On Nixon's Domestic Policy ..
American History - 1945 to the Present - Professor Delton - Fall 2011
By Eric Shapiro
Introduction
Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Program was a failure by the standards of rhetorical leadership established by Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in the early 20th century. Nixon deserves to be criticized for neglecting to dedicate substantial time and effort to ensuring the passage of what he unconvincingly called his “highest domestic priority” (Kellerman 126). However, the fact that the passage of a bill with considerable bipartisan appeal demanded something along the lines of a presidential speaking tour says just as much about the drawbacks of the modern rhetorical presidency as it does about the political failings of a controversial president.
This essay will consist of three sections. The first will explore the role of Nixon’s own conduct in ensuring the failure of the FAP, drawing heavily on Barbara A. Kellerman’s The Political Presidency and Alonso A. Hamby’s Liberalism and Its Challengers. The second section will examine how contemporary expectations of presidential rhetoric, as laid out in Jeffrey K. Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency, posed an equally significant obstacle to the success of the FAP. The final section will posit that Congress deserves as much blame as Nixon for being unable to reach a compromise on welfare reform.
Part I: Richard Nixon, the FAP’s Reluctant Champion Richard Nixon is not remembered as a bipartisan figure. Alonso Hamby writes that Nixon “behaved as if he conceived of politics as a struggle for survival in a jungle” (Hamby 299). Unlike Johnson, he had no use for conciliatory gestures towards his political opponents, whom he saw as enemies rather than potential allies to be courted. Although Nixon tended to be paranoid, his animosity towards the media and the Democratic Party was not entirely unjustified given the hardball tactics they employed to thwart his 1960 presidential campaign (Hamby 298). As the Senate’s resident Communist bloodhound in the 1950s and, subsequently, the Republican President Eisenhower’s prized attack dog, Nixon made many enemies in the liberal establishment, ranging from Democratic congressmen to influential journalists (Hamby 298).
Nixon attacked his enemies with all the means at his disposal, employing the bully pulpit in a mean-spirited fashion that Teddy Roosevelt (who often used the term) never could have imagined, earning the hatred of many Democrats. Nixon’s controversial political history, combined with the close 1968 presidential election in which he narrowly triumphed over Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey, cast him as a highly partisan figure when he ascended to the office of the presidency in 1968, despite his attempts to appear moderate. Nixon did not strike anyone as a man prone to compromise with the Democrats, who had largely set the terms for political debate in the U.S. since the New Deal and currently controlled both houses of Congress (Hamby 298).
According to Hamby, Nixon’s election “seemed to portend sharp shifts of direction… in the direction of welfarism” (Hamby 298). It is therefore somewhat counterintuitive that he made the centerpiece of his domestic agenda an expensive program that seemed rather radical for a president who ran in part on curbing the welfare state that had ballooned during the Johnson Administration. In the years since losing two major national elections (first for president, and then for governor of California), Nixon had moved towards the center of the political spectrum (Hamby 299). This may have just been a ruse to win election, but it was nevertheless reflected in his domestic policies.
Whether motivated by political calculation, a heartfelt ideological shift, or something in between, Hamby writes that: “The Richard Nixon who won the presidency in 1968 was different from the candidate who had lost in 1960. He was more reflective, more inclined towards moderation, more pragmatic... he had become something of a ‘neoconservative’” (Hamby 298). Even if Nixon was not a neoconservative himself (his realist foreign policy would suggest otherwise), he was certainly receptive to their brand of welfare reform, which seemed to represent a suitable middle road.
Neoconservatives accepted the general trend of an expanded government – first by Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt in the Progressive Era in the early 1900s and then by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s – over the course of the century, but opposed what they perceived as the excesses of the modern welfare state. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society had created a vast and costly bureaucracy that did not effectively address the problem of poverty.
Neoconservatives sought a means of reform that provided a minimum quality of life for the poor without the need for excessive government growth. Nixon adopted this approach under the name New Federalism, which focused on bypassing wasteful state bureaucracies established by the Johnson Administration to funnel federal dollars directly to communities (Hamby 318). He may well have just seen neoconservatism as a clever means to sabotage the welfare state and appeal to a wider constituency, but his domestic agenda would nevertheless embrace what to many seemed like a radical solution to the welfare problem (Kellerman 154).
