on a fiscally conservative platform that called for smaller government, balanced budgets, privatizing the Tennessee Valley Authority, and abolishing (or at least shrinking) Social Security. So what did Ike do with Social Security once in the White House? Expand the program. The fact that a Republican president ratified the entitlement meant that significant bipartisan support had developed for the program. It has since become a "third rail" of American politics, difficult for any president to touch.
FDR's role in changing the presidency and the federal government cannot be overstated. His 12 years in office effected not only a political sea change, but also -- and perhaps more importantly -- an intellectual sea change, the merits of which are fiercely debated to this day. Roosevelt's 1944 speech, calling for a second Bill of Rights, went far beyond anything the nation's founders had conceived when they drafted the first Bill of Rights back in 1789. The first ten amendments of the Constitution were limited to political rights such as freedom of speech and the press. But in FDR's mind, a second Bill of Rights was needed that went beyond political rights. He championed the right to economic welfare and social access to all citizens. University of Chicago professor Cass Sunstein calls this sea change "FDR's unfinished revolution."
In football terms, FDR had to content himself to play on defense, but what he really wanted to do was play on offense; he wanted the presidency and federal government to set the pace of the game. He envisioned Washington, DC, assuming unprecedented power to change not just politics, but also the economic and social conditions in American life. The nation, however, was not ready for such far-reaching changes; American individualism ran strong and deep and against the current of big government. It would take at least two more decades before a president could both speak of this "unfinished revolution" and sign enough legislation to make the changes permanent.
LYNDON B. JOHNSON: PLAYING OFFENSE
After the Second World War, America entered the most prosperous era of its history. Harry S. Truman conceived a far-reaching social agenda that was eventually stillborn, but significant to our story nonetheless. The Fair Deal was government on offence. It proposed medical care for the elderly and only went down in defeat because of the Korean War.
Where Harry S. Truman's ambitions for the federal government stumbled, Lyndon B. Johnson's hit a marathon stride. LBJ represents a major turning point in the presidency. The former Senate majority leader and vice president would have a huge impact on the role the president would play in the American economy and society. In short: the president should not just be reactive; he should be proactive. Johnson reasoned that the United States was the richest, most powerful nation in world history. Given our national resources, couldn't the president make the federal government an agent of positive change?
Johnson was much more ambitious for the federal government than previous Democrats Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, or John F. Kennedy had been.
LBJ explained to aides that he wanted to make his mark on history and unroll a "Johnson program." In May of 1964 he went to Ann Arbor to sketch his vision in a commencement address at the University of Michigan. He appealed to their idealism: "Will you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty?... Will you join in the battle to build the Great Society, to prove that our material progress is only the foundation on which we will build a richer life of mind and spirit?" As historian Robert Dallek notes, "The result of Johnson's antipoverty crusade and reach for a Great Society was an explosion of groundbreaking and far-reaching laws passed by Congress between 1964 and 1968." Henceforth there would be Medicare and Medicaid, a federal Office of Economic Opportunity, the food stamp program; not to mention job training, community volunteerism, and urban renewal spearheaded inside the Beltway.[8]
One of America's most influential commentators, James Reston, observed at the time: "President Johnson is beginning to make Franklin Roosevelt's early legislative record look like an abject failure. He's getting everything through the Congress but the abolition of the Republican party, and he hasn't tried that yet. It's a political miracle. It has even surpassed his own expectations, which were not modest...."[9]
Johnson was president for barely more than 5 years, from 1963 to 1969, but his war on poverty -- his advancing his vision of a Great Society -- encompassed almost a thousand bills and impacted almost every element in American society.
In football terms, this was not a president playing defense. It was a president playing offense. The playbook was not always flashy -- often it was three yards and a cloud of dust -- but it represented quite a change for a president to use the federal government itself as an agent to change society.
AFTER JOHNSON: A WEST-COAST OFFENSE?
Not that Washington's tentacles grew willy nilly; not at all, for at least two reasons. In the first place, there were three decades in the past hundred years in which voters grew weary or skeptical of leviathan and were happy to put the beast on a diet: the 1920s of Calvin Coolidge, the 1950s of Dwight Eisenhower, and the 1980s of Ronald Reagan. In Coolidge's case, the federal budget initially shrank but then grew slightly by the end of the '20s. In Eisenhower's case, federal expenditures diminished the first couple of years but then grew significantly by the end of the '50s. In Reagan's case, the federal budget almost doubled during in the '80s [10] -- although it is arguable that it would have ballooned even more had a progressive been in the White House.
In the second place, wars have often diverted presidents' domestic ambitions. In any given administration, domestic policy and foreign policy compete for the president's attention. But when war breaks out, domestic concerns usually take a back seat. American wars are a two-edged sword when it comes to domestic affairs. On the one hand, wars lead to more concentration of power at the federal level; every major U.S. war has put pounds on leviathan: the federal government inevitably grows larger and more intrusive. On the other hand, as presidential historian Robert Dallek observes, wars have repeatedly thwarted reformers' attempts to bend the federal government to their social and economic purposes. The Spanish American War took some of the steam out of populism; World War I took the wind out of the sails of Progressivism; World War II put a halt to the New Deal; the Korean War frustrated supporters of the Fair Deal.
This is why understanding the presidency of Lyndon Johnson is so important to understanding the last four decades of U.S. history. For it was with LBJ that the nation believed that the federal government could simultaneously fight a war against communists abroad and a war against poverty at home. Whether Americans supported or decried the "Johnson program," it was breathtakingly audacious when one considers how tied up in Vietnam the nation was becoming by 1965. Johnson, president during an extremely prosperous era, wanted to have it all -- guns and butter.
We live in Lyndon Johnson's world -- the Johnson administration represents the paradigm in which we live today. He successfully pushed to expand the president's role in domestic affairs. TR (playing commissioner) and FDR (playing defense) and Truman (trying to play offense) were the engineers who made it possible for LBJ to build up the federal government into a leviathan. He did so over vigorous objections and heated debate, and the arguments -- philosophical and practical -- rage to this day.
