The Presidency: Job Specs for the Oval Office

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office and the appeal it could hold for others. There has been far too much lamentation about the President's helplessness vis-a-vis the bureaucracy. J.F.K. called the State Department "a foreign power." Presidents use the power of the permanent bureaucracy as an alibi for their own nonfeasance in the managerial role, and this encourages their Cabinet officers to adopt the same attitude within their departments. When a candidate runs "against Washington," as Carter and Reagan did, this mind-set continues long after the candidate has himself become "Washington." Plenty of people will always seek the presidency, but we may be losing some principled people who have been persuaded by Presidents that the job is hopeless.

>Finally, along with thinking of the presidency as manageable, we need to learn not to expect too much of the President. This is a difficult balance, but justly so, because we want equally delicate balance within the mind and temperament of the President: just enough of this or that quality, but not too much.

We are a profoundly democratic people but deeply susceptible to heroes and leaders. TV can confer a celebrity that may be confused with leadership quality. TV also contributes, in these dragged-out campaigns, to the steady inflation of political promises. As the talking goes on and on, presidential candidates seem drawn to grander and grander claims of what they are going to do. You could cry or laugh or both on rereading some of the promises of Reagan, Carter, Nixon, Kennedy. The apparent necessity of talking such nonsense is one of the things that keep some good people out of politics. A presidential candidate who won on reasonably sober rhetoric might encourage good people for the future, and along the way save himself some trouble in office. For that to happen, the voters—the audience—would have to want it that way.

Thomas Cronin of Colorado College, one of the most perceptive of the new generation of presidential scholars, puts it well: "We must refine our expectations of the President and raise our expectations of ourselves."