Of the character of our political system and its volatility. Scarcely more than one third of our chief executives, beginning in the 18th century, have been elected to a second term for one reason or another. Eight have died in office. Four have been assassination. Five have been elected without popular majorities. Three have been impeached, two of those in the lifetime of many people with us here today. Of all of those numbers, the one i want to of the size most, is the number one. By that i mean that the president is simply one of the 536 elected officials in washington, d. C. Strictly speaking, it is 537, 535 members of congress, and the im treating the president and Vice President for this purpose as a single entity. So the president is one of 536 elected officials. When i reflect on that asymmetry between the one president and 536 other federal elected officials, im reminded of a quip by the journalist theodore white, who wrote several books on president ial elections beginning in 1960. In one of those books, he said, the supreme duty of the president is to protect us from each others congressman. He meant it humorously but there is i think a deep political insight contained in that quip. So lets keep that in mind, that the president is one of 536 elected officials in washington, d. C. But the only one elected one. Nationally, as the state from geographically specific places from which represented us and which representatives and senators come. Lets go back to philadelphia in the summer 1787, when the t down tofathers sa draft a constitution we have lived under ever since. It is worth remembering that among the innovations the founders came up with at that Constitutional Convention in Independence Hall. You can see the lower right room in which they sat. Today in Independence Hall or nearby, actually, you can visit a room in which there are lifesized statues of the people who attended the Constitutional Convention. A reminder that we remain historically fascinated with that moment and live with its consequences after all these years. But among the things, among the innovations that the founders came up with in 1787 was the institution of the presidency. There was no comparable institution or office under the articles of confederation. And there was no executive function under the articles. And there was nothing resembling what we think about the presidency in the colonial period of American History. The rough equivalent to the president in the colonial period was the colonial government, but royallyrnors were appointed, not elected locally. And they were often royally resented because of the distant and arbitrary basis of their authority in the crown. So james wilson, representative from pennsylvania, is often thought of the person who thought most, and advocated most, for the creation of a strong presidency. Replacing well making up for , the fact that there was no president under the articles of confederation. Wilson said the method of choosing the president was the single most perplexing item the constitutional founders had to address in 1787. So, the debate about the nature of the presidency and what it would be was there from the outset. It has been a controversial and Innovative Institution but one that has been beset by controversy and i daresay contradiction, ever since. Alexander hamilton was another person who, in the debates over the constitution was also an advocate for a strong executive. James wilson wanted the president elected by popular vote. What i would call a pl ebicitarian institution. He wanted the direct election of the present by the voting citizenry at large. He and Alexander Hamilton wanted a pretty robust executive. Heres what hamilton had to say in thehe presidency federalist number 70. A feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government. A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution. A government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory , must be in practice a bad government. Again, aramark again, a remark worth keeping in mind as we think about the history of this institution and how the history has deposited us at the place where we are today. So to repeat, james wilson wanted a direct or arian electoral method to elect the president of the United States. He recognized the president is the one single actor in the United States who represent the country at large, not simply individual congressional districts or individual states. But, of course, as we know, that is not what we got. We did not get a direct election for president. We got the Electoral College, which is still with us. And the Electoral College is but one reminder among several of how wary our founders were of direct democracy. Another reminder of that is the fact that until the early 20thcentury, United States senators were elected not directly by popular vote, but they were appointed by state legislatures. Another indirect method of selecting popular representatives. These items are both reminders that the founders had a certain degree of skepticism about direct democracy. But the evolution of various Political Institutions has been in the direction of more and more direct democracy. It may be heretical to say it, that may be a source of some of the problems we have faced in our time. Here is another reminder about something that is important to remember about the presidency. Is another set of numbers, if i can do that again. Article one of the constitution comes first. Why it is called article one. It deals with the legislative branch. And it describes the method of electing the two chambers of the legislative branch and the functions, rights, responsible responsibilities, limitations, on the congress. That article contained 51 paragraphs. Article two deals with the executive. It contains just 13 paragraphs. The majority of those paragraphs have to do with the way the president is elected, and one of those paragraphs deals with the way the president can be impeached. So again, heres another reminder in the numbers. The asymmetry between 51 paragraphs devoted to the definition of the legislatures functions and prerogatives, and 13 paragraphs devoted to the executive is another