The President’s Press Conference, and Presidential Leadership

Speaking of a strange meeting of the minds over the President's press conference remarks, Dana Milbank and Maureen Dowd had basically the same reaction to President Obama’s tetchy press conference yesterday: stop whining about Congress, stop complaining about how hard the issues are, stop being so passive, and start exercising leadership. No one better understood the vital role of leadership in our constitutional democracy – with separated powers that by design tend toward inertia – than Arthur Schlesinger Jr.  “The Constitution is a permanent challenge to presidential leadership,” he wrote in The Imperial Presidency.  “It is a test of a President’s capacity to persuade Congress and the people that his policies make sense.”  But how to persuade a Congress that is recalcitrant or doesn’t share the President’s views?  Schlesinger answered this question in his great essay “Democracy and Leadership,” which I highly recommend to the White House.  The essay is too rich to summarize, but Schlesinger notes that “democracy will stand or fall on the quality of its leadership,” and explained that “[w]inning consent requires leaders who possess not only a personal vision but the capacity to communicate that vision to their age.”  In “After the Imperial Presidency,” written in the 1980s, Schlesinger explained that Ronald Reagan was a more effective president than Jimmy Carter because he “possesse[d] . . . a vision of ideal America,” and because he “explain[ed] to the electorate why the direction the President proposes is right for the nation.”  Schlesinger added: “Reagan understood, as Carter never did, that politics is ultimately an educational process.” With regard to GTMO, Obama has failed on both elements of presidential leadership. First, he does not appear to have a clear vision of what he wants.  Yesterday he implied that he wants to end military detention altogether.  But as Ben noted, that is not his administration’s policy and it never has been.  So what does the President really want to do, where is his real commitment?  To close GTMO and move some detainees to the United States?  To end military detention altogether?  To declare the conflict over?  Something else?  One senses from the press conference – this was a major theme as well in Dan Klaidman’s book Kill or Capture – that the President is personally torn.  As Klaidman shows, the President’s natural or initial instincts appear to run in the direction of closing GTMO and ending military detention, and in general of embracing more dovish the counterterrorism policies than he inherited from his predecessor.  But since the beginning of his administration, as Klaidman also shows, this inclination has run the reality that many dangerous detainees cannot be tried or responsibly released, and more broadly has been hemmed in by the counterterrorism duties of the presidency, which invariably trump the President’s civil liberties instincts.  I believe (though I lack time now to document it) that this pathology runs through the administration's entire approach to counterterrorism for the past five years.  Until the President sorts out this internal conflict, he will not sort out GTMO. Second, not having a clear vision of what he wants, the President has been unable to explain the vision persuasively to the American people.  The President’s failure to educate the public about his vision can be traced as far back as the 2009 Archives speech, and was on display again yesterday.  Yes, the President yesterday ticked off a list of reasons why GTMO should be closed.  But in addition to being unclear whether he wants to end military detention, the President’s tone and demeanor suggested that his heart was not in it.  As Schlesinger said of Carter’s speeches, the President yesterday “gave the impression of regarding [the press conference] as a disagreeable dut[y], to be rushed through as perfunctorily as possible. In short, until the President makes plain precisely what he wants to do with the GTMO detainees, and until he explains his vision persuasively to the American people, the situation in GTMO will continue as it has for the first five years of his presidency.   “I am going to go back at this,” the President said yesterday.  “I am going to reengage with Congress that [GTMO] is not in the best interest of the American people,” he added  But I agree with Ann Althouse: “I am going to go back at this ≈ Nothing will change.”