After America's century-long rise to world hegemony, the presidency is a vastly different institution than it was in the days of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The next few decades will be equally transformative, but in ways that will cause great difficulty for the sober formulation of U.S. foreign policy.
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A series of political, bureaucratic, and military developments threaten to make the presidency into a platform for charismatic extremism and abrupt swings in foreign policy. Barack Obama's centrism and constitutionalism may disguise their significance in the short term. But this should not lead the president to ignore the long-term dangers. He should use his time in office to support reforms that will ameliorate, if not cure, underlying pathologies -- lest a Sarah Palin, or her mirror image on the left, someday come to power and use the presidency as an engine of destructive radicalism.
Let's begin with the presidential primary system. Before 1972, when our current system was adopted, party chieftains steered the nomination to figures who would maximize their appeal to the political center. But the new rules shifted the balance in the direction of extremism -- away from the median voter in the general election, toward the median voter in the primary or caucus. With turnouts low, mobilizing the base is now often a recipe for winning the nomination.
This tendency toward extremism is heightened by the increasingly polarized character of the voting public: The Democratic base is becoming strongly isolationist; the Republican, emphatically militarist. Successful nominees have little choice but to pander to their base during the primary campaign. Once they win the White House, they may move toward the internationalist center. But then again, they may not -- generating a foreign policy that gyrates from extreme to extreme with each electoral cycle.
At this point, a second institutional development intervenes: Presidents now surround themselves with a White House staff of super-loyalists -- numbering more than 500 in recent years. This is a modern development. It was only in 1939 that Franklin D. Roosevelt won the right to name six "presidential assistants" to serve on his staff. Until then, the president governed through his cabinet, relying only on occasional advisors loaned to him by one or another department.
Since FDR, the concentration of power in the White House has only accelerated. Although the president appoints his leading staffers unilaterally, his nominations to key positions in the State and Defense departments require confirmation by the Senate -- where they are notoriously subject to sometimes-infinite delay by a single senator. Between 1979 and 2003, Senate-confirmed positions were, on average, vacant 25 percent of the time. As the Senate finally fills empty jobs, others open up, continually undermining the team effort required for the smooth operation of cabinet departments.
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