Presidents and Terminal Logic Behavior: Term Limits and Executive Action in the United States, Brazil, and Argentina

Chapter 3: The Motivational Structure of Terminal Presidents: What to Expect and Why

38 3.1 INTRODUCTION I n chapter 2 I review research on how actors in the political process change their behavior in anticipation of the end of a president’s tenure and find that a surprising few address this topic when it concerns the president personally . Studies of outgoing presidents often show a strong prescriptive element that instructs them on the “dos and don’ts” of the outgoing administration. Because many scholars view outgoing presidents “as little more than informational resources for incoming administrations,” less attention is given to the specific terminal behavior of outgoing presidents (Howell and Mayer 2005, 2–3). Yet we can assume that, just as other actors begin to perceive the president as a “lame duck” CHAPTER 3 The Motivational Structure of Terminal Presidents What to Expect and Why Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner arrived in the Oval Office bearing socks. President Obama had admired Wenner’s flashy pair on a previous visit, and this gift fit the bill: one pair salmon with pink squares, the other black and pink stripes. “These are nice,” the president said. Then he paused. “These may be second-term socks.”1 THE MOTIVATIONAL STRUCTURE OF TERMINAL PRESIDENTS 39 and change their behavior accordingly, so, too, must the behavior of presidents change. The trick is to identify how terminal presidents change their behavior and their policies in anticipation of this end. Authors like Howell and Mayer (2005) and Indyk and Sicherman (2008) provide us with a jumping-off point. Howell and Mayer find that the last hundred days of US presidential administrations are accompanied by a “flurry of activity” that has “a lasting impact on his successor’s ability to govern.” They cite President Clinton as a quintessential example. They describe him as: a whirling dervish of a President who appointed judges, signed treaties, gave campaign-style speeches, issued scads of executive orders, rescinded ethics regulations he had penned in his first term, raised political money, gave dozens of interviews, granted 234 pardons and clemencies, fired an enemy from her government job, negotiated his own plea-bargain agreement, cast aspersions on his successor, installed a crony as head of the Democratic Party, and gave an entire series of farewell addresses in which he essentially said he wasn’t leaving at all. (Howell and Mayer 2005, citing Cannon 2001, 274) Similarly, Indyk and Sicherman (2008, 1) explain that “second-term presidents believe they can accomplish things that are, in reality, beyond their grasp.” Particularly interesting is their observation that late-term, legacy-driven presidents often sufferfrom“anadaptiveversionoftheJerusalemsyndrome.”2 Theyclaimthatsuch may even cause a shift in presidential policy with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian arena. They detail the change in President Reagan’s policy behavior: President Reagan was not fully engaged in the Arab-Israeli conflict during his second term because of the Iran-Contra affair. In the summer of 1988, however, Secretary of State George Schultz pressed for engagement on the peacemaking front. He argued that if Reagan did not act on the issue, his administration would be forever marked by the failure. In the end, Reagan’s shift of focus from the presidency to his legacy compelled him to begin work on the conflict, which resulted in Washington’s CHAPTER 3 40 recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—a historical event attributed to Schultz and Reagan. (Indyk and Sicherman 2008, 1) President George Bush, they observe, began to show signs of the same syndrome in 2008—visiting Jerusalem in February and voicing his renewed hopes for a peace treaty by the end of his term. In this chapter I develop a theory on the behavior of terminal presidents, a theory that I call terminal logic behavior, or TLB. I discuss its main propositions using insights from intertemporal choice theory and the work of Friedman and Starr (1997, 105) in their adaptation of Maslow’s (1943, 1954/1987) theory of human motivation to outline these processes. Intertemporal choice is the study of the relative value individuals assign to costs and benefits foreseen at different points in time. Intertemporal choice is particularly applicable to this study because it focuses on the passage of time as an independent variable acting on the preference of individuals—a key assumption of TLB. Next, I introduce a cyclical model of presidential tenure that helps us to predict the space in which TLB is likely to operate , laying the foundation for the empirical analysis in...