In line with Nixon’s New Federalism, the Family Assistance Plan differed from the welfare policies already in place in that, by means of negative taxation, it provided incentive for welfare beneficiaries to seek steady employment rather than simply count on government assistance. In ostensibly promoting self-reliance rather than dependency, the FAP made an appeal to the conservative ideological assumption that no-strings-attached benefits would reward laziness in the poor, while also courting liberals with the promise of a guaranteed income for all Americans (Kellerman 129). Nixon reflected: “We hoped… to cut down on red tape, and before long to eliminate social services, social workers, and the stigma of welfare” (Hamby 318).
At first, the FAP elicited an enthusiastic response from the media and legislators on both sides of the aisle (Kellerman 131). Initial words of encouragement from influential members of Congress such as Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (a Democrat) and House Republican Leader Gerald Ford (a Republican) boded well for the future of the FAP, but its passage was still far from assured (Kellerman 131). Distracted, overconfident or both, Nixon failed to capitalize on the program’s warm reception.
The FAP required a president well equipped for the formidable challenge of promoting a bill that neither Republicans nor Democrats would consider ideal. Nixon was not the man for the job. His disposition was not appropriate for the task of aggressively courting congressmen not inclined to be enthusiastic about his domestic agenda. In contrast to Lyndon Johnson, Nixon lacked the interpersonal skills conducive to successful politicking. Hamby writes: “Nixon remained a distinctly unpolitical personality. He found little pleasure in the ritual camaraderie of handshaking and eager socializing so essential to the practice of American politics” (Hamby 299). Nixon tended to isolate himself from all but a few trusted cabinet members, and made little effort to maintain a working relationship with the Congressional leaders who would decide the fate of the FAP (Hamby 299).
In her book The Political Presidency, Barbara Kellerman describes a Richard Nixon startlingly detached from the specifics of his top domestic priority. After asserting that “The ‘magic time’ to change policies, he [Nixon] said… would be the first few months of the Administration,” Nixon waited too long to submit a proposal for his FAP to Congress. By then, public and media enthusiasm for the program had ebbed (although it still had its admirers on both sides of the aisle). Nixon’s limited efforts to promote the lynchpin of his domestic policy agenda were too little too late (Kellerman 145).
G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot propose in The Liberal Hour: Washington andtThe Politics of Change in the 1960s that FAP appealed to Nixon because it offered a “grand plan” that accommodated his tendency to think in broad generalities. Elliot Richardson, a member of Nixon’s cabinet, said: “‘Nixon had a sense of architecture, in both domestic and foreign policy… some parts of the programs were more important than others, but they all belonged to the design.’ And with FAP he had a domestic policy that fit that preference marvelously” (Mackenzie 368). In a broad ideological sense, Nixon was right to see the FAP as a compromise. However, he did not adequately consider how it would fare in the highly technical arena of Congress.
To be successful, Nixon would have had to micromanage the bill’s path through both houses of Congress by strategically applying pressure to individual legislators where needed to ensure the FAP passed the considerable hurdles before it. However, as mentioned earlier, interpersonal appeals did not come easily to Nixon. Instead, he relied on staff members to make the case for the bill to a preoccupied Congress. While men like Daniel Patrick Moynihan were experts on domestic policy and capable of making a compelling case for the FAP, they did not command the same authority as the holder of the nation’s highest office, who could adopt a carrot-and-sticks approach to win the votes of wavering legislators.
Part II: Nixon and the Rhetorical Presidency The Family Assistance Plan is demonstrative of what happens when a president fails to abide by the political norms inherent in what Jeffrey Tulis calls the rhetorical presidency. Although more Democratic, this new understanding of the presidency has its drawbacks.
In his introduction to The Rhetorical Presidency, Jeffrey Tulis frames his perspective in contrast to that of influential presidential scholar Richard Neusdadt. Neustadt, Tulis explains, “views ‘the Presidency from over the president’s shoulder, looking out and down with the perspective of his place” (Tulis 10). By this standard, Nixon’s FAP was an unmitigated failure, demonstrative of what happens when a president refuses to exercise the public leadership expected by Congress and people. Nixon, by extension, was a poor rhetorician who failed to use all the tools at his disposal to accomplish his political aims when it came to domestic policy.
