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It is true that in the early years, Reagan was able to get things done. But he was extraordinarily popular. Moreover, what was his major legislative achievement? Cutting taxes, a political gimme. When it came to more difficult issues -- nuclear modernization, school prayer, Robert Bork -- even this most popular of Presidents was stymied. Take foreign policy. The Congress compels adherence to a treaty interpretation (on antiballistic missiles) that the President rejects, prevents deployment of the MX force that the President wants, utterly undoes the Central American policy that the President covets. In most democracies, to achieve that kind of strategic reversal of a President's agenda, you must replace him by winning an election. In the U.S., you can do it in opposition. To defeat the Trident sub in Britain, you have to throw Mrs. Thatcher out. To defeat the MX or contra policy in the U.S., you need a simple majority in Congress, sometimes in just one chamber.
And yet the President is treated like a king. If the rains don't come, we may not yet blame the President directly but we certainly hold him responsible for making sure no mortal suffers. If the economy weakens, even early in his term when it could not possibly be his fault, he is to blame. The early '80s saw a deep recession followed by the breaking of inflation. These were due to a combination of factors, among them Paul Volcker and the oil bust. Yet it is Reagan who got the blame for recession and credit for deflation, despite the fact that his principal contribution to the economy was a huge Keynesian tax cut that caused neither. When Herbert Hoover was blamed for the Depression, he wryly called it a "great compliment to the energies and capacities of one man."
Harry Truman was blunter. In 1952, Richard Neustadt recounts, Truman was contemplating how frustrated Eisenhower would be should he win the presidency. "He'll sit here," said Truman, tapping his desk, "and he'll say 'Do this! Do that!' And nothing will happen. Poor Ike -- it won't be a bit like the Army."
In the Oval Office, the pleasures of command are few. Power in Washington is radically decentralized. Not just because of the 200-year-old separation of powers, but also because in this generation power has diffused additionally with the decline of the party system, the overthrow of seniority in Congress, and the rise of a fourth branch of government, a standing opposition -- the media. To these new institutional developments, the Executive has not found an answer.
Yet at the same time, the President's heightened media presence in a TV age has encouraged even greater deification. He is father, leader, TV star. We demand of him not just policy but vision and hope and uplift, the kind of spiritual role once assigned to popes and emperors.
Hence one failed presidency after the other. Given our expectations, how could it be otherwise? Even Reagan, who was supposed to have rehabilitated the office and broken the string of Johnson-Nixon-Ford-Carter failures, is now limping out of office, irrelevant and ridiculed. The presidency grows while its powers shrink. Is it any wonder that election year is the season of ennui?