The Presidency, Can Anyone Do the Job? 汉译

The inauguration of a new President is the central sacrament of American democracy—a time of rekindled hope and rising expectation. Its air of renewal has been heightened in this dour winter by Ronald Reagan’s promise of “a new beginning” for the nation and by the glow of ruddy Sun Belt optimism he brings to it. Yet the office Reagan is inheriting from Jimmy Carter comes burdened with an agenda of intractable problems and a twenty year record of disappointment at dealing with them. The Presidency has in some measure defeated the last five men who have held it—and has persuaded some of the people who served them that it is in danger of becoming a game nobody can win.

Reagan and his court are convinced that he can make the office work—that the times are right and that, as he put it to Newsweek, “The tools are there.” But some of those tools have rusted or broken, some have been mishandled by his predecessors—and no one since Dwight Eisenhower has managed even to last out two full terms. John F. Kennedy died with his program becalmed and his promise unrealized. Lyndon Johnson squandered his gifts and his landslide mandate on Vietnam and was forced to stand down. Richard Nixon resigned a steep ahead of his certain impeachment in the Watergate scandals. Gerald Ford was voted out of office after two years, and now Jimmy Carter, after four. The record is discouraging on its face.

The Presidency has survived hard times and ordinary men before, and so has the romance Americans attach to it—the dream that it can still be made to work wonders if only Mr. Right comes along. A sizable number of scholars and practitioners of Presidential power still believe that the fault lies not in the office but in the men who have lately held it. Kennedy, in this view, was cut down before he had a fair chance at Presidenting, and his successors fell victim to their own deficiencies of skill, honor or leadership. The powers available to an Abraham Lincoln or a Franklin Roosevelt are still there, says Prof. Richard Pious of Columbia University, waiting only for “someone who knows how to be President.” Those who admire Reagan believe that he is the man. Those who do not are still waiting for Mr. Right—and, in rising chorus, lamenting the state of a political process that somehow presented the voters with a choice between Reagan and Carter instead.

But others inside the White House and out have come to believe that the job as now holds it. The Presidency is an eighteenth-century invention up against the problems of the late twentieth; it has never been as all-powerful as a generation of civics texts made it seem, and it has been further reduced by the reaction—some say overreaction—to its Empire Period under Johnson and Nixon. Congress thereafter began limiting the instruments of Presidential power, and presidents shucked away some of its trappings. Gerald Ford toasted his own English muffins and banged his head on helicopter doors. Jimmy Carter toted his own suit bag, sold the yacht “Sequoia”, retired “Hail to the Chief” from active duty—and discovered too late that his fade away public persona had made America rather miss the Imperial Presidency. “The pendulum,” says his man Alonzo McDonald, “is on a pretty straight imperialistic swing right now.”

The concern more frequently pressed today is not whether the Presidency is imperial but whether is important. Reagan arrives in the White House at a time when the nation has touched the limits of its growth, its resources and its dominance in the world. He comes with a rough mandate to cool inflation, cut back Big Government and stand up to the Russians, with no clear consensus as to how. The Congress awaiting him is atomized, undisciplined, and after Vietnam and Watergate, resistant to Presidential leadership. The bureaucracy nominally under his control is huge and probably unmanageable. The Cabinet government he proposes to install has not worked for anyone since Ike. The media watching and judging him have grown suspicious of presidents to the point, some say, of cynicism. His maneuvering room has been narrowed by what U. S. Rep. Richard Cheney, once Ford’s chief of staff, calls a “crippling” overconcern with the potential abuse of Presidential power—not its effective use.