It gets suggested or hinted at often enough, but what would really happen if for some unforeseen turn of events, a Trump/Bloomberg/Forbes/Gates/etc. became POTUS? I realize they all have different views on politics, but are there some general approaches to running this country (and their outcomes) a billionaire would have, in your opinion?
There are.
You’re fired.
It’s not as though the ones we’ve had are paupers, you know. George W. Bush had a net worth of ~$30 million when he was originally elected. The Clintons were worth something like $5 million when Bill entered office; ironically, most of it was Hilary’s private-sector income.
Depends on the billionaire. I think a Bloomberg administration and a Trump administration would not have many similarities.
The 10 richest presidents - adjusted for inflation.
These run the gamut from some of our greatest presidents to mediocrities to a couple of disasters. Given this, and the fact that rich people exhibit considerable political diversity, I can’t see that we can draw a firm conclusion on this point.
“If elected I promise to give $20 to each and every American citizen.”
This question goes to the myth of presidential power, so as a myth let’s squash that sucker.
There are independents in high office. Two Senators, Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman, were elected as Independents. One is a Socialist, the other is basically a Republican but both caucus with the Democrats. Why? Because if they didn’t align themselves with one of the major parties they would be nothings with no power and no influence.
If a billionaire won as an independent, on the lines of the Ross Perot campaigns, he or she would have to make that same choice. When that happens, there’s nothing really to talk about.
But imagine a true nutcase who somehow slips through on charisma. What happens then? The new President has to choose a Cabinet, a multitude of high-level advisors, the heads of all the independent agencies, and all new federal judges. Where are they going to come from? There is no pool of experienced independents in this country. Either a party preference will be betrayed by the choices or else an incompatible, unworkable group of fiefdoms with warring policies will result. Lincoln may have brought some of his political enemies into his cabinet, but those days are long gone. A President may appoint one Cabinet member from the opposite party but that’s for looks, not policy. (FDR appointed several Republicans, but they were Progressive Republicans who were more liberal than most Democrats at the time: not a precedent.)
And laws come from Congress. Sure the President can submit as many bills as wanted and always submits budgets, but then what? What incentive would a Congress composed of two parties who want to recapture the Presidency in the next election have to cooperate? Because the people want it? The People want nice simple soundbites, but you can’t make them fight for all the clauses in a 1200-page bill. Once in office, the public will provide the new President a short honeymoon and then move into their normal mode of “what have you done for me lately?”
And how would foreign policy be handled? Foreign leaders already judge Presidents by how much power they have to enact the policies they propose. Why would anybody pay attention to an Independent President at war with Congress? He’d have to turn into Kim Jun Un and start lobbing missiles around.
The best possible outcome would be four years of drifting; the worst and far more likely would be four years of chaos.
An independent loose cannon President is a subject for a novel, where the writer is god and can control everyone’s actions. In the real world, it would be an unworkable nightmare, no matter what beliefs or policies the President might have. Fortunately for us, it can’t happen.
Sorry all you third party advocates. Keep your religious utopias out of my real-world politics.
All the heads of the Occupy Wall Street people would explode and us poor slubs the 1%ers would have to import new [del]slaves[/del] help from other countries to clean up the mess.
I totally disagree. Party is very important in elections and Congress, but a vast amount of power in the American system is exercised by those who not in their positions because of patronage or politics, and derive their power from our laws. That’s the large numbers of civil servants (or bureaucrats, if you prefer) employed by the Executive Branch. The legitimacy of any given person in the Executive Branch has a great deal to do with their lawful powers and duties, as opposed to someone in the Legislative Branch where power goes hand-in-hand with seniority, fundraising, committee assignments, and similar sorts of things. There’s no comparing the two.
“All new Federal judges?” I’m assuming you made a slip-up there.
But an independent president can tap a heck of a lot of people for Cabinet and other appointive jobs. Just recently, Obama kept Robert Gates in as Secretary of Defense for nearly three years (and that’s not a position you give away “for looks”), not to mention Ray LaHood at Transportation and Jon Huntsman as Ambassador to China. Those are substantive positions. Clinton appointed the moderate Republican Bill Cohen to Secretary of Defense. The ability of the Cabinet to get along and not backstab each other depends on making good picks of good people, not on party affiliation.