Yet most chief executives after LBJ either explicitly continued many of his policies -- Nixon, Ford, Carter -- or implicitly recognized that they would not be dismantled -- Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43. Reagan railed against the Great Society but did little truly to dismantle it.
President Clinton is an interesting study in the tension between big-government progressives in his administration and small-gevernment conservatives in a Republican-controlled Congress. Clinton's ambition during his first year in office to nationalize much of the U.S. health system was a breathtaking effort to transform the playbook into a wide-open, West Coast offense. When Clinton was stymied, he settled back into the three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust playbook of his predecessors. The retrenchment was marked rhetorically with the famous line, "The era of big government is over" -- which was not true. For a brief time, President Clinton was compelled to cooperate with a conservative Congress and Republican governors to reform welfare programs. Yet the Great Society model was not, at its core, dismantled. Many of Johnson's programs survived.
Indeed, when a Republican president like George W. Bush has seemed more interested in reforming Great Society programs than in rescinding them (under the guise of "compassionate conservatism") you know that the offensive role of the federal government in the nation's social and economic life has become permanent.
Nowadays, even amid the war on terror, Americans take it for granted that presidents will spearhead an ambitious domestic agenda. It is useful to recall how unthinkable that would have been barely more than a century ago.
____________________________________________________________________
[1]Suzanne Garment, "Stephen Grover Cleveland," in Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House, ed. James Taranto and Leonard Leo (New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 113.
[2]Allan Peskin, "James Abram Garfield," in Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House, ed. by James Taranto and Leonard Leo (New York: Wall Street Journal Books, 2004), p. 105.
[3]Thomas E. Patterson, We the People: A Concise Introduction to American Politics, 5th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2004), pp. 369-70.
[4]Buchanan quoted in Patterson, We the People, p. 370.
[5]Michael B. Stoff, "Herbert Hoover," in The American Presidency, ed. Alan Brinkley and Davis Dyer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), p. 336.
[6]Stoff, "Hoover," p. 338.
From: Matt M., of Okemos, MI
Date: September 3, 2004
Gleaves answers: One of the most significant changes in the American presidency over the last hundred years has been the extent to which our chief executives are expected to manage the economy and to take the lead on domestic policy. It was not always the case. Since we are at the beginning of the gridiron season, let me answer your question in a way that compares the presidency to football.
LATE 19TH-CENTURY PRESIDENTS: REFEREES
During the last third of the 19th century -- between the Civil War and Spanish-American War -- our presidents did not have the power that presidents today have. Most of the power resided in Congress. To many Americans, this arrangement seemed consistent with what the framers of the U.S. Constitution had wanted. Article I set up a strong Congress or legislative branch of government whose role was to make laws that in large measure reflected the will of the people. Article II provided for a not-so-strong president when it came to domestic affairs, where his role was chiefly to sign, implement, administer, and enforce the laws passed by Congress. By this understanding of the Constitution, the president -- in peacetime, anyway -- was like a referee at a football game. He administered the rules of the game but did not himself want to be a player.
The comparison with football describes the referee role of presidents in the three decades between Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865) and Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909). During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, it did not matter which party the president belonged to. Republican presidents like Rutherford B. Hayes were as disinclined to intervene in national life as the Democratic president of the era, Grover Cleveland. They assiduously avoided intervening in the economy. In fact, when a bill to support Texas farmers suffering from a drought came to Cleveland's desk, he vetoed it, observing, "Though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people."[1]
James A. Garfield was typical of the string of referee presidents between Lincoln and TR. Garfield biographer Allan Peskin points out:
The pantheon of presidential "greats" seems reserved for activists, which, in the nature of things, means those who dealt with major national crises. Presidents with the good fortune to preside over quiet times seem doomed to obscurity. In Garfield's day, America was at peace with itself and the world. Neither presidents nor government was expected to make things better, only to keep them running smoothly. Garfield shared this passive view. The whole duty of government, he once maintained, was "to keep the peace and stand outside the sunshine of the people."[2]As Harvard's Thomas Patterson observes of this era, "The prevailing conception was the Whig theory, which held that the presidency was a limited or constrained office whose occupant was confined to the exercise of expressly granted constitutional authority. The president had no implicit powers for dealing with national problems but was primarily an administrator, charged with carrying out the will of Congress."[3] Because he was merely an administrator, he was not even expected to have a vision of where the country should go. "My duty," said James Buchanan, a Whig adherent, "is to execute the laws ... and not my individual opinions."[4]
THEODORE ROOSEVELT: REFEREE-COMMISSIONER
Theodore Roosevelt, who served in the White House from 1901-1909, is regarded by many historians as the first modern president. When he became president at the beginning of the 20th century, the Progressive movement was influencing public opinion. The industrial revolution had led to much social displacement and economic imbalance, and muckrakers were drawing attention to the problems. It was increasingly debated whether the federal government should restore the balance between big business on the one hand, and workers and the public on the other. Progressive politicians sought government intervention. Their vision -- of government, the economy, and social policy being an inseparable triangle -- was the future.
TR was energetic and ambitious for himself and for the United States. He cherry-picked progressive ideas and translated them into a political agenda. Because of his strong character and charismatic personality, he was able to convince the American people that the presidency should have more influence over domestic affairs. He was especially eager to "level the playing field" so that all Americans could compete and get ahead in the marketplace. TR, using the office of the president as a bully pulpit, transformed the presidency and role of the federal government. He sought to make the president and federal government the mediator between special interests and the national interest. One way he did so was by targeting overly large concentrations of power, whether in economic monopolies or political machines. It was the era of trustbusting. He called his philosophy the Square Deal, and by it he meant to make America more truly a land of opportunity.
To translate TR's action into football, imagine a guy who no longer wants to sit in the stands. Imagine a guy so interested in the game that he wants to be down on the field. He doesn't think he can play -- the rules prohibit that -- but he at least wants to referee the game. Better yet, in his wildest dreams he wants to be commissioner of the entire sport. That was TR. He was a dominant personality who started out like a referee (think of the famous NFL referee, Jim Tunney) but decided that it would be even more fun to be commissioner (think of Pete Rozell, who forever changed the NFL). That analogy describes how TR's conception of the office changed over eight years. He had an irrepressible personality that has led some historians to call him the founder of the "charismatic presidency." He used his bigger-than-life personality and ambition to transform the office of the president and its role in domestic affairs.