reminder of where the founders thought the seat of authority and legitimacy in the government was centrally located. That was in the legislature, not in the executive. And again, we are reminded yet again of the importance of that asymmetry, and what the founders thought would be the heart of government, in the legislature. When we recollect that down until the 1830s, 1832, to be exact, president ial candidates were nominated by caucuses in the congress. The First Convention of a Political Party to nominate a president ial candidate, taking that function out of the hands of a congressional caucus and putting in the hands of a much more broadly based party, was a convention convened by the socalled Antimasonic Party in 1832, and all parties soon theeafter, the whigs, democrats, and so on, down to our own time, went to the nominating convention, which was meant to be more inclusive and more democratic, and selecting a president ial candidate, then the than the closed door function of a congressional caucus. The first innovation we see historically in the evolution of the presidency as an institution, going to nominating conventions and departing from the practice of using congressional caucuses, was done in the name of more democracy and more inclusion. Again, a harbinger of what is to come in our political culture. So the system existed for the better part of the First Century of the republics history, down to the late to early late 19th century to early 20th century. But by the late 19th century, a number of people were beginning to wonder if the legacy constitutional system, with congress at its center and a rather feeble executive compared to parliamentary systems where the Prime Minister is also the leader of the legislative branch, as well as in charge of the executive function. A number of people were beginning to wonder if this system was any longer appropriate or optimal for a society approaching 100 million people, with a modern, rapidly industrializing economy, on the verge of assuming Major International responsibilities. One of the first people to make a sustained case on the limitations of the legacy system of the relationship between congress and the presidency was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins university, in the 1880s. His name was Thomas Woodrow wilson, and he wrote a doctoral dissertation with the title, congressional government. It was later published as a book. To this day, Woodrow Wilsons book, now 150 years old, almost, is probably one of the most incisive things ever and about the nature of the american congress, and how it functions or dysfunctions in wilsons view. It is permissible i think to the title of the work, congressional government, as an oxymoron. The book alluded to congress by its nature be incapable of the kind of government a modern industrialized society absolutely needed. Here, i will share with you one paragraph from that work, congressional government by Woodrow Wilson, published in the 1880s. He said the following. In the United States congress, nobody stands sponsor for the policy of the government. A dozen men originate it. A dozen compromises twist and alter it. A dozen offices whose names are scarcely known out of washington put it into execution. Policy cannot be neither prompt or straightforward. But it must serve many masters. It must either equivocate or hesitate or fail altogether. The division of authority, and concealment of responsibility are calculated to subject the government to a very distressing paralysis. I think you really have to pinch yourself. You have to pinch yourself, to realize those words were not written in 2020, but a hundred but 150 years ago. The place where initiatives largely go to die. Criticism of the relationship between congress and the presidency, increasingly articulated desire, that the president become a more active and salient and leaderly figure, in the political system really dates from the late 19th century and begins to become some degree of political reality despite constitutional restrictions in the early 20th century, especially in the administrations of Woodrow Wilson. Here i share another of wilsons aphorisms. When he said, the president is at liberty both in law and conscience to be as big a man as he can. There is a very explicit declaration of the wish that the president have more responsibility and visibility, salience and consequence, and in the american political system. So there are two or possibly three innovations in our political culture, largely having to do with the presidency, that begin to be visible in the early 20th century, especially the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The first has to do with the fact that beginning with Theodore Roosevelt and the program he called and campaigned on, a square deal. Roosevelts square deal could be seen as the first instance of a president laying out a coherent nationallyscaled package of policy initiatives, for which he, the president , would stand as champion. There is really nothing comparable to that in the 19th century. Various president s expressed asious aspirations and so on they went along, but the square deal was thought to be a multipronged, carefully thought out program for a coherent policy package to take the country forward. We see successors to that initiative, of president s laying out and campaigning on coherent policy proposals, right down to our own day. Woodrow wilson campaigned on something called the new freedom. Herbert hoover campaigned on something called new era. We have a new deal, Franklin Roosevelt. Fair deal, harry truman. And on and on down to today what some have called the ordeal. The point is it is only in the early 20th century the president really steps forward as the actor in our political system who aspires to enact a coherent policy package. And i would say only rarely succeeds in doing so. Some of the frustrations we experience today in our political system, polarization, paralysis, are, in many ways, built into the clash of expectations about what the president could and should and wanted to do and they still have they still exist in constitutional restraint that define the boundary between the