Evaluating Presidents

Evaluating presidents is one of the best-loved games in American politics, but it is also a game played without clear standards. Evaluation requires comparison, and a president is usually compared to other presidents. Presidents have much in common with one another, but there are also differences. Brace and Hinckley emphasize the importance of the office over the individual in it. They also see the importance of specific influences, which vary from administration to administration:

It is only when we separate out, or control for, these multiple influences that we can begin to see how each president worked within the uneasy balance of the office (Brace and Hinckley 11).

Some presidents have been highly successful in dealing with the office and with Congress. Ronald Reagan was perceived as a highly effective inspirational leader. Franklin Delano Roosevelt pushed through huge programs to address the problems of the Great Depression and showed strength as a managerial leader. Dwight Eisenhower was seen more as a caretaker. The question is often whether the leadership style fits the times.

The recent emphasis on character as a guide to presidential performance is only the most recent attempt to find a characteristic that can be used to evaluate the qualities of effective presidents, and the difficulty of doing this shows how varied the requirements placed on and the activities performed by presidents really are. Some of the powers of the president are formal and some

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is programs (Thomas, Pika, and Watson 216). Mark A. Peterson offers the idea of tandem-institutions as a way of explaining the way the president and congress interact to shape a program. The two branches are separated in the Constitution seen as an invitation for them to struggle, but the tandem-institutions model emphasizes how the two branches in fact need one another if any of their legislative objectives are to be realized, producing both legislative conflict and cooperation: Most important, rather than accentuating the interbranch confrontation, this perspective draws our attention to a legislative arena that combines Congress and the president, an arena in which presidents attempt to build coalitions by attracting congressional allies to support their public positions and programmatic initiatives (Peterson 455). Coalition building under this system is seen as problematic. The president requires the support of Congress for the passage of an agenda, and Congress needs the president to avoid the veto and the need for a massive majority to overcome the veto. In his book The Presidential Character, James David Barber tries to accomplish what voters have been trying to do in America for over 200 years--set forth a way of pre

Category: Government - E