Do Presidents Deserve More Respect, Or Less?

The Presidency has lost the aura of mystique that used to surround it, and that's a good thing.

Ann Althouse links to a piece up at NPR today which argues that the public’s relationship with the Presidency has become too informal:

Does our increasingly informal relationship with the man in the White House — not just President Obama, but any sitting president — diminish our respect for the man and reverence for the office? Should we leave the uncovering of private and behind-closed-doors habits to the historians?

We’re not talking about major scandals here. We’re talking about a puff of tobacco or a mild BlackBerry addiction. Do we need to know all of these details? Would we be better off as a country if we focused less on the personal quirks and traits and more on the professional successes and failures of our commander in chief? In other words, when it comes to the most famous politician in America, does familiarity breed contempt?

Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University, believes there are pros and cons to having Too Much Information. “Knowing too much about a president makes them seem more human, but it certainly detracts from some of the prestige that Americans once held for the office,” says Zelizer. “If the president is too much like us … we have more trouble developing respect for the officeholder and we start to find fault, too easily, about issues that don’t really matter.”

After all, Zelizer says, “we should be more concerned with Obama’s economic policies and political strategy than whether he snores.”

Of course, there’s nothing that says that knowing about the President’s smoking habits or that he may have accidentally choked on a potato chip while watching the Super Bowl means that you cannot also be concerned with his economic policies and foreign policy plans. But, it’s not a concern over information overload that the author of the NPR story seems to be concerned about, but the fact that the Presidency has lost its aura of mystique. In fact, he seems to have a desire to return to a bygone era when the public knew very little about the President:

In days of yore, personal details about the sitting president were hard to come by. When Warren G. Harding was elected in 1920, he promised a “return to normalcy” in the wake of World War I. The man from Ohio was swept into office by the greatest popular-vote differential up to that point.

By all contemporary accounts, life inside the White House during Harding’s abbreviated two-year term, from 1921-1923, was prim and proper. Occasional intimate tidbits emerged in news reports. For instance, reporter Kate Marcia Forbes — who was also a close friend of the first lady’s — revealed in a 1922 Baltimore Sun article that Florence Harding called her husband “Sonny” and the president’s pet name for his wife was “the Duchess.” The president liked to eat fudge and popcorn balls, and the couple often sat on a davenport by the fireplace.

Most of the stories of the day, however, provided little detail. There were observations about the “stateliness” of events at the White House and the propriety of Florence Harding’s wardrobe. “One thing I most admire in our President and his wife,” Forbes wrote, “is the devotion they have for each other.” She and other reporters whitewashed the White House, and Harding enjoyed great popularity while in office.

But in fact, according to historians writing much later, the Harding home on Pennsylvania Avenue was a nexus of bad behavior. Behind the scenes, writes James S. McCallops in the 2004 volume Life in the White House: A Social History of the First Family and the President’s House, Sonny and the Duchess “were far from the upbeat and optimistic duo they portrayed in public. Petty jealousy, infidelity, illegal drinking, gambling and corruption plagued the Hardings. Yet, in the two-plus-year period the Hardings lived in the White House, the public was kept in the dark about the First Couple’s private lives.”

Having won 60 percent of the vote in 1920, Harding was able to appoint some of his friends, known as “the Ohio Gang,” to his administration. Some of them betrayed him, and his administration was rife with political miscreancy — including the Teapot Dome scandal.

In 1923, Harding died unexpectedly, from a stroke or heart attack. And it wasn’t until after his death that more details of his private life were made public. “Only as the scandals began to surface,” McCallops writes, “did the American people discard their adoration of the Hardings and replace it with scorn and ridicule.”

That tale alone would seem to be evidence enough that more information about the person living in the White House is always better than less, but it’s only one example of information that was withheld from the public by a compliant and unassertive press. Americans didn’t know, for example, that Franklin Roosevelt was in seriously declining health when he ran for re-election in 1944, or that John F. Kennedy was carrying on a long-term extramarital affair with a woman who also happened to be mistress of Chicago mobster Sam Giancana. And then, of course, there was Watergate, which is arguably the point at which the relationship between the press and Presidency changed forever and the veil between the public and the President was lifted.

Is that a bad thing?  NPR certainly seems to think so:

Conventional punditry tells us that Americans are drawn to down-to-earth candidates whom they’d “like to share a beer with.” But once the people get into office and Americans know that their politicians — even a president — are actually drinking a beer and what kind of beer, they are liable to lose some respect.

Of the seven two-term presidents in the past 60 years, only Reagan and Clinton had higher average approval ratings during their second terms. For the most part, the longer we had the chance to know our presidents, the less we approved of the job they were doing.

“It is healthy not to turn our presidents into kings,” says Zelizer, “but too much of this leaves us without enough respect for the most important office in the land.”

And that, to put it bluntly, is the problem with the view that we don’t show the Presidency enough respect. The Presidency that we know today bears almost no resemblance to the institution that the Founding Fathers created when they drafted Article II of the Constitution. In fact, to them, the President’s main job could be summed up in ten words set forth in Section 3 of Article II:

he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,

The President’s other powers consisted of reporting the state of the union to Congress (a far less formal occasion than what we’re used to every January), receiving Ambassadors, and acting as Commander in Chief should Congress declare war. That’s it.

