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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he reflects on Presidents Obama and Bush. See his previous OUPblogs here.

Presidents array themselves along a continuum with two extremes: either they are crusaders for their cause or merely defenders of the faith. Either they attempt to transform the landscape of America politics, or they attempt to modify it in incremental steps. To cite the titles of the autobiographies of the current and last presidents: either presidents declare the “audacity of hope” or they affirm a “charge to keep.” If President Obama is the liberal crusader, President George Bush was the conservative defender.

The strategies of presidential leadership differ for the crusader and the defender, but President Obama appears to be misreading the nature of his mandate. Conciliation works for the defender; it can be ruinous to the would-be crusader.

The crusader must have his base with him, all fired up and ready to go. For to go to places unseen, the crusader must have the visionaries, even the crazy ones, on his side. The defender, conversely, must pay homage to partisans on the other side of the aisle because incremental change requires assistance from people, including political rivals, invested in the status quo. Moderate politics require moderate friends.

The irony is that President George Bush, a self-proclaimed defender - spent too much time pandering to his right-wing base, and Barack Obama - a self-proclaimed crusader, is spending a lot of time appeasing his political rivals. Their political strategies were out of sync, and perhaps even inconsistent with their political goals.

Take the issue of gay rights for President Obama. The President is trying so hard to prove to his socially conservative political rivals that he is no liberal wacko that he has reversed his previous support for a full repeal of The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). What he may not have realized is that it may be politically efficacious for a defender to ignore his base, but the costs to the crusader for alienating his base are far graver. Bipartisanship is not symmetrically rewarding in all leadership contexts.

Consider the example of President Bill Clinton, a “third-way” Democrat. He ended welfare as we knew it, and on affirmative action he said “mend it, don’t end it.” Much to Labor’s chagrin, he even passed NAFTA. Bill Clinton was no crusader. And if the Democratic base wanted a deal-making, favor-swapping politico, they would have nominated a second Clinton last year.
The crusader rides on a cloud of ideological purity. Without the zealotry and idolatry of the base, the crusader is nothing; his magic extinguished. And this is happening right now to Barack Obama.

The people who gave the man his luster are also uniquely enpowered to take it away. (It is a mistake to think that Sean Hannity or Michael Steele have this power.) Obama campaigned on changing the world, and his base can and will crush him for failing to deliver on his audacity. The Justice Department’s clumsy defense of DOMA via the case law recourse of incest and pedophilia may be a small matter in the administration’s scheme of things, but it is a big and repugnant deal to the base - the people who matter for a crusading president.

This is a pattern in the Obama administration: for the promise to pull troops out of Iraq there was the concomitant promise of more in Afghanistan, for the release of the OLC “torture memos,” operatives of harsh interrogation techniques were also offered immunity, in return for the administration’s defense of DOMA, Obama promised to extend benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees. This is incremental, transactional, and defensive leadership. Defenders balance; but crusaders are mandated to press on. Incremental leadership works for presidents mandated to keep a charge, but not for one who flaunted his audacity. There are distinct and higher expectations for a crusader-to-be; and if President Obama is to live up to his hype, then bear the crusader’s cross he must.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at presidents and church. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

Americans do impose a religious litmus test on our presidents, and there is a tradition that proves it. President Obama and his family attended Easter service at St John’s Episcopal Church. Just across from the White House, it is known as the “Church of the Presidents,” the unofficial White House Chapel. Almost every president since James Madison has found occasion to worship in this church and in particular at pew 54, the presidential pew.

The selective presidential need to prove a religious point proves my point. Consider the case of President Eisenhower, who was raised a Jehovah’s Witness and whose home served as the local meeting hall for Witnesses for 19 years. Twelve days after his first inauguration, Eisenhower was baptized, confirmed, and became a communicant in the Presbyterian Church. No president before or after him has ever had to perform such rites while in office. The religious litmus test was so powerful in this case that it was voluntarily taken by a president who had already been endorsed by the people and sworn to protect and defend the Constitution.

Contrast Eisenhower to President Reagan or Bush, neither of whom belonged to a congregation or attended church regularly (or even sporadically) while in Washington, justifying their decision on the basis that the security requirements would be too onerous and disruptive to the congregations they joined. Faith is a personal thing only if the public already believes that a president possesses it. If not, no security arrangement is too onerous to trump the need to publicize it. This is true of President Clinton when he attended Foundry United Methodist Church while in Washington (one of the candidates for the Obamas’ new home church by the way), and it is also true of presidential candidate John Kerry when he made much public display of his Sunday church attendances.

