Choosing A President

By Scott Benjamin

Instead of focusing on who is ahead in the polls, who has raised the most money, or who is flip-flopping on the issues, voters might be able to better predict the future by analyzing the leadership skills and personalities of major-party presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Over the last generation, some scholars have provided insight into how a president might perform.

We’re sometimes surprised by what the chief executive does: Inflation caused conservative Richard Nixon to invoke mandatory wage-price controls; Bill Clinton’s economic program, at times, looked like it came out of the Eisenhower Administration; and George W. Bush went from being the president who was going to reform education to overseeing the operations of two wars simultaneously.

For that matter, who would have ever thought that Lyndon Johnson would escalate a war in a Third World country; that Nixon would resign in disgrace; or that Barack Obama, who in 2008 couldn’t find an arena large enough to hold all the people who wanted to hear him speak, would hardly hear his name mentioned six years later by Democratic congressional candidates seeking re-election.

Perhaps the best source for determining White House performance is The Presidential Character, the 1972 book written by the late James David Barber, a Duke University Political Science professor who had taught former U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Stamford) in the early 1960s when he was a student at Yale.

Barber classified presidents as being Active-Positive, adaptive; Active-Negative, compulsive; Passive-Positive, compliant; and Passive-Negative, withdrawn.

Barber, who updated his book through President George H.W. Bush, stated that the Active-Positive presidents are the most successful. They are self-confident, flexible, create opportunities for action, enjoy the exercise of power, do not take themselves too seriously, are optimistic, emphasize the rational mastery of their environment and use power as a means to achieve beneficial results.

Barber wrote that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Gerald Ford and H.W. Bush were Active-Positive presidents.

Former state Sen. Jamie McLaughlin (R-32), who lived in Woodbury and Brookfield and now resides in Darien, has said that while in his graduate program at Harvard, the late Richard Neustadt, the presidential scholar, told the class that the president “is the conductor of a moving symphony” and needs to be able to follow where public opinion is taking the country.

This theory appears to conform to the analysis of George Edwards, the Texas A&M presidential scholar, who has stated that presidents should focus on identifying and exploiting available opportunities.

Bill Clinton, for example, rebounded from the devastating 1994 mid-term elections by embracing deficit reduction and welfare reform after negotiating with Republican leaders and easily captured a second term two years later.

However, Bill Curry of Farmington, the former two-time Democratic gubernatorial candidate who worked in the Clinton White House for two years, has lamented that most presidents are better at marketing than administration because marketing is what most determines whether they get elected.

Kit Dobelle, whose husband was the president of Trinity College in Hartford, has said that her experiences working in the White House for Carter and former first lady Rosalyn Carter taught her that since it doesn’t have royalty, in the United States the president is both the head of government and the head of state. She has said the successful presidents usually master both roles.

She said Carter excelled at government policies but had little interest in “calling someone on the phone to wish them happy birthday.” She said she thought that former President Ronald Reagan, who succeeded Carter, was better at the role of head of state. PBS anchor Judy Woodruff wrote in her 1982 memoir, when she was covering the White House for NBC News, that Reagan called her at the hospital hours after her first child was born.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman told Charlie Rose of PBS in December 2008 that what President-elect Obama needed to do was get the public to have supreme confidence in his decision-making.

“Ronald Reagan had it, at times Bill Clinton had it,” Friedman said. “They would announce a policy and the public would just say that we know what you will do the right thing and you don’t need to provide us with the details.”