For roughly the first 100 years of the Republic, Healy notes, President’s kept to the limited role that the Constitution gave them. There were exceptions, of course; most notably Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War but also such Presidents as James Polk who clearly manipulated the United States into an unnecessary war with Mexico simply to satisfy his ambitions for territorial expansion. For the most part, though, America’s 19th Century Presidents held to the limited role that is set forth in Article II, which is probably why they aren’t remembered very well by history.

As Gene Healy notes in his excellent study The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, , it wasn’t until the early 20th Century and the dawn of the Progressive Era that the idea of the President as something beyond what the Constitution said he was took forth. Healy documents quite nicely the ways in which Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson to FDR went far beyond anything resembling Constitutional boundaries to achieve their goals, and how they were aided and abetted in that effort by a compliant Supreme Court and a Congress that lacked the courage to stand up for it’s own Constitutional prerogatives. Then with the Cold War and the rise of National Security State, the powers of the Presidency became even more enhanced. It was also around this time that the Presidency began taking on the airs of royalty and questions of “respect” became relevent.

Professor Althouse puts it well:

I thought the American tradition was disrespecting authority. I can’t remember a President who wasn’t disrespected. (And I can remember back to Eisenhower.) Disrespecting authority is a check on power. When I hear journalists, historians, and other purported experts promoting reverence for the President, I suspect them of having the political agenda of increasing his power.

Indeed. Rather than surrounding our Presidents with an aura of mystique, we should be doing everything to drag them back down to earth where he belongs, regardless of which political party he or she happens to come from.

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Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. The office deserves respect. Those that hold it, not so much.

  2. ponce says:

    I think Obama’s done quite a bit to restore the respect for his office that Bush so very badly tarnished.

  3. rodney dill says:

    No predecessor has opened the office to more ridicule and disrespect than Obama.

  4. michael reynolds says:

    When your historical perspective extends no further than 2 years, please refrain from making vast, sweeping historical generalizations. Too much time is spent by commenters on this blog on what amounts to remedial education.

    When you find yourself wanting to say something that sounds cool — like no predecessor etc… — open up the Google, take a few minutes or even an hour or so to actually peruse the history of US presidents. Pause at Harding, Buchanan, the first Johnson and Nixon.

    And then don’t try to buttress your “historical” case with a link to a poll. It’s silly. Had there been polling during Lincoln’s tenure I doubt his numbers would have impressed 2 years in.

  5. reid says:

    Sure, rodney, whatever you say. You seem to have major hate issues.

  6. anjin-san says:

    > And then don’t try to buttress your “historical” case with a link to a poll.

    The sudden obsession with polling by the right is interesting. When Clinton’s polling numbers where through the roof, the party line was that real leadership was based on conviction, not holding one’s finger to the wind to see which way the wind was blowing. When polling data tells them something they want to hear, the story changes dramatically.

    I expect more of this nonsense. Just a short while back, the right wing noise machine was riding high in the wake of the midterms, telling us of the brave new world at hand. After the pasting Obama gave them during the lame duck session, there is a sudden desperation to get message control back on track.

  7. anjin-san says:

    And Rodney is citing Rasmussen. Now there is a shocker 🙂

  8. ponce says:

    “No predecessor has opened the office to more ridicule and disrespect than Obama.”

    Whenever I see Obama speaking on the TV I realize he’s our President and I start to get a big old grin on my face for some reason.

    I can’t remember that ever happening before, maybe during Reagan’s first term…

  9. michael reynolds says:

    On Doug’s post:

    I’ve never been a forelock-tugger (even when I had a forelock to tug.) I grit my teeth when I hear people refer to the POTUS as “our” commander in chief. Unless you’re a soldier he’s no such thing.

    But I don’t think this is a problem about the presidency or the president, I think it’s a society-wide thing. We’re obsessed with the trivial and no longer respect any notion of privacy or appropriateness. Any sort of formal behavior or reticence in expression is seen as phony. The suggestion that anything should be “none of our business,” gains no traction.

    I think that’s a shame, and I think it’s evidence of an undisciplined mind. But it isn’t just an attitude we cop toward the president, it’s society-wide.

    Personally I’d like us to get out of the business of gossip, get out of personal lives, and then, within the sphere of what is appropriately public, be as brash and disrespectful as occasion warrants.

  10. Michael says:

    For roughly the first 100 years of the Republic, Healy notes, President’s kept to the limited role that the Constitution gave them.

    What? I’m pretty sure that even a cursory review of history would prove that false.

  11. tom p says:

    >”No predecessor has opened the office to more ridicule and disrespect than Obama.”

    Except for his immediate predIcessor (sp? too lazy to look it up)

    Rodney, you really are an idiot. Obama just “lost” a mid-term election in historical proportions…. and then had the GOP for lunch.