The speculation about which church the Obamas will ultimately settle on as a home church in DC has been fueled, in part, by his past association with the controversial Jeremiah Wright and his membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ. The speculation about where the Obamas will end up has taken on more than normal political significance because there is a greater need for this president, unless others who didn’t even have to attend church, to demonstrate that his religious views are squarely in the mainstream.

So on this Easter weekend, to those who bemoan the secularization of America, take heart, because presidents who appear godless know that they will be judged on earth before they are judged in heaven; to those who believe the separation of church and state is not yet complete, take stock, because where and whether or not President Obama ends up worshiping every Sunday has become a topic of paramount political importance to the administration. So much so that White House aides reportedly considered over a dozen churches before deciding on St John’s as the safest place for a president to go to observe Easter Sunday.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he reflects Obama’s speaking style. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

President Barack Obama’s first press conference was serious, measured, and according to Mark Nikolas (Politicalbase.com), three grade levels more complex than President George W. Bush’s first press conference.

A cursory glance at readers’ comments to Nikolas’ post reveals sharp disagreements about both the empirical claim and its implications. Since I have used the Flesch readability scale to score the rhetoric of every president since George Washington, I will venture to offer some observations to suggest that George Bush and Barack Obama aren’t all that different.

Superficially, they couldn’t be more different. While the former president is a self-styled cowboy who has rejected his northeastern roots in favor of a Texan down-home speaking style, the current one is a former professor of constitutional law who (if one recalls his speech on race in Philadelphia at the height of the Jeremiah Wright fiasco) will not demure from pontificating on things complex and controversial. I doubt many people will argue that Bush was a more sophisticated speaker, but people disagree about whether or not his simple sentences were delivered at the expense of complex thoughts.

Complex thoughts can be simply expressed, his defenders contend. But Einstein also said that “things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Consider John Robert’s question to President Bush in his first press conference in 2001: “I’m wondering what message he (the Secretary of State) will take from this administration to leaders of the Middle East in the area of sanctions that matter, sanctions that are effective on the regime?”

President Bush answered in his inimitable style: “I have said that the sanction regime is like Swiss cheese. That meant that they weren’t very effective. And we’re going to review the current sanction policy and review options as to how to make the sanctions work. But the primary goal is to make it clear to Saddam that we expect him to be a peaceful neighbor in the region, and we expect him not to develop weapons of mass destruction; and if we find him doing so, there will be a consequence.”

President Bush dedicated little time to “review options” on improving the efficacy of sanctions on Saddam’s regime. And the conditional clause “if we find him (Saddam) doing so” (developing WMDs) was far from satisfied before the President rushed to war. The fact is it was by our president’s slovenly words that we were led to do rather foolish things, as George Orwell warned.

Yes, we need a president who connects with the people. Simple words can conceal complex thoughts. But that is exactly the problem. If we allow presidents to sweet talk us with simple platitudes, and assume that complex negotiations and deliberations are going on behind the scenes and outside of public earshot, we abdicate our role as citizens to adjudicate the direction of public policy. A seduced citizenry cannot hold their executive accountable. Eloquent platitudes generate applause, not reflection. As a component of democratic discourse, they are, like Swiss cheese, utterly inadequate.

Lest this may sound like a partisan post, let me say that Obama is not immune to the draw of anti-intellectualism. The President’s and Secretary Geitner’s messages on the economic stimulus package and especially TARP 2 have thus far been woefully lacking in detail. The President is back to being the Poet-in-Chief, taking his message on road as if he never left the campaign trail. The stock market takes no partisan sides, and it has not taken kindly to the president’s eloquent generalities.

Life is like a box of chocolates, Mama Gump once told Forrest. Profound truths can be simply said, but what we need now are concrete solutions, not quotable verses. President Obama may be speaking at a higher grade level than President Bush, but so far, he appears no more adept at offering us precise answers. The President can use his words – simple or complex – to educate or to obfuscate. The choice is his.

By Ashley Bray, Intern Extraordinaire

From Colony to Superpower by George C. Herring is the newest edition to the award-winning The Oxford History of the United States series, which has won three Pulitzer prizes, a Bancroft and a Parkman Prize.  Herring, Alumni Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Kentucky and a leading authority on U.S. foreign relations, has written the only thematic volume to be commissioned for the series.  This sweeping volume studies the history of the United States through the lens of foreign relations, covering everything from the American Revolution to the current war in Iraq as it examines America’s rise to power. The following excerpt discusses America’s approach to foreign policy throughout history, something all Americans should be aware of, especially President-elect Barack Obama as he prepares to take office in January.

