Review of Running Alone by James MacGregor Burns (Jon Meacham, Washington Post)

Splendid Isolation: How uncoupling presidents from their parties has given us less dynamic leaders (Jon Meacham, Washington Post)

In his impressive new Running Alone, Burns traces the origins of the collapse of broad party politics back to the rise of Camelot, which he sees as a court that was too focused on its king and not enough on the knights in Congress, in the states and in the neighborhoods who could help the monarch convince the realm of the wisdom of his program. The Kennedy drive — JFK’s appetites, curiosity, charisma and charm — is the stuff of great biography, but in this book Burns is more concerned with the story of a nation than with the story of any one individual. And the stories of democratic nations, he argues, are determined by a leader’s capacity to mobilize large numbers of people — not only to elect the leader to office but to enable the work of government to begin when the work of electioneering leaves off.

Though this is not an especially original or startling point, Burns, who remains the preeminent historian of the years of Franklin D. Roosevelt, has written a colorful, intelligent and thoroughly engaging book about America as it has been and as, in his view, it should be. One need not agree with every point Burns makes to savor the stories he tells and to appreciate the passion he brings to the question of presidential effectiveness. He is an unabashed reformer: He wants, for instance, to remove what he sees as antiquated 18th-century constitutional checks on government (such as by abolishing the electoral college and requiring concurrent terms for presidents, senators and congressmen so that all would face the voters on the same day in the same year). On this point I respectfully dissent: One man’s obstacle is another man’s salvation, which is what the Framers intended.

It is difficult, however, to argue with Burns’s central thesis: “America needs better leaders . . . . Since Thomas Jefferson, great leadership has emerged from strong parties, from leaders who have run together with such parties and presented Americans with genuine alternatives.” To Burns, the proliferation of presidential campaigns centered on the candidate, not on a larger party, has turned politicians into free agents more interested in their own survival on election day than they are on governing once they are in office. Burns is not naive; he knows better than most that politics is about ego and ambition. But he rightly recalls old campaigners such as FDR, who could credibly call on America’s Democrats to rally round in a way JFK could not. And, to Burns, therein lies all the difference. The packaging of candidates to make them appear to be free of the demands of their party’s base — the insistence, for example, that candidates have a “Sister Souljah” moment in the way Bill Clinton did in 1992 — is, to Burns, counterproductive when it comes to the business of government, for what works on the trail does not necessarily translate into effective leadership once in office, when a leader needs the base of that party.

Although people who typically don’t know much about the evolution of the American political system (sadly, way too many people, as our public education system continues to fail in its duty to teach American civics in some detail) tend to lament “partisanship,” the notion of “responsible party government” was once one of the big areas of study with the discipline of political science, and the study of parties is still a mainstay (in fact, the main area of study of Houston’s oft-quoted political scientist Richard Murray). This sounds like an interesting (because contrarian!) contribution to the genre.