president and congress. It is only on rare occasions the president in the Congress Really align in their aspirations, and make for major transformations or improvements or whatever in our political system. So that is one innovation that comes to us from the early 20th century. It has to do with the president standing up now and standing for ward before the electorate as the vessel and agent of nationally scaled coherent policy. The second has to do with technology. We see its origins here in the late 1900s, early 20th century. It has to do with the distribution, the mass circulation of newspapers. Most famous actors were Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph hearst seen here. Their publications became organs for mass distribution of political messages and news in general. Woodrow wilson became, arguably, the first president to use publicity as a political tool. When he use publicity through the newspapers to end run or browbeat congress into passing major reform legislation in the 19131917 period, before world war one put a stop to that reform. The Federal Reserve system, the first income tax, antitrust legislation, labor legislation, and so on. Wilson was an accomplished publicist, and he selfconsciously used publicity, appealing to the public at large, as a way to force congress to his will. He was also the first president since john adams to go in person to congress to deliver his annual state of the union. Message. For more than a century, the whole 19th century, president s had sent their state of the Union Message in writing to indicationnother that the president did not normally feature himself as the leader of congress or the prince the principal actor in the political system. That begins to change, at least optically, in the early 20th century. And Woodrow Wilson in some ways is a shorthand reminder of that. I want to stick with Communications Technology for just a minute, because i think the chain of events that begin with mass circulation newspapers and their political utilization in the early 20th century is a chain that extends 100 years later in the early 21st century, all the technologies change. But lets just remember what happens next. Wilson uses newspapers as mass circulation or Mass Communication devices to bend the congress to his well. Franklin roosevelt uses the next generation of technological animation and communication technologies. The radio. Here he is delivering one of his 30 fireside chats. And on the right, you see a statue from the Roosevelt Memorial in washington, d. C. , or where the designers of that memorial correctly memorialize the fact that roosevelt was an innovator in the dimension of political communication, particularly utilizing the radio as an instrument of governance, not just communication, but as a way to mobilize Public Opinion. And here again, we see the aspiration of james wilson, to have a plebescetarian character in the presidency. We see that becoming a factor of a fact of life as president s increasingly turn to talking to the public directly, to mobilize Public Opinion at large, rather than dealing with the congress, as 19th century president s were constrained to do, not least of all because these technologies were not available. The next innovation along the same dimension of using Mass Communication as an instrument of president ial political mobilization is of course television. Here we see john f. Kennedy, who at a stroke diminished the importance of both radio and newspaper print versions of president ial press conferences by televising them life. So there was no need to tune in the evening news to see what the atsident said that morning his press conference or to read next mornings newspaper to see because kennedy had said it all on Live Television earlier that day. Again, another move in the direction of an increasingly plebescetarian presidency that mobilized Public Opinion for political purposes. That brings us to the world we live in today, where so much communication between president s, and others are done by Communications Technologies that were not existent a few years ago and almost unimaginable to many of us in the last century or even the early years of this century. Some people, if you can believe this, actually quantified this. I would not wanted to have done the manual labor to do this qualification, but somebody has. And they calculated that in the 20th century as a whole compared to the 19th century, president s on the average spoke to the public directly six times more frequently than in the 19th century. And conversely, in the 20th century compared to the 19th, president s spoke exclusively or directly to congress one quarter less frequently than they had in the 19th century. Again, some numbers that are another register of how the presidency, despite the fact that the constitution constrained James Wilsons desire for a truly plebe presidency directly elected by the people, our political culture evolved an institution in the way it deals with the electorate and citizenry. One that deals increasingly directly and instantaneously with the public as technology has evolved from mass circulation newspapers to radio to television to the internet, facebook, social media, and so on. Innovation in our political culture that first the scene a little over 100 years ago, in the early 20th century, the socalled progressive era. The first couple of decades of the 20th century, many changes in our political culture. But another one that has its roots there and enormous consequences for today is a primary election. The first primary election that bound the people nominated in the primary election, it bound the electors to vote for those people. It was in oregon in 1910. California followed suit two years later. Briefly in the next decade or so, there were many states that adopted primary elections to select their president ial electors and other candidates for office. For reasons that i wont distract us with here but there is a welldocumented history about this, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, primary elections exploded. When john f. Kennedy ran in the president ial nomination of the Democratic Party in 1960, there were