Presidents Aren’t Kings. Remember That, Democrats.

Presidents Aren’t Kings. Remember That, Democrats.

Jonathan Bernstein | Bloomberg — Read time: 4 minutes

Democracy Dies in Darkness

Presidents Aren’t Kings. Remember That, Democrats.

Analysis by Jonathan Bernstein | Bloomberg

July 11, 2022 at 3:33 p.m. EDT

It’s all about politics. What else?

It’s all about politics. What else? (Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg)

This turned out to be a good weekend for thinking about the presidency, with three worthwhile pieces that helped explain what’s needed in the White House — and, probably more importantly, the limitations of the office.

Item One: Ben Dreyfuss has a highly entertaining blog post mocking a suggestion that the comedian Jon Stewart should run for president. In fact, he’s Fisking (an old timey blog-era word for rebutting somebody else’s article line by line) a Politico column urging the idea. I recommend it! But Dreyfuss focuses more on Stewart’s shortcomings than his key point that the White House is no place for an amateur, even if the amateur in question is smart and good at television. The presidency is a political job, and the best presidents have been experts in politics broadly conceived.

A secondary point: Please, please, please do not base your choice of presidential candidate on who you think would do well in campaign debates. Campaigns are less important than people think, and debate performances are only minor portions of campaigns. Base your support on who you think is most electable, or as an effort to push the party in your direction on policy, or on which candidate you think has the skills to be effective in office. Not on who might get better press coverage for 24 hours during the campaign before everyone’s attention moves on to whatever is next.

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Item Two: I strongly recommend a blog post on the limitations of the presidency from political scientist Steven Taylor. He’s exactly correct that most of the things that have made liberals upset with President Joe Biden are functions of the basic political context, not about Biden himself, or the White House staff, or Democratic leaders in Congress.

That’s not to say that they’re all doing everything perfectly, but just that any differences between what Biden is doing and what plausible Democratic alternatives would be are marginal. No White House strategy can change the composition of the Supreme Court or the narrow margin Democrats hold in the House of Representatives or break the Senate tie that forces Democrats to depend on West Virginia’s Joe Manchin to reach 50 votes. Biden has to work within that world — along with all the other normal constraints that presidents face, even when they have a more friendly Congress and a less antagonistic court.

Again, that hardly means that Biden has been perfect, or that people shouldn’t criticize him. Just don’t fall for the nonsense that presidents can do anything as long as they want it badly enough.

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Item Three: A Sunday New York Times article raised the matter of Biden’s advanced age. There’s a lot of babble out there about this — a lot of false claims that he’s sharply declined cognitively — but putting that aside, there are two ways to look at the fact that he will turn 80 in November. One is that as long as Biden is unpopular, everything about him is going to be interpreted as a negative, including his age. If he was at 60% approval instead of falling a bit below 40%, the age story would be that he is defying it and thriving.

But yes, Biden is very old for the presidency, and even if it’s not affecting him in any serious way right now, there’s no guarantee that it won’t next month or next year. Let alone the four years that a second term would give him. And the truth is that not only was nominating Biden in 2020 a risk for Democrats, so was nominating Hillary Clinton in 2016 — she’ll turn 75 this fall, in what would have been the second year of her second term — just as it was a bad risk for Republicans to nominate Donald Trump, who just turned 76, in 2016 and 2020. Once those candidates are nominated, party voters have little choice but to vote for them, but the parties shouldn’t do it.

And while Biden as president has strong incentives to pretend that he’ll run for re-election at least up to the midterm elections this fall, soon after that he’ll have to either commit to running for a second term that would be even more risky for the nation, or announcing that he won’t run.

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(Corrects year of Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s nominations to the presidency in second-to-last paragraph)

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

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