Fugitive Narrative Extended (Who Cares About Executive Power?)

It’s arguably the most neglected issue of this election. The candidates aren’t talking about it, the debates aren’t asking about it and the mainstream media keeps on blindly pursuing the horse race. So who cares about executive power?

If there’s one place where you’d hope to find a fugitive narrative, it’s the web. Bloggers and columnists have been excellent at delving into the issue, particularly after Charlie Savage confronted the issue head-on in the Boston Globe. And power isn’t just a partisan issue. The concept of an executive with unchecked power is at odds with some of the fundamental tenets of conservatism, meaning that right-wing writers criticize the issue as vehemently as liberal ones.

In October last year, Andrew Sullivan wrote about The Dark Forces Driving Bush’s Executive Power:

“In America, congressional resistance to presidential power is nearing a historic nadir; and we live in a time of a resurgent imperial presidency. The attacks of 9/11 would doubtless have increased presidential power. Emergencies always do. But no one could have predicted the sheer scale of what has happened and the extreme to which it has now gone.”

Granted, this article was in the London Times. And a lot of articles touching on executive power have curiously been in the foreign press, like this interview with Hillary Clinton in the London Guardian, in which she says,

“Well, I think it is clear that the power grab undertaken by the Bush-Cheney administration has gone much further than any other president and has been sustained for longer. There were a lot of actions which they took that were clearly beyond any power the Congress would have granted or that in my view that was inherent in the constitution.”

There’s also this one with John McCain in Der Spiegel. But this isn’t to say that American pundits haven’t been paying attention. In the opinionated press (Slate, Salon etc) there have been posts a-plenty about Bush and the Imperial Presidency, ranging from the pragmatic (Bruce Fein offers a solution) to the extreme (Paul Craig Roberts likens Bush to Adolf Hitler, Julius Caesar and a Sith Lord).

Some of the best opinion writers on the issue are Aziz Huq in the Nation, Bruce Reed and Jack Shafer (and pretty much everyone) at Slate, and Gene Healy at Reason. Huq wrote an excellent piece entitled, Undoing the Bush Legacy. According to Huq,

“Acting largely in secret, the Administration is moving to tie down the next White House–Republican or Democratic–in ways that will prove hard to unravel. Whether or not it succeeds depends on the vigilance of Congress and the public.”

There’s one ray of hope for Hillary Clinton fans: she has Sidney Blumenthal on her campaign as a senior adviser. He wrote this article for Salon about Bush’s consistent abuses of presidential power, which, according to Blumenthal, are still seen by Republicans “as his great asset rather than understood as his enduring weakness. ” Blumenthal continues:

“Despite the obvious shortcomings of his policies, he has startlingly succeeded in reshaping the executive into an unaccountable imperial presidency. And Bush’s presidency is now accepted as the only acceptable version for major Republican candidates who aspire to succeed him.”

Bloggers have been key in spreading the fugitive narrative across the web. Unconstrained (and often appalled) by the blinkers of the horse race press, bloggers like John Perr, Timothy Burke and Dan Fejes have been individually commenting on the Bush administration’s flagrant abuse of executive power. Fejes has the illustrious claim of being the only blogger (that I’ve found) to focus solely on the issue. His blog, Pruning Shears, is dedicated to raising awareness, and putting the issue of executive power at the forefront of the 2008 election.

So what inspires him to do it?

“I get very frustrated when polling, campaign math and horse race speculation take center stage,” says Fejes. “There seems to be a great reluctance among the major media players to confront those in power. The fact that it’s easier to think of exceptions like Charlie Savage and Helen Thomas tells you how uncommon that ethic has become. I think there’s a huge amount of laziness too; it’s easier to speculate about the latest from Rasmussen than to comb through a bill or legal opinion.”

If you look at the right-wing press, there’s a significant degree of uneasiness about the Bush/Cheney power grab. If you consider the notion of executive power, it’s hard to reconcile the concept of unlimited presidential power with traditional conservative ideology.

As a result the right-wing press finds itself in a quandary over what is increasingly being labeled an “Imperial Presidency.” Is it conservative to wiretap US citizens? Issue signing statements? Torture? It’s an enormously difficult question to answer.

There’s currently almost more disagreement between conservatives over executive power than any other issue. Look at Human Events. On the same site you can read David Limbaugh decrying “the left’s orchestrated effort to paint President Bush as a power-hungry, would-be dictator,” and Pat Buchanan declaring:

“There’s a reason the Founding Fathers separated the power to conduct war from the power to declare it. That reason is just such a ruler as George W. Bush, a man possessed of an ideology and a sense of mission that are not necessarily coterminous with what is best for his country. Under our constitution it is Congress, not the president, who decides on war.”

The fugitive narrative may be less obvious than the horserace coverage, but it’s there.