Election Series, No. 1

With this article we begin an online series of election-year commentaries by a team of both American and foreign writers. Some articles will evaluate or compare the presidential candidates, others will examine issues that seem most important for voters to consider. We welcome your response to any of the articles, and, with your permission, we will post some of them as commentaries in their own right. The series will run between now and Election Day, November 4.

No. 1—July 12, 2008

Does Our System Demand Too Much of the President?

by James W. Skillen, President, Center for Public Justice

Why do we make such a big deal of the American presidential election every four years? Obviously, the president is the highest executive official of the land. But it is more than that. In our unusual federal system, citizens of the whole country get to vote for only one official—that’s right, only one: the president of the United States. All other elected national leaders—the Congress—are chosen by only a few Americans, either the few that reside in each of the 435 congressional districts for the House of Representatives or the few that live in each state, where state-wide elections for the Senate take place.

Think about it for a moment. In a country of 300 million people, the national citizenry has the opportunity to elect only a single public official.

That’s got to be a drag on something. And in fact, it is. It leads us to expect too much of the president because we, as a national citizenry, have no way to demand much of Congress. American citizens altogether elect not a single member of Congress. Therefore, we have to demand and expect everything of the president who has to be all things to all people. That is impossible, of course, and it is made even more impossible by the fact that the president has to work with a Congress that is less and less responsive to the national citizenry and more and more dependent on interest-group brokering, which yields all too little benefit to the common good of the republic as a whole.

To help expose this deficiency in our system I want to draw on a surprising source. Larry Siedentop, an emeritus fellow of Keble College, Oxford, wrote a commentary in the Financial Times (London, 7/2/08) about the democratic deficit in the European Union (EU). He tries to explain why voters in a recent referendum in Ireland, and two yeas ago in France and The Netherlands, turned down the latest EU proposal to strengthen the governance structure of the EU. Listen to what he has to say and then consider with me its relevance for the democratic deficit in our federal republic.

The primary motive of Irish, Dutch, and French voters, says Siedentop, was to express disgruntlement about their lack of meaningful representation in the governance of the European Union whose parliament has little authority. The parliament “has no hold over European opinion, no ability to mobilize or shape consent across the Union.” What has happened over the last two decades or so is that the national parliaments of the EU’s member states have transferred some of their power to the EU executives in Brussels but have not acquired for citizens across the union a genuinely representative parliament with recognized legitimacy. As a consequence, writes Siedentop, a “generalized cynicism about government is on the rise.”

What liberal democracy is all about, he says, is the protection of “equal fundamental rights, equal liberty. The self-respect following from that principle gives citizens a moral foothold, in the form of self-government, that helps to compensate for the inequalities that market freedoms and civil society create.” Without a similar embodiment of that principle in the EU, people lose self-respect and idealism about European integration and their place in it. Simply enjoying certain economic benefits from EU membership is not enough to make up for the lack of self-government.

American polity

Now, think with me about our American situation. Our federal structure is very old, of course, quite unlike the relatively new EU that has been built up from a customs union of six countries only since World War II and is not yet a full-fledged political entity. But actually, the difference in historical time is not all that great. While our federal system has been in place for more than 200 years, it was only with the Great Depression and World War II that the federal government became a major legislator and adjudicator in national life through Social Security and employment policies, through welfare and education policies, through investment in the national highway system and battles against racial discrimination, and through many other programs of subsidy, insurance, investment, criminal and civil justice, and civil rights.

Our states, in other words, which were never sovereign and self-sufficient like the European states once were, nonetheless have, since World War II, ceded much of their formerly independent responsibility for education, health care, marriage and family, land use, resource development, transportation, and insurance to the federal government. This is not necessarily a bad thing in the historical course of national integration and population growth. Americans now live together in a national polity rather than primarily in state polities in loose relation to one another and to a distant federal government.

What is bad about the political structure of our relatively new national polity, however, is much like what is bad about the structure of the European Union. Our national legislature suffers from a democratic deficit because it simply does not represent us as citizens in our national polity. It represents us only in and from our states and congressional districts. And for that reason, among others, as is evident from opinion polls and voter turnout, “a generalized cynicism about government is on the rise.”

Most of us don’t know who our Member of Congress is or what our Senators stand for and actually accomplish. When it comes to nationwide concerns, we citizens participate more vigorously in interest-group lobbying efforts on particular issues than in the election campaigns of our representatives to the House and the Senate. Americans love the nation but don’t think much of government and bureaucrats. Most express disappointment if not disgust with Congress and feel alienated from the political process. Without the means of voting for nationwide representatives in the House and the Senate, we feel relatively powerless in relation to Congress. 

Look at the excitement Barack Obama’s campaign is generating and all the young people who are coming out to hear him speak and to register to vote. He knows that Americans want change, including change in the way politics is conducted. He says he wants to overcome the interest-group brokering system of Washington politics and government. Expectations are building, as they have built before for other presidents promising to change things, and if Obama is elected, the hopes and expectations will be huge.

However, unless a President Obama (or a President McCain, or any future president) can get Congress and the people to change our electoral system for Congress to a system that makes room for nationally elected Representatives and Senators, he will not be able to fulfill the expectations of those who want change. It is not simply a new president we need; it is an electoral-system change that we need in the context of our federal system that was never designed for popular national representation in Congress.

American idealism

What is interesting about Siedentop’s commentary is that he misses this problem in the American system and mistakenly lauds it for doing what it does not do. “The EU’s failure to appropriate the idealist potential of liberal democracy,” he writes, “stands in contrast to the US.” He points to the Democratic primary race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, which has “revived American idealism. The primaries have restored belief in the political system, its ability to regenerate a society that had lost its bearings. The primaries also educate Americans in the nature of their complex political system.”

In fact, the presidential primary contests do little to educate Americans about our complex political system, because they focus primarily on the personalities of those who are running for president and ignore the democratic deficit represented in Congress. The long primary season directs all our attention to one figure—the only official—who is supposed to embody the nation and its hopes and aspirations. The presidential primaries actually keep citizens from understanding, for example, that the outcome of about 80 to 85 percent of all House and Senate races can be predicted ahead of time because the small (not national) districts for those races have been gerrymandered to assure that the incumbent, or a new candidate of the same party, will win the election. Congress is even less democratic today than it was decades ago.

The fact is that American idealism about government is not growing. Americans do not have high expectations that Congress and a new president will solve the health-care crisis, make Social Security solvent, bring down deficit spending, end the housing and broader economic crises, make higher education more affordable, and make America preeminent and respected in the world again. Unfortunately, too many Americans are now hoping that Barack Obama or John McCain will work a miracle and solve all these problems. But the new president will soon have to be brokering deals with the interest groups that dominate Congress and Americans will likely sour on him quickly when he fails to save America and remake the world.

It won’t be the president’s fault alone if the common good of our national polity is not strengthened within the first few months or the first year of a new presidency. It won’t be the president’s fault alone if our highly diversified citizenry continues to lose political self-respect because we feel we have no influence apart from interest-group pressures in Washington. Our system places too great a burden on the office of the president for the well-being of the nation precisely because of the wider, national democratic deficit. Beyond this year’s election and the one in 2012 and the one in 2016 we need democratic renewal that will enable American citizens to elect and hold accountable nationwide representatives to Congress.