Presidents such as Nixon and Johnson come on as active-negatives: hard-driven, hard-working, sad-minded, energetic Presidents who use their political life to drive forward their own personal, deep compulsions, actions defined inside their own obsessions rather than outside in the world of the community. That fixation can throw the power of the Presidency away from concern for the human community and guide it instead into the person's own essential demand, a goal to be pursued at whatever cost it charges the country.
Passive-positive Presidents such as Taft and Harding fall in love with the affection which politics gives them--especially as Presidents. Their personalities lived inside their own personas, wanting devotion to flow into them rather than out to the nation. Such Presidents are much manipulated by close-in friends.
The active-positive Presidents are energetic lovers of politics-happy, dynamic, political doers such as Franklin D. Roosevelt or Jack Kennedy. Their personalities come on with enthusiasm for politics, a line of work they sought and liked much when they got it. Their strength is a capacity to reach far beyond themselves politically and make things happen.
These four political personalities turned out to be the most usual and obvious baseline categories to help us know which campaign characters would likely aim in which psychological direction. To label candidates with one of those mainline categories, as his own mainline political personality, will be far more useful to judge how to vote than the hyper-simplified alternatives.
But now, as then, character is only part of the personality qualities we need to know about campaigners. The basic working skills of the Presidency also need to be evaluated the candidate's capacity to do homework, negotiate actions, perform effective rhetoric. Healthy or obsessive characters do not define such skills. The skills are basic independent operative qualities-so they, too, are much needed to be known by a voter. Then there is the substantive belief the person owns, the world view shaped up as a basic political purpose, a philosophy related to this actual world to be acted upon. The world view is also logically independent of the character and skills. You can get a happy Hitler, a talented Stalin, whose psychological strengths can be used to destroy the human rights of their national comrades.
To get to know the candidates as potential Presidents, voters need the stories of the candidates' lives. Fortunately, biography is one of the most interesting and appealing stories ordinary citizens find intriguing--and worth learning. Journalists, given the time and facilities to discover and then depict the basic life story of a political contestant, can make the significant reality interesting to readers who are constantly on the verge of turning the page from politics to sports or comedies. Look at the fascinating personal biographies produced about Presidents after they have been President. That shows how the voters could have been attracted and engaged before they decided who would have their top political power.
The need to know the candidates' life stories before the day to vote clarifies the fact that election is prediction. The vote works when the President turns out to be what the voters concluded--in advance of the choice--as the main probabilities of his actions as President. Perhaps the easiest estimate in advance is the rough categorization of character as defined above. Then comes the predictions of skills and beliefs, as well as the more extensive details of character the biographies expose. The consequent validity or error of attempted predictions test the categories previously concentrated on.
Based on studies of 20th-century Presidents Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, I then took on the challenge of predictions, published in advance, for Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush. Not every prediction was perfect, but at least the baseline character categories and certain essential biographical prophecies worked out.
Nixon, an obvious active-negative type, was wrongly predicted by others for his second-term Presidency as a pragmatic, hyper-flexible, "TrickyDick" person. Instead, my prediction saw "the primary danger of the Nixon Presidency" as risking that "the frustrations and erosions of the self he experiences will accumulate, and that the process of rigidification, triggered by a serious threat to his power and his moral confidence, will show him how to rescue, as he sees it, his Presidential heroism." I saw him as in danger of "rigid adherence to a failing line of policy." That predicted danger turned out to be the crux of the Nixon tragedy.
Ford, who many worried about as a soft, potentially disastrous republican President, was not so predicted in my Presidential character analysis. Instead, I anticipated that "Ford is going to be pragmatic, and he is unlikely to adopt terribly rigid stances." And "he will be ready to admit it when he makes a mistake." That active-positive person turned out to be an active-positive President.
Carter, my friend, had his White House happiness overestimated by my prediction, though he did turn out to be, on balance, an active-positive as predicted. His character was fine; his problem was different: a lack of the skill a President needed to negotiate and organize action results. As predicted, well in advance of his election, "His stylistic weak point is negotiation."
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