Ivan Eland of the Independent Institute has a piece at The San Francisco Chronicle on how presidents are evaluated….and how they should be evaluated:

“Surprisingly, Democrats Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton actually reduced government spending as a fraction of GDP. Dwight Eisenhower, the best of the modern Republican presidents on this score, held spending roughly constant as a portion of GDP. Carter also deregulated four major industries – financial services, energy, communications and transportation – and eventually appointed a Federal Reserve chairman who set a precedent for a tight monetary policy, which ultimately led to national prosperity during the Reagan and Clinton years. Reagan continued Carter’s deregulation but weakened it.

Bias Toward Activism

The fact is: Most presidential scholars have a bias toward activism rather than outcomes.

A president who creates new government programs to deal with societal problems generally will be rated as a better president than one who deals more cautiously – and cost-effectively – with problems. This is true even if the activist president’s programs do little good or even exacerbate the problems they were intended to solve.

Thus,  Johnson and Roosevelt receive high ratings from most historians, though many of Roosevelt’s economic-recovery programs were wasteful and ineffective, and many of Johnson’s Great Society programs increased government dependency and made poverty more intractable. Bush added a Medicare drug benefit – the first new entitlement program since the Great Society – to a system more insolvent than Social Security. And while Reagan is remembered by historians as an advocate of small government, he expanded government substantially.

Presidents should be judged on results. And results should be measured not by the number of new laws passed, the size of a stimulus bill or the number of jobs added or saved during the president’s term.

Results should be measured by the degree to which his actions, or his deliberate inaction, contribute to peace, prosperity and liberty.”

My Comment:

This is a very thoughtful piece and it highlights one of the worst traits of democracy – the incessant pressure from voters to act, to show results.

Interestingly, that’s also one of the underlying reasons behind the increasing volatility of markets today. Firms and analysts are more and more driven by quarterly performances, which results in all-kinds of short-term juggling of balance-sheets. In turn, that contributes to overall market volatility.

In politics, the relentless pressure to act– to take charge – is equally dangerous, because it feeds the delusion that the economy can be made to do what you want in some direct, hands-on fashion.

Well, what about leadership, you might ask? Isn’t there something a leader can do?

This again depends on what you think of the notion of leadership.  I’ll reserve my thoughts on that for a separate post, but for now I’ll say that what seems to be required today is an appearance and demeanor acceptable to the masses of voters. That’s what “charisma” amounts to.

In practice, this means how well a person can read a teleprompter, how personable they are on TV, how personable their family is, how decisive their utterances seem, and so on.

Now, since that varies with the moods of the voters, it follows that opinion-testing (polls, focus groups) becomes very central to this notion of leadership. 

And, opinion-testing is often nothing more than opinion-forming. The leader molds the crowd, and the crowd in turn molds the leader.

This two-way dynamic is also influenced by expert opinion. You would normally suppose that that would exert a moderating influence on the activism of a president. Experts, you’d think, would provide some of the ballast, the weighting to hold back the crowd –  along the lines of the role originally conceived for the Senate, for instance.

But the expert class – and I’ve discussed this at length in The Language of Empire – also has an inbuilt bias toward activism.

Ergo, everything tends to make presidents more activist than it’s wise for them to be.