Tulis views the presidency through a different lens, referring to an executive-centric study of government as “institutional partisanship” (Tulis 9). Presidential, rhetoric, then, is merely a means to an end. In examining politics from the perspective of executive self-interest, Neustadt and his followers lose sight of the implications, both good and bad, that presidential practice has on the U.S. government as a whole. In addition, he disputes the notion that presidents’ increased reliance on public appeals is a natural result of political and technological developments over time (Tulis 13). On the contrary, it represents a fundamental change in how Americans think about the presidency as an institution: “The doctrine that the president ought to be a popular leader has become an unquestioned premise of our political culture… And for many, this presidential “function” is not one duty among many, but rather the heart of the presidency” (Tulis 4). No longer is it adequate for the president to be a competent administrator. Now, he must also be a popular leader.
According to Tulis, the current importance of presidential rhetoric derives from a “second constitution,” or a set of ingrained norms that inform Americans’ understanding of the presidency as much if not more so than the nation’s founding document. The framers of the “original Constitution” were obsessed with the idea that a demagogue might exploit the transitory passions of the public to take power and become a popular dictator. To prevent this, they devised institutional safeguards to prevent the executive, from claiming too much power (Tulis 27). Woodrow Wilson had a much different view.
Wilson was motivated to lay out his vision of a second Constitution (although he did not refer to it as such) by the conviction that “The pursuit of ‘extensive and arduous’ enterprises… may not have been possible in the twentieth century without popular leadership… energy, the possibility of social change, and democratic legitimacy were insufficiently fulfilled promises of the original Constitution” (Tulis 175). In other words, the Framers’ conception of the executive’s role did not allow the president sufficient power to enact fundamental changes in government that would inevitably be crippled by the deliberative process in Congress. Wilson felt that the solution was for presidents to take on the role of popular leader, to go over the heads of Congress and make a direct appeal to the people.
This is in part due to the nature of rhetoric itself. Tulis writes that “rhetorical practice is not merely a variable, it is also an amplification or vulgarization of the ideas that produce it… an avenue to the meaning of alternative constitutional understandings” (Tulis 14). Its increased role in politics is thus an important development that goes beyond a mere shift in emphasis to the roots of American government. Congress and the president must actively consider how the public will respond to legislation and formulate how to best communicate their points of view in simple, persuasive terms to the public. “The founder’s office was structured for ‘normal’ – that is undistinguished – men. The institutional arrangements supplied ‘the defects of better motives…’qualities dependent upon individual talents like eloquence, found little doctrinal support” (Tulis 177). Wilson’s second constitution, on the other hand, idealized a president with oratorical skills, perhaps at the expense of other traits that the Founders would have considered more important (such as administrative ability or knowledge of the Constitution).
Nixon’s subdued, limited promotion of the FAP was consistent with the expectations of the president as delineated in the U.S. Constitution, which is precisely why it failed. Owing to a wide expectation for presidents to abide by the tenets of Woodrow Wilson’s “second constitution,” Nixon’s hands-off approach was no longer conducive to success in a modern context. After proposing an ambitious program (not even the president’s responsibility according to the Constitution), it was expected that Nixon would appeal to the public in order to provide an impetus for Congress to vote in its favor.
The failure of the FAP demonstrates that modern legislative programs are incompatible with the Founders’ conception of the presidential office. Modern expectations no longer allowed for legislation to be accepted or rejected in Congress based purely on its merits. The deliberative process of Congress was, by the Framers’ design, not conducive to the “extensive and arduous enterprises” that had become so common in the 20th century. Such radical changes as those contained in the New Deal and the F.A.P. flew in the face of the considered, incremental change the Founders saw as ideal (Tulis 177). The only way for the president to surmount the institutional barriers inherent in the Constitution was to “go public.” Nixon’s mistake was to propose a uniquely 20th-century program without playing by the rules necessary for it to succeed. In rejecting the FAP, Congress was functioning exactly as the Founders intended. Whether that was good for the country is an entirely different question.
Another reason for the FAP’s failure was the lack of a suitable crisis to give it momentum. Tulis writes: “The continual use of the ‘crisis tool’ of popular leadership was meant to make the president more effective in normal times as well. The long-term consequence of the rhetorical presidency may be to make presidents less capable of leadership at any time” (Tulis 181). While many experts acknowledged that the welfare state as it currently existed was at best in need of streamlining and at worst unsustainable, it did not constitute a pressing public concern of the type that had helped enable similarly ambitious programs to be passed.
Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson used the threat of a revolution to mobilize support for progressive policies. Franklin D. Roosevelt came to power during the Great Depression, a time when the people, if only out of sheer desperation, supported drastic measures to ameliorate their dire situation. The race riots during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency made a compelling case for addressing the issue of poverty, and the legacy of JFK was a very persuasive tool. The problems Nixon sought to ameliorate with the FAP, in comparison to the aforementioned crises, were highly technical and not particularly pressing to the public.
If Nixon had been truly passionate about the FAP, he might have used rhetoric to foster a sense of urgency about welfare reform. He could have embarked on a nationwide campaign to convince the people of its necessity, who would have in turn pressured their legislators to take action. To be fair, Nixon did talk in his campaign about cutting down on the welfare bureaucracy (Hamby 298). However, these appeals were more of a political device than an urgent priority for Nixon, who waited too long to submit his FAP to Congress and even then only promoted it irregularly. When the time came to vote, Congress knew that it could get away with passing the buck down the road without the threat of significant reprisal from Nixon or the public (Kellerman 148).
Part III Political Ramifications of the FAP The Family Assistance Plan was the lynchpin of Nixon’s domestic agenda and its undignified death speaks to his limitations as a leader. However, it can just as easily serve as a cautionary tale for Congress, illustrative as it is of what happens when the legislative branch cannot reach a compromise.
Hardcore fiscal conservatives objected to the FAP on the grounds that it required unacceptable government spending and accepted the permanence of the state (Gould 392). From the perspective of a nation that has veered rightward since the early 1970s, Nixon’s domestic policy proposal seems radical. Unsurprisingly, today’s conservatives look back on the FAP as a radical socialist measure; some even call Nixon the “last liberal president” (Gould 392).
In the short term, the Democrats’ defeat of the FAP must have seemed like a victory. In the broader scope of history, however, they were the losers. Rebuffed by the liberal establishment, Nixon turned to corporate interests for support. From then on, his policies bore a closer resemblance to those of subsequent, more conservative Republican presidents. Perhaps if the Democrats had been more appreciative of Nixon’s progressive tendencies they could have furthered their domestic agenda in spite of losing the White House. Instead, they drove an unlikely ally into the arms of those with a vested interest in dismantling the welfare state (Mackenzie 369).
To be sure, the left’s dissatisfaction with the FAP was not entirely unjustified. For one, its mandatory income was much less than liberals would have liked. Second, it assumed that a steady income and a job were sufficient cures for poverty, despite the fact that many inner city parents worked several jobs and could still barely support their families. Third, the FAP would have replaced, or could have been used as an argument to replace, welfare programs that liberal supported. For these reasons, “liberals chose to be strategically conservative” and opposed the bill (Passell 3).
In doing so, liberals made the mistake of operating on the assumption that the federal bureaucracy they so lovingly cobbled together was invulnerable to shifting political tides. Although domestic spending did indeed increase under Nixon, the president’s rhetorical deprecation of welfare and government programs helped to puncture a conventional wisdom that seemed all but unassailable since the New Deal. No longer did Americans accept as a given the trend of an ever-growing federal bureaucracy.
Seizing upon the shift in public opinion kick-started by Nixon, the right wing of the Republican Party – which had been temporarily marginalized by Barry Goldwater’s trouncing in the 1964 presidential election – convincingly made a case for a smaller government. Democrats refused to heed the warnings of a predominantly middle-class electorate that had come see federal spending as favoring the poor at their expense, and thereby missed out on their only chance to achieve a kind of welfare reform that, while not perfect, went far beyond what would be possible a few years later in a more conservative political climate. Liberals under Reagan would likely have jumped at the possibility of instating mandatory national income.
Nixon’s FAP represented liberals’ best and last hope of adjusting their ideology to a rapidly-changing political landscape by forging a more moderate, bi-partisan approach to their ideology that accepted the need for limits on the welfare state. Their failure to do so gave the conservative movement an opening to push their far right views on an American public fed up with the status quo.
Conclusion: Nixon’s haphazard rhetorical efforts on behalf of the FAP, along with an unwillingness to engage in the political logrolling necessary to shepherd the program through Congress, revealed the president’s lack of commitment to domestic policy. His failures as a rhetorician, in part due to apathy and in part to his personal limitations, spelled defeat for a promising program. Without the president’s active support, the FAP, embodying a distinctly 20th-century brand of legislation, was ground down in the deliberative body of Congress. True to their nature, legislators put political concerns ahead of substance and rejected the bill out of ideological purity or, in the case of Democrats, to score a partisan victory over the Republican president.