Now, after progressive presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and, later, Woodrow Wilson, there was a brief ebb in presidential power. Between 1921-1929, during the Harding and Coolidge administrations and first year of the Hoover administration, there was an effort to take the presidency back to what it was during the late 19th-century, a referee in American domestic life. In Calvin Coolidge's words, "The chief business of America is business."
By the 1930s, that idea was roundly rejected.
HOOVER AND FDR: GETTING INTO THE GAME AND PLAYING DEFENSE
The idea of the referee presidency was abandoned during the Great Depression. It was Herbert Hoover's misfortune to have been in office only seven months when economic catastrophe struck. A common myth of American history is that Hoover remained essentially a spectator when confronted with the deepening crisis, that he stuck to laissez-faire principles while the people starved. This is not accurate. Indeed, before he ever became president, Hoover was no apostle of the unfettered marketplace. Already as Commerce secretary under Presidents Harding and Coolidge, he championed a closer partnership between business and government. The Wall Street Journal noted, "Never before, here or elsewhere, has a government been so completely fused with business."[5]
As the Great Depression worsened from late 1929 to 1932, Hoover accepted increasing responsibility for ending the economic crisis and doing so in a socially humane manner -- he would make the economic and social effects of the depression the federal government's problem. That was unprecedented. Historian Michael Stoff observes, "Measured against past depression presidents -- Martin Van Buren in the 1830s, Ulysses S. Grant in 1873, Grover Cleveland in 1893, Theodore Roosevelt in 1907, Warren Harding in 1921 -- Hoover was a whirlwind of activity."[6]
Nevertheless, in 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt challenged the hapless Hoover and won the first of four terms. He pledged to be an energetic executive dedicated to changing the relationship between the federal government and the American people. FDR inherited the worst depression in American history -- one-quarter of the workforce was unemployed. Within his first 100 days in office, he dramatically enlarged the scope of the federal government and initiated numerous new domestic programs. During his second term, he pushed through a program that affects virtually every American to this day: Social Security. During his third term, most of which coincided with U.S. involvement in the Second World War, he instituted rationing and price controls.
To translate all this into football, FDR wanted in on more of the action. He didn't want just to call what was fair and what was foul as so many nineteenth-century presidents had; nor did he want to be the commissioner as his cousin, TR, had. He wanted to play ball and, moreover, be an impact player, so he changed out of the zebra-stripes and into a jersey. True, FDR mostly played defense; he primarily reacted to economic and social problems, like a defensive player who reacts to where the ball is. But even in that reactive capacity, during FDR's 12 years in office the federal government assumed an unprecedented role in the nation's economy. FDR's presidency consolidated the idea that the federal government, economic policy, and social policy were an unbreakable triangle in the center of which stood the American president. His actions drew much criticism, but the precedent -- of using the government to impact the economy and society -- stuck.
FDR died in 1945, but not his impact. The Employment Act of 1946 -- passed by a Republican Congress -- ratified the trend toward more federal intervention. It committed the federal government to use its economic might to achieve "maximum employment, production, and purchasing power." While specific policies were not mandated, the president was to work with Congress to foster "free competitive enterprise and the general welfare." As James Tobin and Murray Weidenbaum have observed, "The Act was an important bipartisan declaration of federal responsibility for the nation's economic performance. The electorate takes this responsibility for granted nowadays, but it was by no means generally acknowledged before World War II."[7]
It is revealing to see how difficult it is for later presidents to revert to a less active role once a greater role is carved out for the federal government. Dwight D. Eisenhower campaigned for the presidency in 1952 on a fiscally conservative platform that called for smaller government, balanced budgets, privatizing the Tennessee Valley Authority, and abolishing (or at least shrinking) Social Security. So what did Ike do with Social Security once in the White House? Expand the program. The fact that a Republican president ratified the entitlement meant that significant bipartisan support had developed for the program. It has since become a "third rail" of American politics, difficult for any president to touch.
FDR's role in changing the presidency and the federal government cannot be overstated. His 12 years in office effected not only a political sea change, but also -- and perhaps more importantly -- an intellectual sea change, the merits of which are fiercely debated to this day. Roosevelt's 1944 speech, calling for a second Bill of Rights, went far beyond anything the nation's founders had conceived when they drafted the first Bill of Rights back in 1789. The first ten amendments of the Constitution were limited to political rights such as freedom of speech and the press. But in FDR's mind, a second Bill of Rights was needed that went beyond political rights. He championed the right to economic welfare and social access to all citizens. University of Chicago professor Cass Sunstein calls this sea change "FDR's unfinished revolution."
In football terms, FDR had to content himself to play on defense, but what he really wanted to do was play on offense; he wanted the presidency and federal government to set the pace of the game. He envisioned Washington, DC, assuming unprecedented power to change not just politics, but also the economic and social conditions in American life. The nation, however, was not ready for such far-reaching changes; American individualism ran strong and deep and against the current of big government. It would take at least two more decades before a president could both speak of this "unfinished revolution" and sign enough legislation to make the changes permanent.
LYNDON B. JOHNSON: PLAYING OFFENSE
After the Second World War, America entered the most prosperous era of its history. Harry S. Truman conceived a far-reaching social agenda that was eventually stillborn, but significant to our story nonetheless. The Fair Deal was government on offence. It proposed medical care for the elderly and only went down in defeat because of the Korean War.
Where Harry S. Truman's ambitions for the federal government stumbled, Lyndon B. Johnson's hit a marathon stride. LBJ represents a major turning point in the presidency. The former Senate majority leader and vice president would have a huge impact on the role the president would play in the American economy and society. In short: the president should not just be reactive; he should be proactive. Johnson reasoned that the United States was the richest, most powerful nation in world history. Given our national resources, couldn't the president make the federal government an agent of positive change?
Johnson was much more ambitious for the federal government than previous Democrats Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, or John F. Kennedy had been.
