well, good afternoon everyone. i'm jason your may president of the bipartisan policy center. i'd like to give you a very warm welcome to today's event focus

on the evolution of the american presidency over the last two decades. i emphasize the warm welcome because when public health realities forced us to make this a virtual event. i made the compelling argument that there were warm days in february and maybe we should just go for it and get a tent and a couple of heaters. and as usual the thoughtful staff at the bpc prevailed and so here we are virtual yet comfortable my pleasure to set the kind of contest for today's discussion. the bipartisan policy center is really primed to focus on durable national policy that we believe requires the engagement across a broad ideological spectrum and as a result, we normally focus most our attention on the congress. it has occurred to us and in recent months that the congress is a somewhat less dynamic vibrant deficient enterprise and at once was and in that vacuum the presidency the executive branch has absconded with significant amounts of you know, effective national power and

that's really the premise for today's discussion if you think back to president clinton and the mexican peso crisis, he was flexing some executive muscle president bush post 9/11 as a wartime president with a little bit of whispering in his ear from vice president cheney now, so rather expanded imagination of presidential power president obama's pen and pad strategy and proliferation of executive orders followed by president trump's i alone can fix it somewhat unique imagination of the role the presidency and now president biden for whom i think the you know, this story is get mixed, right? there's been a strong emphasis around federal authority on mandates around vaccines and public health. see and at the same time a pretty differential approach to congress on a bunch of priorities. so here you just have you know in 30 seconds a little bit of the mixture of the realities of the presidential authority. so we're gonna you know have an exciting discussion about that today in addition though.

today's actually the soft launch of the bipartisan policy centers new initiative on the study of american presidential leadership. we are most fortunate to have been joined at the bpc by dr. tevi troy. he was leading this exercise. tevi is a classically trained presidential historian. and yet despite that knowledge actually went to work as a senior official in the white house and so he brings both a little bit of historic framework and also some practical experience to this discussion. he's admired. i'm gonna both sides of the aisle. he's also creative and prolific writer. what is unique about heavy in the kind of dc literary scene is he writes books that are actually not about himself. which adds to the national understanding and appreciation of you know, really the past the present and the future of our democracy, so it is a great pleasure tovy to have you with us at the bpc and really happy to hand it off to you and listen to the panel.

it's all yours. great. thank you so much jason for this opportunity and for this partnership with the bipartisan policy center. we're very excited to be here with you guys today. we have this conference on the presidency in the 21st century the premise and it's an idea that i worked on with my longstanding mentor less lenkowski. who's at the killison boderman foundation on their board. is this concept that in the 20 years of the 20th century. the presidency has been held by four men and yes, they were all men. who have changed the presidency in significant ways, which is really important because the presidency is a common touchstone the most senior executive in our nation and really an essential player in our system if we are going to make it through the many challenges that we as a nation face. and so if you look at the last 20 years you would start with george w bush for whom i worked.

and he is faced with the crisis after 9/11 and what he does. is he expands and creates a homeland security state that didn't really exist beforehand. he also is somewhat aggressive in his use of signing statements in a way that often alienated the democratic members of congress and the signing statements allow the presidency to put its stamp on pieces of legislation that are passed by congress in a way that congress didn't always necessarily like he succeeded by barack obama and jason alluded to this already but obama has some legislative success in his first year. but then is stymied after the republicans take congress and looks more to executive power throughout the rest of his presidency and david letterman had a joke in obama's second term that he goes to the doctor and is told that he passes his physical and then lederman says which is a good thing because

it's the first time he's passed something in years. so obama really can't get feelings through congress. so he then engages in this pen and phone presidency where he actually does through executive order things that he said previously were unconstitutional for him to do via executive action such as the the dreamers action that he took and then you have donald trump whom jason also referred to with the ilo to fix it, but kind of a very unilateral vision of the presidency. he wanted to see what he could do individually as president as opposed to working necessarily through all of the levers of government and now we have joe biden his president and what we've seen is biden is very ambitious legislatively and trying to do a kind of fdr or lbj type agenda at a time. when he has much narrower congressional majorities than either of those two and in fact, he is a 50/50 tie in the senate.

so those four people who've held the presidency have really changed things that individually each of those changes is significant and worth noting but in toto, i think we are now in a situation. where the presidency that joe biden now inhabits is vastly different? then the presidency that bill clinton passed on to george w bush at the end of the 20th century and that is exactly what we want to examine here. what does it mean for our nation? what are the parameters of how the presidency has changed and how if we want can we fix it? should we change things are we on a inevitable trajectory or is there a chance that things might change? can political leadership can individual leaders say we want to go in a different direction? what would that different direction look like and that's why we've put together these two panels right now. we're going to introduce the first panel. they the first panel is going to look a little more internal at

the presidency the mechanisms of the presidency. we've got a three people theoretically for the panel of i'm going to go in just an alphabetical order and start with like old friend jonathan burks. i think he won't be embarrassed if i tell the story that i actually hired him as an intern well over 22 years ago and jonathan burks was he got farther than i ever did on capitol hill. he became the chief of staff to the speaker of the house paul ryan. he also worked on the national security council in the white house. so he understands foreign policy on both side of pennsylvania avenue. and then we hopefully have lane k mark although she's a little delayed. she worked with president bill clinton, and she's a senior fellow at brookings institution and then speaking about transitions. we have martha kumar who is at towson state university in a real expert someone who's writings. i admire on the presidency a great deal. so we have these three terrific panelists right now. we've got two of them, but we've got these three terrific panelists and we're going to

have this conversation about the presidency and i just want to let all of you know that if you have questions, there's a twitter feed where you can post that you can also post them directly in the chat and i will be able to see them and potentially ask them and then for the next panel that will be the case as well. so i'm going to begin again. we're gonna go in alphabetical order start with john burks and i'm gonna ask each of the panelists to briefly three minutes or so. explain. what they said in their papers the papers are not online. so this is the only way you're going to be able to find out about that for now and what they're what their theory was what case they made and what they would like to see us do going forward. so jonathan, please take it away. thanks, terry. i really appreciate the invitation to be here and really appreciate your starting my career 22 years ago on capitol hill. so my paper really looks at the question of presidential power in the context of if power is creating to the presidency must be coming from someplace.

and so we look at the congress as lens for clarifying what's changed and what's constant in that presidential relationship and we look specifically at foreign policymaking because that's where the president's power is at its apex and how congress plays in that space i think tells you a lot about what works and what doesn't work or what's changed and what hasn't changed in terms of the presidential presidential power and inner branch comedy. so i think when you look at the details of the last 20 years and what's occurred on foreign policy. what's a prepared in the national security space? it's a lot more nuanced picture than sort of the standard narrative of the presidency is up in the congress is down. there are two or two axes along which is this narrative is the challenge the standard narrative one is along the axis of constitutional powers places and things which constitution

specifically and trust to do and that the president is unable to do independently things like raise an army maintain a navy raise the funds needed to conduct the wars and that's an area where congress has been very active and that congress has interventions have been decisive in shaping how the executive is acted to a variety of tools that they have the second axes that has been important is in terms of international commerce where trade and export controls and other import restrictions and all the rest have been incredibly important tools increasingly important tools in foreign policy and whether again the presidency has a fair bit of discretion that conferences given it but congress has been very active over the last 20 years and cobb and cabineting that exercise authority. and so i think as we look back

over the last 20 years of foreign policymaking, it's actually a complex story that shows that there are both broad presidential expression, but there's an active congress that limits that discretion and that provides new tools or new authorities or at times has pulled those authorities back in a way that that reflects the congress's constitutional role. looking forward. i think we see that there is the form policy agenda is moving frankly in the direction of congress's powers and congress is most adept. given the focus of the great power competition with china and russia one. the accomplishment of china is very much driven by that international economic competition where again congress's authorities are plenary and where the ability of the president to act without congress is limited and some are clumsy and then the second aspect of competition really is

the deterrence which really relies in a large measure on the shape funding capabilities of our military, which again is critically dependent. acts of congress and the actor involvement of congress and so while i think there's no question that the presidency has changed over the last 20 years. it's important not to overstate the case in terms of the change necessarily made the presidency imperial and powerful there are still very important checks in congress hands and congress is still exercising that authority in that ability to check president power. thank you. a nice contrast to what you typically hear when we're talking about this subject how congress has seated so much authority i'm gonna ask for questions of you in a little bit. but first, i'd like to have martha talk for a few minutes about her really interesting paper and transitions. up. thank you very much, debbie, and it's good to be with you here

