The Go-It-Alone President

Jack Goldsmith was hired in October 2003 to head the Office of Legal Counsel, the division of the Justice Department that advises the president on the limits of executive power. Goldsmith, back teaching at Harvard, is a conservative legal scholar who largely agrees with the President's approach in the "war on terror." But at the Justice Department he found himself at odds with what he considered the constitutional excesses of the people making decisions about how to prosecute the war on terror, including his former friend John Yoo, author of the "torture memos" that narrowly defined torture, giving the Administration broad latitude to interrogate terrorism suspects. Goldsmith was also present for the now-famous hospital visit of then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales with Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Goldsmith has a new book out about his time in the White House, The Terror Presidency. He recently spoke with Jeffrey Rosen of the New York Times. Goldsmith's most insightful comment concerns the way, in his view, the President has weakened the power of the Presidency by relying on secret legal decisions to prosecute his war on terror instead of using the political power of the presidency to persuade and find allies in Congress and with the public. Goldsmith notes that his favorite war-time Presidents Lincoln and FDR were both lawyers who stretched the law during war-time but used their massive political skills to create a broad-base of support for their policies. Bush showed none of their political skills:

The Bush administration’s legalistic “go-it-alone approach,” Goldsmith suggests, is the antithesis of Lincoln and Roosevelt’s willingness to collaborate with Congress. Bush, he argues, ignored the truism that presidential power is the power to persuade. “The Bush administration has operated on an entirely different concept of power that relies on minimal deliberation, unilateral action and legalistic defense,” Goldsmith concludes in his book. “This approach largely eschews politics: the need to explain, to justify, to convince, to get people on board, to compromise.”

There are those who say that Bush has these skills and that he used them as Governor of Texas to lead in a bipartisan way. But never once in seven years as President have these skills been in evidence. And it is important to remember that it hasn't mattered whether Congress was controlled by Republicans or Democrats.