West Wing - What's the Point of the President?

 One of the earliest written models for ideal government was in Plato's Republic. He advocates for a philosopher king; the wisest and most qualified should rule with absolute authority. When I was younger and more idealistic (possibly naive), this seemed to be an unequivocally great suggestion. Of course the ruler, or in the case of the United State the president, should be the wisest and most meritorious person. Why wouldn’t you want the best and the brightest to be making decisions? The point of the president is to be smart enough to set everything right. Or so I thought. Three things have changed how I think of the job of the president. First, I know more about history. Second, I’ve been watching a lot of the show West Wing with my wife (and you can check out her thoughts here!). Finally, the course of events in this year, 2020. 

As I’ve learned more about history, my extremism, as well as my idealism, has been somewhat tempered. What drove my commitment to ultra meritocracy was a genuine belief that we could find the perfect person to be president. They'd be brilliant, and through their singular brilliance they'd solve America's problems. Now, I have no confidence in our collective ability to find the right person to be president. Even if we did, it probably wouldn’t go as well as I hoped. If I was designing someone to be the perfect president they’d look like John Quincy Adams, who spoke multiple languages, grew up in various national capitals, served as ambassador for multiple countries in multiple administrations, practiced law, and served in the Senate (it helps when your dad was president). And how was he as president? Most scholarly surveys put him at about 20 out of 44. So not terrible, but nobody is waxing poetic about the political golden age that was the second Adams administration. It turns out that even when meritocracy works, we still don't get a perfect country.

By the time we reached 2020, I'd backed down from my testing to find the best president stance, but I still thought the president should be a policy leader, guiding their party, and the nation through setting a legislative agenda. West Wing follows the Democratic administration of Josiah ‘Jeb’ Bartlet. It’s an up-close look at the executive branch. The show, in many ways, is the fulfillment of my meritocratic dream. Before he became president, Bartlet was a professor at Notre Dame, he won the Nobel Prize for Economics, and served as the governor of New Hampshire. But at the nitty-gritty level that West Wing operates, it doesn’t really matter that Bartlet is a former professor and a Nobel Laureate. His aides, not the brilliant Bartlet, write his speeches and shape his policy positions. His vast knowledge doesn't play much of a role when most of his job boils down to making decisions with incomplete information. He's not crafting economic proposals to set the country straight, he can barely keep his head above water. All he can do is listen and try to make the best decision in uncertain circumstances.

The third thing that finalized my perspective on the presidency was Coid-19. If 2020 has taught us anything, is that life is always on the brink of uncertain circumstances. A novel virus emerged and suddenly in March, the entire world changed. At the time I’m writing this, over 170,000 Americans have died of Covid-19. That’s about 2.5 times the American deaths in the War in Vietnam, and about 55 times more American deaths than 9/11. And while I think we could have done a little more to prepare for Covid-19 (given the history of SARS and MERS) there are always going to be events that catch the president flat footed. No matter how qualified a person is, they’re never going to be an expert in everything, and, like with Covid-19, much will be unknown. No one in 2016 would have set a legislative agenda outlining the steps they would take against a pandemic, but that is the issue that overwhelms almost everything else going into the 2020 election.

So what's the point of the president? I really love the character of Jeb Bartlet. He’s funny in a wry way, unbelievably nerdy and knowledgeable. He’s a good man, and a thoughtful Catholic. I want all of those things from a president. I also want them to be competent and experienced in the way Bartlet is. But for all of his great qualities and merits, the world is uncertain, and he won’t always know the best way to lead us into the unknown. In light of this, I think his most important trait is his decisiveness. The point of the president is to make decisions. When the endless string of duties come to the Resolute Desk, the president needs to make a decision. They need to stand by the decisions that are worth standing by, and take responsibility for the ones that are not. The president must recognize that they can’t solve everything, and listen, reevaluate, and change courses when they get better information. Bartlet is great not because he’s qualified, but because he’s willing to accept censure when he makes mistakes, and learn from them. 

In Federalist 70, Alexander Hamilton argued that a single person, the president, should hold all executive power because a multiplicity of executives "tends to conceal faults and destroy responsibility." If just one person is making the decisions, we know who is responsible for the executive branch of the Federal Government. When they make poor decisions, they should acknowledge their fault, take responsibility for it, and change course. Crisis will inevitably strike during the presidency, whether economic, national security, international affairs, or, as in the present, a pandemic. Even though the information will be incomplete and the path forward uncertain, the president cannot say they “take no responsibility” for these crises. They must say, like Dwight Eisenhower, "the buck stops here." And if the decisions reveal faults and unwillingness to change for the better, it is our duty as voters to hold the president accountable. 

This may be just a justification for the current political predicament. I would rather vote for Bartlet than Biden, but because I’m voting for Biden I have to write this article to be okay with settling. And maybe that is part of it, but when we remember the presidents of the past, the great ones are not always the most brilliant or the most qualified. The great presidents faced uncertain futures, like the Civil War, the founding of America, the Great Depression, and World War II, and despite that uncertainty they took action. Some of their decisions were questionable, but they were willing to bend to contingency. They did not ignore the crisis. They did not blame others. They took responsibility, took action, and changed when need be.