the presidential transitions from from the period of after world war two when harry truman was the first president to be very concerned about a transition well before a time when he left office, he said that he had been when he came in and didn't know about the manhattan project on the atomic bomb. he felt he had been unbriefed and unprepared and he wanted to make sure that who have ever his successor was would be well briefed and he began his transition in in march and thought to bring in eisenhower and stevenson after the party nominations to be briefed in the white house by the ya, but also by white house staff and cabinet members eisenhower did not take him up on it, but stevenson did

but in the period when you look at most of the transitions the legislation starts in 63, they they were not particularly acrimonious, but when you look in the 21st century at the four presidents who come in two of the four had truncated transitions that were in the courts and then also within 2020 with the administrator of the general services administration not declaring a the ascertainment of biden's win so that george bush had 37 days instead of the normal. 75 or so and biden had only 57 days and you look at the 2016

transition that was chaotic in its own way as donald trump fired the staff that had worked through the transition process up to the election and then replaced it with with vice president pence and then with particularly with family members and people who would worked on the campaign most of whom did not have government experience. um, the one transition that was smooth in that time period was the transition in 2008 between bush and obama bush of felt that there were with two wars that he wanted make sure that they had early start and took the transition very seriously and he began his transition talking to

his chief of staff josh bolton in december of 2007 and steve hadley. who was the national security advisor around the same time began gathering information on memorandum countries and issues to provide with whomever came in so when you look at these the series of transitions that even though you have you're going to have a lot of turmoil at the same time when you look at biden's transition, how was it that he was able to come in with a white house staff of 2006 as amen filling out a lot of the presidential appointee positions. that did not require senate

confirmation bush did did much the same thing and they had the biden people had their policies ready ready to start and how was it that they were able to do that even if they had a shortened transition and the same thing was a true with bush and bush with only 37 days had his first months mapped out first week education second week office of faith base initiatives in the in the government. and so what i look at or three particular elements in transitions that have developed over time. the first is the law starting in 1963, you have the things of

transition law where the responsibility for funding transitions moves from political parties to the government itself, and it first is a matter of resources office space and whatever it needs to become with that and then gradually there's a framework that's that's built where you have the white house transition coordinating council that is going to develop policy clinton created one by executive order and then you have the development of the agency transition directors council which takes the policy that are established by the the white house council and then with represented is of all the departments and the largest agencies they implement the same

there are target dates that have been put in as as you've had further development of transitions so that a president has to create these councils by six months before the election. and it doesn't say who is on it, but the president still gets to to decide that. um and this this past election was the first time that you had a a sitting president who had to create a counsel even though he was running for re-election and before that it really was an optional item, but it wasn't in 2020 which was very important for how the transition worked and in addition to law. you have tacit understanding so i've been tested understanding

among presidents that have um have guided the actions of those in office even when they lost re-election while that was not true of donald trump. it was true of jimmy carter and george hw bush both of whom told their staffs that they wanted to smooth transition and to and to begin to work quickly which they did now this past transition though. we did not have that as from the president the president instead of refused to concede the election and then and then also it sought to delegitimize president biden, but that even though he was doing doing that

still you had people in his administration who were carrying out. the law particularly chris liddell who was the deputy chief of staff who had worked on romney's transition the early transition work in 2012, and he knew transitions and and then and follow the law then you have discretion. the third element is discretion. and that is the discretion that the president and the whomever he appoints to run his transition that they have to to do early work if they want to and that was the case with george w bush and his chief of staff josh bolton who ran that transition both took a lot of early actions such as bringing in the representatives of the

presumptive candidates mccain and obama bringing amen in midsummer before the party conventions because the party conventions were late to discuss some important issues like the memorandum of understanding that has to be created for agency review teams to go into the departments and agencies kind of the rules of the road for that and then you also have in addition to discretion that the president and the and his staff. have you also have discretion by candidates do candidates decide that they are going to spend time preparing and in the case of biden, i think that and bush both. yeah george w bush. both of them did a lot of preparatory work and biden's

case obviously to get to 206 people in in the white house. it was a lot of personnel work than a decision to focus on presidential appointees who did not require senate confirmation. he also worked on a developing information and strategies on issues that may came up. such as the date went under a heading of unconventional challenges what an unconventional challenges. could they possibly face and then assigning people to work on those challenges flesh them out and then develop mitigating strategies. so the preparatory work early is not just mandated by the

government. it's also good practice by the candidates. that's tremendously helpful. i mean my read on your really interesting paper martha, is that the candidates and the government have put so much more? resources and attention into transitions in this 21st century and yet the transitions have for the most part been less smooth. which i think is a paradox that is worth exploring. yeah, it is definitely so we're now going to go to elaine who is joined us. i've admired her writing for a very long time and a really pleased to have her here and she's going to start talk a little bit about implementation failures in the 21st century laying the floor is yours. unmute myself. okay. i'll start again. hello, jason.

oh and everyone. sorry. i was late. i did manage to hear you guys, but i was having trouble getting into the feed here. so i i have a very sort of straightforward proposition about the presidency, but it it involves. looking at the structure of the modern presidency and sort of a new way. and basically my argument is is pretty simple when presidents suffer implementation failures in other words when things go wrong. um that the government has some role in it really takes a toll on the presidency and it takes a toll on the perception of presidential competence. as you as you'll see as i take you through some examples presidents lose political capital when the government they runs of faces major implementation failures. this happened to george w bush

after hurricane katrina. it happened to barack obama after the failure of the healthcare websites. it happened to donald trump as he tried to navigate the covid epidemic and it has once more happened to joe biden in the of withdrawal from afghanistan. in each instance, the political capital lost is nearly impossible to get back and that's that. that's very important. for first term presidents implementation implementation failures are major contributors to electoral failures for second term presidents implementation failures eat up so much political capital that these presidents are hobbled in their ability to enact the major changes that they saw that they think is going to be part of their legacy. so let's start with george bush as we all remember after hurricane katrina fema basically

was a mess and so was new orleans and the headlines read that we looked like a third world country which we did in the inability to to help people with all the resources all the plane strains and automobiles that we have in the us military we couldn't help people for days and even months that took a toll on bush's second term. he had gone into the second term with this time a clean mandate. he had actually won the election clearly unlike four years before and he had big plans. i mean his plans were on social security reform the white house had set up this whole operation and if you look at what happened to george bush and his presidency, basically after that, he couldn't do anything. okay, he basically was unable to have the political capital to make anything happen.

um obama in his second term gets to implement his pride and joy that the affordable care act and what happens is that all the websites crash there are hundreds of thousands of americans trying to buy health care and everybody is saying what is wrong with this government? they can't even do what amazon does so every single day. obviously when we get to trump, he was in pretty good shape until covid hit he had a pretty good as controversial as his presidency was the economy was really quite strong. so when we get to trump what we see is a series of really awful missteps in the handling of the pandemic missteps that were evident to everybody the whole country was at home in 2020 while trump was on television every day contradicting himself

confusing things contradicting the experts and finally sort of giving up and giving it to the governors. that was a major implementation failure from which he did not recover and then we come to biden and in my paper i have i showed the data biden had a really very good first five months five six months of his presidency the pandemic seem to be going in the right. action he the chaos that seemed to characterize trump's handling of the pandemic was gone. he passed a great big relief bill etc and then suddenly the month of august the entire month of august is devoted to this these horrific scenes out of afghanistan and while people agreed with the policy they thought for yes, we should be out of afghanistan the fact of the matter was that this looked like an a mess like like a

screwed up mess. that hadn't been well planned and certainly hadn't been well executed. um, it's damaging to these presidents because in fact ultimately the american people regardless of their ideologies and all the polarization. they expect expect some competence from the president. they do not differentiate between the bureaucracy and everybody who works for the president and the president himself. um, they expect out of the presidency. um, the reason i think this understanding this is important. is that in the modern presidency? the emphasis and the staffing has all gone to people with communications backgrounds not operations backgrounds operations. you can find that the third or the fourth tier of a white house communications. you find at the first year of a white house and that's got

terrible consequences because in each one of the implementation failures that i talk about in this paper, there is no speech that gets you out of the whole okay, there isn't a speech there isn't an ad there isn't a communications trick that is going to restore presidential popularity and therefore presidential political capital and i do believe that this is a reflection of the way we've set up the modern presidency where we value communications to the detriment of operations and i'll quit there and leave it to the audience. thank you. that is a fascinating paper and a fascinating talking and what really struck me when i read your paper was just this feeling that we asked the president to do more and more and the more we ask the president to do the more likelihood there is of some kind of catastrophic implementation failure as we see in your paper all four presidencies of this 21st century now, i have a bunch

