LBJ used to say that there are two kinds of people in the world, “those who make history and those who study history.” The more you put a scientific eye on the presidency and rely on research data from behind the scenes you realize he had it wrong: “there are three kinds of people in the world – those who make history, those who study history, and those who make history… up.”
The principle challenge with understanding the presidency and with becoming prepared for the job is not what we do or don’t know but what we think we know for sure that is utterly false.
All of the real challenges are in the 1 square foot of real estate at the top of one’s neck.
1) The first big challenge is the presumption that the presidency is “like…” something else:
- “sending your best hitter from the AAA-ball club up to the major leagues.”
- “Like being governor of California prepares you for being president.”
- “Like being a senator prepares you to be president.”
We get these kinds of analogies all the time from the staff of campaigns as they prepare to run for president.
A triple A player hits a 90 mph fast ball and a Governor of California appoints enough executive staff to keep about 15,000 resumes in an HR database to make those appointments.
It takes about 4 years to collect that many resumes. A presidential candidate’s staff gets 15,000 resumes in the 24-hour period after election day. By inauguration, the Obama staff had 350,000 resumes on file.
So, when going from a 90mph fast ball to a 98mph fastball is the challenge for the ball player on his way up. The analogy would be going from a 90mph pitch to a 2,100mph for a Governor of California on his way up. A fastball that goes from the mound to the catcher in under 2/100 of a second. Literally 50 times faster than the blink of an eye.
And you see that every day: the president’s day can go from elation to desperation in the blink of an eye. And they have to get used to that. There is no job remotely like it. The best you can do is hope to muddle through for a year and be surrounded by staff who can take the job from you for part of the day so not everything is a disaster.
2) Problems come to the president’s desk when 50% of your most trusted advisors advise one way and 50% of them advise another. And just those problems consume the president’s entire day.
President Kennedy often excused himself from meetings during the Cuban Missile crisis while the fate of the world dangled on the brink of nuclear holocaust because he had other stuff to do. A “crisis” is a challenge not because of the stakes involved but because it is an unwelcome interruption to what else the president has to do that is just as important.
And if the president’s agenda isn’t moving forward every day, it isn’t standing still, it is slipping away. No governor or business man or senator has had to learn to think that way.
3) The president’s staff have to learn that the things that they say don’t get to be reconsidered and taken back and restated without consequences. The words they say circle the globe at the speed of light because they speak with the president’s voice.
4) And so do presidents.
5) The president gets briefed on national security issues at 8:15 AM every day, but who briefs the briefer and when?
They set up to be briefed at 7:00. And when does the staff gather to prepare the notes for the briefer?
At 6:00 is a national security conference call to compile the most important items that might get the president’s attention that day.
Those staff then must stay until the president goes home at night. They go to bed at 11 and get up at 4, 7 days a week.
And the stuff they do on 5 hours of sleep 7 days a week shakes the ground we walk on. Literally.
So the presidential staff constantly turns over from pure exhaustion just to keep the president informed on the stuff that matters.
6) White House staff live in a glass house, naked.
The level of scrutiny is beyond the bounds of any that celebrity or official or business person ever has to endure. And it is unforgiving. The White House is an error free zone.
7) And so it is for presidents too.
8) Sometimes the White House is the first to arrive on the scene after the storm. But sometimes, the White House is the storm. And it is both every day.
That makes it the reflection of everything that is good in American society and everything that is awful at the same time.
And learning to do both simultaneously, because there is no time to do one thing at a time, is a critical job skill in that place. Families suffer, everyone will suffer, but you will never be afraid of doing any other job for the rest of your life.
Have there been some presidents who handled the transition more gracefully than others? Who handled their transition into the presidency best?
Absolutely, in the modern era: Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush.
Johnson coming in did an amazing job skirting the edge of nuclear holocaust while transforming America’s society for the better (all in 100 days).
The impact of 30 years experience in national elected office coming to the fore along with an actual vision of how to change society for the better.
And W. coming in and going out, just getting things in order and setting the stage for a grand transfer of party control both in and then out of office.
Both were a masterful performance of responsible, democratic rule that makes America the envy of the world and of history (and we helped).
What would the layman find most interesting and accessible within your research?
2 things.
1) I study the role of bargaining in leadership, not leadership of the public or leadership of an organization, both of which are fairly easy to understand.
