Why was New York City considered ‘ungovernable’ until Mayor Rudy Giuliani got elected? That’s just the way it is – newspaper columnists tend to make excuses for people they like.
The ‘ungovernable’ meme is back, this time for President Obama. Events are not under his control, the US president only has so much authority, no one could have done any better.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto quotes the New York Times‘s Tom Wicker – “It got harder. . . . The rise of single-interest politics and independent legislators has made it more difficult to put together a governing coalition; sophisticated new lobbying techniques wielded on behalf of virtually every interest group further complicate the task. And a strong argument could be made that the major issues–energy and the economy, for instance–are more complex than they were.”
Yeah, things are a lot different now, the world is harder and more complex for a president. Except Wicker wrote that in 1980.
“The presidency has grown, and grown and grown, into the most powerful, most impossible job in the world,” wrote Walter Shapiro of the Washington Post – also Jan. 13, 1980.
In other words, the ‘ungovernable’ meme gets trotted out whenever the mainstream media is really worried about their guy losing. No one claimed America was ungovernable in 1996 or 2008, after all.
President Martyr: The “sounds of slogging” echo through the decades by James Taranto, Wall Street Journal