of good questions that i am eager to ask. however, this is an interactive event. so i am going to favor questions that come in from the audience. there's an implicit assumption of sort of the transitions acts about that. you're going to have sort of a common world view that you know, yes, you have a republican flavor and a democratic flavor, but that ultimately that's all sort of between the 20s and then when president trump is all elected that suddenly expanded the playing field and you had a president who was very much outside of sort of that that broad consensus and so there is certainly an element to which the presidency and sort of all the mechanisms that the white house and the executive office of the president are reflection of the unique agendas unique personalities and the unique needs of whoever's elected to the office. and so there's definitely an

element of inevitable change in evolution that comes with the different people that are elected office. really interesting martha. do you want to have anything on this? i do i look at it as a product rather than personality. although clearly that's it's involved. but product of their experiences um people who have been governors for have tended to be to be decisive right from the start where they they have there used to being an executive and it's say for example when i had an interview with gerald ford a number of years ago and asked him how he made the transition from legislator to an executive as a legislator in a leadership position. he was interested in reaching

consensus and success for him was consensus and you can see that in in biden that that's what he's used to if you can get everybody together. that's what what you should should do ford said that he wasn't sure how it happened. but he knew when it happened he said one day that he was he was listening to a group of members of congress and and he said to himself if i were in their position, i'd be saying exactly the same thing, but i'm not and i'm making the decision if you look at trump, what was trump's experience he it didn't have government elective experience. he didn't have a military experience. his experience was with the family-owned business where he was not responsible to anybody other than the family and so he

liked to control information make the decisions himself and talking about his communications. why did he need to press secretary? he was the one who controlled his own. locations and i think if you look at that at governors through a period of time you see what how they've been decisive and also good computer. it's a good communicators whether it's woodrow wilson who was interested in in communications as a way to educate the public theater roosevelt franklin roosevelt, ronald reagan all had a good sense of what leadership was about and and had practice it before they came to the presidency. great the lane where you stand

on this question of versus power and policy. well, there's no doubt that personality is important. okay, but i think that what has happened to our modern presidents. is that the way they are chosen is changed fundamentally. they are chosen in the system of primaries where what is valuable is your ability to communicate and your ability to get attention and you're and your ability to to promise things and be out there and what is less valuable than it used to be is in the old days is who you are and what you've done and whether you've had experience running something governing legislating whatever and that i think has we're just beginning to see the real effects of this transition. we've gone through an american history from nominations that

were closed and essentially by party people to nominations that are just i mean one of the one of the features of our modern nomination systems is that we have people in there who have absolutely no business being present running for president of the united states spiritual advisors pizza entrepreneurs. okay, it's there's always people in each party who are in this to sell books or get themselves a spot on cnn and not because they know anything at all about governing. and i think that the emphasis on communications starts in the primaries and you win the primaries on the basis of your ability to communicate then you get in the white house and what happens? oh, there's a whole government out there. sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. and i have quotes in in a book. i wrote about this from people in the obama white house. who were sort of felt felt, you

know put upon because this website, you know, they they weren't supposed to code the websites other people were supposed to write code right and yet they were taking the brunt of this they were taking the hit. and that's what happens in all of these failures the white house gets a very very defensive because the fact of the matter is that the white house has no idea in any of these how things are actually operating out there these we've had four presidents now who are less experienced with the exception of biden, but certainly less experienced than any other presidents and biden is less experienced going back to martha's point in executive management. he was never in executive management. he was a creature of the united states senate. so we've we've got a system which generates a different kind of person getting nominated and therefore elected. let me just end with a little

story for you to think about in 1959 1960 jack kennedy had to get the approval of the governor of pennsylvania who controlled the delegates to all the delegates to the democratic convention and there were a lot from, pennsylvania. and that involves some old-fashioned smoke-filled rooms. i'm sure and some brown liquid. i'm sure and it involves some heavy-duty discussions about power politics and government. now imagine if in 2016 donald trump had had to negotiate with a powerful governor. for you know for delegates to a democratic convention and he went in there and he said i'm going to build a wall. and i'm going to get mexico to pay for it. now we all know that's one of the dumbest statements anybody has ever made, but no one called

donald trump on it. right every once in a while a journalist would try to call him on it, but it was clearly a statement that was misleading. that was inaccurate. there was absolutely no way we were going to make mexico pay for a wall unless we were willing to invade mexico and steal their treasury. i mean, it was just playing out now, imagine if he had had to go through a gauntlet of people who knew something about governing. basically, we are nominating people who are very good talkers. not experienced in operations. they get into the white house and they think they can talk themselves out of these failures and the bottom line is they can't and it takes down their presidency. really? i thought you didn't name your paper the aaron sorkin effect. so a lot of the walk and talk through the halls of the white house with solve any day. yeah, really? i've seen two things that you mentioned elaine one is that you said we've always had the pizza

entrepreneurs and the spiritual advisors, i would argue. it's not an always thing. it's a recent always know that's what i'm sorry. that's what i meant. we've really you combine it with what you out also said about the smoke-filled room. the smoke-filled room is a filter that prevented. that's right those kinds of people from running i think is really interesting what we don't have any more as peer review. no one who actually knows what the business is. has a has a voice in who the nominee is we don't if we go to have a neurosurgeon for brain surgeon. we don't ask if he's the most popular one. we ask if that this person has been. stamped the stamp of approval by other neurosurgeons and we accept peer review in every part of our economy in our society except in politics. super interesting just another lens in which the 21st century presidency is a different one. we're very fortunate to have a question now from one of the leading experts on congress on the budget process tom kahn and

tom asks about a question of the imperial presidency, which is of course arthur schlesinger's famous book, which she was really using as a dig on the nixon administration, but it almost seems as if that schlesinger was premature that he was talking about the imperial presidency in the 70s and maybe it's the imperial presidency that now exists in the 21st century. maybe we can adopt some of schleser's concept. of the imperial presidency into what this 21st century presidency is martha. do you want to start with that question about the imperial presidency and whether it's now come to us? well, i think the expectations of what what a president can produce or is very different as as elaine talked about it's very different than what he actually can produce. there's so many there's so many forces now that he has to contend with that say even in arthur's lessengers time. he didn't mean look at the array

of interest groups that exist that have blossomed since that time that that make it difficult to write certain kinds of legislation like tax legislation. you have so many even foreign governments hiring lobbying firms and many of them many firms for one country to to deal with legislation on the hill. so they and the president has party members who don't owe him anything. they got there on their own and he's just one of the voices that they listened to so he can come in with great expectations of what he can do and what he wants to do tackling the virus. for example, i mean who who

would have thought that here? we have a vaccine, but they're large numbers of people who are refusing to take it. and that's something that that's been very important i think in in biden's difficulties with the with the virus and so i think the expectations of what a president can do far outstrip what he actually can do. elaine do you have any thoughts on the imperial presidency? yeah, i mean, let me just take off a little bit on the government itself. okay? when you have a government as big as the us federal government. something is going really right and something is going really wrong all the time. okay there are there are there are agencies that are ready to blow up and cause you problems you didn't imagine like the

veterans administration health scandal that that so embarrass the obama administration and yet there's also great capacities in the federal government george bush could have avoided a lot of the problems he ran into in iran with a little bit closer attention to what the spies that the state department. we're saying as opposed to the spies at the defense department and that's a long story, but it's a good one. and what happens with these modern presidents who get there by virtue of their golden tongue and their ability to talk and connect which i i is important is that they don't have any idea what's going on out there the government. they're running. so they don't know what's not only do they not know what's going to blow up in their faces. they also don't know the tools that they have so that when something happens they can actually manage it and deal with

it. i'm i was stunned in the those early months of 2020 how long it took for donald trump to discover the defense production act. and you could actually see him on television sort of talking about it in a way that those of us have been professors. we we have a sixth sense for this when your student suddenly has learned something brand new and they're trying try it out. right and that's what he was doing with the defense production act. well, you know, that was something just really should have known about so there's a light go up. yeah anyway, so there's a lot of there's a lot of sort of operational talent. that these modern presidents don't have and that they i think they need to have or they need to somehow build into their white house. great. well jonathan, i'm going to throw the imperial question to you, but i'm also going to throw another question the next question because we are kind of hitting the home stretch and i want to make sure we get to as

many questions as possible in addition to your thoughts on the imperial presidency. you worked on a transition in fact you and i work together on a transition do you agree with marathon how the transitions have changed? and how much were you aware of the history of transitions when you were doing the work with the transition that you did? no, thanks heavy on tom's question. you know, i think there's a important element that we would be remiss to leave out which is that much of the equation of a power to the executive hasn't been seized by the executive as much has been by congress. and so there's a series of statutes that were passed in the 70s so many of them intended to ratchet down the presence authority that subsequently have been sort of reinterpreted and used in ways unintended to really give him a very broad hand play. so i think the degree that one worries about excessive

executive power. the first place to start is for congress to go back and look at many other statutes. it in terms of presidential transitions, you know when we were working on the 2012 romney transition that never was the you know, we i certainly was aware of the recent history i couldn't have given you a chapter in verses back to the truman years, which i thought was fascinating, but the you know, the the challenge that we had faced coming in in 2001 into the motion administration and the contrast with the emphasis of president bush in place in 20089 on ensuring a smooth transition out of office meant that you know, there was just a lot of energy in the romney campaign about making sure that we're doing it right that we're engaging, you know together with the obama folk too to the credit where we're engaging in good faith and their end of the responsibilities to make the transition work.

