Presidential Paradox
Presidents are blamed for what they can not possibly have complete control over. We admire strong Presidents who take a strong roll in policy -- irregardless of party affiliation. Presidential elections attract the attention of the country, but only 50% of the people vote in them. We seat Presidents with the power to make moral judgments for the rest of the world: "who is free and not free enough?" We have conflict between how we want to see the President; whether we want someone normal and down to earth, or huge and larger then life.
We like presidents who come from "humble" backgrounds -- shown by the fact that it's not often we elect aristocrats of the country -- but we treat our Presidents like royalty giving them planes, helicopters, money and security for the rest of their lives. We consistently maintain the idea that anyone can be president, and to do so, you must be strong; yet we fear presidential powers growing too large.
The American political culture has a lot to do with how we think about our presidents. We are one of the few nations across the world that mistrusts our government to the extent that we do; we almost fear a national government. We equate liberty with a weak government, which was how the constitution was originally structured. Yet it is impossible to run an effective and prosperous country with a small and weak national government, like the President is tasked with doing. Americans, prefer local governments. Despite all of these misgivings, however, historical developments have shown that the office of the President has had a dramatic impact on our lives. Over the years, the Presidents power has grown beyond its original constraints, and even without the Great Depression, it was inevitable, but why?
"No Man," proclaimed John Donne, "is an island," and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies and a world of generalizations. We are insulated from the tragedy of others, by our island nature and by the repetitive shape of stories we hear. In life, the shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived and then, by some means or another, died. You are then given the opportunity to fill in the details as you see fit from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life.
Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, "casualties may rise to a million," "100 members of the senate," "435 members of the house." With individual stories, the statistics become people.
Personal and individual accounts allow us to slide into other people's heads, take us to these other places, and look out through other eyes. A life that is, like any other, unlike any other. It is in this vein which we place the soul identity of the government on the head of the President. It is not congress who enthralls the people with sentiments of loyalty in times of crisis, but it is the figure head, the one who takes action, the one who promises to us that wrongs will be righted. We are reassured as a people that someone is taking action, not a mass-less, faceless body of people that we often feel does little more then deliberate. There are an abundance of reasons to why the Presidents roll in our country has increased so dramatically over the last 100 years, most of them directly related to the progress and emergence of America's national identity.
Our national ideal was easily what lead the office of the President to power. Being endowed with the task of handling what was once a drastically unimportant topic called "foreign affairs." When our constitution was written, America might as well have been called an isolationist society, for our ideals ran parallel with such thoughts. We cared only for our country, but more specifically, about our specific states. The states were already in existence before our nation was born; the constitution was simply used almost as a patch for a cohesive society. Along comes WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, and every other major national problem and our tune changed inside of 70 years.
We need a leader, and in a hurry, not a bunch of them, one who can guide us. As Roosevelt stepped to the plate our hopes resided with him and with him alone. There was no group we would have trusted, local government had already let our economy go to hell, and it need to rectified. It was a national problem, like none we'd ever seen, something local governments couldn't handle. So national government took the reigns of power while riding upon the coat tails of the President. And since then, as Stan Lee always elegantly states, "with great power [came] great responsibility." But not just any responsibility, it is unusual, unexpected and impossible responsibility.
Like the many other contradictories within our American society, we wanted and still want everything. We want humble and grand, powerful and weak, rich and normal. We want no taxes but social programs, leadership and control without regulation, protection and complete freedom. We then roll all of these expectations up in one big ball, and expect our President to knock it out of the park, disseminating all of our wishes across the country is the most grand fashion.
We then wake up from our dream, coming back to reality to eventually find that it hasn't happened, and we get angry at the man who is supposed to give it all to us. Forget what he has accomplished, it's about what he hasn't accomplished. It is an acceptance we will most likely never come to.
"There are areas in which the president clearly has too little power (domestic and economic policy) and simultaneously areas where he has too much power (foreign policy and war)," states Michael A. Genovese in The Presidential Dilemma: Leadership in the American System. This clarification couldn't be more dead-on. We expect our presidents to do something with nothing, as well as maintain restraint when he has everything. Life, better yet reality, doesn't work that way. We want our cake and to eat it to; the only recourse and solace one can find in this ideal is that it keeps the people skeptical and questioning, thereby inciting interest and care within the populace. We don't become content as a people, and this is one of the few things which maintains our efforts for the betterment of our society as a whole.