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The Obama SOTU, Presidency Research, and Presidency Power

- January 29, 2010

Barack Obama’s State of the Union address on Wednesday night has already been parsed, polled, probed, and pundited. Instant judgments are readily available at any number of online locations; and frankly these can be fun. Who knew how easy it is to be distracted by Joe Biden’s bizarrely bright smile? (or, still stranger, that this would make us miss Dick Cheney’s sour visage?) Who knew it was such shocking incivility to criticize a Supreme Court justice’s opinion favoring robust free speech, to his face? (You’re supposed to do it behind his back, by press release.)

My task, though, is to use the address, coming as it does on the heels of the first anniversary of the Obama inaugural, as an occasion to assess the performance of the administration in broader terms, using presidency research in political science. This is my aim, anyway, for the next week or so as I join The Monkey Cage as a guest blogger. Many thanks to the site’s Big Bosses for giving me the chance to do so.

A few topics that could be explored include the optimum size of presidential agendas – a “rifle” or a “shotgun”? as Jim Pfiffner put it in “The Strategic Presidency”:http://www.amazon.com/http://www.amazon.com/Strategic-Presidency-Hitting-Running-Government/dp/0700607692/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264773179&sr=8-1 .

Indeed, how is the president’s program formulated and what does it contain? In December 1986, a young White House staffer named Mitch Daniels – yes, “this one”:http://www.in.gov/gov/ — wrote a memo giving his thoughts on President Ronald Reagan’s upcoming State of the Union address. “Everyone favors some sort of visionary, thematic SOTU as opposed to a legislative laundry list,” Daniels wrote. He added: “This is an especially sound idea when your laundry consists mainly of sweat socks and old underwear.” At least that was the 7th year of an administration. Is Obama already reduced to recycling old underwear?

Given an agenda, we might think about the ability of presidents to get the public to support it. This has been a popular question, of course, given the rhetorical skills of President Obama – see an earlier Monkey Cage discussion “here”:https://themonkeycage.org/2009/09/what_difference_will_obamas_sp.html, for instance. The short answer is often “he can’t.” Well, if so, will evading the legislative process via a unilateral, administrative strategy have more substantive impact in the end?

And of course, given that the president observed that “campaign fever has come even earlier than usual this year,” we might look ahead to November, to begin to think about presidents’ roles in midterm elections and what those elections do to and for presidential power.

As always on this site, your comments and suggestions are very welcome.

I end with a basic premise. Towards the end of his speech, the president told Republican lawmakers – urging them to overcome their inner Nancy Reagan – that “we were sent here to serve our citizens, not our ambitions.” But it is worth remembering that the structure of American government contemplates something somewhat different. It is built on the assumption that serving our ambitions, by dint of a separated system of institutions sharing powers, will in fact serve our citizens. Recall James Madison in “Federalist #51”:http://thomas.loc.gov/home/histdox/fed_51.html, that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” Even at the best of times, then, our Constitution embodies a tendency towards gridlock. At worst, people fear the connection between ambition and the public good has broken down.

Either way it hints at the challenges any president faces in seeking to harness that government to do his will.