The In-Box Presidency

What's behind the politics of personality.

Cathy Young from the April 2000 issue

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More particular presidential (or administration) instincts also matter greatly. During the Bush administration, the economic in-box kept filling up with "competitiveness" questions. Trade protection and technology planning were all the rage among policy intellectuals, who panicked over the declining market share of U.S. memory chip makers. Without immediate government action, said the industrial policy gurus, American electronics companies were going to be wiped out by the Japanese. We would soon have no high-tech sector.

Fortunately, administration instincts ran counter to these experts. Bush policy makers did next to nothing about the competitiveness crisis, and by doing nothing helped make the current boom possible. At great political cost but to enormous economic benefit, the Bush administration also let "restructuring" ripple through the American workplace, despite cries that the government should save those big corporate jobs.

Relying on instincts is dangerous, however, especially when something new appears. Teddy Roosevelt's civilization-planning model encourages presidents and legislators to regulate first and ask questions later. It encourages "bold action" that can stifle the decentralized ideas and individual choices from which true "national greatness" springs. McCain's litanies about an "iron triangle" of "big money and lobbyists and legislation" are not reassuring, since he always omits the actual third side of the proverbial triangle: the regulators. ("Big money and lobbyists" are the same team.) And regulators are the ones, some of them anyway, under the president's control.

An in-box president guided only by an inchoate sense of right and wrong--of duty, honor, and country--will expand the size and scope of government unless the climate of opinion says he shouldn't. That's why George Bush became, in Jonathan Rauch's well-documented epithet, "the regulatory president." He didn't know better and succumbed to peer pressure on environmental and workplace regulations.

"McCain's instinctive support for universal [health care] coverage runs headlong into his instinctive opposition to bigger government," writes The New Republic's Jonathan Chait. "Who knows which principle will be left standing?"

Here, then, lies the task for those who would free our civilization from central plans: We must turn the articulated principles of freedom into unarticulated instincts about what is right and what is wrong, what is real and what is fantasy, what is reasonable and what is inconceivable. In an in-box era, the climate of opinion matters more than ever.