only a dozen president ial primaries, and not all of them were binding on the delegates selected thereby. By the president ial elections in the 1970s, virtually every single state had either a primary or a caucus, essentially the same idea. The whole purpose of primaries when they were first invented in the early 20th century and as they exploded across the Political Landscape in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the whole point was to give the people a more direct voice in the selection of political candidates. Here again, we are edging into this very controversial and uncomfortable territory, where we are forced to reflect on whether the reforms taken in the name of more democracy, more participation, may have consequences that in fact result in increased dysfunctionality in our system. I know that is a heretical thought in the kind of democracy we live in and cherish. But the history of this institution and how it has evolved in relationship to society over which the president presides does i think give rise to that kind of thinking. So, i want to shift gears now and bring us to the present moment. Trying to talk here about several evolutionary factors in our larger social existence that have affected the presidency. I am going to use a fancy word here when we talk about the asline of Political Parties entities that select, invent, train and groom candidates for electoral office, that function has been displaced by primaries which is why you can get to situations today where, in 2016, there were 17 candidates for the republican president ial nomination. Many of them to try to rent a party as the vehicle for their own political aspirations. Why we had such a large democratic field in 2020. Because the parties have yielded their traditional functions of andtifying, grooming, bringing forward candidates to the primary process. It is a familiar refrain, primaries are justified in the name of more direct, simple democracy. But in practice, primaries are the venues in which the most ideologically motivated, and some would say most extreme factions in either party, or any party, actually mobilize and take part. And the primaries have the practical effect, therefore, of selecting for candidates that do not necessarily command majorities in their respective parties and represent some of the most extreme elements in their respective parties. That is the practical effect of primary elections, but not their original philosophical justification by any manner or means. Here is the fancy word i am going to use. Intermediate diss disintermediate. That is to say they disintermediate institutions that gather or resolve differences between citizens and unite them for common political purpose. The fragmentation of the media as we have seen, particularly in the explosion of social media s,vices, also disintermediate that is to say reduces significantly, what used to be the authority and legitimacy of the socalled Mainstream Media to report the news in objective ways. And if you combine the fragmentation of the media that the social media environment gives us with what we now understand to be the insidious workings of something called confirmation bias, where all of us are more prone to believe ms. News reports or items that confirm our preexisting worldview. When you combine the psychological predilection for confirmation bias with the hyper fragmentation of the media, and you have disintermediated the function of traditional media to create consensus around an agreed body of data or facts. All right, i want to quickly in the last few minutes before we go to q and day bring us down to the present and talk a teeny bit about the 2016 election and then about the political environment we are in today. This is a familiar map to anyone who has followed political life in the past few years. It shows results of the 2016 election. It is a little bit gross because it reports visually on the basis of states. I think we get a little better sense of what our society really looks like and how it voted if we reduce or shift, i should say, to county level results of the 2016 election, and this gives us the result by county. Again, there are a lot of small counties, particularly in the midwest and eastern parts of the country. But this gives us a much more granular view of where voters were. People in the red areas, of course, voted republican, and people in the blue areas voted democratic. And heres a correlation that i think is actually quite instructive. Because of the movement of population over the last two centuries and the increasing urbanization and suburbanization of the american people, half the American Population lives in just 146 counties, and here they are. These are the counties that contain 50 of the American Population. There are more than 4000 counties in the United States. But 50 of the population lives in just 146 counties. And here is a way to correlate that. And this is not a perfectly visual correlation by any means, but its highly suggestive. If you look at the blue vote up there on the upper left and the concentration of population, those 146 counties that account for more than 50 of the population, correlation is pretty strong. Its not absolute, but its pretty strong. And it tells us something we already know, or reminds us that urban centers or metropolitan centers, conurbations, vote more democratic than do rural and other areas. The next slide i am going to show you here is actually a little difficult to understand just at first glance, but it tells a very dramatic story. The roughly 480 counties of the 4000 or so that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 account for 64 of gdp. So if you look on the left, the blue counties, many of those counties are populous enough. The size of the cell represents the relative size of the county. So theres los angeles county, New York County in the upper left. The size of those cells are big enough you can actually label them with names. Theres enough room in the graph , or the chart, i should say, to actually put the name of the county in there. If you look to the right hand, the graph, the red counties, they account for a minor share of gdp. And most of them