LBJ explained to aides that he wanted to make his mark on history and unroll a "Johnson program." In May of 1964 he went to Ann Arbor to sketch his vision in a commencement address at the University of Michigan. He appealed to their idealism: "Will you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty?... Will you join in the battle to build the Great Society, to prove that our material progress is only the foundation on which we will build a richer life of mind and spirit?" As historian Robert Dallek notes, "The result of Johnson's antipoverty crusade and reach for a Great Society was an explosion of groundbreaking and far-reaching laws passed by Congress between 1964 and 1968." Henceforth there would be Medicare and Medicaid, a federal Office of Economic Opportunity, the food stamp program; not to mention job training, community volunteerism, and urban renewal spearheaded inside the Beltway.[8]
One of America's most influential commentators, James Reston, observed at the time: "President Johnson is beginning to make Franklin Roosevelt's early legislative record look like an abject failure. He's getting everything through the Congress but the abolition of the Republican party, and he hasn't tried that yet. It's a political miracle. It has even surpassed his own expectations, which were not modest...."[9]
Johnson was president for barely more than 5 years, from 1963 to 1969, but his war on poverty -- his advancing his vision of a Great Society -- encompassed almost a thousand bills and impacted almost every element in American society.
In football terms, this was not a president playing defense. It was a president playing offense. The playbook was not always flashy -- often it was three yards and a cloud of dust -- but it represented quite a change for a president to use the federal government itself as an agent to change society.
AFTER JOHNSON: A WEST-COAST OFFENSE?
Not that Washington's tentacles grew willy nilly; not at all, for at least two reasons. In the first place, there were three decades in the past hundred years in which voters grew weary or skeptical of leviathan and were happy to put the beast on a diet: the 1920s of Calvin Coolidge, the 1950s of Dwight Eisenhower, and the 1980s of Ronald Reagan. In Coolidge's case, the federal budget initially shrank but then grew slightly by the end of the '20s. In Eisenhower's case, federal expenditures diminished the first couple of years but then grew significantly by the end of the '50s. In Reagan's case, the federal budget almost doubled during in the '80s [10] -- although it is arguable that it would have ballooned even more had a progressive been in the White House.
In the second place, wars have often diverted presidents' domestic ambitions. In any given administration, domestic policy and foreign policy compete for the president's attention. But when war breaks out, domestic concerns usually take a back seat. American wars are a two-edged sword when it comes to domestic affairs. On the one hand, wars lead to more concentration of power at the federal level; every major U.S. war has put pounds on leviathan: the federal government inevitably grows larger and more intrusive. On the other hand, as presidential historian Robert Dallek observes, wars have repeatedly thwarted reformers' attempts to bend the federal government to their social and economic purposes. The Spanish American War took some of the steam out of populism; World War I took the wind out of the sails of Progressivism; World War II put a halt to the New Deal; the Korean War frustrated supporters of the Fair Deal.
This is why understanding the presidency of Lyndon Johnson is so important to understanding the last four decades of U.S. history. For it was with LBJ that the nation believed that the federal government could simultaneously fight a war against communists abroad and a war against poverty at home. Whether Americans supported or decried the "Johnson program," it was breathtakingly audacious when one considers how tied up in Vietnam the nation was becoming by 1965. Johnson, president during an extremely prosperous era, wanted to have it all -- guns and butter.
We live in Lyndon Johnson's world -- the Johnson administration represents the paradigm in which we live today. He successfully pushed to expand the president's role in domestic affairs. TR (playing commissioner) and FDR (playing defense) and Truman (trying to play offense) were the engineers who made it possible for LBJ to build up the federal government into a leviathan. He did so over vigorous objections and heated debate, and the arguments -- philosophical and practical -- rage to this day.
Yet most chief executives after LBJ either explicitly continued many of his policies -- Nixon, Ford, Carter -- or implicitly recognized that they would not be dismantled -- Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43. Reagan railed against the Great Society but did little truly to dismantle it.
President Clinton is an interesting study in the tension between big-government progressives in his administration and small-gevernment conservatives in a Republican-controlled Congress. Clinton's ambition during his first year in office to nationalize much of the U.S. health system was a breathtaking effort to transform the playbook into a wide-open, West Coast offense. When Clinton was stymied, he settled back into the three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust playbook of his predecessors. The retrenchment was marked rhetorically with the famous line, "The era of big government is over" -- which was not true. For a brief time, President Clinton was compelled to cooperate with a conservative Congress and Republican governors to reform welfare programs. Yet the Great Society model was not, at its core, dismantled. Many of Johnson's programs survived.
Indeed, when a Republican president like George W. Bush has seemed more interested in reforming Great Society programs than in rescinding them (under the guise of "compassionate conservatism") you know that the offensive role of the federal government in the nation's social and economic life has become permanent.
Nowadays, even amid the war on terror, Americans take it for granted that presidents will spearhead an ambitious domestic agenda. It is useful to recall how unthinkable that would have been barely more than a century ago.
____________________________________________________________________
[1]Suzanne Garment, "Stephen Grover Cleveland," in Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House, ed. James Taranto and Leonard Leo (New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 113.
[2]Allan Peskin, "James Abram Garfield," in Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House, ed. by James Taranto and Leonard Leo (New York: Wall Street Journal Books, 2004), p. 105.
[3]Thomas E. Patterson, We the People: A Concise Introduction to American Politics, 5th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2004), pp. 369-70.
[4]Buchanan quoted in Patterson, We the People, p. 370.
[5]Michael B. Stoff, "Herbert Hoover," in The American Presidency, ed. Alan Brinkley and Davis Dyer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), p. 336.
[6]Stoff, "Hoover," p. 338.
[7]James Tobin and Murray Weidenbaum, Two Revolutions in Economic Policy: The First Economic Reports of Presidents Kennedy and Reagan, ed. James Tobin and Murray Weidenbaum (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), p. viii.
[8]Robert Dallek, "Lyndon B. Johnson," in The American Presidency, pp. 413-14.
[9]James Reston quoted in John F. Stacks, Scotty: James B. Reston and the Rise and Fall of American Journalism (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), p. 236.
