88 A. Reading: The Powers of the Presidency
Learning Objectives
After reading this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
- How is the presidency personalized?
- What powers does the Constitution grant to the president?
- How can Congress and the judiciary limit the president’s powers?
- How is the presidency organized?
- What is the bureaucratizing of the presidency?
The presidency is seen as the heart of the political system. It is personalized in the president as advocate of the national interest, chief agenda-setter, and chief legislator.[1] Scholars evaluate presidents according to such abilities as “public communication,” “organizational capacity,” “political skill,” “policy vision,” and “cognitive skill.”[2] The media too personalize the office and push the ideal of the bold, decisive, active, public-minded president who altruistically governs the country.[3]
Two big summer movie hits, Independence Day (1996) and Air Force One (1997) are typical: ex-soldier presidents use physical rather than legal powers against (respectively) aliens and Russian terrorists. The president’s tie comes off and heroism comes out, aided by fighter planes and machine guns. The television hit series The West Wing recycled, with a bit more realism, the image of a patriarchal president boldly putting principle ahead of expedience.[4]
Presidents are even presented as redeemers.[5] There are exceptions: presidents depicted as “sleaze balls” or “simpletons.”[6]
Enduring Image: Mount Rushmore
Carved into the granite rock of South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore, seven thousand feet above sea level, are the faces of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. Sculpted between 1927 and 1941, this awe-inspiring monument achieved even greater worldwide celebrity as the setting for the hero and heroine to overcome the bad guys at the climax of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic and ever-popular film North by Northwest (1959).
This national monument did not start out devoted to American presidents. It was initially proposed to acknowledge regional heroes: General Custer, Buffalo Bill, the explorers Lewis and Clark. The sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, successfully argued that “a nation’s memorial should . . . have a serenity, a nobility, a power that reflects the gods who inspired them and suggests the gods they have become.”[7]
The Mount Rushmore monument is an enduring image of the American presidency by celebrating the greatness of four American presidents. The successors to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt do their part by trying to associate themselves with the office’s magnificence and project an image of consensus rather than conflict, sometimes by giving speeches at the monument itself. A George W. Bush event placed the presidential podium at such an angle that the television camera could not help but put the incumbent in the same frame as his glorious predecessors.
The enduring image of Mount Rushmore highl