By Peter Oliver
As the November 5 election date draws near, public attention is understandably consumed by the Presidential race. With the uniquely grotesque personage of Donald Trump overwhelming the airwaves with one expression of looniness topped by another, it is understandable that the top-of-the-ticket matchup is a car wreck the country can't look away from. A more positive attention grabber is the prospect of Kamala Harris becoming the first women president in history.
However, in terms of an impact on the average person's daily life, the choice of president is really a bit player on the overall electoral stage. As the former Speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill, once said famously, all politics is local. O'Neill might have been overstating his case, but he was nevertheless onto something. It is not the president who determines local property taxes or the budget for road maintenance or the cost of housing. It is not the president who determines zoning ordinances, building codes, or pet-control policies. And so on. The choices of select board members (not on the November ballot) and state legislators might not be attention-grabbing, but they affect local life at a personal level in a way that eclipses any effects of the choice for president.
Moving up the electoral ladder, even the choice of members of Congress is theoretically more impactful than the choice of president. It is Congress, as the legislative branch of government, that passes laws, even if laws are frequently credited to the president of the moment. It is true that national legislation is often shaped by the policy priorities of the president, and some presidents (e.g., FDR and LBJ) have been more effective than others in muscling their agendas through Congress. Still, Congress has the final legislative say. In recent presidencies, such signature policies as Obamacare, Trump's tax cuts, or Biden's infrastructure bill came about (or could have been quashed) only by a vote of Congress.
Put simply, laws and ordinances at the local, state, and national level are not the direct result of who wins the presidency. But they are the foundational components of the interaction between the government (in the broadest sense of the term) and its populace.
Article II of the Constitution defines the president's role in government with a degree of vagueness that allows considerable latitude in determining the limits of presidential power. (The recent Trump vs. the United States decision in the Supreme Court, shielding the president from criminal liability, expanded that latitude further.) But except for the role as Commander in Chief (along with a central role in conducting foreign policy) and in the broad ability to grant pardons, a president's constitutionally defined duties are largely managerial. The president's principal obligation, per Section 3 of Article II, is to see that the laws are faithfully executed. In other words, do what Congress has legislatively instructed the president and the executive branch to do.
That doesn't mean that someone like Trump, childishly amoral and ethically vacuous, would feel constrained from bringing considerable mayhem to the effective functioning of government. He has made it clear that, if elected, he will be guided by self-interest and retribution rather than Constitutional principle. But Congress, in addition to its legislative powers, is also empowered to rein in a rogue actor in the White House, largely through its role in approving (or denying) key presidential appointments and, in a worst-case scenario, impeachment. (When Trump was resident, of course, he repeatedly showed disdain for the law, frequently named short-term, sycophantic, "acting" appointees to bypass the Senate approval process, and twice survived impeachment. How well Constitutional checks and balances might work to keep him within presidential guardrails in a second term, should he be elected, is a scary topic of conversation.)
In truth, the choice of president is as much about a choice regarding national character as it is about government policy. What sort of leader embodies America's best face put forward? Who exemplifies America's best attributes? The president is a figurehead representing the kind of country America seeks to project to the world and to itself. That's meaningful in the way that it reaches deeply into the country's collective psyche, but it doesn't reach into the nuts and bolts of day-to-day American life in the way that decisions by Congress, state legislatures, and local governing bodies do.
As emotional and theatrical as presidential elections are, they aren't the main reason to cast a ballot or participate otherwise in the mechanisms of democracy. When it comes to so-called "kitchen-table issues," (almost) all politics are local. If you think, say, that property taxes are too high or that infrastructural protection against the next (inevitable) natural disaster needs improvement or that excessive housing costs need to be controlled or that your kids need a better education, your vote for president won't do much. Your votes on other lines on the ballot will.
Oliver lives in Warren.
