Organizer in chief: great presidents are great movement builders.
What do you do if you've just been elected president and you lack a working majority in Congress?A lot, actually. Our most effective presidents have moved not just legislation but public opinion. Eventually, they moved Congress-because they had influenced public perceptions and values first. And that's not all.
Presidents also have enormous executive power (see Clay Risen, "The Power of the Pen" page 27). John F. Kennedy famously abolished segregation in interstate public transportation "with the stroke of a pen." Harry Truman, likewise, desegregated the armed forces. Conversely, much of the mischief perpetrated by Presidents Reagan and Bush, pere and fils, to weaken regulation in the public interest, has been done administratively.
Recent Republican presidents, most notably Ronald Reagan, have used their office to inspire their base, build their movement, and advance their ideology. Reagan gave comfort to the religious right, to the gun lobby, to the anti-abortion activists. He and the Bushes also steered federal dollars their way, through "faith-based" social-service initiatives, abstinence-only sex education, marriage-education programs, and other policies. The Reagan ad ministration very explicitly "defunded the left" by blackballing liberal grantees. Under George W. Bush, that blacklist was expanded to include mainstream environmental scientists, biologists who refused to genuflect to Bush's bizarre theology on stem-cell research, and countless other opponents of Bush's brand of junk science. A new president can not only restore objectivity to the funding of science but can remind voters of how it has been dangerously politicized by the ideological right.
Presidents can teach. A President Kerry could remind Americans that the "liberty and justice for all "that we ritually invoke is not, in fact, God-given, but is a function of whether our government safeguards or tramples due process and civil liberty. In reforming the USA PATRIOT Act and in restoring due process to immigrants, the new president could infuse abstract conceptions of the land of the free with practical meaning that is politically safeguarded in the hearts of the citizenry. John Kerry, recalling Martin Luther King Jr., could reclaim religion as a force that teaches social justice as well as private piety. And he could remind voters why separation of church and state exists: not to discourage faith but to protect the private right of worship from zealots wielding state power.
Presidents can choose whom to lionize. Reagan, in the 1980 campaign, disingenuously told an audience of tax-exempt and presumably nonpartisan conservative preachers, "You can't support me, but I can support you." He associated himself with ultra-right groups and thereby made them seem more respectable and mainstream. Effective presidents have also been great party builders, energizing their institutional base as well as their ideological ones.
The most effective Democrats have helped build progressive movements that eventually swelled their electoral constituency, and they did it despite the legislative limits of the moment. Franklin Delano Roosevelt could not muster the votes to end segregation, but blacks knew he was a true friend. Likewise gays with Bill Clinton, despite legislative failures and even travesties that Clinton signed, like the Defense of Marriage Act. Roosevelt never quite said in so many words that he wanted American workers to sign union cards, but his close alliance with the burgeoning labor movement allowed John L. Lewis, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, to declare, with only slight poetic license, "President Roosevelt wants you to join the union." Lyndon Johnson took enormous political risks to end the stain of official racism and to lead the broad citizenry to appreciate the national disgrace of extensive poverty. Johnson was also a good enough politician to deliver benefits to the broad middle class through programs such as Medicare and federal college aid. But for Vietnam, the coalition might have swelled and solidified. Great presidents expand not just the agenda but the national sense of possibility--and the polity itself.
Progressive magazines often publish manifestos of long-deferred policy goals--national heath insurance! universal child care!--that stand little chance of near-term enactment. Or, conversely, they decide to be hyperrealists, move to the ostensible center of a shrunken polity, and settle for pitiful token gains that inspire even more mass passivity.
This year, we are commending a different brand of realism, drawing on lessons from the history of the presidency. A chief executive has a lot of latent power to build for the long term by using his influence to inspire broad changes in public values, to help build a progressive movement that in turn will help him move Congress. We asked scholars and activists associated with a broad range of public issues to join us in thinking about how John Kerry, if elected, might help energize a progressive movement for the long term. Their advice gives us a lot of hope.
--The Editors
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| Publication: | The American Prospect |
|---|---|
| Geographic Code: | 1USA |
| Date: | Aug 1, 2004 |
| Words: | 788 |
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