[10]See the federal budget year-by-year at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy05/sheets/hist01z1.xls
Sunday, July 25, 2004
Convention Cities
Question: My question is prompted by the Democratic National Convention being held in Boston: How many times has Boston hosted the Democrats? What are the other top convention cities? How are the host cities chosen?
From: Dena M. of Wilmington, Delaware
Submitted: July 24, 2004
From: Dena M. of Wilmington, Delaware
Submitted: July 24, 2004
Gleaves answers:
The Democrats have held 43 national conventions. Their first meeting was in a saloon in Baltimore in 1832; the shindig in Boston will be the 44th. That first national convention back in 1832 occurred in the heyday of the Age of Jackson, when American politics was lurching toward a more democratic process of selecting candidates. (Before 1832, candidates were selected by the party elite -- by "King Caucus" -- not by broadly representative conventions.) It surprises people to learn that historic Boston is experiencing a first: Beantown has never before been the host city of the Democratic National Convention.
That may seem odd when you consider how many times some cities have been tapped to host political conventions. Democrats have met most often in Chicago; the Windy City has hosted the Democrats 11 times. (Chicago is also the top choice for Republicans, who have met in Chicago 14 times. In fact, in 1896 and 1932, both Republicans and Democrats held their national conventions in Chicagoland.) Baltimore has hosted the Democrats 9 times; New York, 5 times; St. Louis, 4 times; Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, a couple of times each. A dozen other cities -- Houston, Denver, Atlantic City, Miami Beach, Kansas City -- have earned the distinction once.
Listed below and in chronological order are the cities that have hosted the Democrats, as well as the nominee who emerged victorious from the convention. An asterisk indicates that the nominee went on the be elected president:
1832: Baltimore - President Andrew Jackson*
1835: Baltimore - Vice President Martin Van Buren*
1840: Baltimore - President Martin Van Buren
1844: Baltimore - Rep. James K. Polk of Tennessee*
1848: Baltimore - Sen. Lewis Cass of Michigan
1852: Baltimore - Former Sen. Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire*
1856: Cincinnati - Former Sen. James Buchanan of Pennsylvania*
1860: Charleston / Baltimore - Sen. Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois / Vice President John Breckinridge of Kentucky (Southern Democrat nominee)
1864: Chicago - General George McClellan of New Jersey
1868: New York - Gov. Horatio Seymour of New York
1872: Baltimore - Horace Greeley of New York
1876: St. Louis - Former Gov. Samuel Tilden of New York
1880: Cincinnati - Gen. Winfield Hancock
1884: Chicago - Gov. Grover Cleveland of New York*
1888: St. Louis - President Grover Cleveland renominated
1892: Chicago - President Grover Cleveland renominated*
1896: Chicago - William Jennings Bryan
1900: Kansas City - William Jennings Bryan
1904: St. Louis - Former Sen. Henry Davis of West Virginia
1908: Denver - William Jennings Bryan
1912: Baltimore - Gov. Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey*
1916: St. Louis - President Woodrow Wilson renominated*
1920: San Francisco - Gov. James M. Cox of Ohio
1924: New York - John W. Davis
1928: Houston - Gov. Al Smith of New York
1932: Chicago - Gov. Franklin Delano Roosevelt of New York*
1936: Philadelphia - President Franklin Delano Roosevelt renominated*
1940: Chicago - President Franklin Delano Roosevelt renominated*
1944: Chicago - President Franklin Delano Roosevelt renominated*
1948: Philadelphia - President Harry S. Truman*
1952: Chicago - Gov. Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois
1956: Chicago - Gov. Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois
1960: Los Angeles - Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts*
1964: Atlantic City - President Lyndon B. Johnson*
1968: Chicago - Vice President Hubert Humphrey
1972: Miami Beach - Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota
1976: New York - Gov. Jimmy Carter of Georgia*
1980: New York - President Jimmy Carter renominated
1984: San Francisco - Vice President Walter Mondale
1988: Atlanta - Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts
1992: New York - Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas*
1996: Chicago - President Bill Clinton renominated*
2000: Los Angeles - Vice President Al Gore
2004: Boston - stay tuned....
How are the host cities selected, you ask? By doughty souls who are persuasive and willing to work hard. The Democrats, in the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and the Republicans, in the Republican National Committee (RNC), canvass the cities that are competing against one another for the honor of hosting a convention. In any given year, a number of factors go into the selection of the host city -- geographic, historic, electoral, political, financial, personal. Sometimes the site is chosen because of its historical symbolism; in 2004 the GOP is meeting in New York City in 2004 to provide a dramatic background to their renomination of George W. Bush as a war president, and to connect with the spirit of that city after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Sometimes the site is chosen because of the financial contributions of certain party leaders; in 1928 Democrats met in Houston in part because of the deep pockets of Jesse Jones, a Texas mogul.
Tuesday, July 06, 2004
Presidential debates
Question: Are the presidential candidates scheduled to debate this fall? Have there always been presidential debates?
From: Dan P. of Boulder, Colorado
Submitted: July 05, 2004
From: Dan P. of Boulder, Colorado
Submitted: July 05, 2004
Gleaves answers:
2004 DEBATE SCHEDULE
Debates provide one of the few opportunities for high drama in an election season, and this fall there will be three of them, as well as one vice presidential debate. Here is the schedule as set out by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD):
First presidential debate: Thursday, September 30, at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, FL.
Vice presidential debate: Tuesday, October 5, at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH.
Second presidential debate: Friday, October 8, at Washington University in St. Louis, MO.
Third presidential debate: Wednesday, October 13, at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ.
The CPD also announced two back-up sites, Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY, and the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC. All debates will start at 9:00 p.m. ET.
The debate schedule was announced back on November 6, 2003, by Paul G. Kirk and Frank J. Fahrenkopf, co-chairmen of The Commission on Presidential Debates. To keep abreast of any changes, check out the CPD's Website: www.debates.org/
WHAT TO WATCH FOR (A DEBATE STRATEGY PRIMER)
Conventional wisdom says four things about debates.