so plan i have a question for you. also about your previous experience. you worked with the clinton with bill clinton in the clinton white house. we're very close and influential on clinton's thinking do you agree with this thesis that the presidency that bill clinton inhabited is very different than the presidency that joe biden now inhabits that if you perhaps have been with clinton and he had this level of power maybe he would have done different things more things additional things. is it is it sort of a wistful moment. wow, we we had this kind of power. we've a lot more. well, yeah, i think it is a different moment. i think the polarization which which appear during the clinton presidency because it appeared let's face it in 1994 when newt gingrich took over the congress. that was really the first indication that politics was going to be very different than it had been and but is still clinton was able to manage some

things with with gingrich even though the rhetoric took a definite step up in 1994, and now we're in this situation where the the polarization pervades everything including is martha said, you know whether or not you're gonna take a vaccine who would have thought that that getting a vaccine for would be a part of become a partisan issue. you know that that's something that's sort of unbelievable to those of us who lived long enough to see different phases of policy go forward and during the campaign people reporters used to ask me. well, do you really think that joe biden can overcome the polarization in the congress and in the country and i would give the response that i think is still true which is if anybody could have done it it would have been joe biden. but that's a big if i think nobody can do it right now. i think we're in a very very

serious place and a president needs to be a president for this era needs to be able to do everything right and that includes implement and that's where i think the biden administration's first year fell down now they have three more years to make up they concentrated so much on passing bills because going back to martha's discussion. that's what that's who joe biden was. that's he was the legislature. so that's what he wanted to do. and that's how he figured success and i i think that my point is success is actually don't screw up. and when you have a big when you have a big problem use that government to fix it. as opposed to not knowing even how and where in the government to fix it. so at this point in history any president has really tough road. i think joe biden's is much tougher because he has had his

first implementation failure. hopefully for his sake he won't have any more and he might be able to end up with a successful first term. this issue of partisanship and polarization and legislating actually is a nice lead-in to a good question we have from kathy moyd and i'm going to start with martha on this question is how much is the presidency been changed by the increase use of the filibuster in the senate and part of the premise of this whole conference? is this idea that congress has seeded powers because of its inability to legislate and in that vacuum, the presidency has stepped in. so how much do you think that filibuster has played a role? but i i think it goes back elaine's point about polarization. the that it's become such a polarized system that people are unwilling to negotiate with one another in the ways that they they did at a much earlier time

probably a time when they didn't get as much media coverage. but look at the the way that people are trying to to stop some appointees. the cabinet secretaries got through. all right, but you've had the vice president have to to come in and and vote on on a over a dozen of pointe ease. so i i think i mean you look at the battles that ted cruz is is waging and i think that that kind of thing comes from elaine was talking earlier about the party bosses the people like john bailey who did a lot of work for for kennedy and we

don't have we don't have that kind of of work within a party and and the loyalty to a party. it's a loyalty to who you're funders are and and the constituents that that you think are going to to actually get to the polls. so i think it's those are really factors that that drives things like the filibuster that they get rewarded for politics that that step away. on the traditional compromise and negotiation and i think that's why we all thought biden would with all of his experiences legislative experience would would have some

would have success as a lane mentioned, but the people who inhabit the the senate now or not the people who were there when he was there and it's a small number of them, really? right, but we only have three minutes left. so i'm going to ask a final question. for the two people who have had policy experience in jonathan and elaine the question is is there anything to be done? is there a policy prescription that either of you would advocate for how the presidency has changed in the 21st century or though new john? you said it's not as stark as maybe this panel suggests. maybe you wouldn't do anything. so jonathan, why don't you start first and then the link tell us what you would do the situation we face right in. i do think it's become unbalanced. i don't think it's as dire necessarily as some critics, but i do think it's become a balanced. i think the first step really is for congress to take back. it's authorities and in terms of appropriations in particular

getting back to regularly appropriating funds for the operations the executive branch doing it on time gives cars a powerful tool to hold the executive to account and to really manage and enforce the executive to engage in as a policy. that's the almost all everything but good first step. click the link um, i think what i would do is a reorientation of the white house staff. and i would certainly you need a strong communications team, but you need a strengthening of what used to be called cabinet affairs these days cabinet affairs is what's the president's message this week. let's send the cabinet secretaries out to talk about this that or the other thing. it's it's a waste of time frankly. nobody really cares if the cabinets if the secretary of agriculture is talking about the build better bill. i mean it but they keep doing it. i mean they keep doing it even

though it doesn't ever seem to work. i think that it starts with how he puts together the cabinet he's got to put together a cabinet with executive experience because only with executive experience. can you and then he's got to tell the cabinet? go look at that agency and tell me what's good. and what's bad what's going right and what's going to blow up in my face and ruin the less rest of my beautiful policy. agenda white houses are about communications and policy and they are not about operations and yet it is operations that kills them in the end. and so i would reorient the white house staff and the cabinet towards an emphasis on operations both to avoid messes and disasters and also to know when something comes at you out of the blue as it always does know what your tools are. no. no, what's operating? well in the government and know

how it can be used to deal with the crisis so that you look like a strong incompetent leader as opposed to the four instances that i've been talking about where the president didn't look strong and didn't look competent and couldn't talk his way out of that problem. i completely agree with you that the orientation of the white house staff is really an essential element of how the presidency develops and one of the premises in all of my books on the presidency has been this notion that the white house staff really comes out of the late roosevelt administration the brown low commission, which had this forward conclusion. the president needs help and it really is that that leads to the development of the white house staff as we know it today. i do have some insight into this question of cabinet affairs. it was really in the george hw bush administration that cabinet affair shorter became an alternative policy making mechanism because there was some sclerotic nature to the policy development process in the rest of the white house part of it

was dorman and sununu had a tight rain on the controls part of it was a lot of things were coming out of opt the office of policy development and see we had some very smart young talented staffers and cabinet affairs in those days including jay lefkowitz and dan cast and they were really trying to generate policy academy affairs now josh bolton was in that white house and he looked at that and he said i don't want to see that in the future white house and he helped shape the george w bush white house, which jonathan i both worked in a way that cabinet affairs did not really have any policy making role and i think that has continued ever since so it's an interesting insight and there is some history behind how it happened with that. we're gonna transition to the next panel. i'd like to thank the three panelists run this panel for doing a terrific job really riveting our great insights great historical. thoughts and great experience that you have shared as well. so thank you for your participation. and now i'm going to pass it on to susan glasser from the new yorker who wrote a really terrific book along with her

husband peter baker on the man. who ran washington on james baker who i consider to be the greatest chief of staff in white house history, and anybody can ping me offline and i can give the reasons why i think that and susan's going to introduce and moderate the next battle. thank you. well, i want to thank you heavy and all of the previous panel. that was really a fantastic and interesting introduction. i think to to the conference today and i have to say you guys are in for a treat who are listening in because i've read these papers from our four panelists for this second group, and i think it's it's just a really wide range and interesting set of provocations. that makes us consider this question of how has the presidency changed over the last few presidencies, and i know it's gonna sound a little counterintuitive that one of the ways that we're gonna consider that is by talking about calvin coolidge, but trust me it works and i think it's a really

important thing that we're bringing in history as well and not just immediate modern history, but i thought we would go ahead and start today with the question sort of baseline assumption about presidents today and one of the biggest ways in which the presidency has changed the last few years, so i was hoping that we could have kristen solstice anderson be our first kind of discussing in this second panel today. she is a fantastic republican pollster and it has really written. i think an important paper that hopefully you can sort of fill us in on that that gives us a baseline understanding for that most important question of a modern president going back decades now, which is the question of how does the public view the the job they're doing and there's been a pretty radical shift that she describes in this paper and it's called low and steady which is the new normal when it comes to

presidential polling and the approval ratings or disapproval ratings as the case may be but kristen maybe you can start us off in this second panel, which is a little bit of a sense of how radical of a shift is it? you know, we're familiar at this point with the kind of straight line trend of the donald trump presidency and now to it somewhat lesser extent the divide and presidency, you know like this at a really low level the days when public opinions hung wildly about our president seem to be gone at least for now. so help us understand, you know, this this kind of new normal i think to get us going. thank you. sources and well, thank you so much for that kind introduction and i want to thank heavy for including me in this group and inviting me to participate in this symposium writing this paper was a lot of fun and he let me start my paper off with a number of references to important 1990s film presidents.