I study leading leaders. Every layman knows that their boss is an idiot, so what happens when we put the most important stuff in the hands of a boss of bosses?
The leadership of other leaders: how to turn practiced and accomplished leaders into followers is the presidential challenge and usually presidents do this in private and often as it turns out with an appeal to the “target’s” possible role in history.
A president can put the hands of others on the “steering wheel of history” and let them drive for a brief period and the pursuit of that kind of “fame” (inward acknowledged and basically private) alters leaders so they become a follower in that moment because making history is their fundamental motivation.
And other times presidents can persuade because they can utilize their different vantage point.
The Senator who comes to the White House because he holds the last vote the president needs to make a landmark bill happen might seem like he’s in the catbird seat only to discover that the president intends to let the thing fail and blame it entirely on you.
So, you make history, but entirely in the wrong way AND if the president doesn’t help you right now and give you an obvious out so you can vote with the others, then your failure now pisses off a majority of those Senators you will need to make things better for you on a host of other matters.
You’re not in the catbird seat at all. You’re the bird in the cat’s mouth instead.
That’s the president’s vantage point and how it can alter situations. Now how does that happen on a systematic basis is what I study.
2) I also study presidential routine, what does the president do all day, literally minute by minute? What can we learn about the job from what the guy does all day? Sort of just like anyone’s job.
Since there are only so many hours every day when presidents do choose to alter their routine, what are the trade-offs that they have to make?
When they decide to tweet storm to the public, what is it that they are not doing instead that is catastrophically important?
And do presidents really work differently every day or do the overwhelming realities of being president simply take control of the day’s work?
What are the trade-offs between being Commander in Chief and other constitutional duties? And when faced by a crisis, do they alter their routine or, like President Kennedy, they KBO – as Winston Churchill recommended – “keep buggering on,” doing what they would normally do?
This is a long-term project because it takes a long time to gather the minute by minute details of presidential routine from the presidential libraries and archives.
What we know so far: KBO is a pretty powerful routine of the working president BECAUSE it reflects the basic demands of the job that are hard to turn away from.
When presidents communicate more, especially with the public through whatever means, it is their primary responsibilities for national security and diplomacy that suffer.
Alternately, when presidents choose to spend more time on national security or diplomacy they usually take the needed time from their personal time – they “stay at the office” later and “miss dinner and family time.”
In the first 100 days, the early on and utterly unexpected demands of the job (see #1 above) invariably result in the president being unable to choose priorities among the demands on their time (having not learned #2 above) and so they choose to stay later and later every day. Not learning #2 above exhausts presidents and their staffs (#5 above) so that they then make mistakes early on too.
If you were to give advice to a student thinking of pursuing a PhD American politics what advice would you give them? What is on the cutting edge of the field?
The “cutting edge” of a field always changes and it remains the same. They are not exactly fads but the current cutting edge always has many of a fad’s characteristics.
What really matters in a discipline (and therefore what should matter in a career) has always been “big ideas.”
We train students, however, to criticize and substitute the newest whiz bang for the earlier newest whiz bang (something can always be made better), but we don’t train students to accomplish big ideas or even how to make sure they are pursuing them or even how to pursue a little idea that will contribute to a big idea.
The cutting edge of my American politics field is not what you do to win an election but what you do when you have won (elections don’t make history, office holders do) and how do you navigate the institutional circumstances to get other equally accomplished leaders to follow you rather than the other way around?
With all the funding in the world, what would you research and how?
My career path has been to do exactly what I think is the right thing for a scholar to do: collect the behind the scenes data for and analyze it so as to establish the knowledge necessary to further the decisiveness of democratic leaders when they are afforded the opportunity to put their hands on the wheel of history.
If I had all the research funding in the world, I would do four things:
1) I would continue to do exactly as I have been doing since I got tenure in 1993 in terms of focus,
2) I would give a bunch of money to assist the National Archives in transforming its collections of data into electronic format so that I can add to our knowledge of how things work,
3) hire a staff person to administer the paper work for me so I wouldn’t get tripped up so often by accounting rules.
And then 4) I would give back the remaining funding because 1-3 don’t cost that much.
In your career what has been your biggest obstacle and how did you overcome it?
The presumption of your colleagues and university that, after tenure, productive knowledge is and must be reflected solely in the publications you have in the top professional journals of your discipline. And I have never overcome that institutional hurdle.