Lesson: How much power does the president really have?/ExerciseD1

Listening Exercise

- A lot of

want the president of the United States to

us from our enemies, from the

and other really big things. So, we're trying to figure out: what

of power does the president really have? To

that question we sat down with George Edwards, distinguished

of political science and a leading scholar on the presidency.

GE: The president has much

power than people think and they have much less power than you

think from what you

candidates promise on the campaign trail. And I don't

that promises aren't sincere because

always they are. But presidents, once they take office, run into some

hard realities. And the first reality is that they

connect unilaterally. They share power primarily with congress and congress,

, in modern American politics, is populated with the opposition, as it is

now. And so presidents

in and think that after two years of campaigning they

be pretty persuasive fellows, after all,

won the big prize in

and they've been basically

nothing but talking for two years. But that's a bit

because you are simply drawing a comparison with

candidate and that's different than convincing people to support a

piece of policy. And it's almost

the case that the public doesn't move in the president's

or it actually moves a little bit in the opposite direction. So, presidents

fail in their effort to win the

and, therefore, they don't have the kind of leverage that they want in moving congress.

- So, if we can't

the president to just fly in and save day, how do we get

done in this country?

GE: The founding fathers, they

what they were doing, they divided power, they decentralized power, they specifically designed an inefficient

and that forces deliberation and it

compromising. So, if there's no people in the

, there's no people with whom you can cut a deal and if compromise

a dirty word and you're viewed as a traitor to your party, then

is very little chance of doing

. I'll give you an example, senator Lindsey Graham, a very

guy and a long time clear conservative. And he found that

by talking to the white house and trying to work out issues on climate

and on immigration that he was condemned by his

party. That's just an

of the kinds of problems that you face when

must feel that the opposition

are untrustworthy and,

, you can't compromise with them. So, to

about change, you have to compromise. That's a

thing in my mind. And voters have to {`support _7 } candidates who are willing to compromise. You have to be

to give up something. You can't argue that I should get everything I want and the other side can have nothing that they want. And you got to support candidates who are willing to talk to the other side sincerely and to compromise and I don't know any

way to actually deal with the kinds of

that we face.

- All right, thanks for chatting with us.

GE: Thank you, bye bye.