are so small that you couldnt possibly put the label in there, because theres just not room given the scale of the visual representation to do so. So this is a reminder of one important aspect of our present circumstance, and that is the parts of the country that were doing reasonably well, producing the lions share of gdp in 2016 , voted democratic. And the parts of the county that were doing much less well did not. So thats one kind of, you might say, materialistic or economic dimension of the election that we just saw in 2016. But again, im aware or sensitive to the amount of time i have left here. So ill try to do this quickly, but i hope not confusingly. Theres another dimension to this that i find particularly disturbing. And it has to do with the fact that we, as a people, have lost trust and confidence in a broad array of our institutions, including the presidency and including government. And this is not just because of the current president of the United States. It goes back a long way. Here is a graph that tells us, from Good Research data, the kind of confidence weve had in government going back to the 1950s. And again, theres some ups and downs in this. A long declining confidence in decline in confidence in federal government from the late 1950s down through the late 1970s. Some uptick and again, a little bit of uptick around the events of 9 11. But a longterm secular trend where we lost confidence in government. Here is the confidence in the federal governments ability to handle problems. Again, this is data just from the 1990s forward, but again, a n obvious long term secular decline. Here, this traces confidence in the three branches of the federal government. All have lost confidence of the american people, the legislature most of all, but the presidency included. These are people who have a great deal of confidence in the federal government. As you can see pardon me, in congress, sorry. And were down to the Single Digits of people who have confidence in congress. This is people who have hardly any confidence in the federal executive. Its a Strong Majority by now in 2014, these data. And thats bad enough that weve lost confidence in the executive, in the congress, and the judiciary. But as these data show, weve lost confidence in virtually all of our major institutions. These data go down to 2015. And youll see that theyre only three, as of 2015, only three major institutions in our society in which a majority of people have confidence. Once you get past the police, theres not a Single Institution in which a majority of americans have either a great deal or quite a lot of confidence. And i dare say that today, in 2020, the police probably wouldnt figure quite as strongly as they did here. Confidence in the news media, at historic lows, down into the single digit range. Confidence in press and television, down clearly in the single digit range. Thats bad enough, it seems to me, that we dont trust our major institutions of governance or communication. But the story gets even worse. Because as these data show, we dont trust one another the way we once did. So these are data from various sources, as you can see here, General Social survey, pew, trust data and so on. But the people who increasingly going back into the 1970s, here you see in the upper left, the green line traces people who say most people can be trusted, thats declining. You cant be too careful. Thats ascending. And if you do it by region, the Southern Region is the most distrustful. If you do it by education, though, people with the least education are the most distrustful. If you do it by race, nonwhite people are more distrustful than white people. And then the one that really makes me worry at night, wakes me up at night with worry, is if you break it down by age. The younger you are, the more distrustful you are not only of institutions, but also of other people, your fellow citizens. If you look down here in the lower left, socalled millennials born after the mid 1880s are the least trustworthy. They think most people cannot be trusted. Heres some more recent data from 2020. Again, the part to Pay Attention to here is the left hand column,. U. S. Adults, overall, a near majority, pardon me, a slight majority think that most people can be trusted. But if you break it down by different ethnic groups and especially by age groups, its a pretty grim picture. The 18 to 29 year olds, two thirds, essentially, think that most people cant be trusted. And then bring it right home to our own moment in time. Heres some very recent data from june of 2020. About how people thought various institutions could be trusted to handle the covid19 outbreak. And again, in every instance, without a single exception, including hospitals and doctors, although they remain high, but every institution lost confidence, lost the publics confidence, when it came to addressing the covid pandemic that were now facing. And this is the final bit of data that i will share with you. This has to do with confidence in the integrity of the 2020 election, the one coming up. And these are some recent data from the monmouth poll, a reliable polling source. And again, the first question is how confident are you that the november election will be conducted fairly and accurately . 