THE WISDOM OF ARCHILOCHUS:

What Makes for a Strong President? (Jeffrey Bell, 12-02-02, History News Network)

(1) Strong presidents seek political power to accomplish specific goals, not to make themselves look good or even to acquire power, or the perception of power, as an end in itself. [...]

(2) Because strong presidents think in terms of specific goals, they devote a lot of their time to building political support for their goals. [...]

(3) While strong presidents are hardly oblivious to calculations of risk and lost prestige, their orientation toward specific goals makes them far more interested in building loyalty. [...]

(4) Strong presidencies are not generated by the nature of the times they live in or the problems they deal with. [...]

(5) Strong presidents tend to be selective in their agenda at any given point of their presidency. They greatly value focus. They are hard to divert from any issue or task they have decided is their center of gravity, as has so obviously been the case with Bush in regard to the war on terrorism in the last 14 months. In Isaiah Berlin's typology, a strong president is far more likely to be a hedgehog than a fox (the infinitely knowledgeable and voluble Bill Clinton is the epitome of a fox).

(6) The critics and political opponents of strong presidents often mistake their hedgehog-like methods and focus for a kind of tunnel vision.

The hedgehog and fox analogy is particularly good for explaining why a Bill Clinton is overestimated, a George W. Bush under. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 9, 2002 10:06 AM