Presidential Power to the People

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So, while the current administration has been especially egregious about expanding executive power, the table was already set.

George W. Bush has pushed this harder and faster than I think his predecessors would deem wise. Nevertheless, the trend was clearly in place. Reagan articulated the idea much more carefully, while [George H. W.] Bush and Clinton worked behind the scenes to maintain presidential power. So I don’t think there’s any reason to hope that electing somebody from a different party is going to stop this historical trend.

This is something I don’t think the framers foresaw. I don’t think they ever imagined that the presidency would become this focal point for democratic power, democratic expression, and democratic action. I don’t think they ever imagined that the office itself would be able to make Congress irrelevant.

Barack Obama’s ascendance has inspired great enthusiasm among reform-minded voters. Is it because of his vocabulary of change or is he just another superhero—someone to save us?

Obama is interesting in big ways. He speaks the language of open systems. He’s talking about a coproduced democracy; he’s talking about citizen access, citizen input, and universal volunteerism. I think what people, especially young people, are excited about is that he talks like a leader who would reopen democracy for citizens to be coproducers and not just consumers of government services.

If he wins, do you think that will happen?

I don’t want to be unfair to Senator Obama, but I think there’s a good chance that there will be more rhetoric than action. When people step into that office, the power is centripetal—it sucks them into what they will then argue are the demands of that office. The presidents who first served in Congress—Lincoln, Truman, Johnson—were all initially against executive power. They went out and battled it and they said smart, principled things about why it’s dangerous to give the president more power than the people. Then, the minute they were in the office, they started backpedaling, and quite arrogantly so.

My argument is that no one leader will deliver democracy back to the people; the fact that people ardently believe that an Obama-like candidate is needed to effect that change is exactly where we go wrong.

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