Totally disagree. If the office of the President of the United States can get along with a non-intellectual like George W. Bush, someone suffering early stage Alzheimers like Reagan, a philanderer like Clinton (and so on), nothing in Washington is going to grind to a halt because the Chief Executive doesn’t have a (D) or (R) after their name. Like, get real.
If Jesse Ventura were president, he might be the laughing stock of talk shows, but he’d still have his finger on the button, the ability to appoint people, the power to veto bills, and every other same power that presidents have enjoyed — the Constitution doesn’t stop because party control might. The President’s power primarily comes from the huge power of the Executive Branch, as opposed to it being legitimized by the DNC or RNC.
The wording was deliberate. I was distinguishing between positions he can replace, like Cabinet members and judges, where he can only appoint new ones when vacancies occur.
In a fantasy world, yes. In the real world, battling between Cabinet members is legion and legendary, even when they are supposedly all on the same side. Mix a group of random Republicans and Democrats together, with different axioms about how the world and politics works, and no amount of goodwill will succeed.
The Presidency works because it is backed by a support apparatus of half the country’s politicians. This provides a power base down to the roots of every community and up to every power broker. You think you can remove that and still have a working system? I don’t.
In the broadest sense, the notion of an independent coming in and changing the country because of a brand-new non-partisan policy perspective is sheer lunacy. The President is leader of all the country and that’s powerful pressure - the explanation for why Bush disappointed the conservatives and Obama is disappointing the liberals.
Even within the normal confines of party politics we’ve certainly seen the result of lack of consensus and the inability of a President without the power to push things through Congress over the past two years. But Obama has still had enough power to get some things done. A truly Independent President would lack even that much juice. As I said, best case is drift. But the possibilities for chaos exist to an order of magnitude higher than today’s battles.
If Berlusconi was any trend setter, we can expect a string of young prostitutes at the white house. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Chile had a billionaire president. I’m guessing other countries have too.
Ah, I misread that. I read “all new” in the sense the the President appoints “all new” Cabinet officials upon taking office, rather than he appoints judges to fill “any new” vacancies.
As I said before, previous Presidents have had cabinet members of opposite parties in charge of important departments. If party affiliation is such a determining factor, could you provide specific examples of how Robert Gates, Bill Cohen, Ray LaHood or Norm Minetta undermined presidential power due to partisan disagreements?
I took a quick scan through the notable academic literature on presidential power and could find no reference to control of party apparatus as being on the short list of sources of presidential power. In fact, I can’t find at the moment that respected scholars like Richard Neustadt or Doris Kearns Goodwin talk at all about party control or unity as being an important power. To the contrary, Goodwin wrote about having a diverse cabinet as a reflection of presidential power: Lincoln’s “political genius was not simply his ability to gather the best men of the country around him, but to impress upon them his own purpose, perception, and resolution at every juncture.”
So, if you could provide some reputable citations for how important party leadership or control is for a president, I’d be delighted to read them. Because it does not seem to be an issue that academics have identified as being very important at all.
It’s weird that Obama gets credit for pushing things through Congress, when he has been notably less involved in the legislative process than most of his predecessors. Just look at the health care bill: Obama wasn’t in there making the deals to get to passage, he essentially delegated those decisions to Reid, Pelosi, and others in Congress to figure out a package that could get through the process.
If your argument is that the President is not automatically the Leader of his Party and that Presidents don’t spend half their time arm-twisting and ego-boosting members of Congress to get their bills passed (with whole sections of their staffs doing nothing else) and that Cabinet members who pursue policies other than those of the President’s choosing don’t get thrown out on their ears, then we’re going to have to stay in disagreement.
First and foremost, though, this is a hypothetical. Every answer in the real world would depend entirely on the exact details of how it occurred. Anything else is a fruitless argument about how one views political theory. I believe that the President being a party leader is extremely important. You don’t. Everything we say after that will be talking past one another.