“President Obama went back to his
vacation on Martha’s Vineyard Tuesday evening after spending less
than 48 hours in Washington, leaving people puzzled over why he
came back in the first place,” Justin Sink
wrote yesterday at The Hill. Actually, Obama probably
dropped into Washington, D.C., in August—not the most pleasant time
of year to visit the swamp that neither Virginia nor Maryland
wanted—because he was getting his balls busted from every
ideological point on the compass over his absence. Why won’t he
do something about the unrest in Ferguson and ISIL
beheading James Foley?
Ummm…What? Exactly?
In his excellent book,
The Cult of the Presidency (text
here), Gene Healy warns that Americans have come to see the
inhabitant of the White House as “Chief Legislator, Manager of
Prosperity, Protector of the Peace, World Leader—and more.” He
penned that book during the Bush administration, but later
wrote for Reason that “When it comes to presidential
cults, Barack Obama has turned out to be the gift that keeps on
giving.”
The White House is now reportedly reviewing and
throttling even basic requests for federal records. The New
York Times‘ James Risen was almost late to the party when he
called the current president “the greatest enemy to press
freedom in a generation.” This administration has expanded on its
predecessors’ penchant for
invoking “national security” as an excuse to hide its missteps
and thwart judicial review of official errors, let alone
abuses.
“America is dropping like a stone in rankings of freedom. As
power accumulates in one person, expect that to continue,” says
Frank Buckley, author of the recent book,
The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in
America.
Buckley
sat for an interview with Reason TV in which he explained the
rise of this country’s elective monarchy and the dangers that
poses.
Both Healy and Buckley point out that this isn’t the result of a
coup—Americans let it happen.
We push the process along when we insist that the Lord High
Protector of the Realm give up a round of golf to reassure the
nation about…everything. So he troops home and delivers empty
words about terrorist atrocities in foreign lands and
long-developing racial tensions and lousy law-enforcement practices
in various localities at home. Then he plans some sort of action so
that he won’t be blamed for inaction, even if that’s what he should
deliver.
The president, fortunately, doesn’t have the unilateral power to
salve all our wounds and solve all our problems, but inhabitants of
the office are more than willing to accumulate authority if we
insist—either because they love the power itself or because they
want to be seen “doing” something so we’ll leave them the hell
alone to play some golf and then fade off onto the lecture circuit
after the four- or eight-year nightmare is over.
The presidency is long since “a constitutional monstrosity, too
powerful to be trusted and too weak to deliver the miracles we
crave,” Healy noted in his 2012 article for Reason.
Most problems are beyond the reach of the presidency. They would
be beyond its reach even if the office were entrusted with absolute
power, though Americans often seem wiilling to test that theory.
But most problems have to be resolved by people close to them, and
some can’t be resolved at all.
That’s life.
The United States started with a federal system so that policy
could be experimented with locally, and so could policy mistakes.
The country also started with a limited government out of
recognition that even saints wielding unlimited power will do much
more harm than good by trying to perfect an imperfect world.
At the end of the day, the president is one guy. He has a lot of
power and responsibility, but we’ve already given him too much of
both in expectation that he’ll address more woes than any
institution, let alone individual, could fix.
Leave Obama (and his successors)
alone to golf. The solutions to most problems lie
elsewhere.
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