so i really appreciated being able to invoke great american cinematic classics like independence day when assessing the way that i think the public imagination has thought about presidents has how it has changed over the decades. so as there's a noted my papers looking at presidential job approval and i sort of term it low and steady these days and it's low in steady for two reasons first. it's low because people tend to be pretty upset about things these days in a way that they were not as upset consistently in prior decades. we have seen this is not just about the presidency but in all sorts of institutions the media other branches of government. what have you that what used to be a general sense of trust and periodic disapproval has not really curdled into americans feeling like not a lot these days is working and that bleeds into how they're viewing the

president see as well. so when people just tend to be a bit more mad about everything and that's going to depress your overall numbers. the other factor is that presidents in more modern times have not had as much of a honeymoon gallop has thankfully been tracking data on presidential job approval going back decades and decades and decades and it used to be the case that when you came into office there was at least some brief period where you got the benefit of the doubt you both had a lot of support from your own party, but even large numbers of those and the other party would say, you know, i don't think they've screwed anything up yet. so i'll give them the benefit of the day, but that honeymoon period really does not ex as much anymore. i apologize. i'm hearing something pop up in my ear. sorry. well, i'll proceed and hope you're able to hear me. i'm so sorry. anyway, you are not that. so the reason why i think that

there's no more honeymoon again is linked to the reason why people's job approval is steady. and that's because we have polarization that's pretty significant. um people again used to be able to get some credit from the other party and they would get some criticism from their own but nowadays people are really unlikely to say that they like much of what the other president is doing with biden is the example cnn released a poll last week that asked people well, even if you disapprove of the job biden is doing is there anything he's doing that you like and this statistically significant number of people to in that question well, he got a cat. so there's just it's very hard to get people to say that they will give credit to the other party for anything now biden is an interesting case in that donald trump's job approval really fit that low and steady description quite well where biden he actually is losing the

enthusiasm and support of some democrats in a way that trump never did the irony of the trump presidency. is that for all that? his job approval numbers tended to be pretty low throughout. he also maintained the highest job approval among republicans a really any any president when you look at how their own party viewed them. so, you know when i was i right in the paper when donald trump said he could shoot someone on fifth avenue and his voters would stay with him. he wasn't completely wrong in that political assessment, but that does mean that for most presidents if you really only got the support of your party, even if word is quite strong. it keeps your job approval low and steady now. this has some spillover effects. it reduces the president's mandate. it reduces their ability to kind of strong arm congress into doing things because they're very popular and it reduces their incentives to want to appeal to the other side if you're the biden administration why bother going on fox or if

you're the trump administration, why bother sending a spokesperson onto msnbc, but i'll leave it to other panelists to talk about sort of the after effects of what happens when presidents are unpopular, but i'll turn it back over to you, susan and thank you again for including me in this discussion. well, no, thank you. i because i think it is a kind of a startling new reality the the permanent unpopularity of the american presidency and you know has pretty big implications for just about everything which is why i thought that would be a great sort of starting point now a person who has most recent experience in the white house itself and in the administration, ken bearer is our next speaker and he's written a really interesting paper that looks at communications in the modern white house both from the perspective of someone who was was living it as well as how it's changed since then with the

trump presidency obviously going one way or the other going to be a marker of a very very different model for presidential communications, but can it was a founder of the journal democracy, which i always point out because it's a very important publication especially now that that's no longer an academic interest purely but a real day in and day out question in our politics as well as having served in the first term of the obama administration, which is why his paper also includes probably the only history of the omb twitter feed that you're going to get but can i i really i found that to a really important point. out obama's presidency really coinciding the iphone being debuting just a few months into the obama presidency arguably both those being kind of transformative events in in the modern presidency. so, how does that how does that connect with this new reality

that christian is also describing which is one where polarization means it's very hard for presidents to define leading except in a very fragmented way the way in which we all experience the media world at this point. yeah, and thank you susan. and and i think that's an interesting segue because what i want to discuss on christmas talking about we could spend all day arguing which came first the polarization or the new media which is affecting whom but but ultimately the polarization is sort of an effect into it, but you mentioned the iphone just from my own personal experience. i was a young speech writer for vice president gore at the very end of the clinton years my first day at work. they handed me a beeper and the beeper from white house communications agency. would you know for people don't know what that is, it would like vibrate or ping and it would tell the go to a phone and call this number and then have to go

to a payphone and they be in the metro platforms are stuck there and call like what's up? what do you need and they usually song and argue about an adjective or an adverb and some kind of policy document or speech as writing, but that that was it fast forward. 10 years later january 2009 and they're going to the obama administration. i'm handed a blackberry and the blackberry was like this is now exponentially more interactive and now i can get email. so now analy i could be buzz say call me if i could be sent an email. i immediately react and so i spend friends with my whole metro ride to and from the white house actually either reading clips or responding to inquiries by the time i'm leaving the white house towards the end of the obama first term. everyone's now scrambling for twitter handles his people in within the white house itself. and to me that that was just for the emblematic of its march of technology in about how in the 21st century communications has changed and there is so much to unpack there and but i really

think it to elevate up to a higher level is that we're really talking about obviously there's the rise of digital media and digital media is already there by two thousand right? there is the what internet is there? well, why web is there people are i'm able to read the new york times online, you know bill clinton is the first president to send an email. he used he first point to go online, but you know, it was a very static sort of experience 2000 it starts ramping up for 2001. and so you really have i think two eras, which is the obama presidency sort of straddles one is a a pre-algorithmic era, which is basically you have a digital landscape, which is increasing in popularity and is really hallmarked by the barrier to entry to enter the media landscape is now zero. so people we know friends are like josh marshall talking points memo can decide i'm just going to start a website. i'm gonna start reporting and putting stuff out there opinion

journalists like andrew sullivan could say i'm just going to start blogging and the blog experience which rise and it but ultimately it's just the same march. we've seen except more more outlets and the ability to create content disseminate it is now zero by the time you start going into the obama's second term and again, it's not overnight but by timing to the second term, it's now the algorithmet algorithmic era of media and in that that is what is shaping are the social media platforms youtube facebook. twitter by preeminently that are using algorithms or very sophisticated math computations which as a person a speech writer focuses and a communications person that focuses on words. i've no idea how they work but but be as it may it works and they're using tons of data in order to give you what you want and to create information bubbles and then to also reward things that get more eyeballs. that's the metric and so that kind of how we intersects the

christmas talk about well in that world being more part isn't gets more activity. i like that. i want to hear more of that being controversial being outlandish being in some ways just the meaning or saying whatever you want can actually get more eyeballs and that's the thing which is rewarded in that era the twitter era the relationship between the white house and the media changes and then that era which we can unpack more you really have something where it's it's extremely hard to get your message out and and and and actually under the old norms and then fast forward dr. obama era and the person understands this me to landscape of anyone is don donald trump and trump unders realizes and knows that i how to use social media to manipulate basically the media and how to control the news cycle and that's what he does if you have no compunction about saying whatever you want about being inflammatory calling people names like all that stuff generates heat and generate the tension and so really what i'm

looking at here. is that that change for me this sort of the digital media landscape sort of emerges and then changes over time and then now you have this algorithmic era and i'll just end by saying it it is in problematic because not only as the polarization perhaps but also the people who are online are deeply on representative of the american people and i like the idea happy to go into that more but just deeply they are just generally younger wealthier whiter. more liberal and even among democrats much more liberal and it creates a kind of a strange echo chamber and i see that reverberates out into our politics and also verb weights into the presidency and arguably could make governance harder as well. other than that, everything's just fine, but we'll come back to this in the course. the conversation but i was also struck by the of what choices

are made and how much there for is just this structural shift in american politics because there's a structural shift in media and how we communicate versus you know, what's a choice? what are the incentives barack obama had twitter, but he didn't use it the way that donald trump chose to use it then trump got turned off and the question, you know as we are a year plus into the biden presidency, right is how much of trump's use of this communications environment is is a new normal or was it trump in every way a sort of a departure so that even if tools may remain the same he actually didn't change the template for presidential communications. i don't know the answer to that but i do think that's a really interesting question for a conversation and a conference dedicated to the presidency. you know, joe biden is not a divisive communicator because he's that's just not who his

