A lot of people want the President of the United States to save us from our enemies,
from the economy and other really big things. So we're trying to figure out what kind of
power does the President really have? To answer that question we sat down with George Edwards,
distinguished professor of political science and a leading scholar on the presidency.
Uh, the President has much less power than people think and they have much less power
than you would think from what you hear candidates promise on the campaign trail. And I don't
mean that the promises aren't sincere because almost always they are. But Presidents, once
they take office run into some pretty hard realities and the first reality is that they
rarely can act unilaterally. They share power primarily with Congress and Congress often,
in modern American politics, is populated with the opposition as it is right now. And
so presidents come in and think that after two years of campaigning they must be pretty
persuasive fellows, after all they won the big prize in politics and they have been basically
doing nothing but talking for two years. But that's a bit different because you were simply
drawing a comparison with another candidate. And that's different than convincing people
to support a particular piece of policy. And it's almost always the case that the public
doesn't move in the President's direction or it actually moves a little bit in the opposite
direction. So presidents generally fail in their efforts to move the public and therefore
they don't have the kind of leverage that they want in moving Congress.
So if we can't expect the President to just fly in and save the day, how do we get anything
done in this country?
The Founding Fathers, they knew what they were doing. They divided power. They decentralized
power. They specifically designed an inefficient system and that forces deliberation and it
forces compromising. So if there's no people in the middle, if there's no people with whom
you can cut a deal and if compromise becomes a dirty word and you're viewed as a traitor
to your party then there's very little chance of doing something. I'll give you an example.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a very smart guy and a long time clear conservative, and he found
that just by talking to the White House and trying to work out issues on climate change
and on immigration that he was condemned by his own party. That's just an example of the
kinds of problems that you face when everyone must feel that the opposition party are untrustworthy
and therefore you can't compromise with them. So to bring about change you have to compromise.
That is a good thing, in my mind. And voters have to support candidates who are willing
to compromise. You have to be willing to give up something. You can't argue that I should
get everything I want and the other side can have nothing that they want and you've got
to support candidates who are willing to talk to the other side sincerely and to compromise.
And I don't know any other way to actually deal with the kinds of problems that we face.
All right. Thanks for chatting with us.
Thank you. Bye-bye.
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