Caesaropapism Rampant

If you can name it, presidents are responsible for it. The name for this is infantilization. "The average American," said President Richard Nixon, "is just like the child in the family—you give him some responsibility and he is going to amount to something." Vice President Al Gore said the government should act like "grandparents in the sense that grandparents perform a nurturing role."

Such demented talk encourages presidential candidates to make delusional promises—energy independence in eight years (Mike Huckabee), "an excellent teacher in every classroom" and "every school an outstanding school" (John Edwards, who presumably knows how every school can stand out when all are outstanding), a "perfect" nation (see above) and so on.

The last presidential candidate to talk sense about the office was fictional. In an episode of NBC's "The West Wing," the Republican candidate, who was not the hero, was asked, "How many jobs will you create?" "None," he replied, adding: "Entrepreneurs create jobs. Business creates jobs. The president's job is to get out of the way."

An occupational hazard of the inflated presidency is a hazard to the nation. It is what Healy (borrowing a term from psychiatry) calls Acquired Situational Narcissism. As repositories of absurd expectations, and surrounded by sycophants, presidents become deranged. Inevitably, the inflation of expectations causes what Healy calls an "arc of disillusionment" that diminishes one president after another.

Michelle Obama says, "Barack will never let you go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed." Leaving aside the insult—her opinion that we are uninvolved and uninformed—do we really elect politicians to yank us out of our usual lives? Americans are said to be cynical about politics. Actually, they are presidential romantics. Which is why they suffer serial disappointments.

Immediately after Nov. 4, the media will foster feverish speculation about how the president-elect will satisfy the now normal expectations for a hyperkinetic "100 days." That phrase entered America's political lexicon with Franklin Roosevelt's flurry of activism following his 1933 Inaugural Address. In it, FDR, adopting the war paradigm so favored by presidents even in peacetime, urged Americans to "move as a trained and loyal army," submitting their "lives and property" to "a common discipline" with "a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife."

The original phrase "100 days" was about real war—the days after Napoleon's escape from Elba. They ended at Waterloo, which the president-elect should remember, but won't.

© 2008