CQ TODAY ONLINE NEWS
Dec. 18, 2008 – 5:07 a.m.
Waiting for Obama: Power Vacuum in a Time of Crisis
By Adriel Bettelheim, CQ Staff
History is never kind to politicians who appear weak or ineffectual during a time of crisis. Just ask Vice President Dick Cheney, who recently tried to rally Senate Republicans to support an auto industry bailout plan by implying that a refusal would invoke memories of Herbert Hoover, the president remembered for bungling the response to the Great Depression.
Unfortunately for Cheney and his boss, the pitch failed to persuade the senators, thus helping cement President Bush’s place in an unfortunate fraternity of lame-duck presidents who have left office handcuffed by a national emergency.
Crises such as the current economic meltdown and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan underscore the power vacuum that exists during every interregnum, when outgoing presidents have little influence left and incoming administrations have no real authority. This sensitive transition period actually was longer during the Great Depression, when Hoover’s successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had to wait until March to be inaugurated.
“In particularly tough situations, the lame-duck status tends to be paralyzing,” said Barbara Kellerman, a Harvard University political scientist and author of Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters.
“There’s an incredible longing to get on with things; we’re hearing over and over the phrase, ‘When Obama takes office . . . ,’” she said. “It seems like an interminable period to have the president and president-elect overwhelmed by crisis.”
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Obama has tried to fill the vacuum by demonstrating he is ready to take charge, holding near daily news conferences at which he introduced a seasoned group of Cabinet officials and senior advisers, and proposing a huge stimulus package of infrastructure and technology investments to revive the economy.
Yet he’s carefully distanced himself from the current administration’s decisions by noting there can be only one president at a time and not offering specific recommendations on pressing questions like the auto industry bailout. He also declined an invitation to attend a Group of 20 meeting Bush organized in Washington to plot an international response to the financial crisis.
Obama’s refusal to assume responsibility for any action before becoming president is reminiscent of Roosevelt, who refused to join Hoover during his final days in office in calling for a bank holiday to halt withdrawals of gold and currency. But one day after taking the oath of office, Roosevelt put his intentions into action by issuing an unprecedented edict that halted withdrawals for four days.
Legacies and Lame Ducks
Presidential scholars say President Bush’s inability to mitigate the financial crisis — and his difficulties rallying members of his own party around bailout plans for the financial service industry and automakers — are sealing the perception his presidency has been a failure.
It’s a verdict that’s also been affixed over the past century to the tenures of Hoover, Harry S Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter, who each left office struggling with economic or national security crises.
With the possible exception of Truman, such judgments tends to stick.
“The final months of a president’s tenure are quite important and tend to overshadow what’s come before,” said Princeton University political historian Julian Zelizer. “It’s totally unfair to expect President Bush to come up with some magic formula within a month that will fix a complex problem . . . but the public still wants a president who makes some progress. They don’t want someone who can’t get off the starting line.”
Unlike Bush, who embraced government intervention after the magnitude of the current crisis became apparent, Hoover was beholden to a conservative orthodoxy that held the best thing presidents could do for the economy was balance the federal budget and avoid overregulating business activity.
Hoover was suspicious of deficit spending programs that could have reduced the severity of the Depression. He tried to cut taxes to put more money in people’s hands — and also cut federal spending to balance the budget. But those actions, combined with the Federal Reserve Board’s failure to expand the money supply, only worsened the situation. By 1933, when he left office, unemployment had reached a staggering 25 percent.
Ironically, Roosevelt didn’t advocate radical fiscal policies while he campaigned. He even attacked Hoover for failing to balance the budget. But upon taking office, Roosevelt launched huge construction and relief programs as part of the New Deal, concluding that throwing the budget deeper in the red was justifiable if it reduced suffering and began to put people back to work.
Truman’s final months in office were plagued by a different kind of emergency: a seemingly inconclusive war in Korea. Truman had committed troops in 1950 without seeking a congressional declaration and paid dearly in public opinion as the conflict dragged on.
His effort to assert emergency wartime powers by seizing steel mills in an effort to avert a threatened strike was rebuffed by the Supreme Court, in 1952. And his very public clash with Gen. Douglas MacArthur over the direction of the war for a time stoked talk of impeachment.
However, Truman was able to maintain the support of most of the military establishment. And after he left office, his actions increasingly were viewed as a logical consequence of the United States’ postwar emergence as a superpower constantly engaged in world affairs. Still, his job-approval ratings hovered around 25 percent toward the end of his term, and he ended a re-election campaign in 1952 after losing the New Hampshire primary.
Johnson’s experience illustrated how an ambitious and largely successful domestic agenda could become overshadowed by military failures. After rushing a resolution through Congress authorizing the deployment of U.S. troops to Vietnam, Johnson became indelibly identified with the war.
By late 1967, with the military situation deteriorating and his political coalition crumbling, an increasingly isolated Johnson lamented to aides, “I am like the steering wheel of a car without any control.”
Even under the stress of war, Johnson didn’t give up his dream of a Great Society. But his insistence on “guns and butter” added inflationary pressure to the economy, which was aggravated by his decision not to ask Congress to raise taxes.
Carter’s tendency to personalize the problems of state made him appear weak and indecisive — an assessment that stuck in the public’s mind during his futile attempts to negotiate the release of 52 U.S. embassy personnel who had been held hostage in Tehran. When attempt to negotiate a release failed, the military mounted a rescue mission in April 1980 that had to be aborted after eight commandos died in a helicopter crash. The hostages were released just minutes after Carter’ successor, Ronald Reagan, was inaugurated, in January 1981.
Harvard’s Kellerman said in spite of such high-profile failures, one thing worse than a president stumbling out of the Oval Office is for him to try burnish his legacy, by launching unrelated initiatives or playing up past accomplishments. That carries the risk of appearing both vain and disconnected.
“It may be perfectly natural to be remembered fondly. It’s a very understandable human impulse, but I wouldn’t call it wise,” Kellerman said.
Comments
That last Kellerman quote was unfortunate because it lacks clarity. But the article makes a good point. You cannot rescue a legacy the making of which was years ago squandered. Bush is not now, however, hamstrung by the national crisis. He is hamstrung by his well-desreved reputation of having been incompetent all along, issue after issue, for eight years. Rove's fantasy to the contrary, the ill-named 'war on terror' did 'remake' the Bush presidency, but not into the image Rove and Bush imagined. History is larded with characters whose self-image is not exactly aligned with their actually existing characteristics. Bush has turned Gary Trudeau into the prophet, the Trudeau who showed us eight years ago a big Texas hat sitting atop a big pair of Texan shoulders with nothing discernable between the hat and the shoulders. Thanks heavens Obama is presiding about as well as one might imagine him doing so before he actually holds the office. Who can now say what is possible with a president bearing such a rich imagination? Hopefully for Bush, he will go to his own library and take up reading and reflecting, something to balance out his bike-riding and listening to popular music.
By becoming so publicly involved while saying that there was only one President at a time, Obama has caused much of this quagmire. Obama stated that he was in favor of the auto loans. Obama asked the Iraqis to wait until after the election to request a reduction in troops. A large portion of this is not natural.
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