The Presidential Leadership Dilemma: Between the Constitution and a Political Party

ConclusionThe Right Choice at the Right Time

Conclusion The Right Choice at the Right Time Julia R. Azari, Lara M. Brown, and Zim G. Nwokora In this volume we have asked: how do contemporary presidents balance countervailing pressures to serve as party leaders and act as the nation’s leader? In other words, do presidents lean more toward upholding their constitutional obligation “to faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States” and engage in national leadership, or do they interpret their duty in a partisan manner, owing to the selection method. The contributions to this volume have shown that presidents assume both roles. However, they do not fuse the demands of national leadership and partisan leadership in an unchanging formula. How presidents deal with this leadership dilemma depends on the varying circumstances that they confront and their differing leadership styles and skills. As such, the question then is: do presidents’ choices vary systematically? And, if so, are their leadership decisions influenced more by political structures or by a president ’s agency, or vice versa? These questions, as Nancy Kassop points out, defy easy answers. Yet the contributions in this volume suggest the deep connections between structure and agency in presidential politics. Structures impact presidents, but presidents-as-agents can mold their structural contexts, and presidential success is largely tied to how presidents assess structural constraints and opportunities. Those ­ presidents who are most 213 214 Julia R. Azari, Lara M. Brown, and Zim G. Nwokora aware of these connections are most able to successfully negotiate the leadership dilemma. The Challenges of Modern Politics Contemporary presidents face challenges endemic to the era, as well as some classic dilemmas. Copeland and Farrar-Myers examined how two presidents addressed a contentious social issue, gays in the military. Kassop and Goldzwig assessed how Barack Obama handled the transition from campaigning to governance in his approach to the politically fraught “War on Terror.” These authors found that there was a critical interplay between changing public sentiment and presidential behavior, which suggests that even if the president’s personal agency matters, his or her decisions and leadership success are structured by political conditions. Deep conflicts in American society over these issues may have raised the visibility of the president’s leadership dilemma and rendered a balance between nation and party more difficult. But struggles over gay rights and the War on Terror also tapped into familiar themes of presidential leadership. As Richard Neustadt contends in Presidential Power, political success results from carefully reading a situation and anticipating the reactions of other players in the process—opponents as well as allies. While some contributions in this volume dealt with presidential leadership in the context of contemporary challenges, others drew mainly on classic questions of presidential decision making. Goren’s chapter on base closures highlighted the difficulty of insulating leaders from politically unattractive decisions. Both Nwokora and Brown explored the enduring burden borne by presidents and presidential aspirants: that of winning the nomination and the general election. Nwokora’s analysis showed how presidential aspirants can maneuver to shape potentially volatile nomination races and can also be shaped by structural factors. But whether a candidate is able to dominate in a race, ahead of his or her rivals and in the face of structures, largely depends on his or her political skills. Brown’s study revealed that presidents are able to win reelection by pursuing either a national or a partisan strategy, but only if they accurately evaluate their partisan experiences from the previous four years and make a suitable leadership choice. She also hinted at the deeper implications that these choices can have for governance in the second term. The linkage between elections and governance ties into another presidential choice: whether and how to claim an electoral mandate for their preferred policies and lay the ground- 215 Conclusion work for their historical legacies. Azari contended that the effectiveness of these mandate claims is in part determined by the president’s ability to set him- or herself apart from conflict in Congress but not appear oblivious to partisan disagreement. In other words, the president must “rise above,” but not appear to be “out of the loop.” More generally, there are tradeoffs associated with either leadership strategy; successful presidents find those middle grounds between ignoring partisan conflict and succumbing to it. Finally, the chapters by Ponder and by Kelley, Marshall, and Watts considered the classic questions of how presidents amass and spend political capital...