IN 1796, George Washington announced that he would retire upon completion of his second term as president, declining to seek a third term that he likely would have won. His decision, remarkable in an age when much of the world was ruled by life tenured monarchs, established a precedent so enduring that only one subsequent president was elected to a third term of office, despite the fact that the Constitution was not amended to forbid this until 1951.
The periodic transfer of power by means of elections is a hallmark of democratic government, as is the ability of all (or at least most) citizens to hold office and participate in the political process. And so it is with some dismay that I have watched Hillary Clinton pull away from her rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination over the past several months. I say this not because Clinton is unworthy of the office, but simply because if she were elected, America would face the prospect of 28 consecutive years in which the presidency was held by members of just two families.
To recount briefly, George H.W. Bush was elected president in 1988 and unseated by Hillary Clinton's husband, Bill Clinton, in 1992. Bill Clinton served two terms, after which George H.W. Bush's son, George W. Bush, was elected president in 2000. Barring his death, resignation or impeachment, George W. Bush will serve two terms and, if she wins the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton will stand a strong chance of succeeding him after the 2008 election. If she is reelected in 2012 and completes her second term, America will have gone from 1989 to 2017 under no other leadership than that of Bushes and Clintons.
The danger in this is twofold. In the first place, the president should be the most capable leader we can find and it's hard to know if this standard is met when we pick the sons and wives of people who served before. It's always possible that leadership runs in families, but the election of Bushes and Clintons six or seven times in a row would seem to suggest that Americans are voting for familiar names and faces rather than making a genuine effort to evaluate the candidates and vote for the best. In the case of George W. Bush, who had little to recommend him but a famous name when he first ran for election, this was almost certainly true.
A second and more insidious problem with presidential dynasties is that they may encourage ordinary Americans to view themselves as mere observers of a political process dominated by others. The average American may have little chance of becoming president, or even of influencing the president in a meaningful way, but the regular change of names and faces in the White House suggests at least that the business of government has not been permanently outsourced to a few prominent families. If we, the people, are to believe that government belongs to us, it would be nice to see a few more of us at its highest levels.
To be fair, the Clintons come from distinctly middle class backgrounds and their mutual ascent to the presidency might be viewed as a democratic success story. Hillary Clinton, moreover, would be the first female president, a distinction that might broaden America's conception of who is fit to hold office. But the sheer inevitability of her candidacy, from the moment her husband left office, cannot be encouraging to those who believe that a healthy democracy requires regular turnover at the top of the totem pole.
Washington, who died in 1799, would not have completed a third term of office. But had he been reelected in 1796 and turned over the presidency to John Adams upon his death, he might have established the fateful precedent that the president serves for life, upon which his office is passed to a predetermined successor, the vice president. It is impossible to say whether these events would have short-circuited our democracy, but it is not entirely farfetched to think that in the absence of a consensus expectation of how its new government would work, early America might have developed a system of kings by election not entirely different from the monarchies of contemporary Europe. As a professor of mine once put it, America might have run monarchical software on the constitutional hardware of democracy.
Twenty-eight years of Clintons and Bushes might not mark a return to monarchy, but it would at least mark a bit of democratic apathy on the part of the American people. For, while government of, by and for the people may always be more of an aspiration than a reality, it's little more than a fantasy when the White House is perennially occupied by people and families who have been there before. Hillary Clinton might make a good president, but surely she's not the only one.
Alec Solotorovsky's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at asolotorovsky@cavalierdaily.com.
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