Philip Jenkins, author of Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America, has an interesting "think post" over at the Oxford University Press Blog: Do Presidents Matter? His answer: Not so much. At least, not as much as we give them credit for. I find the argument an interesting one, and something I largely agree with. For any era, there's a great deal of historical determinacy that an American President has only a limited push or pull on. They often provide the figurehead upon which we hang a great deal of significance, and around which the narrative is composed, but that doesn't mean that if the head were different, so would the narrative have been.

The case can be overstated, and it may be difficult for readers to swallow the idea that a Carter re-election would have written a history largely similar to the Reagan '80's, but I have often said that I have felt that had Gore won in 2000, it's not unlikely our post-9/11 actions would have gone along rather similar lines, with the Republican Party playing the role of the isolationist Right it was on a course for.

Eric "What Liberal Media?" Alterman violently disagrees:

But in order to find Jenkins' thought-experiment far-fetched, one would have to ignore the Gore that was in power as VP and described in Ken Pollack's book, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq as the administration hawk on Iraq, and only take into account the fire-breathing ultra-lefty he's become since losing. The point is to envision the Gore that might have been had he been saddled with a real job and the burden of responsibility for his rhetoric. In that case, Jenkins may not be so far off at all.

The perceived difference between what many of these politicians said or seemed to believe when they were in positions of responsibility, and what they bloviate about when they're simply irresponsible opposition figures (like Jay Rockefeller, in addition to Gore, for instance) is why many of us seem to have such ire for them. We actually remember what they were on about when it mattered.

Anyway, here's Jenkins' post again: Do Presidents Matter?

Short answer: Yes, but in a democracy, there are far too many factors for them to matter as much as we give them credit for. At least, probably not with regard to the major flows of history.