Obama's Moment: Historians Say He Could Redefine The Presidency

[babylonsister]

Obama's Moment Arrives
Historians Say He Could Redefine the Presidency

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 20, 2009; Page A01


Barack Obama takes office today with a realistic prospect of joining the ranks of history's most powerful presidents.

The more familiar observation, that he confronts daunting trials, enhances that prospect. Emergencies have always brought commensurate new authority for the presidents who faced them, not only because the public demanded action but also because rival branches of government went along.

Obama arrives with a rare convergence of additional strengths, some of them inherited and some of his own making. Predicting a presidency, to be sure, is hazardous business, and much will depend on Obama's choices and fortune. But historians, recent White House officials and senior members of the incoming team expressed broad agreement that Obama begins his term in command of an office that is at or near its historic zenith.

"The opportunity is there for Obama to recast the very nature of the presidency," said Sean Wilentz, a presidential historian at Princeton. "Not since Reagan have we had as capable a persuader as Obama, and not since FDR has a president come in with quite the configuration of foreign and domestic crises that open up such a possibility for the reconstruction of the executive."

No president has begun his term with so broad a wave of public confidence -- 78 percent approval in the most recent Gallup poll. There are precedents for single-party control of the White House and Congress, but the early signs suggest that House and Senate Democrats will be far more united in loyalty to Obama than their counterparts were to President Jimmy Carter. The Republican opposition, by contrast, appears to be as fractured as at any time since Barry Goldwater's landslide defeat in 1964. If Obama keeps the loyalty of the online social networks he used to win election, with unprecedented success in fundraising and recruiting, his White House could be the first to harness a meaningful grass-roots movement as an ongoing tool of governance.

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[laconicsax]

1. Technically speaking, wouldn't anyone who doesn't govern like * redefine the presidency?

[bemildred]

2. There is irony in the fact that Bush & Cheney expanded Presidential power

so relentlessly as they did, in order to hand it all over to Obama.

[On the Road]

3. Sean Wilentz

I remember him chiefly for his statement to the House managers of the Clinton impeachment:

"If you understand that the charges do not rise to the level of impeachment, or if you are at all unsure, and yet you vote in favor of impeachment anyway for some other reason, history will track you down and condemn you for your cravenness."