In an article from our new issue, now available online to subscribers, Ezra Klein, in his introduction to a package of profiles of figures who will determine how effective the next president will be, argues that we overestimate the importance of the president:
Forget the president. Not totally, of course. The president matters. But not as much as you think. Not as much as you've been led to believe. The centrality of the executive is something of a convenient fiction in American politics. Convenient for the media, which can tell the story of national affairs by following a single character. Convenient for the party that holds the White House, which can outsource the messy work of constructing an agenda to one actor. Convenient for the party that does not hold the White House, which can create an agenda out of simple opposition. And convenient for voters, who can understand politics through the actions of a discrete player and offload their dissatisfaction onto the failures of a hapless individual.
And, in the first full-length piece from the package, Brad DeLong explains how the Fed has become politically untouchable and, under Ben Bernanke, will play a huge role in the success or failure of the next president:
Ben Bernanke is the closest thing to a central economic planner the United States has ever had. He bestrides our narrow economic world like a colossus. Unelected (he was appointed by President George W. Bush and confirmed by an overwhelming majority in the Senate) and unaccountable (unless the Congress decides that it wishes to amend the Federal Reserve Act and take the blame for whatever else goes wrong with the economy), he is responsible only to his conscience -- and his open-market committee of himself, the other six governors of the Federal Reserve Board, and the 12 presidents of the regional Federal Reserve banks.
Finally, Brentin Mock reports on Sarah Palin's polar bear problem:
Scientists and comedians alike have derided vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin over her denial of human responsibility for global warming. Palin has repeated in interviews and debates that the "the world's weather patterns are cyclical" and that "over history there have been cooling and warming trends" that explain climate change. She also claims that polar bear populations are stable, not endangered as scientists report.
If Palin's against-the-grain views were simple matters of scientific disagreement, then it would be convenient to ignore her. But, as governor of Alaska, her theories have dire consequences because of the world's untapped oil and gas reserves that lie below the Arctic ice carpet. Over 130 billion barrels of these fossil fuels may be available from the Arctic Circle. Tapping these reserves would fuel the kind of consumption that leads to more aggressive global warming through greenhouse gas emissions.
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—The Editors