political persona is, but you know, i don't know maybe he's just bad a communicate. yeah, but but all but we now know we know like all of us here know there are senior members of the white house, who are on twitter and who are engaging even with people and arguing with them to the point where politico and their wrap up of the today's news. we'll tell you this is what the white house wants you to read because look at what you read they retweeted and this is what they don't want you to read. you know what they didn't retweet and so it's just becoming such part of the fabric but again arguably if you are trying to get engagement on a platform like twitter for instance you it's hard to you start thinking that's the people that's the populace and it is not it is deeply deeply not and one could potentially say that some of the problems by and presidency has had is because of them the room so to speak well, that's a perfect note to bring in our next conversation and and the rest of it with this

historical grounding and i'm delighted to have larry haas helped to answer the question for us today of what would jack kennedy do wwjkd on on twitter. but no his paper doesn't doesn't quite get to that level of granularity, but i think it's really it's it's a provocation that i think helps to elaborate on this kind of new normal that both kristen and can are trying to establish for us and obviously larry is a great, you know distinguished author. in fact, his most recent book is is a version of he's done a shortened version if you will for us today, his new book is the kennedy's in the world how jack bobby and ted remade america's empire and we have all three kennedy brothers who make appearances in your in your paper for this conference, so very what would jack kennedy do would he be a trump-style tweeter would he just be like an

instagram influencer, maybe more because he was so cool. i mean what you know yeah, it's it's it's such a it's such a fascinating thing to try to picture someone wakes up from their previous life in 2022. and how would they approach it? so, let me get to that sort of lead into lead up to that in a sense and let me step back and talk a little bit about the kennedys and well three of them and how they approached the presidency and then we'll try to modernize it a bit. well needless to say all three of them are for it the kennedy family saw the office as somewhere between and entitlement and inevitability and that actually predates the three brothers. i mean after all people forget joe kennedy the father actually wanted to run for president 1940 and was hoping to do so as a

democrat in the hopes that franklin roosevelt would not run for an unprecedented. third term obviously that didn't work out for him and and joe never wound up running but then the sense of inevitability fell to joe jr. the firstborn who surely would have run for public office and select the presidency had he not died at war at the age of 29 and 1944. but look what you know what the kennedy's having common is that in their pursuits whether it's sports or politics they they aim for the top as joe kennedy said to a columnist one day for the kennedys. it's either the castle or the outhouse nothing in between but having said that the three brothers who did seek the presidency in a sense pursued

viewed their pursuit differently and it's interesting and we will get to the question of what they would what they would do today. were they alive jack was the most determined to be president of the three of them because he had the biggest sense that the presidency was as he called it the center of action and from his earliest days, you know, he served in the house first and then in the senate and then as president you always got a sense that he thought presidential. he did not think legislative even as a house member he was giving speeches that you would think a president would give a big questions war and peace the future versus the past and all the rest and of course since his overriding interest was foreign policy. that is the most presidential of issues if you want to affect it in the biggest way you need to be present and i'll say one more thing about jack in terms of

being the most determined. he was all the most in a hurry. because he suffered from great ailments throughout his life and he himself didn't know how long he was going to live his you know, his addison's disease was wearying him his back was causing him severe pain. he had all sorts of other ailments so he felt that you know, he wanted to get to the top and he needed to get there in a hurry now bobby who ran in 1968 would not inevitably have run for president had jack not been assassinated. he talked about doing all sorts of other things running a university going to teach somewhere in all the rest, but with jack's death and with lyndon johnson taking over bobby. kennedy's world changed immediately. he was immediately seen as the heir apparent who needed to

restore a kennedy to their rightful place in the presidential throne and along with that bobby kennedy loath linden johnson and thought he was an unworthy successor to his beloved brother. obviously there were policy differences and they arose almost immediately and they did not start with vietnam by the way that everybody thinks they began in latin america, then they moved to vietnam as as johnson militarized our effort there, but they were on domestic policy, too. the urban affairs and and all the rest so he felt the obligation in 1968 to run that he did not feel in his earlier days. um, teddy kennedy. perhaps is the most interesting of the three when it comes to the presidency. in his earlier days he of course expected to run simply because

he was a candidate and in fact, he wrote a book in 1968 that i think it's called decisions for a decade that almost nobody remembers, but it was almost like a manifesto of a presidency for the future. he was under enormous pressure to run in when he did run in 1980 because just like democrats will worry that lbj was going to take the party down in 1968 democrats were worried in 1980 that jimmy carter was gonna take the presidency down so he did challenge carter in the primaries and wound up losing but what you see from ted, is this very conflicted figure about the presidency, and i don't think it was any coincidence that he got off to a very slow start and that famously he could could not answer the question from roger. cds. why do you want to be president? the conflict came from the fact

that unlike jack and bobby who saw the senate as only a stepping stone to the presidency ted kennedy who became a senator back in 1963 fell in love with the senate. he saw it as a place not necessarily to leave, but perhaps the serve a career to do fulfilling work. unlike jack and bobby who were terribly terribly impatient with the legislative process take kennedy loved the ebb and flow of issues and how they evolved not only within a year or within a congress but across congresses and was willing to stick with things in a way that is impatient brothers. we're not and i'll say one more thing about him, which was that he was by far the best retail politician of the three of them which lends itself to the where you or congress where you need to build coalitions patiently he

knew how to put his arm around people. you know how to slap their back, you know how to shake their hands, you know how to kiss their babies in a way that was superior to how jack was talented in that and bobby who was actually quite shy knew how to do so so they were quite different in their pursuit having said that more to the question that that susan asked and more to the issues we've been talking about all three of them would have loved the modern presidency but for different reasons we've discussed the fact that the president is more powerful congress is weaker over the course of time presidents preside as we've said over bigger executive branches with much bigger budgets presidential power has grown as can bear as

discussed with the advent of mass communication has complicated the question of messaging but has helped presidential power grow and as heavy said at the beginning of this conference presidential unilateral presidential power has grown with a president stretching the limits of executive action, whether it's executive orders, it's rules and regulations. it's sign. maintenance and the rest so why would they have loved the modern presidency? well i said before jack saw the president president presidency as the center of action. well needless to say if a president can take more you unilateral action, it plays to the fact that you are in fact the of action jack kennedy. stretched the powers of the presidency himself with the unilateral action in the bay of pigs in april of 1961 and obviously, although he certainly is president was the only one who could have done it.

he singularly with the help of his aids but singularly solve the most perilous moment of the cold war whether we were going to have nuclear war with the soviets in the aftermath of the cuban missile crisis, so certainly comfortable with executive power. he would have exploited these other avenues of unilateral action. presence today take for granted. bobby would have liked the modern presidency for a different reason. he was the most impatient. of the three brothers. he hated the legislative process even more than jack did. in fact, i'll tell you a funny story when he was serving as attorney general and jack's top aid jack had taken some members of congress out on the presidential yacht to schmooze them. try to get some support for some bill. so, you know, they're grilling steaks that you know, drinking drinks and all the rest bobby

gets done and an aide is driving him home to his house. he turns to the eight if the plopping in the seat of the car and says wow, this is such a bleepy job and bleepy. i'm obviously cleaning up but it was simply because he didn't like any part of that. so unilateral executive action, that would have played to his impatience. i don't need congress. i'll do this stuff on my own ted kennedy finally would have been more reluctant of the three of them to bypass congress. he was a product of congress. he loved the institution had he won the presidency he would have he would have given legislation. a bigger chance than i think the other two would have any also had a broader agenda than as other brothers. they it stretched across not just domestic affairs, but

foreign affairs as well, which people don't realize having said that partisanship of today and the inability of past legislation would have forced him to the same place jack and bobby wound up which was exploiting all the tools of unilateral action that presidents have today. so all three of the kennedy brothers were they to wake up in 2022? each of them is president. they all would have loved the powers that they're disposal but for different reasons. well, thank you so much larry. i think that is a really great setup. actually for amity actually is our next panelist and that conversation around you know, the the inevitability of where we are today or lack thereof the imperial presidency certainly was something that probably would have been welcomed by jack kennedy and many but not necessarily all presidents who didn't have all of the tools at