1. To debate or not to debate. It is usually in the incumbent's interest to debate a challenger as few times as he can get away with. Contrarywise, it is in the challenger's interest to get the incumbent to debate as much as possible. The idea is to create the opportunity for a major misstep that will diminish the stature of the president. This is what happened in a 1976 debate between challenger Jimmy Carter and incumbent Gerald R. Ford. To the amazement of his audience, Ford said, "There is no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, and there never will be during a Ford administration." The president had to endure sustained criticism for that misstatement. John Kerry will try to create and take advantage of a similar situation when he debates George W. Bush in 2004.
2. The are-you-better-off question. Once in a debate, the incumbent must try to convince the audience that they are better off now than they were four years ago. By contrast, the challenger will be trying to persuade voters that they are worse off. This is what Jimmy Carter did in 1976, when he set out to beat incumbent Gerald R. Ford. Carter's campaign created the "misery index" -- the sum of the inflation rate and unemployment rate -- and asserted again and again that President Ford had not been a good manager of the nation's economy -- the numbers proved it. Ah, but the misery index came back to bite Carter in the 1980 campaign, because unemployment and inflation had risen dramatically during the Democrat's four years in office. Reagan asked Americans, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" and he beat Carter in a landslide that sent the incumbent packing to Plains, Georgia, a melancholy man.
3. Presidential presentation. Both the challenger and the incumbent must possess self control and act presidential during their entire 90 minutes onstage. They must also do something paradoxical: they must look like the ordinary guy next door (I'm just a good ol' Bubba), and yet convey an inner character that says, in effect, I am superior to my opponent and, indeed, to most Americans, for I am the one who can stare terrorists down, send young men and women into war, and do whatever it takes to increase the security and prosperity of Americans. In 1988, Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis sometimes had a tough time looking as if he could be commander in chief. (Admittedly Ronald Reagan was a hard act to follow.) He hardly helped his case when handlers got him to don a military helmet and ride around in a U.S. Army tank in Michigan. The nation laughed, and the image stuck to Dukakis during his debates with George H. W. Bush, who was able to paint the Massachusetts governor as just another Northeastern liberal who wasn't tough enough to lead America and the free world. Four years later, in 1992, Republican George H. W. Bush was portrayed as totally out of touch with ordinary Americans when it was shown that he did not recognize the scanner in a grocery store, and he lost to a skillful Democratic challenger, Bill Clinton.
4. Whose mission makes people want to march? Successful presidential contenders need an idealistic streak -- they need to appeal to something greater than self-interest. Throughout American history, politicians have looked to Americans' love of freedom -- not just for themselves but for others -- to inspire the nation. The more expansive the freedom, the better. The 1980 debates are instructive. Carter had premised his presidency on limits -- limits to economic growth, limits to American power, limits to energy, limits even on the American spirit (which he said suffered from malaise).* Reagan self-consciously took the opposite tack, emphasizing that Americans can do anything if they are free -- free from burdensome taxes and regulations at home, and free from Communist intimidation abroad. Voters responded positively to the more positive message. It was Reagan's mission that made them want to march, and he won the 1980 election in a landslide.
EARLY DEBATES**
What about the most famous debates in American history, Lincoln-Douglas? Those seven sparring matches that took place throughout the Illinois countryside during the summer and fall of 1858 were not presidential debates; they were debates between U.S. Senate candidates. The Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, was challenging the Democratic incumbent, Stephen Douglas. Each debate lasted three hours. Although Lincoln won the popular vote the following November, he lost the 1858 election in the Illinois legislature (consistent with the manner of electing senators prior to passage of the 17th Amendment). Lincoln clearly won in the longer run. The cogency of his arguments concerning Union and slavery made his reputation soar and positioned him to win the Republican nomination for president two years later.
The first modern public debate between presidential candidates took place in 1948, in the Oregon Republican primary where Thomas Dewey and Harold Stassen were battling it out. The one-hour debate, over the question of whether to outlaw the Communist party, was broadcast nationally over radio to more than 40 million listeners. It was the only debate in which the contenders were restricted to one topic.
The next debate occurred in 1956, in the Florida primary, where Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver were duking it out for one hour on ABC radio. Topics ranged from foreign to domestic policy.
1960
The year 1960 saw truly momentous developments in presidential debates. They were the first nationally televised debates, and they were the first debates between contenders from different parties. Each of the four debates between Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy was seen by more than 60 million television viewers, and heard by millions more radio listeners. The setting for combat was a new milieu -- the TV studio -- in Chicago, Washington DC, New York, and Los Angeles. Most of the debates lasted one hour.
Interestingly, people who listened to the candidates on radio tended to think that Nixon won; people who watched them on television tended to think that Kennedy won. (Nixon's recent illness and his propensity to sweat under klieg lights did not help his presentation.) Media handlers still study the 1960 debates to understand audience response and to prepare their candidates to act like Everyman -- the plain ol' Bubba next door -- yet look authoritative and sound presidential.
There would be no more public, nationally broadcast debates among presidential candidates for another 16 years.
1976 to the present
The continuous tradition of having major candidates debate before a national TV audience is less than three decades old. The number of debates and their format are basically the same today as in 1976, the year America was celebrating its bicentennial. Democratic upstart Jimmy Carter challenged Republican incumbent Gerald R. Ford in three debates, hosted in cities redolent with the nation's founding -- Philadelphia and Williamsburg -- as well as in San Francisco. Interestingly, there were not many more television viewers of the debates in 1976 than in 1960 (despite a larger population and more access to television), probably because of the cynicism generated by the Watergate scandal that unfolded after the 1972 election.
A new twist in 1976 was to see the vice presidential contenders debate on national TV: Democrat Walter Mondale and Republican Bob Dole had at each other in the Alley Theater in Houston, Texas. Some 43 million Americans tuned in.
In 1980, Republican nominee Ronald Reagan took part in two debates on the road to the White House. His first was in Baltimore against Independent candidate John Anderson and lasted one hour, and his second was in Cleveland against Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter and lasted an hour and a half. The Cleveland debate was seen by more than 80 million viewers, a record that has not since been matched.