36 , a third roughly, of americans down here think that probably not. And then, if you ask a more specific and focused question here, number 19, how likely is it that the Trump Campaign will try to cheat . A majority of people think its likely or somewhat likely. And if you ask people how likely is it the Biden Campaign will try to cheat . About 49 , a near majority of people, think the same there. Pardon me, 39 , so a little over a third. So this, to me, is deeply disturbing. And how much of this lack of confidence in our institutions has to do with the fact that the presidency, for a century and more, has been over promised and underperforming . The president s have presented these ambitious, aspirational goals. But because of the constitutional constraints, the congress is still the place where president ial aspirations go to die. That our system is built in a chronic kind of frustration with the inability of the system to deliver on the kinds of promises that candidates routinely make. And whats more, we as a people not only distrust our institutions, but for reasons that are still puzzling to explain exactly how we got here, we distrust one another. And ill leave you with this remark from alexis de tocquevilles democracy in america, published well over two centuries ago but still, to this day, the most incisive and insightful thing ever written about the character of democracy. And he talks about the prospects of despotism in democracy. And he said it is never more secure of continuance, than when it can keep men asunder and all its influences commonly exerted for that purpose. A despot easily forgives his subjects for not loving them, provided they do not love each other. If you substitute the word trust for love or loving, i think you have a warning about the dangers in our own political time, including the dangers that attend the evolutionary character of the american presidency. I am going to stop there. And i think if i understand the way were going to proceed, emilys going to come back on and do some fielding of questions. Emily thank you, david. That was just fantastic. A lot of people have been asking questions about the Electoral College. And theyre wondering if, about would it be possible, or likely, that wed end the Electoral College and go direct to popular vote. If theres arguments against this or risks associated with doing this. David [laughter] we need another few hours to do justice to that question. Its a great question. I think that the prospects that we will get rid of the Electoral College, i think, are very, very slim. Its embedded in the constitution. And the process, the mechanism for constitutional amendment is such that you need a super majorities of the individual states eventually to approve of any amendment. And enough states are actually at the margins advantaged by the Electoral College that it is very, very difficult to see how that could change. Now there are two states today, maine and nebraska, that do their Electoral College business a little bit differently than others. They dont do a winner take all system. Instead, their Electoral College votes are awarded at least in part on the basis of how their individual congressional districts voted. And a number of states have signed something, i forget the name of it, but its the interstate congressional Electoral College compact or some name like that. Where they pledged that if enough states pledge to give their Electoral College votes to whoever wins the National Popular majority, they will cast all their Electoral College votes for that person regardless of how their individual state voted. As yet, not a sufficient number of states have signed up for that. But go back to the prior point i was trying to make, if states started awarding their votes on the basis of how they allocated their Electoral College vote on the basis of how their congressional districts voted, youd get a much more granular account, it would start to approach a kind of plebiscitarian electoral mechanism. And there may be some possibility for change in that direction. But abolishing the Electoral College altogether, i just dont see it happening in my lifetime. Emily okay, thank you for that. And then there have been many questions about the use of executive orders. David well, yeah, the increasing use of executive orders in the last several president ial administrations is an indication of exactly the kind of structural obstacles to unified, vigorous government, as Alexander Hamilton might have said, that i was talking about. When you cant get congress to align with the president s ambitions and aspirations, the only mechanism left essentially to get anything done as the president is the executive order. And even that is not universally successful and can easily be overturned by the next or some succeeding president. Executive orders dont have the kind of legal and constitutional standing that statutes have. Theyre much more labile and volatile. But the fact that we see increasing reliance on them, it seems to me, is yet another proof of my theorem. That we, as a culture as a people, weve invested increasing hopes and aspirations and ambitions in the presidency. Weve fetishized the president as the person whos supposed to be all of our representative, the Single National actor in our system. But the constitution constrains the president from actually fully exercising that function. Emily in the event of a contested election, what are the steps to resolve the conflict . David [laughter] i can see that this presentation has done nothing to allay peoples anxieties about the immediate future. Again, i dont know what to say about that in any detail. I think the prospect of a whole set of problems like we saw in 2000 occurring in more than one state, having to do with the technology of mailin ballots and with the contested and polarized moment in which we live. Just the technical and mechanical difficulties of voting in person in covid time. And the inability of individual states and the Postal Service to handle the volume of mailin ballots that are necessary, im not going to make a prediction, but i will just say the probability of a dozen florida s, a dozen florida 2000s occurring this coming fall, the probability is not trivial. And i, personally, dont know what to say by way of whats a preemptive remedy. How we can avoid that, other than simply sounding the toxin as much as we can right now that we should not be surprised if on Election Night in november the result is not definitively clear. And there will be a period of contestation about what the actual result is. And the fact that it will be contested does not mean its illegitimate. Mailin ballots in many states are going to take weeks to count and to legitimate and authenticate. So i think we should all brace ourselves for a period of unprecedented disruption and doubt and argument about the legitimacy and authenticity of the electoral result. Emily what worries you the most about the modern presidency and what gives you the most hope . David well, look, if you stuck with me through the argument ive tried to make