An awful lot of lawyers were poli sci majors, so I'm guessing that many FWIW readers will look at that headline and think I can't count. They will recall their freshman introductory courses: The President of the United States is Head of Government and Head of State. A combination of Prime Minister, if you will, and King. Two roles, not three. That's what I was taught, too. But limiting the job description in this way misses one vital aspect of the modern presidency.
The Founding Fathers weren't keen on having a President. But they liked having a President better than having a Prime Minister who might build an unrepresentative majority in Congress by doling out ministries as patronage plums, as the PM did in Britain. And they were dead certain sure they did not want a king.
Still, they needed someone to 'front' for the country on the world stage. Someone who would do the bidding of Congress, of course. The Founders may have talked a good game about three co-equal branches of government but, of the three, Congress was expected to be primus inter pares. On steroids. The President was envisioned, to some extent, as a glorified clerk. In a recent Page 2 post, I suggested that we have three types of elected officials in Illinois, policy making, ministerial, and judicial. We never elected federal judges, of course, but the Founders would have seen Congress as policy making and the presidency as ministerial. The President might make a treaty, of course, but it wouldn't count unless the Senate ratified it. The President could not declare war; that right was reserved for Congress, but the President would be expected to execute Congressional policy, in the event of a war, as Commander-in-Chief. The President was required to report back to Congress from time to time on how its policies were being implemented; this was the constitutional germ from which the annual State of the Union address arose.
Yes, the President was initially going to be a glorified clerk---a front man---not much more. However, when the Constitution was adopted, George Washington was the only realistic choice for the position and he was too big for such a small job. The office began to grow with him. He was used to issuing commands, not necessarily following them. And he was willing to be advised -- but he expected, and usually got, consent.
With the rise of political parties, the President, as de facto head of one party or the other, became Head of Government as well as Head of State. The President acquired a role in shaping the policies that his followers in Congress would try to write into law. This was pretty well established by the time of Lincoln's election in 1860. Lincoln enlarged the presidency by adopting still another role. A third role.
There was a hint of this new role at the end of his First Inaugural:
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Lincoln was not speaking as a Head of State or Head of Government. He was speaking as a pastor; the nation was his congregation.
Though not himself a particularly religious man---every pastor but one in Springfield opposed Lincoln's first campaign for the White House because he had not joined any local congregation---Lincoln became America's pontifex maximus, the high priest of our civic religion. (Pontifex maximus was an elected office in the Roman Republic. This was among the offices held by Julius Caesar; it was as pontifex maximus that he reformed the Roman calendar.)
Poli sci faculties may not have recognized the enhanced role, but Presidents following Lincoln surely did: Theodore Roosevelt spoke of the presidency as a "bully pulpit." Heads of Government don't speak from pulpits; neither do Heads of State. But priests do.
Where the academics probably went wrong was in looking at the ceremonial role of other Heads of State: The Queen of England (or, more frequently these days, Chuckie or Billy), for example, is always laying a wreath somewhere. Presidents do that, too. Therefore, they suppose, this is just another function of a Head of State. But, actually, as you may remember, the Queen is also Head of the Church of England. She has a very-well defined sacerdotal role; in a country that celebrates the separation of Church and State, the priestly role of a President is more ambiguous.
There is, however, no other way to read Lincoln's Second Inaugural except as a sermon. The beautiful cadences of that brief speech are unmistakeably biblical. In four, grueling years, how the emphasis had changed: Whereas the pastoral balm was applied only in the last paragraph of a lengthy, legalistic argument for national union in the First Inaugural, three of the Second Inaugural's four paragraphs are wholly spiritual:
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war---seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
A President's priestly role is not simply to provide comfort. Mr. Lincoln was not providing comfort in the Second Inaugural when he warned that the Civil War might continue "until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword."
