06/07/2023: Presidential Restraint

Matt Yglesias has a piece in the New York Times under the headline: “It’s Great to Have a President Who Knows When to Shut Up.”

My favorite topic: presidential restraint.

I spent a lot of time on the topic in my book, and why it’s necessary for the job. (Chapter 23: Restraint).

There is no greater quality that illustrates the disconnect between what the presidency requires and how we hire people for the job.

That’s because campaigns encourage the candidates to participate in their own marketing and marketing has increasingly become all about capturing attention. That encourages candidates to hop around a lot and it makes them chaos entrepreneurs who do things just to get attention.

They are rewarded by traditional media, which has always been captivated by conflict and social media which runs on squirrel! Plus, with the presidency the Streetlight Effect is in full force.

I wrote about Truman’s use of restraint in my last Atlantic piece:

Sometimes Truman’s best decisions were merely giving the thumbs-up to another’s idea—like Secretary of State George Marshall’s plan to bolster the European economy after the war. That might not seem hard, but a president who knows how to stay out of the way—and doesn’t demand credit—gets a lot more done. Such restraint also can deliver a vital tactical benefit. “If we try to make this a Truman accomplishment, it will sink,” the president told his White House counsel, Clark Clifford, about what would come to be known as the Marshall Plan. Facing stiff Republican opposition, an initiative named after his secretary of state would do “a whole hell of a lot better in Congress.”

I also wrote that restraint was a quality we should use to evaluate presidents instead of the 100 day metrics we use:

Finally: restraint. Our campaigns and media demand action. When the 100-day assessments start, we’ll spend a lot of time on what’s immediately visible. We should think more about what we don’t see, and the actions a president does not take—a partisan dig not made, a slower approach on one issue that allows attention and progress on another. Restraint is the key to prioritization.

This quality also shapes presidential psychology. The job includes acute moments of decision, but it also requires enduring the daily pressure of always being onstage and, more often than not, having to play a role for the public that is disconnected from a president’s feelings or thoughts. A healthy presidential brain has the restraint to maintain balance—tolerance to weather criticism, patience to let situations develop rather than stabbing after solutions, and comfort in uncertainty.

And, of course, you can learn about how various presidents used restraint in longer form here.