Obama? Romney? How About Both?
The race for the American presidency is a contest unique in its stakes, ferocity, and cost. Whoever prevails becomes the single most powerful person in the country—the one who gets to move into the White House, the one who gets to stand before the nation every January and deliver the State of the Union address. The winner wins alone: That’s why there’s one big desk in the Oval Office. That’s why there’s one executive suite in Air Force One.
Now imagine there were two. Two big desks. Two sets of keys to Camp David. Two presidents, instead of just one. And imagine that made everything about our government work better.
“People are so used to our system that they haven’t thought of this alternative,” said David Orentlicher. “But right now we are giving so much power to one person—we’re giving 100 percent of the power to someone who may be elected with barely 51 percent of the vote.”
Orentlicher, a professor at the Indiana University School of Law and a former state representative, lays out his case in a new book to be published next summer by NYU Press. In the book, “Two Presidents Are Better Than One: The Case for a Bipartisan Executive Branch,” Orentlicher makes the startling argument that when the Founding Fathers debated the leadership structure of the new United States, they picked the wrong option: a single president instead of a “plural executive” that would spread the power around. According to Orentlicher, in setting up the presidency as an office with a maximum occupancy of one, the framers of the Constitution unknowingly laid the groundwork for a structure that, centuries later, would lead to a too powerful executive branch and seemingly intractable partisan divisions.
It might seem that a powerful presidency would be a recipe for effective governance, but as Orentlicher sees it, precisely the opposite has turned out to be true in the United States, with the modern executive branch growing so strong that an opposition party’s best political strategy is simply to obstruct the president at any cost. Orentlicher points to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who infamously asserted in 2010 that the GOP’s top priority over the next two years would be to make Barack Obama a one-term president. His top goal wasn’t to pass laws, or work for his constituents, but to try as hard as possible to deny an elected president the ability to claim any accomplishments.
When the Framers conceived the office of the presidency in 1787, they envisioned something much less influential than the modern White House. The president was to be responsible for implementing policy, but setting it would be the job of Congress.
This dynamic has virtually halted progress in Washington. And as Orentlicher see it, a bipartisan presidency is precisely what’s needed to shake it loose. The presidential race would be less divisive if the top two winners were guaranteed a slot. And a Republican and a Democrat who held office at the same time would be forced to find common ground or risk leaving office with both their parties having achieved nothing.