INDIANAPOLIS – It seems like a small thing.
But it matters.
When the people President-elect Joe Biden has asked to serve in his Cabinet introduced themselves to America, they all delivered asides so similar that they read and sounded like variations on a theme.
They said that no matter how much they might like and admire Biden, their first duty and their first loyalty would be to the nation itself. The president might be their supervisor, but, ultimately, the American people were their bosses.
If the members of the Biden Cabinet adhere to that sentiment, it will be a refreshing change -– and go a long way to restoring this country to sanity.
President Donald Trump, of course, did not see things this way. He’s treated the federal government as an acquisition, not a public trust. He’s used Attorney General Bill Barr, for example, as his personal attorney and dragooned the entire Justice Department into fighting his personal legal battles, including ones that didn’t even have a tenuous connection to the presidency.
But it’s not fair to blame Trump alone for this development.
There’s something about the nature of the modern presidency that encourages almost unquestioning idolatry. Partisans of this president or that one see their candidate not as a servant of the people, but as the embodiment of the nation itself.
In the eyes of these presidential idolators, to criticize or disagree with the president is to break faith with America itself.
That’s nonsense.
If this country stands for anything, it is supposed to be a place where people are able to think for themselves and believe what they wish to believe.
Donald Trump may be the culmination of this absurd trend of personifying the nation in the president, but it did not begin with him.
The trend is at least as old as Theodore Roosevelt, who was the first politician to master the art of manipulating modern media and thus became the first president to live and die by headlines and newspaper column inches. Americans at the beginning of the 20th century followed TR’s adventures and exploits as if he were a favorite character in a novel — and Roosevelt learned how to marshal the public interest in him, his family and his life as if it were an army to deploy in his battles with Congress.
What TR developed his distant cousin Franklin Roosevelt enhanced. FDR presented himself as a symbol of national determination and resilience and cemented to him a huge base of supporters who were so devoted that they were willing to override or ignore established traditions and norms such as, among other things, third terms for presidents.
What followed this second Roosevelt was a series of presidents who strove to present themselves in mythic terms as walking incarnations of America. Some succeeded better at this better than others – Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama come to mind – but all tried.
There are several problems with this.
One is that it creates unrealistic expectations about who presidents are and what they can accomplish. When we strip presidents of their humanity and see them only as symbols, it becomes easy – too easy – to forget that they’re just like the rest of us. They, too, are combinations of strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vices, penetrating insights and appalling blind spots.
But the even larger problem with these presidential cults is that they blind us to the true nature of government in a free society.
That government is the expression of our will as a nation and the defender of our rights and liberties, not the pet possession of the person who occupies the Oval Office. The people who take oaths of office pledge to serve us and that sacred responsibility, not any one person.
That’s what Joe Biden’s Cabinet selections were trying to tell us.
That they were going to be our servants, not his.
And that’s a refreshing notion.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.
