Tricky Dick Broke the Presidency
It’s sometimes hard to remember how shaken we all were by Watergate. (By “all,” I mean people who recognized how aberrant the president’s behavior was, not the apologists whose children and grandchildren became part of the Trump base.) But we may not realize how badly he broke the political system – particularly the Presidency.
To prepare to write today’s essay, I looked at the political experience of all the men elected to the office of President since its inception – 1788 – and found some interesting patterns.
Up until 1900, there were only three Presidents who came to the office without being either elected or appointed to national office. Zachary Taylor and Ulysses S. Grant rode their military reputations to the top office. Taylor died after 1 year in office, but Grant served two full terms. Later in the century, New York Governor Grover Cleveland won the Presidency twice – in 1884 and 1892, with Benjamin Harrison slipping in between the two separated terms.
Prior to 1900, all of the presidential candidates with national government experience had been elected to national office – either the House, the Senate, or the Vice Presidency. After 1900, some of the men elected President had been appointed to their Washington positions.
Both Roosevelts had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy – Teddy for one year, FDR for seven years.
Hoover was Director of the US Food Administration during World War I and Secretary of Commerce for seven years
Taft was Solicitor General of the US for two years (which means he argued cases before the Supreme Court) and served in diplomatic positions in the Philippines and Cuba.
Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1912 without ever serving in Washington in any capacity. That didn’t happen again until President Eisenhower was elected in 1952 – mirroring the achievements of Taylor and Grant in the previous century.
But now look at the Presidency since the 1970s, when Nixon and Watergate made “Washington” a swear word, “inside the Beltway” a pejorative, and “the swamp” a synonym for national public service. Five of the ten presidents who served since Nixon’s resignation in 1974 came to the office as complete national political outsiders.
When Carter ran in 1976, he campaigned as an outsider, a peanut farmer from Plains, someone who was not part of “that mess in Washington.” His campaign shtick regularly included the line “I will never lie to you.” That was the title of his 1976 campaign autobiography. The fact that this was a successful selling point for his campaign tells you how badly Nixon had damaged our politics. But Carter attempted to govern as an insider, using the traditional levers of power to get things done in government. It didn’t work out well for him, and Ronald Reagan defeated him convincingly in 1980.
Reagan also ran as an outsider, but he remained an outsider even when he was inside. He famously proclaimed in his first inaugural address that “government is not the solution to our problem – government is the problem.” His policy focus included “devolution,” which means returning power (and money) to the states. He had risen to power in California because of his B-Movie movie career, and he rode that career to the governorship of California and then galloped on to the White House. When he was at home on his California ranch, he was often photographed clearing brush or doing other ranch-y things. White House guest lists during his presidency were full of the Hollywood glitterati. Clearly he was distancing himself from Washington.
George H. W. Bush was an insider, but he was the Republican nominee in 1988 only because of his connection with Reagan. He somewhat ludicrously tried to use the “outsider” label, but this was a hard sell for the blue-nose son of Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush. As former director of the CIA, ambassador to China, and head of the Republican National Committee, his claim to “outsider” status wasn’t believable, and, once Reagan left office, Bush saw his political fortunes wither with his loss to Bill Clinton in 1992.
Clinton was another outsider – the “Man from Hope,” governor of Arkansas with a Yale and Rhodes Scholar background. But he was able to use folksy charm to win over voters, and he was successful in battling the entrenched power in Washington to win a second term as President.
Along came George W. Bush, son of George H. S. Bush, who hailed from Texas and owned a ranch on which he was also regularly photographed clearing brush. It seems unlikely that the grandson of Prescott Bush and son of Washington insider George H. W. Bush could sell himself as an outsider, but this is what he did. He rode this image to two terms in the White House.
President Obama is the least inside of the insider Washington presidents of the last century. He was in the middle of his first term in the Senate when he announced his candidacy for the Presidency, but he didn’t emphasize his Washington experience during the campaign. He ran on the platform of “hope” and “change,” and youthful exuberance. He won the presidency twice.
