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148 8 Campaign-Driven Accountability The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. —John Maynard Keynes (1960, 383) Our ideas of accountability, and the definitions of good campaigns and competent citizens that derive from them, shape what we demand from candidates and leaders and from the media and voters. And what we demand is not always realistic or wise. Campaigns and elections offer an unrivaled opportunity for the public and leaders to interact. The operation of campaigns is important for the legitimacy of democratic government; the outcomes are important for the actions of government. We need campaigns and elections to work well. But what does it mean for a campaign to be good? What do we want campaigns to do? The answer to these questions should fundamentally depend on the answer to another question: What role does the leader in question play in governing? Yet the process of governing is mostly neglected by critics of campaigns—and so they provide standards for campaign quality that bear little relationship to the governing that might follow from the election. Campaigns, they tell us, should educate people about the candidates ’ policy stands, should provide clear and meaningful differences in the direction of future policy, and should highlight current conditions as the responsibility, for good or ill, of the incumbent party or administration . And these criteria for a good campaign seldom vary by office. In the case of the presidency, the office with which I am concerned, the answer to the last question—What role does the leader play?—is something like this: Presidents can direct the attention of Congress and the public, can influence the sequencing of important legislative activity , can set the governing priorities. Presidents cannot dictate legislation —efforts to do so are met with resistance by Congress and mockery by the professional political “commentariat”; Bill Clinton’s doomed health-care reform efforts stand as a useful reminder of this. What we then need to learn from presidential campaigns is, What will a candidate ’s priorities as president be? What problems does each candidate believe most require attention? What issues will earn his effort? On what legislative outcomes will he spend his political capital? In short, we should be asking not what will you do about a problem, but on what problems will you try to do something. This focus, in addition to fitting better with the capacity of the presidency , fits well with the preferences of the public, a largely nonideological mass who wants government to do the work of fixing national problems. That citizens cannot always correctly identify the issue positions of major party candidates is not as dire as skeptics would have it. Citizens, voters and abstainers, hear the agenda emphasis in the campaign and understand what the candidates’ priorities are. And even if campaigns don’t move voters, they can still do this—disseminate priorities, establish expectations. This is not an apology for citizen ignorance but a call to reconsider what citizens need to know about a future leader in the context of the job the future leader seeks.1 It is not enough for citizens to understand competing issue agendas during the campaign, however; they must incorporate them into their understanding and expectations of the president. This is an outcome campaigns promote exceedingly well. The long, repetitive, nonspecific, sometimes tedious presidential campaign with its endless ads aired ad infinitum works to hammer the issue priorities home. While many bemoan these characteristics of the campaign—When will they say something new? Where are the policy details?—this, I contend, is a feature, not a bug. Campaigns could be improved, to be sure, but many of the reforms suggested for their improvement are misguided. And it is not enough for citizens to incorporate the candidates’ issue priorities into their understanding of the candidates, of the future president . Citizens must also continue to evaluate the president on the basis of his adherence to his own agenda. As new problems arise and new challenges unfold, his attention should adjust as well. But at the beginning of the presidential administration, particularly in the first year when a leader’s ability to influence the agenda is at its peak, the campaign priorities should guide the president’s efforts. The public should judge him accordingly. This is agenda accountability. Campaign-Driven Accountability 149 [18.223.172.252] Project MUSE (2024...

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