By Eric Shapiro
Introduction
Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Program was a failure by the standards of rhetorical leadership established by Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in the early 20th century. Nixon deserves to be criticized for neglecting to dedicate substantial time and effort to ensuring the passage of what he unconvincingly called his “highest domestic priority” (Kellerman 126). However, the fact that the passage of a bill with considerable bipartisan appeal demanded something along the lines of a presidential speaking tour says just as much about the drawbacks of the modern rhetorical presidency as it does about the political failings of a controversial president.
This essay will consist of three sections. The first will explore the role of Nixon’s own conduct in ensuring the failure of the FAP, drawing heavily on Barbara A. Kellerman’s The Political Presidency and Alonso A. Hamby’s Liberalism and Its Challengers. The second section will examine how contemporary expectations of presidential rhetoric, as laid out in Jeffrey K. Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency, posed an equally significant obstacle to the success of the FAP. The final section will posit that Congress deserves as much blame as Nixon for being unable to reach a compromise on welfare reform.
Part I: Richard Nixon, the FAP’s Reluctant Champion Richard Nixon is not remembered as a bipartisan figure. Alonso Hamby writes that Nixon “behaved as if he conceived of politics as a struggle for survival in a jungle” (Hamby 299). Unlike Johnson, he had no use for conciliatory gestures towards his political opponents, whom he saw as enemies rather than potential allies to be courted. Although Nixon tended to be paranoid, his animosity towards the media and the Democratic Party was not entirely unjustified given the hardball tactics they employed to thwart his 1960 presidential campaign (Hamby 298). As the Senate’s resident Communist bloodhound in the 1950s and, subsequently, the Republican President Eisenhower’s prized attack dog, Nixon made many enemies in the liberal establishment, ranging from Democratic congressmen to influential journalists (Hamby 298).
Nixon attacked his enemies with all the means at his disposal, employing the bully pulpit in a mean-spirited fashion that Teddy Roosevelt (who often used the term) never could have imagined, earning the hatred of many Democrats. Nixon’s controversial political history, combined with the close 1968 presidential election in which he narrowly triumphed over Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey, cast him as a highly partisan figure when he ascended to the office of the presidency in 1968, despite his attempts to appear moderate. Nixon did not strike anyone as a man prone to compromise with the Democrats, who had largely set the terms for political debate in the U.S. since the New Deal and currently controlled both houses of Congress (Hamby 298).
According to Hamby, Nixon’s election “seemed to portend sharp shifts of direction… in the direction of welfarism” (Hamby 298). It is therefore somewhat counterintuitive that he made the centerpiece of his domestic agenda an expensive program that seemed rather radical for a president who ran in part on curbing the welfare state that had ballooned during the Johnson Administration. In the years since losing two major national elections (first for president, and then for governor of California), Nixon had moved towards the center of the political spectrum (Hamby 299). This may have just been a ruse to win election, but it was nevertheless reflected in his domestic policies.
Whether motivated by political calculation, a heartfelt ideological shift, or something in between, Hamby writes that: “The Richard Nixon who won the presidency in 1968 was different from the candidate who had lost in 1960. He was more reflective, more inclined towards moderation, more pragmatic... he had become something of a ‘neoconservative’” (Hamby 298). Even if Nixon was not a neoconservative himself (his realist foreign policy would suggest otherwise), he was certainly receptive to their brand of welfare reform, which seemed to represent a suitable middle road.
Neoconservatives accepted the general trend of an expanded government – first by Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt in the Progressive Era in the early 1900s and then by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s – over the course of the century, but opposed what they perceived as the excesses of the modern welfare state. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society had created a vast and costly bureaucracy that did not effectively address the problem of poverty.
Neoconservatives sought a means of reform that provided a minimum quality of life for the poor without the need for excessive government growth. Nixon adopted this approach under the name New Federalism, which focused on bypassing wasteful state bureaucracies established by the Johnson Administration to funnel federal dollars directly to communities (Hamby 318). He may well have just seen neoconservatism as a clever means to sabotage the welfare state and appeal to a wider constituency, but his domestic agenda would nevertheless embrace what to many seemed like a radical solution to the welfare problem (Kellerman 154).
