Classifying and Predicting Presidential Styles: Two “Weak” Presidents

In the United States, no one can be president but the President. If he withholds his energies or fritters them away ineffectively, we endure or enjoy a period of national stalemate. So we need to know as much about why some presidents fail to lead as about why others succeed. Indeed, it can be argued that our periods of political drift have been as fateful for the nation as our eras of New Freedom, New Deal and New Frontier. But the dull presidents are a trial for the political analyst, particularly for the student of personality and political leadership. It is not just that they sap one's intellectual verve, but that their personality configurations are, on the surface, indistinct. They thus provide "hard-case" tests for the supposition that personality helps shape a president's politics. If a personality approach can work with Coolidge and Hoover, it can work with any chief executive. I mean to show here how these two men illustrate some recurrent dynamics of presidential style and how these dynamics can be caught in a theory with predictive possibilities. The following pages take up these themes in order. First I shall set forth a scheme for classifying presidents according to the major dimensions of their political styles and demonstrate the applicability of the classification scheme to Coolidge and Hoover. The purpose of this section is to define and apply concepts potentially