Then came Trump. He ran against Washington when it suited him – calling it “the swamp” and criticizing the dedicated core of civil servants as “the Deep State;” but we all remember that he embraced Roger Stone, the “dirty trickster” who had aided Nixon during the years leading up to the Watergate break-in and subsequent scandal. Trump’s chaotic and dysfunctional campaign in 2016 was successful in winning him the presidency – and the chaotic and dysfunctional term in office that followed damaged America’s political institutions in ways we don’t fully comprehend yet. Trump is unique among all of the men who have held the presidency in his disdain for public service at any level. Alone among all of the men who have been president, Trump was never elected to any office, never appointed to a position of public trust, never led troops in battle before ascending to the Presidency. We should not be surprised that he did not know how to do the job. How hard could it be, right? What do those people in government do, anyway?
President Biden is the only true Washington insider to hold the Presidency since Nixon himself. He was elected because enough voters understood that the country needed someone at the helm who knew how the system worked. He worked with two other masters of Washington politics – Senator Chuck Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi – to have a remarkable first two years in office despite the shenanigans coming from the other side of the aisle. Amateur hour had gone on for too long.
This is not of just historical interest. Public opinion polling has been around only since the 1940s or so, but here’s how public trust in the federal government has changed since 1960.
We may not have learned this lesson. If you’ve been paying attention over the past few months, the most prominent name floated as a Trump opponent for the GOP presidential nomination is Ron DeSantis – governor of Florida with no experience in national politics. And if President Biden decides not to run, two names I heard mentioned on a podcast last week as possible frontrunners were Democratic governors – Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Gavin Newsom of California. Their lack of federal government experience is seen as a feature, not a bug, of their potential candidacies. I’m not sure we can survive a return of the political amateurs to the presidency.
The impact of this anti-Washington mentality has spread to Congress as well. In the pre-Watergate years, men elected to Congress (and they were almost all men) brought their families with them and made Washington their home – or at least their home-away-from-home. When I taught briefly at National Cathedral School in the late 1970s, I had children of Congressmen in my classes. Members of Congress went back to their home districts or states regularly, but not every weekend.
In 1995, however, Speaker Newt Gingrich reduced the workweek in the House from five to three days in order to give his Republican caucus more time to fund-raise. You can look it up. https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1168&context=curej The Capitol building is now virtually empty on Mondays and Fridays.
The result is that members of both the House and Senate are increasingly isolated from one another except when they are actually at work. They no longer buy or rent homes large enough to host social events with other members of Congress. They don’t bring their families to Washington, so their children don’t go to the same (private) schools or play on the same Little League teams. Jimmy Carter was the last president to send his daughter to public school in DC.
Dozens of members live in their offices – including former Speaker Paul Ryan. Some set up group housing arrangements; three prominent Democrats – Senator Chuck Schumer of NY, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, and former Rep. George Million of California, shared a Capitol Hill rowhome until 2014.
One of the results of these changes can be seen in Gallup polling, which shows that disdain for Washington has spilled over into institutions other than the presidency. In 1973, 77% of respondents to the question “How much confidence do you have in Congress” answered either “some,” “quite a lot,” or “a great deal.” In 2022, only 42% of respondents chose those answers.
The Congress has problems that will not be resolved if members somehow all decided to move permanently to Washington. But it might solve some problems.
It would also help if we chose national political leaders who had some vague notion of how national politics worked. Because public trust and confidence in government is so low, any asshat who wants publicity can decide that running for national office is just the way to get on Fox News. I mean, how hard can it be, right? And Republican voters, who have no more respect for Washington than the candidates do, vote them into office. So we have George Santos, Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz – you can name them. They’re not interested in governing. They just want to be noticed.
And they prove their point every damn day. Elect clowns, expect a circus.