In line with Nixon’s New Federalism, the Family Assistance Plan differed from the welfare policies already in place in that, by means of negative taxation, it provided incentive for welfare beneficiaries to seek steady employment rather than simply count on government assistance. In ostensibly promoting self-reliance rather than dependency, the FAP made an appeal to the conservative ideological assumption that no-strings-attached benefits would reward laziness in the poor, while also courting liberals with the promise of a guaranteed income for all Americans (Kellerman 129). Nixon reflected: “We hoped… to cut down on red tape, and before long to eliminate social services, social workers, and the stigma of welfare” (Hamby 318).
At first, the FAP elicited an enthusiastic response from the media and legislators on both sides of the aisle (Kellerman 131). Initial words of encouragement from influential members of Congress such as Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (a Democrat) and House Republican Leader Gerald Ford (a Republican) boded well for the future of the FAP, but its passage was still far from assured (Kellerman 131). Distracted, overconfident or both, Nixon failed to capitalize on the program’s warm reception.
The FAP required a president well equipped for the formidable challenge of promoting a bill that neither Republicans nor Democrats would consider ideal. Nixon was not the man for the job. His disposition was not appropriate for the task of aggressively courting congressmen not inclined to be enthusiastic about his domestic agenda. In contrast to Lyndon Johnson, Nixon lacked the interpersonal skills conducive to successful politicking. Hamby writes: “Nixon remained a distinctly unpolitical personality. He found little pleasure in the ritual camaraderie of handshaking and eager socializing so essential to the practice of American politics” (Hamby 299). Nixon tended to isolate himself from all but a few trusted cabinet members, and made little effort to maintain a working relationship with the Congressional leaders who would decide the fate of the FAP (Hamby 299).
In her book The Political Presidency, Barbara Kellerman describes a Richard Nixon startlingly detached from the specifics of his top domestic priority. After asserting that “The ‘magic time’ to change policies, he [Nixon] said… would be the first few months of the Administration,” Nixon waited too long to submit a proposal for his FAP to Congress. By then, public and media enthusiasm for the program had ebbed (although it still had its admirers on both sides of the aisle). Nixon’s limited efforts to promote the lynchpin of his domestic policy agenda were too little too late (Kellerman 145).
G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot propose in The Liberal Hour: Washington andtThe Politics of Change in the 1960s that FAP appealed to Nixon because it offered a “grand plan” that accommodated his tendency to think in broad generalities. Elliot Richardson, a member of Nixon’s cabinet, said: “‘Nixon had a sense of architecture, in both domestic and foreign policy… some parts of the programs were more important than others, but they all belonged to the design.’ And with FAP he had a domestic policy that fit that preference marvelously” (Mackenzie 368). In a broad ideological sense, Nixon was right to see the FAP as a compromise. However, he did not adequately consider how it would fare in the highly technical arena of Congress.
To be successful, Nixon would have had to micromanage the bill’s path through both houses of Congress by strategically applying pressure to individual legislators where needed to ensure the FAP passed the considerable hurdles before it. However, as mentioned earlier, interpersonal appeals did not come easily to Nixon. Instead, he relied on staff members to make the case for the bill to a preoccupied Congress. While men like Daniel Patrick Moynihan were experts on domestic policy and capable of making a compelling case for the FAP, they did not command the same authority as the holder of the nation’s highest office, who could adopt a carrot-and-sticks approach to win the votes of wavering legislators.
Part II: Nixon and the Rhetorical Presidency The Family Assistance Plan is demonstrative of what happens when a president fails to abide by the political norms inherent in what Jeffrey Tulis calls the rhetorical presidency. Although more Democratic, this new understanding of the presidency has its drawbacks.
In his introduction to The Rhetorical Presidency, Jeffrey Tulis frames his perspective in contrast to that of influential presidential scholar Richard Neusdadt. Neustadt, Tulis explains, “views ‘the Presidency from over the president’s shoulder, looking out and down with the perspective of his place” (Tulis 10). By this standard, Nixon’s FAP was an unmitigated failure, demonstrative of what happens when a president refuses to exercise the public leadership expected by Congress and people. Nixon, by extension, was a poor rhetorician who failed to use all the tools at his disposal to accomplish his political aims when it came to domestic policy.
