Constitutional Powers and Limits of the Presidency with Lara Brown | BRI Scholar Talks

0:00 what is interesting to me about presidents is that i think there’s a belief that somehow the institution of the presidency will change them that they may be someone before but then they take the oath of office and they will be someone different and i would argue that

0:23 who you are will only manifest more evidently inside the institution of the presidency than not [Music] hi this is tony williams senior fellow at the bill of rights institute and we are pleased to bring you another episode of scholar talks for this episode we’re

0:44 honored to have scholar laura brown who is going to discuss her new book amateur hour presidential character and the question of leadership as part of a new series on the american presidency and the guiding question for this series is what are the constitutional powers and limits of the american presidency now dr laura brown is a professor and

1:06 director of the graduate school of political management at george washington university she’s an expert on national elections candidate strategies political scandals and presidential leadership she has written and edited four books including amateur hour has written for dozens of publications and is a frequent

1:26 uh guest and makes many media appearances sharing her expertise and we’re likely uh lucky to have her uh doing so today so laura thank you for joining me thank you so much for having me here today it’s wonderful to have a chance to speak with you great you know one of the reasons i love

1:46 amateur hour is that it’s not like just a very readable book a nice brief book on presidential leadership kind of throughout history especially our most recent history with some really interesting biographical details and of course an examination of their presidencies which is always fascinating

2:07 but you just write in such a remarkably even-handed way i mean you’re so fair uh you know you’re describing some pretty controversial presidencies you’re looking at republicans and democrats and you know frankly you know i i don’t think a reader would come away knowing where you stand uh personally on your politics so so take that as a real compliment that it a very

2:28 very even-handed book but also some some great analysis of all these different presidencies uh so why don’t we jump into the conversation then uh and my first question is examining uh what you think are the most important traits of presidential character and what impact does character play both in fulfilling

2:49 the various roles of the office but also in in exercising both the constitutional powers but also seeing restraints in the office of the presidency well so first let me just say thanks for the kind words about my writing um i do believe that when we’re trying to understand

3:11 presidents um partisanship really shouldn’t play a role in the sense of my own viewpoint at the end of the day as a scholar i often say what i want personally is really pretty irrelevant what i am interested in is kind of how we can get to really great leadership

3:33 from individual politicians and this is where i sort of look at this in a couple different ways i mean it’s important to understand that my background is really studying kind of um very traditional philosophy right i mean in college and graduate school i did

3:54 read a lot of aristotle and machiavelli and i i’ve thought a lot about leadership broadly it is also true that i wrote my dissertation on kind of the impacts of scandals on incumbent members of congress and what really

4:15 drove that was an interest in character does character matter to the electorate do they really think about or value and way judgments about politicians on their character so this is a book i would say that came out of a lot

4:35 um but it’s really something of a distillation to what i believe which is what heraclitus said um hundreds now thousands of years ago uh that man’s character is his fate and that at the end of the day kind of who you are is what becomes

4:57 in your life and so what is interesting to me about presidents is that i think there’s a belief that somehow the institution of the presidency will change them that they may be someone before but then they take the oath of office

5:17 and they will be someone different and i would argue that who you are uh will only manifest more evidently inside the institution of the presidency than not so i’ll just pause there and we can pick up on any of those threads

5:38 right right so so how does it let’s follow up with that how does it magnify these character traits is it because of the stresses of the office or it’s just characters revealed in these crises or in the everyday stresses of the office domestic international affairs what makes you say that well so the office itself i think is

5:59 interesting and this is the other reason why i tend to study presidential leadership it’s interesting because article 2 is very short and it is very vague and what that means when we think about those constitutional powers is that i believe there is a tremendous amount of latitude

6:21 for the individual to kind of impact the system so while it is true that your agency may not result in grand policies or huge governmental shifts because our government itself kind of rests on a system of separation of powers and

6:42 checks and balances i still believe that the president can change the executive branch quite uh profoundly and that their personal imprint really does make a difference over time um and so what i was what i was kind of interested in

7:03 is right how do we get to the essence of a person um what does a person really sort of do when they are trying to demonstrate leadership and this is where the book kind of digs into this idea that

7:24 character is an internal um sense of oneself reputation is an externally derived kind of judgment and there is i think an imperative on most politicians

7:44 to try to create the most sort of approval from an external standpoint as possible and what that means is that they are often engaged in kind of acting in specific ways

8:05 that they hope will generate the reputation they want and that from that reputation um the public will then infer a specific kind of character um and this is where i think our public pronouncements or judgments or our

