...the Green Lantern Theory of Presidential Power...

[babylonsister]

Boy, does this sound familiar!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/04/30/why-the-green-lantern-theory-of-presidential-power-persists/

Why the Green Lantern Theory of Presidential Power persists

Posted by Greg Sargent on April 30, 2013 at 3:34 pm


At today’s press conference, President Obama spent a fair amount of time pushing back on what some of us are calling the “Green Lantern Theory of Presidential Power.” This theory — which seems to hold broad sway over many in the press — holds that presidents should be able to bend Congress to their will, and any failure to do so proves their weakness and perhaps even their irrelevance.

What accounts for the persistence of this theory? The answer, I think, lies in the tendency of reporters and analysts who are trying to remain a neutral, nonpartisan posture to feel comfortable making process judgments, but not ideological ones.

The extent and limits of presidential power were at the center of one of the most interesting exchanges of the day. ABC News’s Jonathan Karl asked this question:

Mr. President, you are a hundred days into your second term. On the gun bill, you put, it seems, everything into it to try to get it passed. Obviously, it didn’t. Congress has ignored your efforts to try to get them to undo these sequester cuts. There was even a bill that you threatened to veto that got 92 Democrats in the House voting yes. So my question to you is do you still have the juice to get the rest of your agenda through this Congress?

Obama answered that Republicans have the option of cooperating with him to avert the sequester. He also said:

You seem to suggest that somehow, these folks over there have no responsibilities and that my job is to somehow get them to behave. That’s their job. They are elected, members of Congress are elected in order to do what’s right for their constituencies and for the American people. So if, in fact, they are seriously concerned about passenger convenience and safety, then they shouldn’t just be thinking about tomorrow or next week or the week after that; they should be thinking about what’s going to happen five years from now, 10 years from now or 15 years from now. The only way to do that is for them to engage with me on coming up with a broader deal. And that’s exactly what I’m trying to do is to continue to talk to them about are there ways for us to fix this.

snip//

The reason all these explanations don’t weigh on the Green Lanternites is the basic process/ideological imbalance identified above. It’s okay for the nonpartisan writer to criticize a president for failing to exert his will (a process judgment), but it’s not okay for the nonpartisan writer to fault Republicans for failing to agree to move in the direction of the policy a president wants (an ideological judgment). Today, for instance, Ron Fournier, to his credit, conceded that Obama was right in describing the limits on his powers. But he added: “Even if you concede to Obama every point of his Tuesday news conference, a president looks weak and defeated when he shifts accountability to forces out of his control.”

Perhaps this is how the public will view Obama; perhaps it isn’t. What is clear, however, is the basic imbalance here. While neutral commentators often hold up compromise, abstractly, as the Holy Grail, the process/ideology dichotomy makes it much easier for those commentators to fault the president for failing to work the process effectively enough to secure compromise than to pillory the opposition for being ideologically uncompromising.

[graham4anything]

1. The media has stopped the back room deals which are needed to run the country

But you see, the media is meaningless

WHY?

Because no one but junkies of politics listen or care.

President Obama has a 90% rating with his core voters. He don't need the other 5-10% nor does Hillary, who has a 90% favorable with her voters.

People no longer watch the news, and the talking heads.
Nobody is listening to them

That is why Fox is still #1 but is rapidly going south, and the others are way behind.
One of these days if we are lucky there will be ZERO cable politics, zero hate radio, and
again, America will be the wiser.

Rush has his voters. At the end of the day, at their peak 4.3 million was the top #.
(Oddly that was the top # the NRA had.
That is rounded, 1% of the nation.

99% don't listen, therefore no one is harmed.

And it will lead to the 80-20 split. The 20% will be irrelevant and not matter.

And then the blackmail will be gone and there will be both working together.

Like FDR had, like the Great LBJ had. The others just aren't needed.

[Enrique]

2. Sargent is being too protective of Obama

the reporter's question is a perfectly good one. I can understand why Obama would not like it, it raises something which I'm sure is frustrating to him, namely his lack of influence over Congress. But the reporter doesn't identify with Obama the way Greg Sargent does, so he asked it even though Obama apparently didn't like it.

[babylonsister]

4. So it's an Obama problem again. Got it! nt

[rug]

3. Do you prefer Joe Btfsplk?

[OnyxCollie]

5. What a ridiculous article.

We assume that statesmen think and act in terms of interest defined as
power, and the evidence of history bears that assumption out. That assumption
allows us to retrace and anticipate, as it were, the steps a statesman-
past, present, or future-has taken or will take on the political scene.
We look over his shoulder when he writes his dispatches; we listen in on
his conversation with other statesmen; we read and anticipate his very
thoughts. Thinking in terms of interest defined as power, we think as he
does, and as disinterested observers we understand his thoughts and actions
perhaps better than he, the actor on the political scene, does himself.

The concept of interest defined as power imposes intellectual discipline
upon the observer, infuses rational order into the subject matter of politics,
and thus makes the theoretical understanding of politics possible. On the
side of the actor, it provides for rational discipline in action and creates that
astounding continuity in foreign policy which makes American, British, or
Russian foreign policy appear as an intelligible, rational continuum, by and
large consistent within itself, regardless of the different motives, preferences,
and intellectual and moral qualities of successive statesmen. A realist theory
of international politics, then, will guard against two popular fallacies:
the concern with motives and the concern with ideological preferences.

~snip~

Yet even if we had access to the real motives of statesmen, that knowledge
would help us little in understanding foreign policies, and might well
lead us astray. It is true that the knowledge of the statesman's motives may
give us one among many clues as to what the direction of his foreign policy
might be. It cannot give us, however, the one clue by which to predict his
foreign policies. History shows no exact and necessary correlation between
the quallty of motives and the quality of foreign policy. This is true in both
moral and political terms.

We cannot conclude from the good intentions of a statesman that his
foreign policies will be either morally praiseworthy or politically successful.
Judging his motives, we can say that he will not intentionally pursue
policies that are morally wrong, but we can say nothing about the probability
of their success. If we want to know the moral and political qualities
of his actions, we must know them, not his motives. How often have
statesmen been motivated by the desire to improve the world, and ended
by making it worse? And how often have they sought one goal, and ended
by achieving something they neither expected nor desired?

Morgenthau, H. (1948). Politics among nations: The struggle for power and peace (pp. 5, 6). New York: Knopf.