“Presidents should be leaders who create a seductive image of what the country should be like and allow the love and hate of a country to focus on them”

One of the accusations against President-elect Donald Trump is that he is inconsistent or disengaged from the complexities of policymaking. That is probably true. However, it gives me an opportunity to consider the relationship between policymaking and the American presidency and, by extension, other political systems.

I would argue that the idea that policy optimisation is at the core of the presidency is incorrect. The president is not the U.S.’ chief administrative officer. He is a leader and manager of the political process. His job is to be a symbol

Franklin D. Roosevelt was ridiculed before he took office as an intellectual lightweight whose only reason for wanting to be president was to be president. It would appear that few of the initiatives for which he is lauded were things he thought of before taking office. Roosevelt understood that policies may or may not work, but he gave the public a sense that someone decent was in charge. For most of his first two terms, Roosevelt came under vicious attack by his enemies, who were legion. He developed policies from two sources. The first was from the reality he faced, a desire to be reelected and tactical moves to build his popularity. The second was from a group of advisers who cobbled together fairly hit- or-miss ideas on what might work, and which frequently didn’t work. The same could be said of Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, among others. They were not universally admired when elected, they lived in a chaotic fun house, and their goal was to survive. All of them made policy, but not as the policy industry would have liked.

All of them had in mind a general idea of the direction they wanted to go. Truman wanted to continue the New Deal. Eisenhower wanted to stabilise U.S. foreign policy and avoid nuclear war. Reagan wanted to end stagflation and reestablish American power after Vietnam. These were intentions.

Policymaking, the complex weaving of a plan, could not survive the realities of political life. First, policies focused on one subject as if the presidency consisted of neat pigeonholes. Second, the policy writer might have a good idea, but not grasp or care that there were powerful forces