8:26 opinion about what kinds of presidents we should have matter tremendously in terms of the kinds of people we get because i think politicians are aiming and aspiring to meet those sorts of judgments as

8:47 often as possible right and and you offered two examples uh of george washington and abraham lincoln as as two exemplars of presidential character of mastery of the office and and ability to to to meet those crises or lay down precedents why

9:07 why washington and lincoln because both of them were internally reflective and externally striving and ambitious for a great amount of approbation from the public i think when you look at both of those men and you look at their lives

9:28 you can’t help but see that these were individuals who they’re kind of original temperaments were not necessarily what they knew would be uh well suited for high office and so they worked on themselves they refined themselves they studied and learned

9:52 how to engage in different kinds of leadership behaviors i basically in my book distill leadership into kind of three big categories one is what i call kind of the courage category and this is where you’re demonstrating some level of strength or

10:15 force or risk taking and then um you know those behaviors kind of begin to be that attribute boy that person has a lot of courage um then there is also another leadership behavior that i call curiosity and it is actually about

10:36 trying to appear discerning or reflective or thoughtful not too hasty and usually when presidents are engaged in kind of curiosity driven leadership behaviors they’ll say things like i think we need to have a commission to study this problem i think you know it’s important

10:58 to ask some experts um they tend to pause and and take a step back and try not to do what you might do if you were in the courage leadership which is russian um and then i think there’s a third kind of leadership behavior that is i call compassion

11:18 and it is really about witnessing the emotional content in the moment right so your job in that kind of leadership role is to reflect the emotions of the public if there is a tremendous amount of anger then it’s

11:38 important to demonstrate that you too have a sense of anger at whatever injustice it is you are witnessing um you you state your feelings right and this is where you are trying to help basically the public and those that you are leading

12:01 kind of digest what is happening and hold the moment hold the symbolism and the content well uh let’s look at some of the more recent uh examples of presidential character uh that maybe uh served the the nation well uh and the office well over the past few decades

12:22 who who demonstrated those those characteristics of courage and and curiosity and and so forth well so i will say that i sort of jokingly refer to these trio of as um the wizard of oz right um in order for dorothy to get down the road at the

12:43 yellow brick road and get home she has to have the you know the cowardly lion the tin man and the scarecrow right this is courage curiosity and compassion and you need all of them um and i think when you look at our contemporary presidents which is really what this book focuses on those presidents from jimmy carter

13:06 through president trump that what you see is that both ronald reagan and bill clinton are probably the most successful at i think doing these kinds of behaviors right they knew when to take kind of a courageous stand they knew

13:26 when to show a sense of compassion they knew when to kind of pause or engage in some levels of curiosity and i don’t think it should surprise us much i mean ronald reagan not only was he a legitimate actor but he was also

13:46 the president of a labor union um for three different terms and then he was governor of california and then he stepped in to the presidency so he was serving in a lot of executive kind of roles where he needed to

14:06 display these kind of different leadership traits at different times um similarly you know bill clinton well he lost a run for the house of representatives early in his political career but then he served as 12 years in the role of governor

14:27 in arkansas and again after 12 years of kind of running and engaging and um leading he certainly knew at the national level what it meant to respond to certain crises in different ways

14:48 and i will say both their presidents had difficult times you know they were not perfect in their terms certainly president reagan had had difficulty when you look at the iran contra scandal um president clinton obviously had the lewinsky scandal but prior to that

15:08 he had a first couple years that were incredibly rocky so even they weren’t um i would say exemplars but they were certainly much further ahead than i think any of our other contemporary presidents were in terms of having the public

15:31 um appreciate the work that they did and look back on their presidencies with some level of kind of reflective nostalgia and i think that that’s important because what they really did try to do was lead the entire nation

15:52 as opposed to only be the partisan warrior um or essentially the very narrow technocrat that we saw some of our other presidents engage with and indeed let’s talk about those other presidents then uh i just we’ve looked at a few uh examples who

16:13 did well uh now maybe provide a few examples where presidential character has fallen short you know and and what are the consequences for for the office itself but also for the country and and maybe even you know the constitution well so let me just say something about jimmy carter because i think he’s so interesting right i mean

16:36 jimmy carter is somebody who really does and most people believe that he has a genuinely sincere warm good character i mean i don’t think there are many people who would malign him but i think what my book tries to show is that he comes at almost everything

17:00 from a place of curiosity and the problem with sort of curiosity being your strongest leadership skill is that you often tend to alienate people um and there were ways in which i think you know president carter just was not adept at the at the kind of