here, i think a lot of the problems with the presidency are structural. They go way beyond the personality or the character of any individual person. And i know its heretical to challenge the assumptions that underlie our constitutional system. But its also a fact of life that, to the best of my knowledge, of the countries that have written their constitutions in the last three quarters of a century or so, in the post colonial era when many one once when many once upon a time colonial societies became fully independent and sovereign, and had to draft constitutions, to the best of my knowledge, few if any have taken the american constitution of 1787 as their model. Many more have taken the some version of the british system, in which the legislative and executive functions are fused in a Prime Ministerial system. I dont want to be misunderstood as standing on the soapbox here and advocating that we change our system to be parliamentary to a parliamentary system. We have the system we have. But the fact is other peoples, other societies, have recognized the built in difficulties in our system. The founders in 1787 were animated by many things, but among their greatest fears was the fear of power. They feared monarchical power and they feared president ial power. They knew they needed an executive function in the federal system, but they jacketed about with all kinds of constraints. We learned them in grade school or high school as checks and balances, which at least there i at least where i grew up checks and balances were thought to be one of the great wonderments of the american system. But checks and balances also are a formula for status or i daresay paralysis. So i think that the problems with the presidency go way beyond any problems that we might have with any individual person. Its just the nature of our system. Emily and what are your thoughts on having the election of president be totally National Election and not run by individual counties . D individual emily counties. David well, thats right, its that granular. Ive just listened to a broadcast yesterday from texas where theyre, to my amazement, they were talking about major differences between different texas counties and how they conducted their electoral machinery. So yeah, i mean, this is a special case, a very important special case of a more general issue, another one of our structural characteristics in the society of federalism. Theres a lot to be said for federalism about distributing government power and authority down as close to the actual operational level as possible. But it also means that in moments of truly National Mobilization or crisis, we have great difficulty behaving in a uniform manner. Another example of it again, its controversial, you can argue either way, i suppose, is our educational system. There are thousands of individuals School Districts in this country, which make any aspiration for uniform standards of educational achievements and performance, very, very difficult to implement. And we have as you just said , emily, that we have just been reminded county Level Administration of things like voting mechanisms. So, yeah, some mechanisms, some, as we move in the direction of more uniform practice, both educationally and in terms of election machinery, i think that would probably be a healthy development. Emily is the relative lack of restraint of the powers of the president in the constitution compared to the powers of congress a factor in the growth of the power in the presidency versus the congress over the last 150 years . David well, yes, but let me take the occasion of that good question to make another point. Its related to what we been to what we have been talking about, but its a little bit fresh in terms of our discussion here this morning. And that is the division of responsibility for foreign affairs, especially military affairs, between the legislature and the executive. Article 1 invests the writer the responsibility to declare war in the congress. Article 2 defines the president as the commander in chief. And that distribution of responsibility for the conduct of foreign especially military affairs has long been as the great constitutional scholar Edward Corwin once said, an invitation to conflict, conflict between the president and the congress. The fact is it that the congress has exercised its responsibility, its sacred responsibility to declare wars. Scarcely any government function more consequential and full of gravity than that. Congress has exercised that function exactly five times in all of American History. War of 1812, mexican war, spanish american war, world war s i and ii. But by actual count the Congressional Research service did a study of this a few years ago. So even these data are a little bit out of date, but as of approximately 10 years ago, there have been well over 300 u. S. Military actions overseas. So again, theres a huge asymmetry, five former five formal declarations of war but 300 deployments and military actions overseas. So the point is simply, the president has great discretion in the realm of foreign affairs, especially military affairs, much greater than with respect to most domestic matters. And thats an invitation not only to conflict, but to adventurism and to a certain degree unfettered and unrestrained president ial initiatives in the realm of foreign policy. And weve struggled as a society, as a country for more than two centuries to find the right balance between democratic deliberation over the decision to resort to arms, and the necessity sometimes to do it in a hurry. There was a constitutional amendment proposed in the 1930s that if it had passed would have required a National Referendum to declare war. Take the power away from congress and invest it in a National Referendum. And Franklin Roosevelt among others, but Franklin Roosevelt opposed that and roosevelt said it would make as much sense to require a meeting of the city council before the Fire Department was authorized to put out a fire. There are times when you simply cant afford that sort of deliberation. So thats an extreme case of the effort to bring deliberative democratic process to bear in foreign policy. That