Tulis views the presidency through a different lens, referring to an executive-centric study of government as “institutional partisanship” (Tulis 9). Presidential, rhetoric, then, is merely a means to an end. In examining politics from the perspective of executive self-interest, Neustadt and his followers lose sight of the implications, both good and bad, that presidential practice has on the U.S. government as a whole. In addition, he disputes the notion that presidents’ increased reliance on public appeals is a natural result of political and technological developments over time (Tulis 13). On the contrary, it represents a fundamental change in how Americans think about the presidency as an institution: “The doctrine that the president ought to be a popular leader has become an unquestioned premise of our political culture… And for many, this presidential “function” is not one duty among many, but rather the heart of the presidency” (Tulis 4). No longer is it adequate for the president to be a competent administrator. Now, he must also be a popular leader.
According to Tulis, the current importance of presidential rhetoric derives from a “second constitution,” or a set of ingrained norms that inform Americans’ understanding of the presidency as much if not more so than the nation’s founding document. The framers of the “original Constitution” were obsessed with the idea that a demagogue might exploit the transitory passions of the public to take power and become a popular dictator. To prevent this, they devised institutional safeguards to prevent the executive, from claiming too much power (Tulis 27). Woodrow Wilson had a much different view.
Wilson was motivated to lay out his vision of a second Constitution (although he did not refer to it as such) by the conviction that “The pursuit of ‘extensive and arduous’ enterprises… may not have been possible in the twentieth century without popular leadership… energy, the possibility of social change, and democratic legitimacy were insufficiently fulfilled promises of the original Constitution” (Tulis 175). In other words, the Framers’ conception of the executive’s role did not allow the president sufficient power to enact fundamental changes in government that would inevitably be crippled by the deliberative process in Congress. Wilson felt that the solution was for presidents to take on the role of popular leader, to go over the heads of Congress and make a direct appeal to the people.
This is in part due to the nature of rhetoric itself. Tulis writes that “rhetorical practice is not merely a variable, it is also an amplification or vulgarization of the ideas that produce it… an avenue to the meaning of alternative constitutional understandings” (Tulis 14). Its increased role in politics is thus an important development that goes beyond a mere shift in emphasis to the roots of American government. Congress and the president must actively consider how the public will respond to legislation and formulate how to best communicate their points of view in simple, persuasive terms to the public. “The founder’s office was structured for ‘normal’ – that is undistinguished – men. The institutional arrangements supplied ‘the defects of better motives…’qualities dependent upon individual talents like eloquence, found little doctrinal support” (Tulis 177). Wilson’s second constitution, on the other hand, idealized a president with oratorical skills, perhaps at the expense of other traits that the Founders would have considered more important (such as administrative ability or knowledge of the Constitution).
Nixon’s subdued, limited promotion of the FAP was consistent with the expectations of the president as delineated in the U.S. Constitution, which is precisely why it failed. Owing to a wide expectation for presidents to abide by the tenets of Woodrow Wilson’s “second constitution,” Nixon’s hands-off approach was no longer conducive to success in a modern context. After proposing an ambitious program (not even the president’s responsibility according to the Constitution), it was expected that Nixon would appeal to the public in order to provide an impetus for Congress to vote in its favor.
The failure of the FAP demonstrates that modern legislative programs are incompatible with the Founders’ conception of the presidential office. Modern expectations no longer allowed for legislation to be accepted or rejected in Congress based purely on its merits. The deliberative process of Congress was, by the Framers’ design, not conducive to the “extensive and arduous enterprises” that had become so common in the 20th century. Such radical changes as those contained in the New Deal and the F.A.P. flew in the face of the considered, incremental change the Founders saw as ideal (Tulis 177). The only way for the president to surmount the institutional barriers inherent in the Constitution was to “go public.” Nixon’s mistake was to propose a uniquely 20th-century program without playing by the rules necessary for it to succeed. In rejecting the FAP, Congress was functioning exactly as the Founders intended. Whether that was good for the country is an entirely different question.
Another reason for the FAP’s failure was the lack of a suitable crisis to give it momentum. Tulis writes: “The continual use of the ‘crisis tool’ of popular leadership was meant to make the president more effective in normal times as well. The long-term consequence of the rhetorical presidency may be to make presidents less capable of leadership at any time” (Tulis 181). While many experts acknowledged that the welfare state as it currently existed was at best in need of streamlining and at worst unsustainable, it did not constitute a pressing public concern of the type that had helped enable similarly ambitious programs to be passed.
Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson used the threat of a revolution to mobilize support for progressive policies. Franklin D. Roosevelt came to power during the Great Depression, a time when the people, if only out of sheer desperation, supported drastic measures to ameliorate their dire situation. The race riots during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency made a compelling case for addressing the issue of poverty, and the legacy of JFK was a very persuasive tool. The problems Nixon sought to ameliorate with the FAP, in comparison to the aforementioned crises, were highly technical and not particularly pressing to the public.
If Nixon had been truly passionate about the FAP, he might have used rhetoric to foster a sense of urgency about welfare reform. He could have embarked on a nationwide campaign to convince the people of its necessity, who would have in turn pressured their legislators to take action. To be fair, Nixon did talk in his campaign about cutting down on the welfare bureaucracy (Hamby 298). However, these appeals were more of a political device than an urgent priority for Nixon, who waited too long to submit his FAP to Congress and even then only promoted it irregularly. When the time came to vote, Congress knew that it could get away with passing the buck down the road without the threat of significant reprisal from Nixon or the public (Kellerman 148).
Part III Political Ramifications of the FAP The Family Assistance Plan was the lynchpin of Nixon’s domestic agenda and its undignified death speaks to his limitations as a leader. However, it can just as easily serve as a cautionary tale for Congress, illustrative as it is of what happens when the legislative branch cannot reach a compromise.
Hardcore fiscal conservatives objected to the FAP on the grounds that it required unacceptable government spending and accepted the permanence of the state (Gould 392). From the perspective of a nation that has veered rightward since the early 1970s, Nixon’s domestic policy proposal seems radical. Unsurprisingly, today’s conservatives look back on the FAP as a radical socialist measure; some even call Nixon the “last liberal president” (Gould 392).
In the short term, the Democrats’ defeat of the FAP must have seemed like a victory. In the broader scope of history, however, they were the losers. Rebuffed by the liberal establishment, Nixon turned to corporate interests for support. From then on, his policies bore a closer resemblance to those of subsequent, more conservative Republican presidents. Perhaps if the Democrats had been more appreciative of Nixon’s progressive tendencies they could have furthered their domestic agenda in spite of losing the White House. Instead, they drove an unlikely ally into the arms of those with a vested interest in dismantling the welfare state (Mackenzie 369).
To be sure, the left’s dissatisfaction with the FAP was not entirely unjustified. For one, its mandatory income was much less than liberals would have liked. Second, it assumed that a steady income and a job were sufficient cures for poverty, despite the fact that many inner city parents worked several jobs and could still barely support their families. Third, the FAP would have replaced, or could have been used as an argument to replace, welfare programs that liberal supported. For these reasons, “liberals chose to be strategically conservative” and opposed the bill (Passell 3).
In doing so, liberals made the mistake of operating on the assumption that the federal bureaucracy they so lovingly cobbled together was invulnerable to shifting political tides. Although domestic spending did indeed increase under Nixon, the president’s rhetorical deprecation of welfare and government programs helped to puncture a conventional wisdom that seemed all but unassailable since the New Deal. No longer did Americans accept as a given the trend of an ever-growing federal bureaucracy.
Seizing upon the shift in public opinion kick-started by Nixon, the right wing of the Republican Party – which had been temporarily marginalized by Barry Goldwater’s trouncing in the 1964 presidential election – convincingly made a case for a smaller government. Democrats refused to heed the warnings of a predominantly middle-class electorate that had come see federal spending as favoring the poor at their expense, and thereby missed out on their only chance to achieve a kind of welfare reform that, while not perfect, went far beyond what would be possible a few years later in a more conservative political climate. Liberals under Reagan would likely have jumped at the possibility of instating mandatory national income.
Nixon’s FAP represented liberals’ best and last hope of adjusting their ideology to a rapidly-changing political landscape by forging a more moderate, bi-partisan approach to their ideology that accepted the need for limits on the welfare state. Their failure to do so gave the conservative movement an opening to push their far right views on an American public fed up with the status quo.
Conclusion: Nixon’s haphazard rhetorical efforts on behalf of the FAP, along with an unwillingness to engage in the political logrolling necessary to shepherd the program through Congress, revealed the president’s lack of commitment to domestic policy. His failures as a rhetorician, in part due to apathy and in part to his personal limitations, spelled defeat for a promising program. Without the president’s active support, the FAP, embodying a distinctly 20th-century brand of legislation, was ground down in the deliberative body of Congress. True to their nature, legislators put political concerns ahead of substance and rejected the bill out of ideological purity or, in the case of Democrats, to score a partisan victory over the Republican president.