their fingertips that a modern president does and i think we can have a conversation hopefully in our back and forth among everyone here around this question of you know is it incentives? is it a individual presidents who got us to the place where we are or would it have happened regardless, so i really love and intrigued by amity's paper for this group, which is called the possibility of counter-revolution and a meditation on calvin coolidge of which she is i think the world expert her best-selling biography of calvin coolidge came out. not sure when a few years back 2013 and she of course has written widely on the depression period as well and i think for the purposes our conversation today is actually me chair of the national calvin coolidge presidential foundation among many other distinctions, but amity, thank you for giving us. i think this this important sort of counter perspective which is

it didn't necessarily have to turn out this way. i did it. so does that mean that we should be hesitant to over interpret the moment? we're in right now. well, thank you and for that magnanimous intro i will say before i answer the question that calvin coolidge would have been very comfortable tweeter. he spoke in short sentences, so i'll give you three coolidge tweets. can you hear me? well? yep. number one tweet men do not make laws comma they do about discover them. tweet to there is no right to strike against the public safety by anyone anywhere anytime. he said that and another. kind of inverted grammar like latin he said about the constitution. there is something that is exceedingly restful. rather. let me say that again about the

declaration there is something that is exceedingly restful if all men are equal that is final. so i see these as coolidge's from a century ago his tweets to us. he was silent cal but he did say a lot and i'm glad susan liked my provocation which is really to say um that coolidge made the presidency greater. we're talking all along here including with kristen about cleaning up the presidency improving a president's or the president's these reputation coolidge made the presidency cleaner and probably greater by making it smaller. what a paradox that's so different. i'll just tell the story and you'll hear as i tell it some of the questions we've been addressing and hopefully get a little bit of illumination.

in 1920, which is when coolidge ran for vice president behind warren harding. there was a tradition a new tradition of large government from world war one woodrow wilson. we had nationalized a railroad the government had taken over a good share of the economy then untaken over it and the country was angry. we we don't have a monopoly on rudeness at this point, right? he was angry the ku klux klan was on the rise. there was much unemployment even 20% unemployment in some places jobs weren't where they were supposed to be. and there was the beginning of a downturn in agriculture and nobody knew quite with you. there was also an overwhelming federal debt from the war not was standing war bonds. so harding and coolidge run the republicans on normalcy, which i don't know about you but when i was a child and i heard about

normalcy, i thought that's awful. they want us all to be normal. that isn't that way they want us to be pegs in halls. that's not what they meant at all when i went back and looking it's an awkward term normal see but what they meant was they want the environment to be kind of in middle and common sense. so that business can get back to work. they don't want an extreme and you could hear that in all the candidates now talking let's get back to to way it was. and in specific they wanted to they wanted to clean up. and harding vision of that with coolidge along was to cut that the government so the economy could grow and he had all sorts of plans one was to privatize some natural resources that were in the hands of the government. that would be energy out west another was to get the budget and the debt under control and actually cut the budget and harding elected did do some of that with coolidge watching as

vice president. they passed the budget and accounting act of 1921, which is kind of the inverse of the budget law that we got put the time of nixon's catastrophe it moved to the executive some control and took it away from congress. and he passed a tax cut which was important for them because they thought and there's some evidence for that that business was so heavily taxed. it was after world war one that it wasn't creating jobs or there was what's called a capital strike in that period but harding did not clean up the presidency or help the office because he was as alice roosevelt longwood said a bit of a slob. and a next show the harding revisionist will come on improve me wrong, but he was he had other things going going on in his life. he screwed up a lot exact and so that meant he as president bush

43 would say squandered political capital. example prohibition was on nobody liked it. not even the republicans. but if it was the law and a recent amendment had been passed the 18th amendment. well, the president ought not fight with it harding partied wildly in the white house and everyone knew it including alcohol. he undermined the rule of law and his reforms in particularly the energy reform among another for hospitals undermined his principles and his case. because if you say you must privatize resources and take an asset away from the government and put it into private hands you don't. do a teapot dome which is what is scandal was called in favor friends and giving them the energy and that is what happens. so harding undermines very principle. he's trying to advance which is essentially privatization by the manner in which he privatized or least to private sector. the energy resources he had said no on pensions for veterans.

he said he would build hospitals instead. that's a very hard piece of news. and what was discovered was that his hospitals were corrupt and were enriching again friends of friends of harding. well, then maybe pensions are necessary over and over again. so i would say a hardy harding aborted in terms of policy. he wiped out and when he died, this is what coolidge inherits. coolidge therefore it's two jobs as a vice president suddenly president one is to complete the agenda that harding wiped out on and the other is to clean up the office at harding unfortunately charming as he was dirty, and he did both and i'll just be briefly about how he did that. he was silent cal, but he's spoke a lot in press conferences. so it's it's a mixed legacy. um, he swore he he did put through as president further tax

cuts as promised. he did use the budget and accounting law that harding had seen into law to cut the budget. so coolidge actually cut the federal budget today and we speak of cutting the federal budget. we mean reducing the rate of increase coolidge actually cut the budget over at 67 months in office. he was elected once that's important to know too in 1924. he cut the taxes any got two prosecutors. this is the tradition we have now prosecutors looking into presidents nixon or later one democrat one republican to be fair to look into the harding scandals and some men did go to jail the attorney general in particular. i mean interior and we say interior secretary. i think of him as an interior minister was also out so we cleaned up and moved past. that was very important. excuse me, coolidge size goal is shrinking government and he did it. and then became very popular.

i want to say two things about the way he did it. which is quite important one. is he focused. all he did was cut the government. recently, we have a new pet in the white house. uh, what do white houses mean their pets willow bow? socks right the coolidge's name their pet tigers their pet baby lines budget bureau and tax reduction. why did they do that because coolidge was making a joke about how very determined in every aspect of his life. he was to control the budget and control the tax. great. coolidge had a very pristine white house even a laid off the white house housekeeper could see that they spent too much because he was asking is he said the people to cut the budget federal budget then he must cut his white house budget as well and the big character thing that he did was he was rather popular

contrary to what history books suggests now. and so he easily could have run again in 19. 28 he chose not to run why because he was trying to convey that office. is more important than man? i'm not as an lbj or of course roosevelt who said the elections about moi, you know. coolidge wanted to receive to in order to make the office more respectful. we live in a republic of laws. not men. and that that was a tough decision not to run because the party didn't exactly thank him for it when a candidate is very popular. he has big coattails. well coolidge did it. anyhow, there were other factors including illness his wife and so on but the main factor was he wanted to make like george washington rather than make like theodore roosevelt who said he

wouldn't run again and then did and also made life very difficult for the republican party by splitting it when he chose to run again. so coolidge really feared vanity and he thought vanity in the office was was a problem and he left office quite popular and i'll just stop there and say one last thing about coolidge which is he made the presidency small. it was a meticulous constitutionalist. he also made it. greater and he one of the scenes that most touches me were making a movie right now about coolidge is when he was at rushmore because rushmore is the other kind of presidency, right? it's the big presidency presidents as titans by the sculptor gutsenburglum. i was just looking at the footage of coolidge at rushmore at the very beginning when gutsenburglum was about to sculpt roosevelt theodore and

jefferson and so on and coolidge looks practically terrified at the idea that someone might like to put him up on a big rock in that way someday. so i think that's why he's lesser known and in our work at the foundation we were we're trying to help him be better known without. i'm betraying his spirit of modesty. thank you. well, thank you. anthony. i i do think i know we're not going to have that much time, but you've basically just described the antithesis of the presidency and in particular on our most recent past president, although they share a party late identification. it's it's hard to think that someone who was known for his restraint and especially in the use of word with probably our most logarithmic president, you know a non-stop for your monologue. i guess i'm gonna ask everybody then this question as we pick this up and and kristen all

good. are you first? does amy's counterexample here with calvin coolidge suggests that that we make the mistake of assuming that our our new normal is the trajectory that we're going to be on for a while. did you see anything as you looked at the data from presidential approval ratings that suggests it's not necessarily a straight course ahead toward this sort of polarization and division. is there a way for someone to overcome it biden? doesn't seem to he suggested he would try but he doesn't seem to have succeeded. well, i would certainly never want to be in the business of saying that the way things are today is the way that they will be forever. and ever amen. i think you don't have to look very far back in history to see things constantly in flux and that i think because one outside events really do matter you can take a look for instance at the job approval that george w bush

received after september 11th, and that would have been something very hard to predict in the midst of bush vigor and the immense division that our country was experiencing around that that election and its outcome. it's very close outcome. and so external events one. i think have the ability to disrupt and drive things in a very different direction and we don't know what that will look like. i also think that that leadership matters and that there's a little bit of this that is you know, what came first the chicken or the egg. is it that president's nowadays make less of an effort to win over the other side because it's less possible to win over the other side or does it cut the other direction is it that because presidents are making less of an effort to win over the other side things just seem more baked in and polarized than ever. i don't know. direction the causality arrow points on that front, but i would say that the things that are holding presidential job