  12. anjin-san says:

    > For roughly the first 100 years of the Republic

    Whenever you run into “Republic” “citizen” “militia” and the like being used as buzzwords, you can be fairly certain you have run into a Glenn Beck sock puppet…

  13. Rock says:

    What makes President Obama so great is that he is the President of all 57 states unlike those other fellows who settled for less . . .

  14. An Interested Party says:

    “What makes President Obama so great is that he is the President of all 57 states unlike those other fellows who settled for less . . .”

    Indeed! Isn’t it something that he got elected president even after making a gaffe like that!? Why, there’s hope for Caribou Barbie yet…

  15. rodney dill says:

    peruse the history of US presidents. Pause at Harding, Buchanan, the first Johnson and Nixon.

    Yea, I remember just the other day at the water cooler, one of my co-workers said, ‘I remember having a lot of respect for the Presidency until that Buchanan came along.’ There have been good or bad Presidents, but I don’t see anyone other than modern era presidents that are affecting peoples (other than historian’s) view of the office. The Aura or mystique of the of the current Presidency is mostly affected by Presidents since Eisenhower, or maybe Truman, to present. That leaves Nixon (and the impeached Clinton, who still remains popular) who tarnished his own image, but saved that of the office by resigning.

    And then don’t try to buttress your “historical” case with a link to a poll.

    I’m under no compulsion to explain why people disapprove of Obama, I just listed one of a number of polls that show a trend of disapproval. He likely will get some bounce this term as I’ve posted elsewhere. (Probably by taking credit for any thing the new Congress manages to achieve.)

    Sure, rodney, whatever you say. You seem to have major hate issues.

    Sorry reid, you’re the one raising the ‘hate’ issue. Maybe you are full of it and can’t tolerate those with other views. Please play again when you’ve resolved your ‘hate’ issues.

    Whenever I see Obama speaking on the TV I realize he’s our President and I start to get a big old grin on my face for some reason.

    I agree, clowns make me smile too.

    Obama just “lost” a mid-term election in historical proportions…. and then had the GOP for lunch.

    With the same lame congress elected with promises of hope and change. Sorry to bring your intelligence into question on this, but I thought you would’ve known they haven’t taken office yet. (I do hope someone has gotten around to reading all those laws that were passed.)

    President of all 57 states

    Sigh…. He does make one smile.

    Indeed! Isn’t it something that he got elected president even after making a gaffe like that!? Why, there’s hope for Caribou Barbie yet…

    Precisely… It makes room for someone just as vacuous as Obama to replace him, though I don’t see that happening.

  16. Michael says:

    I’m under no compulsion to explain why people disapprove of Obama, I just listed one of a number of polls that show a trend of disapproval.

    Your claim wasn’t that people currently disapprove of him, your claim was that he’d opened the office to more ridicule than any other president in our history, and then you posted a link to a study that doesn’t back that up.

    It makes room for someone just as vacuous as Obama to replace him

    There’s a difference between a slip of the tongue and being intellectually vacant. Obama never believed there were 57 states.

  17. An Interested Party says:

    “That leaves Nixon (and the impeached Clinton, who still remains popular) who tarnished his own image, but saved that of the office by resigning.”

    Please, as if he had any other choice but resigning…he knew as well as anyone that Congress was well on the road to removing him if he didn’t already remove himself…

    “Precisely… It makes room for someone just as vacuous as Obama to replace him, though I don’t see that happening.”

    While you are questioning the intelligence of others, take a moment to try to hone your sarcasm-detection skills…as Michael wrote, of course the president doesn’t really think there are 57 states…

  18. rodney dill says:

    as Michael wrote, of course the president doesn’t really think there are 57 states…

    Right, and Dan Quayle didn’t really think Potato was spelled with an ‘e’ at the end.

  19. Michael says:

    Right, and Dan Quayle didn’t really think Potato was spelled with an ‘e’ at the end.

    Quayle was relying on the incorrect spelling given to him by the school, rather than his own knowledge. Given that, I’m inclined to believe that he did know the correct spelling of the word, but simply used the “official” spelling given to him..

  20. rodney dill says:

    I’m inclined to believe that he did know the correct spelling of the word, but simply used the “official” spelling given to him..

    and yet still was crucified for the gaffe.

  21. An Interested Party says:

    “…and yet still was crucified for the gaffe.”

    Awwwwww…the same way you would like to crucify the president for misspeaking…

  22. Michael says:

    and yet still was crucified for the gaffe.

    I don’t understand where you’re going with this. Is all your antipathy towards the current President just a way for obtaining retribution for what happened to VP Quayle?

  23. rodney dill says:

    This isn’t about Quayle or the Obama thinking there were 57 states, Someone else brought that one up. that’s just an example of the airheadedness when he doesn’t have a script in front of him.

    the same way you would like to crucify the president for misspeaking…

    I’d settle for equal treatment instead of just lowering the bar for intelligence. This was not a single instance of misspeaking. I’m sure some one has informed him on the correct number of states since then.

  24. RealityBites says:

    The last 4 presidents needed a rope not an office.

    Traitors should be hung, not sure why the bush traitor isn’t swinging in the wind, probably because the rest of DC are traitors, criminals and co – conspirators.

    545 ropes and we can start over.