Hail to the Chief and to the Thief: Fantasies, Fictions, and Fears about the United States Presidency

November elections bring forth January reflections, like one writer's fearful description of a post-ballot "popular hallucination" that unrealistically made each new presidency a "new millennium." From "talk heard on the streets" about a "new and brighter epoch," a stranger might suppose each new president a "species of arbitrary monarch." As contemporary as the talk on the street might sound, the observer was Charles Francis Adams Jr., who had his own reasons to worry over the presidency, and the newly elected "arbitrary monarch" of his era was Grover Cleveland, now remembered perhaps less for his kingly reign than for his mustache or the Roy Rogers–graced rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike named in his honor.¹

For Adams, this tendency to make of presidents kings (and, by implication, of the people subjects) was more irritating than outrageous, but over the twentieth century it looked less ridiculous than prescient as presidents acquired power over sections of the government left previously to Congress or to the states. More recently, of course, the notion of an arbitrary monarch seems even less fanciful after the United States Supreme Court's December 2000 Bush v. Gore decision elevated to the White House an administration that expanded the frankly monarchical notion of a unitary executive required neither to obey nor answer to directives of the elected legislative branch. Instead of crazy talk on the street, a modern-day Adams could learn about "King George Bush" from the public remarks of a sitting United States senator.²

Against the administration's torture, war-mongering, and Robin Hoodin reverse tax cuts, and in the face of an often-acquiescent media, scholars fell upon their word processors. To their credit, many resisted alluring but inadequate arguments about Bush's personal failings. For Bush was no exception; his overreaching culminated a series of destructive trends in modern U.S. politics, trends that would not necessarily be reversed by replacing Bush with another, better person.

It is a strange and useful thing to read these critical works on presidentialism as the president who inspired them has decamped to Preston Hollow and as a far more sympathetic figure takes possession of the White House. Conceived partly in outrage, the books under review here arrive in a political world defined, for now, largely by hope. In taking away the punchbowl of the presidency just as the party gets started, their chronological contrariness warns of dangers many might rather forget.

Although they are serious works of literary, historical, and psychoanalytic scholarship, several of these books flirt with presentism. Remarkably, given publication schedules, five mention Obama directly, and the sixth discusses the Bush administration's handling of the War on Terror. In distinct ways, these works take as the starting point not the individual president but the presidency as an institution and as a site of the kind of fantastic projection that Adams described in 1893 or that Whitman called the "White House of future poems, and of dreams and dramas."³

The most frankly presentist, least nuanced, and most stimulating of these is Dana D. Nelson...