Barber was 42 years old and chairman of the political science department at Duke University when the first Time article appeared in In the election, Barber told Time, the choice was between an activepositive, George McGovern, and a psychologically defective active-negative, Richard Nixon. Actually, Barber had told inteviewers from U. News and World Report more than a year before that he considered Ford an active-positive. The election campaign has witnessed the appearance of another Barber book, The Pulse of Politics, and in honor of the occasion, two Time articles.
This is all to the good, because the first, a Sidey column in March, offered more gush than information. Barber has made political history before. For Barber, it has come at some cost. Though his ideas now have a currency they otherwise might not have, the versions of those ideas that have circulated most widely are so cursory as to make them seem superficial or even foolish—instantly appealing to the naive, instantly odious to the thoughtful. This situation is in need of remedy.
For all their limitations—some of them self-confessed—they offer one of the more significant contributions a scholar can make: an unfamiliar but useful way of looking at a familiar thing that we no longer see very clearly. Political scholars long had taken as axiomatic that the American presidency, because executive power is vested in one person and only vaguely defined in its limits, is an institution shaped largely by the personalities of individual presidents.
But rarely had the literature of personality theory, even in its more familiar forms, been brought to bear. As Erwin Hargrove reflected in post-Vietnam, mid-Watergate , this failure was the source of some startling deficiencies in our understanding of the office. Scholars also had recognized for some time that the attitudes Americans hold toward the presidency are psychologically as well as politically rooted.
Studies of schoolchildren had found that they first come to political awareness by learning of, and feeling fondly toward, the president. There was also a sense that popular nationalistic emotions that in constitutional monarchies are directed toward the king are deflected in American society onto the presidency. Surveys taken shortly after the Kennedy assassination recorded the startling depth of the feelings that citizens have about the office.
A large share of the population experienced symptoms classically associated with grief over the death of a loved one: they cried; were tired, dazed, nervous; had trouble eating and sleeping. A quick scan through history found similar public responses to the deaths of all sitting presidents, popular or not, by murder or natural causes.
The events of this period brought students of the presidency up short. Beyond that, it proposes methods of predicting what those personalities and feelings are likely to be in given instances. These considerations govern The Presidential Character and The Pulse of Politics, books that we shall examine in turn. The primary danger of the Nixon administration will be that the President will grasp some line of policy or method of operation and pursue it in spite of its failure.
First such charges strike a raw nerve, not only from the Checkers business, but also from deep within the personality in which the demands of the superego are so harsh and hard. The first impulse will be to hush it up, to conceal it, bring down the blinds.
If it breaks open and Nixon cannot avoid commenting on it, there is a real setup here for another crisis. James David Barber is more than a little proud of that passage, primarily because he wrote it on Jan. The theory received its fullest statement in The Presidential Character. Some emerge from all this with high self-esteem, the vital ingredient for psychological health and political productiveness; the rest face the further problem of searching out an external, and no more than partially compensating, substitute.
Depending on the source and nature of their limited self-esteem, Barber suggests, they will concentrate their search in one of three areas: the affection from others that compliant and agreeable behavior brings; the sense of usefulness that comes from performing a widely respected duty; or the deference attendant with dominance and control over people.
Because politics is a vocation rich in opportunities to find all three of these things—affection from cheering crowds and backslapping colleagues, usefulness from public service in a civic cause, dominance through official power—it is not surprising that some less than secure people find a political career rather attractive. This makes for a problem, Barber argues: if public officials, especially presidents, use their office to compensate for private doubts and demons, it follows that they will not always use it for public purposes.
Affection-seekers will be so concerned with preserving the good will of those around them that they rarely will challenge the status quo or otherwise rock the boat. The danger posed by the power-driven, of course, is the greatest. They will seek their psychological compensation not in inaction, but action.
Since such action will be motivated by the desire to maintain or extend their personal sense of domination and control through public channels, it is almost bound to take destructive form: rigid defensiveness, aggression against opponents, or the like. Only those with high self-esteem are secure enough to lead as democratic political leaders must lead, with persuasion and flexibility as well as action and initiative.
And Barber recognizes that even they sometimes will fail us, psychological health being a necessary but not a sufficient condition for successful political leadership. Moving to the predictive realm is more problematic. How in the heat and haste of a presidential campaign, with candidates notably unwilling to bare their souls publicly for psychoanalytic inspection, are we to find out what they are really like?
His high sense of self-worth enables him to work hard at politics, have fun at what he does, and thus be fairly good at it. As with Calvin Coolidge and Eisenhower, it is duty, not pleasure or zeal, that gets him into politics.
The Presidential Character caused quite a stir when it came out in Not surprisingly, it generated some vigorous criticism as well. At one level, this criticism is as trivial as it is true. Given the nature of election campaigning, a reasonably accurate shorthand device is about all we can hope for.
Why might we expect these two simple dimensions [active-passive, positive-negative] to outline the main character types? In nearly every study of personality, some form of the active-passive contrast is critical; the general tendency to act or be acted upon is evident in such concepts as dominance-submission, extraversion-introversion, aggression-timidity, attack-defense, fight-flight, engagementwithdrawal, approach-avoidance.
In everyday life we sense quickly the general energy output of the people we deal with. Similarly we catch on fairly quickly to the affect dimension— whether the person seems to be optimistic or pessimistic, hopeful or skeptical, happy or sad. The two baselines are clear and they are also independent of one another: all of us know people who are very active but seem discouraged, others who are quite passive but seem happy, and so forth. The activity baseline refers to what one does, the affect baseline to how one feels about what he does.
Both are crude clues to character. They are leads into four basic character patterns long familiar in psychological research. Some scholars compare presidents by the role they play in history.
For example, some see FDR as particularly significant because he framed the terms of debate in the United States for decades to come. Other studies examine the lasting impact a president had by studying how much of what he did survived their presidencies.
Scholars and historians debate about the best and worst presidents in American history. Although there is no consensus, there is a general agreement as to who should be considered great.
Jekyll and Mr. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Summary Understanding and Evaluating Presidents. Factors Contributing to Success and Failure Many factors affect how successful a president will be: Strong leadership: The ability to rally people behind him Congress: The ability to control or persuade members of Congress Popularity: The ability to convince others to do as he wishes Decision-Making Analysis Decision-making analysis explores the methods and circumstances under which key decisions are made.
He devised three models, all of which explain parts of the decision-making process: The rational actor model: Decision makers act in a rational manner: They gather all the evidence, weigh their options, and make an informed choice. The organizational process model: The structure of organizations shapes how decisions are made. The bureaucratic politics model: Leaders of different organizations are in competition with one another, and that affects how decisions are made.
The Best and Worst Scholars and historians debate about the best and worst presidents in American history. Previous section The President and the Public.
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