President always gets blame for economy

The caller to NPR's "Talk of the Nation" last Thursday was dripping with sarcasm about the man in the White House he referred to as "Barry" or "this administration." The caller said he had decided to cancel a planned expansion of his business because of the economic ineptness of "this administration," which, he said, had never had to meet a payroll or look at a monthly P&L statement. "This administration" had never had a real job, never managed anything, he said.

The president, no matter who he is, gets the blame for a lousy economy or plaudits for a good economy, despite the fact that the president has little control over the economy. Congress controls spending. The Federal Reserve controls the money supply. The president, most often, is left to a role as a cheerleader when the economy needs a boost.

The critical caller got me to thinking, though, about presidents with business experience vs. those without it. In the past 50 years, only a handful of presidents have had meaningful business management experience. Jimmy Carter ran a family peanut warehouse business. George H.W. Bush was in the oil business in Texas. George W. Bush helped manage a baseball team for a while. All three of these men saw the economy turn sour on them and got the blame.

Presidents who had little or no business experience fared better in the economic sweepstakes. Bill Clinton's only occupation has been politics, except for a brief stint practicing law after losing an election; Ronald Reagan was in the acting business, but as an employee, not a decision-making manager; Richard Nixon practiced a little law but mostly practiced politics; ditto for Gerald Ford. Lyndon Johnson claimed to be a gentleman farmer and executive, but his only real interest was politics. All five of these presidents enjoyed better economic results than "this administration" is experiencing today, but their better fortunes could not have been the result of their business management experience.

Economic upswings and downturns are almost never the result of presidential action. They are usually the result of factors beyond a president's control, such as the bursting of the housing bubble and the international debt crisis that plague us today. A president can have some influence over the economy, as Franklin Roosevelt did in his first term by pushing stimulus spending and reassuring the public, or as John F. Kennedy did by proposing a dramatic cut in the maximum tax rates. Even then, however, Congress must act to approve a president's proposals.

Whenever the economy founders, from whatever causes, "this administration" will always get most of the blame.

100-year perspective on Ronald Reagan

I never voted for Ronald Reagan, but on this 100th anniversary of his birth, I have to confess to a great admiration for the man and a belief that historians will rank him among the great presidents.

In 1980, I voted for Jimmy Carter, a good man whose first term had been disappointing to say the least. I voted for him because I thought he was a good man whose heart was in the right place, and because I was a little frightened by Reagan's fiercely confrontational rhetoric. Four years later, I had become a bit of a fan of Reagan's optimism and confidence in the American system. I had never cared much for Walter Mondale, who seemed to me an old-style Democrat wedded to the union bosses and the old solutions. But my wife couldn't stand Ronald Reagan (she had threatened to move to Australia if he were elected in 1980), so I left the presidential choice blank in 1984 as a way of "ensuring domestic tranquility."

My admiration for Reagan doubled in 1993 when he wrote a heart-felt farewell to the American people, announcing that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. That short note was one of the best writing he ever produced, and it was quintessentially Reagan. In a new book, his son Ron suggests that Alzheimer's was already affecting his father before he left the White House. Historians aren't so sure. Regardless, when the diagnosis was confirmed, he faced his fate with all of the dignity, confidence, courage and equanimity that the American people had come to expect from him.

How will historians judge Reagan? Already, his star is on the rise. He has to rank as one of the major political figures of the post-World War II world. He altered the discussion of government and taxes. Unfortunately, some who now claim Reagan's mantle forget that he raised taxes, compromised with Democrats, negotiated treaties with the Soviet Union, supported civil rights legislation, called for a nuclear weapons-free world and sought practical solutions over ideological purity. History — not GOP efforts to deify a false image of him — will ultimately gauge Reagan's greatness, but from today's perspective, I think he will rank among the top half-dozen presidents, even though I never voted for him.