By dividing foreign policy powers between the executive and legislative branches of government, the U.S. Constitution added another level of confusion and conflict. The executive branch is obviously better suited to conduct foreign policy than a larger, inherently divided legislature whose members often represent local interests. George Washington set early precedents establishing presidential predominance. In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the growing importance of foreign policy and the existence of major foreign threats have vastly expanded executive power, producing what has been called the imperial presidency. Congress from time to time has asserted itself and sought to regain some measure of control over foreign policy. Sometimes, as in the 1930s and 1970s, it has exerted decisive influence on crucial policy issues. For the most part and especially in the realm of war powers, the president has reigned supreme. Sometimes, chief executives have found it expedient to seek congressional endorsement of their decisions for war if not an outright declaration. Other times and especially in periods of danger, Congress has witlessly rallied behind the president, neglecting to ask crucial questions about policy decisions that turned out to be badly flawed.

America’s peculiar approach to foreign policy has long bemused and befuddled foreign observers. Referring specifically to the United States, that often astute nineteenth-century French observer Alexis de Tocqueville warned that democracies “obey the impulse of passion rather than the suggestions of prudence.” They “abandon a mature design for the gratification of a momentary caprice.” In the early years, European diplomats tried to exploit the chaos that was American politics by bribing members of Congress and even interfering in the electoral process. More recently, other nations have hired lobbyists and even public relations experts to promote their interests and images in the United States.

Despite claims to moral superiority and disdain for Old World diplomacy, the United States throughout its history has behaved more like a traditional great power than Americans have realized or might care to admit. United States policymakers have often been shrewd analysts of world politics. They have energetically pursued and zealously protected interests deemed vital. In terms of commerce and territory, they have been aggressively and relentlessly expansionist. They exploited rivalries among the Europeans to secure their independence, favorable boundaries, and vast territorial acquisitions. From Louisiana to the Floridas, Texas, California, and eventually Hawaii, they fashioned the process of infiltration and subversion into a finely tuned instrument of expansion, using the presence of restless Americans in nominally foreign lands to establish claims and take over additional territory. When the hunger for land was sated, they extended American economic and political influence across the world. During the Cold War, when the nation’s survival seemed threatened, they scrapped old notions of fair play, intervening in the affairs of other nations, overthrowing governments, even plotting the assassination of foreign leaders. From the founders of the eighteenth century to the Cold Warriors two hundred years later, they played the great game of world politics with some measure of skill.

Popular notions to the contrary, the United States has been spectacularly successful in its foreign policy. To be sure, like all countries, it has made huge mistakes and suffered major failures, sometimes with tragic consequences for Americans—and other peoples as well. At the same time, it has sustained an overall record of achievement with little precedent in history. In the space of a little more than two hundred years, it conquered a continent, came to dominate the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean areas, helped win two world wars, prevailed in a half-century Cold War, and extended its economic influence, military might, popular culture, and “soft power” through much of the world. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, it had attained that “strength of a Giant” that Washington longed for.

Ironically, as the nation grew more powerful, the limits to its power became more palpable, a harsh reality for which Americans were not prepared by history. The nation’s unprecedented success spawned what a British commentator called the “illusion of American omnipotence,” the notion that the United States could do anything it set its mind to, or, as one wag put it, the difficult we do tomorrow, the impossible may take a while. Success came to be taken for granted. Failure caused great frustration. When it occurred, many Americans preferred to pin it on villains at home rather than admit there were things their nation could not do. Despite its vast wealth and awesome military power, the United States had to settle for a stalemate in the Korean War. It could not work its will in Vietnam or Iraq, nations whose complex societies and idiosyncratic histories defied its efforts to reshape them.

The emergence of a new twenty-first-century threat in the form of international terrorism and the devastating September 11, 2001, attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon underscored another hard reality: that power does not guarantee security. On the contrary, the greater a nation’s global influence, the greater its capacity to provoke envy and anger; the more overseas interests it has, the more targets it presents to foes, and the more it has to lose. Weaker nations can deal with a hegemonic nation by combining with each other or simply by obstructing its moves. Even America’s unparalleled power could not fully assure the freedom from fear that George Washington longed for.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com.  In the article below he reflects on the rehabilitation of liberalism. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

Whatever happens at the polls in two weeks, the pendulum has swung back in Liberalism’s direction. Economically, culturally, and ideologically, liberal answers are regaining legitimacy.