In 1984, Democratic nominee Walter Mondale challenged Republican incumbent Ronald Reagan in two debates in Louisville, KY, and Kansas City, KS. Each was one and a half hours in length and viewed by some 60 million Americans. In addition, the two vice presidential nominees, Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush and Democratic challenger Geraldine Ferraro (the first woman vice presidential candidate in U.S. history), fought it out for an hour and a half in Philadelphia.
In 1988, Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis challenged Republican nominee George H. W. Bush in two nationally televised debates, in Winston-Salem, NC, and Los Angeles, CA. The vice presidential nominees -- Lloyd Bentson and Dan Quayle -- made for some memorable moments in Omaha, NE.
In 1992, Independent candidate Ross Perot added color to the debates between Democratic challenger Bill Clinton and Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush in three nationally televised debates that were crammed into nine days. The settings for the dramas were St. Louis, MO (at Washington University, which hosted a 2000 debate and is hosting a 2004 debate as well), Richmond, VA (University of Richmond), and East Lansing, MI (Michigan State University). Vice presidential nominees James Stockdale (I), Al Gore (D), and Dan Quayle (R) went at each other in one debate in Atlanta, GA, before 51 million TV viewers.
Note this: During each of the three debates in 1992, viewership ranged between 60 and 70 million people, which was fairly consistent with the number of viewers of all previous presidential debates, reaching back to the Nixon-Kennedy debates more than three decades earlier. The exception was the Reagan-Carter debate in 1980, which saw a spike of more than 80 million viewers. That record has not been beaten, despite the presence of more Americans, more television sets, and more news channels than ever before. After 1992 there would be a dramatic fall off in the number of viewers of nationally televised presidential debates.
In 1996, Republican candidate Bob Dole challenged Democratic incumbent Bill Clinton in only two debates, the first in Hartford, CT, and second in San Diego, CA. Only 36 million Americans tuned in -- fewer than watched the VP debate in 1976. And in 1996, only 26 million Americans watched the lone vice presidential debate between Jack Kemp (R) and incumbent Al Gore (D) in St. Petersburg, FL -- half the number who watched the 1992 VP debate.
In the lead up to one of the most contested presidential elections in U.S. history, that of 2000, there were three debates in which George W. Bush (R) and incumbent Al Gore (D) fought it out. The venues were Boston (University of Massachusetts), Winston-Salem (Wake Forest University, its second), and St. Louis (Washington University, its third in all). The length of each debate was one and a half hours -- not long by Lincoln-Douglas standards. Nevertheless -- and despite the headline Al Gore earned because of his visible exasperation in the first debate -- the contests were viewed by fewer than 47 million people. Vice presidential aspirants Joe Lieberman (D) and Dick Cheney (R) battled it out in Danville, KY, before 28 million viewers.
Conventional wisdom says four things about debates.
1. To debate or not to debate. It is usually in the incumbent's interest to debate a challenger as few times as he can get away with. Contrarywise, it is in the challenger's interest to get the incumbent to debate as much as possible. The idea is to create the opportunity for a major misstep that will diminish the stature of the president. This is what happened in a 1976 debate between challenger Jimmy Carter and incumbent Gerald R. Ford. To the amazement of his audience, Ford said, "There is no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, and there never will be during a Ford administration." The president had to endure sustained criticism for that misstatement. John Kerry will try to create and take advantage of a similar situation when he debates George W. Bush in 2004.
2. The are-you-better-off question. Once in a debate, the incumbent must try to convince the audience that they are better off now than they were four years ago. By contrast, the challenger will be trying to persuade voters that they are worse off. This is what Jimmy Carter did in 1976, when he set out to beat incumbent Gerald R. Ford. Carter's campaign created the "misery index" -- the sum of the inflation rate and unemployment rate -- and asserted again and again that President Ford had not been a good manager of the nation's economy -- the numbers proved it. Ah, but the misery index came back to bite Carter in the 1980 campaign, because unemployment and inflation had risen dramatically during the Democrat's four years in office. Reagan asked Americans, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" and he beat Carter in a landslide that sent the incumbent packing to Plains, Georgia, a melancholy man.
3. Presidential presentation. Both the challenger and the incumbent must possess self control and act presidential during their entire 90 minutes onstage. They must also do something paradoxical: they must look like the ordinary guy next door (I'm just a good ol' Bubba), and yet convey an inner character that says, in effect, I am superior to my opponent and, indeed, to most Americans, for I am the one who can stare terrorists down, send young men and women into war, and do whatever it takes to increase the security and prosperity of Americans. In 1988, Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis sometimes had a tough time looking as if he could be commander in chief. (Admittedly Ronald Reagan was a hard act to follow.) He hardly helped his case when handlers got him to don a military helmet and ride around in a U.S. Army tank in Michigan. The nation laughed, and the image stuck to Dukakis during his debates with George H. W. Bush, who was able to paint the Massachusetts governor as just another Northeastern liberal who wasn't tough enough to lead America and the free world. Four years later, in 1992, Republican George H. W. Bush was portrayed as totally out of touch with ordinary Americans when it was shown that he did not recognize the scanner in a grocery store, and he lost to a skillful Democratic challenger, Bill Clinton.
4. Whose mission makes people want to march? Successful presidential contenders need an idealistic streak -- they need to appeal to something greater than self-interest. Throughout American history, politicians have looked to Americans' love of freedom -- not just for themselves but for others -- to inspire the nation. The more expansive the freedom, the better. The 1980 debates are instructive. Carter had premised his presidency on limits -- limits to economic growth, limits to American power, limits to energy, limits even on the American spirit (which he said suffered from malaise).* Reagan self-consciously took the opposite tack, emphasizing that Americans can do anything if they are free -- free from burdensome taxes and regulations at home, and free from Communist intimidation abroad. Voters responded positively to the more positive message. It was Reagan's mission that made them want to march, and he won the 1980 election in a landslide.
EARLY DEBATES**
It's hard to believe nowadays, but public presidential debates are a recent development in American politics. Only since 1976 have they been a regular feature in America's political landscape.