A good pastor provides context, a framework with which to understand, and to accept, and to endure. And to go on. The President as pontifex maximus takes a national crisis, or tragedy, or moment of national grief, and articulates for us what we wish we might have said ourselves. Since Lincoln, obviously, some Presidents have been better at this than others. FDR's "Fireside Chats" brought the nation's pontifex maximus into American parlors, the radio in the corner sitting where, in a former age, the family's pastor might have sat on a visit.
Not surprisingly, given his earlier career as an actor, Ronald Reagan was also pretty good at this role. The closing lines of his speech after the Challenger disaster were, I believe, genuinely touching:
The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God."
Barack Obama wiped away tears as he led the national mourning for the victims of the Sandy Hook School shooting. In his remarks, the President challenged the nation,
As a country, we have been through this too many times. Whether it’s an elementary school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago -- these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods, and these children are our children. And we're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.
But this was not a apeech to make legislative proposals. In the role of pontifex maximus, a President does not get specific. The challenge, like a good pastor's challenge in any sermon, was meant to focus and shape and give purpose to the nation's grief. But offering condolence to the families specifically, and the nation generally, remained the object of President Obama's remarks:
This evening, Michelle and I will do what I know every parent in America will do, which is hug our children a little tighter and we’ll tell them that we love them, and we’ll remind each other how deeply we love one another. But there are families in Connecticut who cannot do that tonight. And they need all of us right now. In the hard days to come, that community needs us to be at our best as Americans. And I will do everything in my power as President to help.
Because while nothing can fill the space of a lost child or loved one, all of us can extend a hand to those in need -- to remind them that we are there for them, that we are praying for them, that the love they felt for those they lost endures not just in their memories but also in ours.
May God bless the memory of the victims and, in the words of Scripture, heal the brokenhearted and bind up their wounds.
And then there was Donald John Trump. Even when appropriate words of consolation or comfort were set before him on the teleprompter, he could not stay on script. He turned every event into something about himself, either bragging about something he claimed to have done or complaining about something that he thought had been done to him. And, even in those moments before he veered off script, he sounded bored, or distracted, or hurried.
COVID-19 would have been a monumental challenge for any President. The virus has proved an enormous challenge for every elected leader in America, at all levels. And all---not just Trump---stumbled and bumbled and fumbled with this challenge, particulary in the opening months of the pandemic. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo initially sent COVID-19 patients into nursing homes to rehabilitate. It was, after all, a novel virus; no one knew what to do initially. But Gov. Cuomo later emerged with reputation intact, and even enhanced. Was it all "media bias"?
No. Cuomo in New York, and Gov. Pritzker in Illinois, and other leaders at all levels around the country could summon empathy and convey sympathy, at least to some extent. Not Donald Trump. Even when he got the disease himself. Maybe it was his fear of showing "weakness." Showing weakness may be hazardous to the successful outcome of a negotiation, but there is no way to negotiate with a virus.
President Trump's advisers tried to posture him as a 'wartime president' leading a war against this dreaded disease. They had strong precedents to back up their arguments that America would not shun a President in wartime. As Mr. Lincoln said, it's best not to swap horses in the middle of a stream.
And who knows? If they could have gotten him to employ only a few well-chosen, well-uttered words, a dash of inspiration, a touch of empathy, Trump's advisers might have succeeded in getting Mr. Trump reelected. In the history of our Republic, only two presidential candidates ever have received more than 70,000,000 popular votes. One of these, of course, is President-Elect Joe Biden. But the other is Donald Trump.
The outcome of the 2020 presidential election is clear---but it was a close-run thing. Relative handfuls of votes in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin were determinative. And history will judge that the Trump Administration's response to the COVID-19 pandemic was its downfall. Certainly there are a number of approaches that the Trump Administration might have taken---approaches the Trump Administration refused to take---tactics it might have employed, scientists it could have listened to. Still, even if his advisers were right about the limitations of the power of the national government in this health crisis, Trump might have at least tried appealing to the better angels of our nature. But he did not. Perhaps he could not. Mr. Trump never understood, much less embraced, his role as pointifex maximus. Now Mr. Biden will have his chance.
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