After all, even though the Democratic party nominated a liberal anti-war candidate over a more moderate establishment candidate this year, and the Republicans turned to a maverick with a reputation for bi-partisanship, the Democratic candidate is ahead in practically every battleground state that George Bush won in 2004.

How quickly times have changed. Whereas John Kerry was swiftboated in 2004, Obama (like Reagan) is developing Teflon powers as he continues to ride his surge in the polls despite stories about Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and ACORN. When terrorism was issue number one, people preferred a Republican president; but when the economy becomes issue number one, people prefer a Democratic president.

This is why Sarah Palin’s charge that “‘spreading the wealth‘ sounds a little like socialism” isn’t getting much traction. Spreading the wealth sounds like sharing the wealth, and these days such thoughts aren’t all that unpopular. After all, the Bush administration’s decision to obtain equity stakes in several private banks in return for a liquidity injection isn’t exactly laissez faire.

Culturally, the country appears to have moved on from those culture wars we heard so much about just four years ago. Just this year, the California and Connecticut Supreme Courts’ decisions to legalize same-sex marriage and the lackluster response from the conservative community indicates the shifting cultural tectonics. Abortion isn’t such a hot button issue this year either. Anti-abortion Catholics have endorsed Obama in significant numbers. If anything, McCain’s selection of a running mate who will not make an exception to her pro-life position for rape and incest reveals a campaign completely in illusion about where the country is culturally. McCain’s contempt for the “health” exception for women will seriously damage his chances with women.

We also see the ideological shift in cross-party endorsements for Obama. Breaking a century and a half year old tradition, the Chicago Tribune has endorsed Barack Obama. Christopher Buckley’s defection is both substantially and symbolically powerful, as were the endorsements of Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar. And now Colin Powell has joined the bandwagon, characterizing Obama as a “transformational” leader. The last time we saw such language being used to describe a potential president was during the landslide and realigning elections of 1932 and 1980.

In the days to come, Republicans will push back to insist that this is still a “center-right” country - as Karl Rove and Charles Krauthhammer have done - and they will try to remind Americans that Democratic control of all branches of government may not be a good idea. But if the result of the White House race is still unclear, no one doubts that the Democrats will strengthen their majorities in both the House and the Senate. Average Joe, the median independent voter has moved to the Left of Plumber Joe, the median Republican voter. It may be time to excavate “liberal” and “liberalism” from the dictionary of political incorrectness.

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com.  In the article below he reflects on last Friday’s debate. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

In the first presidential debate on Friday night, Senator McCain tried repeatedly to cast Senator Obama as a naive lightweight who does not understand foreign policy. Seven times, McCain laid the charge that Obama just doesn’t get it.

-”Senator Obama doesn’t understand the difference between a tactic and a strategy.”
-”And, yes, Senator Obama calls for more troops, but what he doesn’t understand, it’s got to be a new strategy…”
-”What Senator Obama doesn’t seem to understand is that if without precondition you sit down across the table from someone …”
-”I don’t think that Senator Obama understands that there was a failed state in Pakistan when Musharraf came to power.”
-”If we adopted Senator Obama’s set date for withdrawal, then that will have a calamitous effect in Afghanistan and American national security interests in the region. Senator Obama doesn’t seem to understand there is a connection between the two.”
-”Again, a little bit of naivete there. He doesn’t understand that Russia committed serious aggression against Georgia.”
-”Senator Obama still doesn’t quite understand – or doesn’t get it — that if we fail in Iraq, it encourages al Qaeda.”

In schools, in the boardroom, even around the kitchen table, people tend to prove their knowledge by proving what they think to be true rather than by attacking their interlocutors for their failure to understand. McCain was deploying a peculiar form of persuasion that we see often in our politics: he was trying to make a self-referential claim by an other-referential jab. By calling Obama naive he was trying to imply that he was not. Since it is bad taste in politics (as in real life) to be a self-professed know-it-all, it was, McCain probably thought, a classier act to simply dismiss Obama as naive and allow the conclusion that he understood foreign policy better to follow.

Yet this was exactly the failed strategy that Al Gore used against George Bush in their presidential debates in 2000. Although some pundits thought that Al Gore was scoring debate points, many viewers came away thinking that he was a condescending know-it-all.