What about the most famous debates in American history, Lincoln-Douglas? Those seven sparring matches that took place throughout the Illinois countryside during the summer and fall of 1858 were not presidential debates; they were debates between U.S. Senate candidates. The Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, was challenging the Democratic incumbent, Stephen Douglas. Each debate lasted three hours. Although Lincoln won the popular vote the following November, he lost the 1858 election in the Illinois legislature (consistent with the manner of electing senators prior to passage of the 17th Amendment). Lincoln clearly won in the longer run. The cogency of his arguments concerning Union and slavery made his reputation soar and positioned him to win the Republican nomination for president two years later.
The first modern public debate between presidential candidates took place in 1948, in the Oregon Republican primary where Thomas Dewey and Harold Stassen were battling it out. The one-hour debate, over the question of whether to outlaw the Communist party, was broadcast nationally over radio to more than 40 million listeners. It was the only debate in which the contenders were restricted to one topic.
The next debate occurred in 1956, in the Florida primary, where Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver were duking it out for one hour on ABC radio. Topics ranged from foreign to domestic policy.
1960
The year 1960 saw truly momentous developments in presidential debates. They were the first nationally televised debates, and they were the first debates between contenders from different parties. Each of the four debates between Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy was seen by more than 60 million television viewers, and heard by millions more radio listeners. The setting for combat was a new milieu -- the TV studio -- in Chicago, Washington DC, New York, and Los Angeles. Most of the debates lasted one hour.
Interestingly, people who listened to the candidates on radio tended to think that Nixon won; people who watched them on television tended to think that Kennedy won. (Nixon's recent illness and his propensity to sweat under klieg lights did not help his presentation.) Media handlers still study the 1960 debates to understand audience response and to prepare their candidates to act like Everyman -- the plain ol' Bubba next door -- yet look authoritative and sound presidential.
There would be no more public, nationally broadcast debates among presidential candidates for another 16 years.
1976 to the present
The continuous tradition of having major candidates debate before a national TV audience is less than three decades old. The number of debates and their format are basically the same today as in 1976, the year America was celebrating its bicentennial. Democratic upstart Jimmy Carter challenged Republican incumbent Gerald R. Ford in three debates, hosted in cities redolent with the nation's founding -- Philadelphia and Williamsburg -- as well as in San Francisco. Interestingly, there were not many more television viewers of the debates in 1976 than in 1960 (despite a larger population and more access to television), probably because of the cynicism generated by the Watergate scandal that unfolded after the 1972 election.
A new twist in 1976 was to see the vice presidential contenders debate on national TV: Democrat Walter Mondale and Republican Bob Dole had at each other in the Alley Theater in Houston, Texas. Some 43 million Americans tuned in.
In 1980, Republican nominee Ronald Reagan took part in two debates on the road to the White House. His first was in Baltimore against Independent candidate John Anderson and lasted one hour, and his second was in Cleveland against Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter and lasted an hour and a half. The Cleveland debate was seen by more than 80 million viewers, a record that has not since been matched.
In 1984, Democratic nominee Walter Mondale challenged Republican incumbent Ronald Reagan in two debates in Louisville, KY, and Kansas City, KS. Each was one and a half hours in length and viewed by some 60 million Americans. In addition, the two vice presidential nominees, Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush and Democratic challenger Geraldine Ferraro (the first woman vice presidential candidate in U.S. history), fought it out for an hour and a half in Philadelphia.
In 1988, Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis challenged Republican nominee George H. W. Bush in two nationally televised debates, in Winston-Salem, NC, and Los Angeles, CA. The vice presidential nominees -- Lloyd Bentson and Dan Quayle -- made for some memorable moments in Omaha, NE.
In 1992, Independent candidate Ross Perot added color to the debates between Democratic challenger Bill Clinton and Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush in three nationally televised debates that were crammed into nine days. The settings for the dramas were St. Louis, MO (at Washington University, which hosted a 2000 debate and is hosting a 2004 debate as well), Richmond, VA (University of Richmond), and East Lansing, MI (Michigan State University). Vice presidential nominees James Stockdale (I), Al Gore (D), and Dan Quayle (R) went at each other in one debate in Atlanta, GA, before 51 million TV viewers.
Note this: During each of the three debates in 1992, viewership ranged between 60 and 70 million people, which was fairly consistent with the number of viewers of all previous presidential debates, reaching back to the Nixon-Kennedy debates more than three decades earlier. The exception was the Reagan-Carter debate in 1980, which saw a spike of more than 80 million viewers. That record has not been beaten, despite the presence of more Americans, more television sets, and more news channels than ever before. After 1992 there would be a dramatic fall off in the number of viewers of nationally televised presidential debates.
In 1996, Republican candidate Bob Dole challenged Democratic incumbent Bill Clinton in only two debates, the first in Hartford, CT, and second in San Diego, CA. Only 36 million Americans tuned in -- fewer than watched the VP debate in 1976. And in 1996, only 26 million Americans watched the lone vice presidential debate between Jack Kemp (R) and incumbent Al Gore (D) in St. Petersburg, FL -- half the number who watched the 1992 VP debate.
In the lead up to one of the most contested presidential elections in U.S. history, that of 2000, there were three debates in which George W. Bush (R) and incumbent Al Gore (D) fought it out. The venues were Boston (University of Massachusetts), Winston-Salem (Wake Forest University, its second), and St. Louis (Washington University, its third in all). The length of each debate was one and a half hours -- not long by Lincoln-Douglas standards. Nevertheless -- and despite the headline Al Gore earned because of his visible exasperation in the first debate -- the contests were viewed by fewer than 47 million people. Vice presidential aspirants Joe Lieberman (D) and Dick Cheney (R) battled it out in Danville, KY, before 28 million viewers.
*Steven M. Gillon, "Jimmy Carter," in The American Presidency, ed. Alan Brinkley and Davis Dyer (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), pp. 457, 465.
**For an overview, see "Debate History," in Commission on Presidential Debates Website: http://www.debates.org/pages/history.html
**For an overview, see "Debate History," in Commission on Presidential Debates Website: http://www.debates.org/pages/history.html
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