approval in this kind of low and steady pattern right now. they're pretty they're pretty big strong forces, you know solving the polarization we are facing is not something i imagined and will happen overnight, but i would be reluctant to say that i think it's just going to continue on this way forever and ever because leadership matters and external events matter. so can i i want to bring you in here because you were there for obama presidency and like biden to to a lesser extent obama came in and sort of said, well, you know, i'm gonna overcome these divisions and be a different kind of president by the end. that was not what he was saying and so into this question of we are where we are right now. and is it possible to vary from that trajectory? i'm curious. what what you think. you know as kristen said he should be humble and what we project going forward. however, i think that the great sort of trend of american

government since world war two has been a increase of power into the executive branch that is inexorable and when there have been times or maybe it's back a little bit to the congress thinking in the water post watergate era for one. they've been mere ripples from the larger tie that's going that way so i don't think i'm a governance standpoint that that's changing also. think that there's something which though really does affect and go enter any of these are trends and that's actually politics. and again, despite what anyone may think about donald trump and i think extremely low of him personally and another part is into that matter. however, what is interesting? is that what we have seen and curious to christians of you and this is that you know, and it'll close to 2016 and 2020 elections. there are groups of voters whose partisans attachments are in play, right who have shifted both.

there's the white working class. there is a working class broadly of all of all racial backgrounds as well as white suburban voters as we see also sort of some of them in play which has led to different outcomes in the congress and frankly in the presidency. so, to think that our politics is just static as stuck and static and it's like it's a trench warfare between the two. there's actually been some movement which is interesting and if that resolves into it one large new electoral coalition, i doubt it, but who knows right, but you know, you know, i think we if we were sitting here in 2012. we never would have predicted 10 years later. oh, yes, you know you're going to have i think it was 40% of hispanic voting for a republican much as a republican who wants to close the border right like that. just seems you know, kind of would have been seen crazy someone back then. you know, it's really interesting because there's two ways of having this conversation right one is about politics and about the voters and the people

who make up the base of a presidency and then there's the question of the president him or one day, perhaps herself and so, you know, i'm interested too because when i think of obama and your experience and then kennedy's right those the other way to look at this conversation and an amity also suggested that when she talked about the difference between teddy roosevelt versus calvin coolidge raiders is sort of ideology versus personality or celebrity, right? i mean jfk is sort of our, you know proto, you know, cool guy. cool cat president, you know obama and that sense is kind of his air trump very different kind of appeal but also all about the celebrity taking republicans to places where ideologically many of them would have said were anathema to go even just a year or two before and so, you know, we didn't kind of frame it that way in any of the conversations yet, but actually i feel like every

single one of your papers gets at this question of how much is ideology figuring to the modern presidency and where we're at right now versus this just overwhelming other factors of partisan identification or the overall powers of the office or the communications p. so larry, i mean you've thought a lot obviously about what it means to be, you know, kind of a modern celebrity president figure to think about and write about the kennedys. what's your what's your view about it? you know, are we does ideology have the same weight now that it did? in the cold war era well, i have a whole variety of things that i'm thinking from these very interesting comments from my colleagues. first of all, i do want to echo the point about the inevitability of anything and the static nature of politics. i mean, you don't you don't have

to be a very in-depth historian to know how many times we have said it's never going to get better. it's never going to get different. it's never going to change. i remember heading into the clinton years what people would very angry about economic stagnation. we're never going to get out of this. we were never going to get out of the 1970s with thagflation. we were never going to solve inflation after that. so that's my number one point. we will get out of this. i can't tell you if it's gonna be next week next month next year in a decade, but something will follow this because people will get tired of it. enough people at the grassroots level. so that's number one. number two with regard to this question of can presidents overcome it. look i i you know in the air advent of mass communication you can't under you can underestimate the power of a

face a voice a figure a the central figure of america for sure, but i don't think we've talked enough about externalities. i mean amity a paper about calvin coolidge reducing, you know, this the presidency the size of government, government, but when the depression hits people look to washington and a president had to respond and hoover did not to the public's dismay and roosevelt did and i do think that was singularly. presidential in the aftermath of world war two in the advent of the cold war we had this central issue of freedom versus communism and containment and yes, there was cooperation with congress, but but presidents had this issue that they could

galvanize the country around and when they had divisive issues, obviously that popularity sank johnson in vietnam nixon in vietnam, i bush in iraq and all the rest with regard to our politics today. could joe biden have overcome, you know republican opposition by schmoozing. i doubt it. i think the first thing to address is redistricting, which is beyond presidents. so there's there is a limit finally on the question of you know, personality and glamor and all the rest. yes, i mean as someone who studied, you know, kennedy and who previously studied, you know, wilson and i and and roosevelt and who was watched, you know clinton work for clinton and watched obama and obviously saw trump operate

their there is something to that but i do believe to finally to a point that can made about you know online media now competing with mainstream media. and this 20% in the middle of america that has been switching back between the parties. both parties today led by presidents are missing the boat. there is a potential 60% of america, that is getable if if either party would find a way. to overcome it's extreme forces on either wing. both parties are missing the boat. i definitely think the democrats have missed the boat and i definitely think republicans in earlier eras have missed the boat. there is a governing coalition there that can overcome the partisanship, but neither party

seems to want it. all right. well, i feel like larry. that's the perfect. you know, they remark from this bipartisan policy center. they were gonna have to bring back kristen. i think for a more in-depth deep dive on the question of this this new governing from the center coalition. that's gonna that's gonna reorient the presidency amity. i want to give you the last word very quickly because then heavy is going to close up this this really wonderful and provocative conference. ah, donald trump franklin roosevelt, they literally there was no platform in their party except for them. do you are you suggesting to us that? sort of authoritarianism and the exact the imperial presidency go hand in hand together. is that what calvin coolidge would have said about these talking about. well, that's a good question susan the republican platform. i recently bought a copy of it from 1920 actually was called the republican textbook.

here five ritz crackers thick more than an inch. it's you know, because i had some rich next to it. so the republicans of 1920 who were the ones who were going back to the center with the 60% reasonables that that larry was describing. they wrote it all out in a book and then they slapped the candidates pictures on the cover, but the candidates were less important than the platform and that was extremely useful when president one wiped out as i said in president two had to come in. he had a playbook he was so so i think for for both parties if that's what you're asking platform should come first. and it doesn't for both it's about personality because that's tv, but in that that leads to incredible disappointment in the electorate, i want to say one of

the things which is sometimes events happen. i mean i wouldn't have considered margaret thatcher for example popular charismatic until britain got into so much trouble that it needed a very strong personnel to deal with real economic trouble when our interest rate goes above 10% we will look for different kind of president than when our interest rate is into present same for our inflation, right? so it really depends on the mood of the country. thank you very much for this wonderful event. thank you. this was really a great conversation everyone and i i think we are gonna have to reconvene and we'll see how it all worked out. but tevy thank you for bringing this very eclectic group together. and for some stimulating conversation today. great. thank you susan for a terrific job moderating. thanks to all the panelists to link ken kristen jonathan larry

martha and again to susan for moderating. we have learned a lot today. the presidency is changing it changes. it seems a little bit of time but when you look over 20-year period it's changed a great deal in ways that have significant implications for all of us for our lives and for our quality. we are only scratching the surface here and i'm glad that jason mentioned that this is the launch of a program by the buy parks and policy center on the study of the presidency that i'm going to be working on and i'm excited to do and i will be calling on great experts such as the ones you've seen today and others in the months ahead. we're also only scratching the surface on this question of the 21st century presidency. there will be another event in april that you should start looking out for where we will have high level practitioners who've worked in various white houses who are going to talk about the issue. i'd like to thank the funders the sponsors for this event, including the great achilles and bodman foundation at skate foundation. i'd like to thank great bpc

staff. i including steve jason the lady elise greg with his fantastic technical expertise and the entire staff at bpc and i think that we to take the audience because they asked terrific questions. i know a lot of people tuned in they're gonna be more people watching this on youtube in the days ahead and i think a lot of us want to have this conversation about what we want out of the presidency what we can get out of the presidency and what is the path to get there. so thank y hello everyone and we

to tonight's program and thank you so much for being here. my name is marcia eli i come to you from the center for brooklyn history at the brooklyn public library and bpl presents, which is the library's arts and culture arm that brings you so many programs and conversations like tonight's as well as musical performances family and children events literary and philosophical discussions and so much more tonight's program the history of