A history of presidential power

[nancylebov]

http://www.reason.com/news/show/126020.html

This one covers the expansion of presidential power and prestige from the beginning (when they were pretty small) till now.

I don't agree with everything in the article: I don't think it's awful for citizens to have a public venue to ask the candidates questions, nor for a President to have some interest in what happens to children. And I think the author wasn't fair to Obama. After saying that Obama is better than Clinton and McCain on civil liberties, he then says that Obama will presumably give in to the same temptations to expand power.

I'm dubious that much expansion of presidential power happens because the president is afraid that an overly demanding public will blame the president for everything that goes wrong.

Still, the history was interesting. I didn't know how small the presidency used to be nor had I thought about whether the intelligence services should be attached to the president.

Link thanks to The Agitator.

And awhile ago at Unqualified Offerings, there was the plausible idea that government power tends to increase because, while the three branches are somewhat balanced against each other, this isn't enough to protect the public from any of the three nibbling away against the public's freedom.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

The Obama "kingdom right here on earth" quote alarms me.

...government power tends to increase because, while the three branches are somewhat balanced against each other, this isn't enough to protect the public from any of the three nibbling away against the public's freedom.

There's also not enough to keep the three branches from colluding.

[avram]

I want to see that "Kingdom right here on earth" quote in its full original context. And I can't, because nobody seems to have a full transcript of the speech online. That, to me, is a warning sign. I suspect that the original context is inoffensive, and the scary-to-secularists fragment is being quoted by itself to frighten us.

[avram]

I don't think Healy believes that it's "awful" for a President to have some interest in what happens to children. I think he believes that, if the American people are concerned about (say) tobacco companies marketing cigarettes to children, they should write to their Representatives and Senators and state legislators to do something about it.

Healy is playing off the common image of a distraught politician or activist pushing for some kind of new law, trying to silence opposition by asking "What about the children?!". Surely you've encountered this image. It's been parodied on The Simpsons, and I've seen it invoked on dozens of blog discussions, and even in the old days on RASFF.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Here's what Healy said:

The scene was the campaign’s second televised debate, held in Richmond, Virginia; the format, a horrid Oprah-style arrangement in which a hand-picked audience of allegedly normal Americans got to lob questions at the candidates, who were perched on stools, trying to look warm and approachable. Up from the crowd popped a ponytailed social worker named Denton Walthall, who demanded to know what George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and H. Ross Perot were going to do for us.

“The focus of my work as a domestic mediator is meeting the needs of the children that I work with…and not the wants of their parents,” Walthall said. “And I ask the three of you, how can we, as symbolically the children of the future president, expect the three of you to meet our needs, the needs in housing and in crime and you name it.”

One wonders how some of the more irascible presidents of old would have reacted at the sight of a grown man burbling about childish necessities to the prospective national father. Yet under the hot lights of the 1992 campaign, Ross Perot said he’d cross his heart and take Walthall’s pledge to meet America’s infantile needs, whatever those were. Bill Clinton, being Bill Clinton, pandered.

[avram]

I thought you were talking about this part:

In a 2002 study tracking word usage through two centuries of SOTUs and inaugural addresses, political scientist Elvin T. Lim noted that in the first decades under the Constitution presidents rarely mentioned poverty, and the word help did not even appear until 1859. Nor did early presidents subscribe to the modern notion that it's all "about the children"; they rarely even mentioned the little buggers. But Lim found that "Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton made 260 of the 508 references to children in the entire speech database, invoking the government's responsibility to and concern for children in practically every public policy area."

Walthall, however, isn't actually talking about the needs of children in his question. (He himself meets the needs of children in his work, but that's not what he seeks from the candidates.) He's talking about Americans in general being "children of the future president". As Healy points out, Walthall is infantilizing adult Americans.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I can see good reasons to be pissed off at Walthall (and in fact, I'd skimmed past his question because his intro was so irritating), but I think Healy at least implies that it's a good thing that earlier Presidents didn't mention children. (Interesting to think about how much the world has changed.)

I agree that invoking "for the children" as an all-purpose excuse for taking charge of adults is a current problem.