one clearly i think is not on the table, and shouldnt be. But i think we still need to think hard about how we can somehow better bring deliberative democratic processes into the realm of president ial initiatives and foreign policy. Emily how would you rate the president s as having the greatest impact on the u. S. , and maybe make your top three . David well. [laughter] i recollect two things. Periodically, the American Historical Association or the organization of american historians, my two principal professional associations, one or the other will conduct a poll of card carrying professional historians about who are the most positive, effective, consequential, Good American president s. And consistently over many decades, two president s appear at the top of those polls, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. They both changed the american landscape socially, economically, constitutionally, attitudinally in ways that are lasting and beneficial. I think theres very little argument about that. After you get past those two, then theres a lot of arguments thereafter about who else deserves to be in that pantheon. More recently, or actually the most recent survey of this sort i saw, actually participated in and witnessed the final version of, was at a meeting of the organization of american historians in providence, rhode island, about three or four or five years ago. In which there was a Panel Discussion on who was the worst american president. And there were several hundred people in the room, all of them professional historians of some sort, had a vote was taken at and a vote was taken at the end. People who down usually show up in the basement of those polls are James Buchanan and andrew johnson. The one failed to prevent the coming of the civil war. And the other, andrew johnson, did a bad job of administering reconstruction at the end of the civil war. No surprise there. To date, the civil war is the biggest trauma in American History. So those are the two usual inhabitants of the basement, but in this poll, the final two candidates for worst president ever, reflecting im sure the moment we all were living in, were george w. Bush and Richard Nixon. They would not have been necessarily my candidates, but thats came up the end. Came up at the end. And then there was a vote taken. And by a pretty large majority, Richard Nixon won. [laughter] if that is the right word. Why . Because he had done the most damage to our political culture. For reasons not unrelated to what i was just talking about earlier in this hour, that he undermined confidence in the authority, legitimacy, and honesty of a Major Political institution, the presidency of the United States. And the vietnam war, over which he apparently presided, did a lot to undermine Peoples Trust in the rectitude and legitimacy , i daresay the morality, of government. So yeah, again, im not sure i want to cast my ballot again here on the screen this morning. But it is a reminder that damage to our Political Institutions can get a president or any political actor a pretty low ranking in the judgment of history. From George Washington to george w. Bush, every sunday at 8 00 p. M. And midnight eastern, we feature the presidency, our weekly series exploring president s, policies, and legacies. You are watching American History tv, all weekend every weekend, on cspan 3. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] the first tv president ial campaigns add aired in the 1952 contest between dwight d. Eisenhower and stevenson. Ads have been essential to every president ial campaign since. Here is a look. I was born in a little town called hope, arkansas, three months after my father died. I remember that old Historic House where i lived with my grandparents. They had very limited income. It was in 1963 that i went to washington and met president kennedy at the boys nation program. Thinking what an incredible country this was that somebody like me who had no money or anything would be given the opportunity to meet the president. That was when i decided i could do Public Service because i cared so much about people. I worked my way through law school with parttime jobs, anything i could find. After i graduated, i didnt care about making a lot of money. I just wanted to go home and see if i could make a difference. We worked hard in education and health care, to create jobs, and we have made real progress. Now, it is exhilarating to me to think that as president we can change all these peoples lives for the better and bring hope back to the american dream. I dont believe him. I dont believe him. I dont believe him one bit. I dont believe him. I dont know much about clinton except promises. He tells everyone what they want to hear. He wants to spend more money and the only place he can get it is from the taxpayers, so hire taxpayer so hire taxes. Less food on the table. Broken promises. Less clothes on the kids backs. Less money to go to the doctor. He raised taxes in arkansas. He will raise taxes everywhere. Ask we get less of everything. We get less of everything. Who is the best qualified person on the stage to create jobs . Make your decision and vote on november 3. I would suggest you might try to consider somebody who has created jobs. Second, who is the best person to manage money . I would suggest you pick a person who has successfully managed money. Who is the best person to get results and not talk . Look at the record, make your decision. Finally, who would you give your pension fund and your savings account to, to manage . And last one, who would you ask to be the trustee of your estate and take care of your children if something happened to you . To you students up there, god bless you. I am doing this for you. [applause] and to the american people, i am doing this because i love you. Thats it. If you like politics, you can find plenty of archival eyes, ads, president ial debates and Campaign Speeches on our website, cspan. Org. Ofnext, the university utahs Hinckley Institute of politics host a discussion on the vice presidency and how the position and its response abilities have changed over time. Speakers include a Political Science professor