Even the most artful rhetorician of our time, President Ronald Reagan, had to strike the right balance of tone and humor to successfully get away with his “there you go again” rejoinder. This well executed line in his debate with President Carter in 1980 was one of the defining moments of that campaign. But it gained traction only because there was a growing consensus in the electorate that the decades-long liberal formula for solving the country’s economic woes was obsolete and in need of overhaul. “Do you still not get it” only works when the audience has already gotten it and moved on to newer solutions, leaving one’s interlocutor alone in the dustheap of history.

The problem is that in 2008, Obama is not alone in his views. There are significantly more voters tired of George Bush’s unilateralism, his hard-headed focus on the war on terrorism in Iraq, and his refusal to negotiate with rogue nations than there are voters who would prefer to stay his course. Unlike in 1980 when the country was moving to the political right, this year, many Independents will be apt to wonder if it is McCain who still doesn’t get it.

Senator McCain would do well to remember that the primary season is over and he needs to stop speaking only to his base if he wants to narrow Obama’s lead in the polls. The strategy of calling one’s debate partner naive (a euphemism for a fool) does not often get one extra points from neutral bystanders, independent voters. If Republicans were, like McCain, exasperated on Friday night with their perception that Obama just wouldn’t see the obvious, McCain probably appeared condescending to Independents with the forced grins by which he greeted Obama’s alleged displays of naivete. McCain needs to stop harping on the charge that Obama doesn’t get it but start proving that HE gets it - that many Independents and Democrats are looking to restore the country’s relationship with the rest of the world, that there are many Americans who see the war in Iraq as a foreign policy tangent to the brewing problems in Afghanistan. Maybe Senator Obama doesn’t get it. But do you, Senator McCain?

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com.  In the article below he looks at Senator Barack Obama. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

The talk of town these days is that Senator Barack Obama is either just too cerebral, or refreshingly so.

Assessing the Senator’s weak performance at the Saddleback Faith Forum, Michael Gerson wrote in the Washington Post, “Obama was fluent, cool and cerebral — the qualities that made Adlai Stevenson interesting but did not make him president. ” Yet to others, cerebral is good. “Obama’s cool, cerebral style may be just what we need,” wrote Eleanor Clift of Newsweek.

It has occurred to me that people who agree or disagree with my thesis about The Anti-intellectual Presidency have tended to be divided on the question of whether or not a president’s political judgment should be based on intellection or intuition. This division may appear to some to map crudely along partisan lines: some liberals and Democrats tend to value reliance on the intellect; some conservatives and Republicans prioritize instinct. I think there is more agreement than meets the eye.

Insofar as there is a partisan disagreement, populist Republicans are probably right that as a general political rule, visceral trumps cerebral. The Obama campaign is starting to recognize this, with their choice of vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden, someone who speaks with passion and sometimes, apparently, without much prior thought.

But I don’t think many people are against intellection as a method for decision-making. It is surely a strawman argument that President Bush does no thinking and that Karl Rove was the brain behind his decisions. The key is that Bush pulls off the semblance of intellectual diffidence, even though he must do a lot of thinking behind the scenes. Like others have said of President Dwight Eisenhower, President Bush has mastered the highest political art that conceals art itself.

Now, there is still an argument to be made for judgment to be based on intuition rather than intellection, but it is a weak one. “Go with your gut” may be a familiar refrain, but even if intuition is less error-prone than intellection, there is one reason that recommends against its excessive use. Intuition is non-falsifiable. No one can prove what he feels in his or her gut. So when President Bush told us that he looked into Vladamir Putin’s eyes and saw a soul, we could only take his word for it that he saw what he saw. We couldn’t test the claim; we couldn’t even debate it. This can’t be what democracy is about, because democracy is conducted with the deliberation of public reasons, not the unilateral assertion of private emotions.

If I am correct, then no one disagrees with the importance of intellection as a decision-making method, even as there is disagreement on the political utility of projecting or hiding such intellection. The disagreement is about the image, but we can scarcely deny the importance of the process of intellection. Because they have failed to make this distinction between image and process, those who disagree with the appearance of intellection have also wrongly concluded that the process of intellection should have no place in leadership.

Anti-intellectualism is politically powerful, but it is in the end self-defeating. Suppose I feel in my gut that intellection is key to decision-making. How will someone who disagrees with my gut instinct prove my intuition wrong? Only by argument, debate, intellection.

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