The U.S. has one of the lowest voter turnouts in the West. Everyone has his reasons: difficult voter-registration procedures, a large and apolitical underclass, a general contentment that makes people not even bother to vote. But there is another explanation: boredom. People are so disappointed with the nominees for President that they see no point in expending great effort to choose among them.
Presidential politics is afflicted with political dwarfism. The Democrats started out the year with seven dwarfs. Now there is one. Republicans say many things about George Bush. That he is a political giant is not one of them.
Presidential dwarfism, however, is not a recent condition. When F.D.R. ran for President in 1932, Walter Lippmann described him as a "highly impressionable person without a firm grasp of public affairs."
John Kennedy's stature is retrospectively inflated by his martyrdom. But as a candidate he was seen as a lightweight. "There are men and there are boys," wrote Murray Kempton in 1960. "Lyndon Johnson, say of him what you will, is a man. Jack Kennedy is a boy." %
Truman-Dewey, Carter-Ford, Dukakis-Bush. The question is always the same: How does a great country of 250 million get stuck with these guys?
But Roosevelt and Truman and Kennedy were no dwarfs. And only the historians will be able to judge Bush and Dukakis. The better question is: Why is it that candidates always appear not up to the job?
Not because they are in reality so small. But because the office looms so large. Nowhere in the Western world is the head of government more deified than in the U.S. And nowhere else is the office so feeble. Nowhere else, in other words, is the gap between its real and imagined powers so great. This sets up an impossible disparity between expectation and delivery that makes any prospective President look inadequate.
The deification of the American President begins with the Constitution. The President doubles as head of state and is thus endowed with the aura of a king. When Challenger explodes, when Marines come home dead, he is the nation. His person embodies the state, and we give him all the accoutrements: a plane, a fanfare, a mountain retreat. Even the rowdy White House press corps stands up when he enters the room. He symbolizes the power of the state, and it happens that his is the most powerful state on earth. Which makes him, so goes the syllogism, the most powerful man on earth.
The superman myth is reinforced by the fact that he can "push a button" and destroy large swaths of the globe. But that is a wholly unused and wholly unusable power. In reality, the American President is one of the least powerful chief executives in the West. He cannot even pass his own budget, a minimal attribute of governance.