17:23 compassion side of the equation which then left him so vulnerable when the economy was faltering or when um people were kept asking you know why isn’t there more going on with the iran iranian hostage situation because

17:43 he kept sort of relying on the experts and he was in some ways neither willing to take the risk that would have would put him in the courage place and then when it came to gas prices he couldn’t really understand the compassionate side of the equation so this is where i do think it’s a

18:03 it’s a fascinating thing because the bigger question is does the man meet the moment um or is that moment sort of needing a different man right um and obviously i say that with the idea that at some point i hope there will be women in this office um but for now

18:25 it has been men and what we have seen is that some have really you know faltered i mean i i do think that i’m i’m kind of equally harsh to both george w bush and barack obama um and it is not to say that i think either individual is sort of a bad person i just

18:48 don’t think that their prior experience really um suited them for office and i think their prior experience kind of set them each up to be real true partisan base warriors

19:09 and that ended up creating i think some of the polarization uh that we are living with now and that sort of president trump only uh amplified and he certainly did that as as you described in in the book uh with with numerous examples so uh so so my last question is is how can

19:31 we reverse this trend towards amateur hour then and maybe get you get an office occupied uh by more experienced uh sort of less celebrity presidents and and presidents who really have those those three c’s uh to to provide you know and restore the presidential

19:52 character so that it might support you know constitutionalism greater restraint but also greater prestige for the office yeah so this is where it’s interesting and i’ll sort of just hearken back to both uh george h.w bush um as well as current president joe biden

20:14 um both of them had a tremendous amount of experience and so a lot of people say to me but lara you know a lot of people with a great amount of experience haven’t necessarily succeeded in uh these in the presidential office and i would say that is true

20:35 but again i think what you have to understand is what is the nature of their experience um i do think that that the senate generally is a poor training ground for the presidency it is partly a poor training ground because you are

20:56 one of a hundred who are in a very elite position and you are very secure politically in the sense that your seat only comes up once every six years and it’s also true that when you’re one of a hundred you can kind of hide um so this is where i would say that i think

21:16 probably um governorships are a better uh training ground that being said uh governors are never gonna know how washington works and so this is also where it’s going to be rocky if you come from that sort of a background but i do

21:38 believe and i do make the argument in the book that the most dangerous background is not necessarily senator or somebody like george h.w bush where he was a little bit more like herbert hoover where he had had a lot of positions but not necessarily always elected positions um

21:58 and this is where i say the worst thing and the most dangerous thing is somebody who has no attachment to our political system whatsoever and what i mean by that is they have no prior elective office experience they might not even have political science or law as as a background in

22:18 their education i think what we know about former president trump is what we would know about you know ben affleck or um you know any of the other sort of you know matthew mcconaughey democrats who who have said that they have kind of larger ambitions and that is

22:40 that they don’t fundamentally understand the nature of our democratic system they don’t respect or appreciate checks and balances prerogatives and constraints and i don’t think they perceive the role

23:00 of the president as anything other than a ceo and that is a really bad model um for what a president in a democratic system that does have separation of powers that does appreciate and have to deal with a

23:21 tremendous amount of federalism and kind of local politics as well it’s a it’s a completely different world and i think it is very dangerous when you select people who are being selected because they are a celebrity

23:41 and because you think you know them you think you like their um kind of known public behavior which might be quite frankly pretty awful um and what you find out is really all they are is their celebrity and not

24:04 much else well we’ll have to be a little wary of uh jeffy’s house and elon musk and jay-z and and oprah winfrey and and all the rest uh so yeah i mean you can go back to ross perot you know i mean i do think that this idea that you can know nothing about our

24:26 system and that will help you manage and succeed in our system is probably one of the most naive and ridiculous kind of logics that americans have said to themselves because quite frankly it is true that people say oh well politics is the only profession

24:47 where you don’t need any experience um there is no way in the world that our framers would have ever believed that and they were certainly not the gentleman farmers of myth they were men who were deeply engaged in political and civic conversation for

25:10 decades before they stepped in to any official offices in our country an excellent point to end on uh laura i want to thank you very much for joining us the book is amateur hour presidential character and the question of leadership thank you again thank you tony and thank you all for

25:31 joining us on this episode of scholar talks please check out our other interviews in the series on the american presidency and from our extensive library of interviews on the topic including the cold war and the presidency series steve knott on the constitutional and populist presidency and sarah burns on the presidency and war powers also please check out our

25:52 highly popular bri curriculum presidents and the constitution thank you for joining us