A President Distracted by a Pool of Water

The scene, as it has been described, is almost comic, were it not so costly. With less than three months before important elections, a president is reported to be “still wasting even a moment thinking about the Reflecting Pool,” a matter in which the related legal cases are said to be collapsing. He keeps public pressure on an official, while his own attorney general notes, with dry candour, that if the president wished to dismiss her, “he understands he has the power to do that.” Here is not the tragic constraint of office, but the voluntary misdirection of attention; not the burden of necessity, but the indulgence of preoccupation.

In my inquiry into moral sentiments, I argued that we judge conduct by imagining the impartial spectator, a well-informed but disinterested observer. Such a spectator, surveying a ruler who toys with a decaying controversy about a damaged pool while facing an approaching electoral test, would feel little admiration. He would perceive prudence sacrificed to pique, and public business displaced by a quarrel over who “folded like an umbrella.” To be thought strong while acting pettily is to be praised without being praise-worthy; and to deserve blame for imprudence is, in the long run, more wounding than any unjust censure.

One must not, however, appeal only to propriety and dignity. In political life, as in commerce, men act from interest as they understand it. If a president persists in this dispute, it is not because he is uniquely wicked, but because the incentives he faces reward the appearance of unbending firmness more than the quiet husbandry of administrative time. A dramatic feud over a Reflecting Pool and a subordinate may enliven his partisans, even as it leaves the underlying legal cases in ruins. The error is not in having self-love, but in mistaking what truly serves it, and confusing the gratification of the moment with the durable esteem of posterity.

When I wrote on the wealth of nations, I urged readers always to ask who ultimately pays. Every visible quarrel for power has an invisible ledger of cost. The minutes and hours a president devotes to nursing resentment about contractors, openings, and collapsing cases are minutes and hours not spent on the great duties of defence, justice, and sound administration. The officials who posture and deflect to protect their positions expend intelligence that might have been used to improve the condition of the labouring poor. The public, meanwhile, pays in the dearest of all coin: its limited power of attention, which is drawn from serious questions toward a shallow pool.

The testimony of subordinates is revealing in another way. When an attorney general explains that the president “has the power” to fire an official, he tacitly acknowledges that the continued pressure is a choice, not a necessity. It is the difference between resolving a question within the constitutional powers of the office and transforming it into a televised morality play. Such dramas flatter the ruler’s sense of consequence, and furnish material for his partisans and his critics alike, but they do not advance the public good. They represent, in effect, the use of other people’s time and trust as fuel for a spectacle whose chief benefit is to the principal actor.

Defenders may reply that firmness, even upon a seemingly small issue, signals resolve in larger matters: that to let an underling “fold” without consequence invites disorder. There is some truth that rules must be enforced, and that negligence in public works should not be passed over. But here the cases are said to be collapsing, the damage partly explained by haste demanded for a patriotic celebration, and the president himself has not determined to remove the official. The impartial spectator, hearing all this, would suspect that the continued agitation is less about maintaining standards than about preserving a narrative of betrayal and grievance. Rules applied to vindicate the ruler’s story, rather than the public’s interest, soon cease to be rules at all.

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I warned against the man of system, who imagines he can move men as a hand moves pieces on a chess-board. In a lesser key, one sees a similar conceit when a ruler supposes he can bend events to his will by sheer persistence in a failing line of attack: that by keeping pressure on a subordinate and speaking often of a Reflecting Pool, he can compel reality to conform. Yet the law, the facts, and the independent judgments of voters all possess motions of their own. To neglect these, and to spend scarce political capital upon a decaying cause, is not merely a moral failing; it is bad politics disguised as strength, and the public has quietly to pay for the masquerade.