James David Barber is rather famous – or about as famous as professors of political science can get in the Real World – on account of his landmark study and classification of presidential personalities. Since you're not my damn students I won't sit here and lecture you at length about his work. Let me give you the brief version before explaining why you might care.
You and I have no contact with presidents or presidential candidates. We can't get to know them or understand their personalities. All we get are carefully staged, often scripted words and images through the media. So it's not possible to engage in armchair psychology and claim that we can assign some personality disorder or qualities to George W. Bush. But what we can do is observe them and get a basic sense of what kind of person we're dealing with based on two simple questions: is he a positive or negative person? Is he active or passive?
On this basis he created a four-part typology (active-negative, active-positive, passive-negative, passive-positive). Long story short, active-negatives are the folks to watch out for.** Examples include George W. Bush, Nixon, and LBJ. Because of low self-esteem, they crave power, surround themselves with toadies, and are psychologically incapable of admitting that they are wrong. They're paranoid, seeing threats everywhere, and often consider themselves to be above the law. Barber wrote his book right before Watergate broke, and his description of Nixon as a classic active-negative was soon borne out by the events of the day. Hence Barber's fame.
Active-negatives are not always "bad presidents." One could argue that Nixon, W, and LBJ accomplished some valuable things in office. But they have obsessions – Vietnam, Iraq, or a list of "enemies" – that bring out their bat-shit insane side and their eventual downfall. Self-esteem is the fundamental concept in Barber's opinion – active-positives have it, and thus they quickly rebound from embarassing failures (Clinton, FDR, Lincoln). Active-negatives don't, and they are too insecure to admit defeat or accept criticism. They develop an Ahab-like obsession with proving themselves right. Hence the years of hemmoraging lives and money into Vietnam long after Johnson stated that the war had become a lost cause, for example.
Why do you care? Maybe you don't. But as someone who is very familiar with the analysis, let me offer you two cents on what we're dealing with right now.
Barack Obama is a classic active-positive. Relentlessly optimistic, ambitious but not craven, able to move past his fuck-ups, and utterly undaunted by the fact that going from State Rep to President in 6 years is ludicrous. One thing that many people misunderstand about Barber – active-positive does not equal "good." Clinton wasn't that good of a president. But he fit active-positive to a tee. Obama does too.
John McCain is the classic passive-negative.
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Military men turned politicians usually are. He's not energetic and doesn't look like he's really enjoying what he does. He does it because of a sense of duty (snicker…"duty.") He's not chock-full of ambitious ideas (most of his platform appears to be recycled, standard GOP fare). He lets the action come to him, choosing to react rather than act. Note that passive-negatives are not "bad." Washington and Eisenhower did alright.
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Hillary Clinton is pure active-negative. Her win-at-all-costs mentality, and a complete inability to accept defeat, officially scare the shit out of me. She baldly craves power and appears to be willing to behead her own mother to get it.
When it became mathematically impossible for her to defeat Obama in the delegate count, her immediate reaction was to unveil a new strategy of trying to corrupt pledged delegates. How, she does not say; threats, bribery, coercion, pleading….there doesn't appear to be a depth to which she will not go to win. And she isn't stupid, so certainly it must be clear that doing something so inimical to the democratic process will devolve the nomination into a months-long circus of disorder and bad publicity. 1968 all over again, while McCain sits back and smiles. Hillary Clinton understands but does not care; the attitude is simply "If I can't have it, no one will."
Maybe I'm wrong; people frequently disagree about something as subjective as Barber's psychology-from-afar analysis. If I'm right, the best-case scenario is a Lyndon Johnson-type presidency; that is, one marred by a single fatal flaw. The worst-case scenario is a woman who, denied the power her ego needs, salts the Earth behind her.
Samantha says:
Does Barber cite examples of passive-positive presidents? I'm positively too passive to look it up.
Samantha says:
Actually, I did look it up, and according to this site: http://people.brandeis.edu/~woll/barberpp_files/frame.htm
Clinton was passive-positive not active-positive.
Samantha says:
And George W. Bush is passive-negative not active-negative, just like his father.
Ed says:
With all due respect to the knucklehead who assembled that powerpoint presentation, it is dead wrong. And I'll be more than pleased to debate the point. In fact, I'd love to hear an explanation of how Eisenhower and George W. Bush are similar. Really. Or how George W. Bush's affect could, by any stretch of the imagination, be called "passive."
I'm happy to be corrected, but I usually prefer it to happen when I'm wrong.
Samantha says:
Obviously, the key to effectively predicting a future president's behaviour using Barber's method lies in accurately typing him/her beforehand. But from three different sources now I've seen Teddy Roosevelt typed three different ways…and we even have documented behaviour patterns to base his particular label on. This begs the question: is there an expert aside from Barber himself who can accurately type future presidents, or is Barber's method so subjective it is, for all practical intents and purposes, ineffective?
Ed says:
Yes, it's very subjective. Personally I don't see a lot of predictive value in it – even if I'm right about the 2008 candidates (and we could find people who disagree quite easily), it doesn't really tell us anything specific.
Like most presidency literature, I think its value is mostly explanatory and useful in hindsight. Of interest mostly to historians and social scientists. That said, the fact that it's subjective doesn't make every interpretation equally valid. George W. Bush, who entered office with an ambitious agenda and adopted an attitude toward executive power roughly equivalent to that of Napoleon, can be called "passive" only by someone who doesn't understand the idea. Sorry to be an elitist, but that's just plain wrong.
With someone like Teddy R., we find that making judgments about the long-dead, especially those who left little historical record, is very difficult. Barber lumps him in with the active-positives in his book, but I know that others have disagreed.
In short, the theory is ineffective at predicting the future. What I take from it is very basic – good presidents can come from any group, but active-negative types are very, very dangerous people to have in power.
Mike says:
Wouldn't George W. Bush be passive in the sense that he doesn't seem really driven at all throughout his life? ; he has no notable success before becoming Governor besides a drinking-problem (a flag for low self-esteem) and running some businesses into the ground through indifference. Compared to the manic resume of Hillary, Obama or Romney, always achieving the next big thing, which would be active in that sense. (Or an LBJ or Nixon, always grabbing the next lever of power.)
Rob says:
I don't believe that Bush is particularly active or passive – he's just stupid. :)
One could argue that he is active in his attempt to allow foolishness to govern our foreign and local affairs, while remaining passive is his attempt to do anything that might help the situation.
Ultimately, I'm not sure I agree that Barber's arbitrary division of presidents into 4 classifications allows us to tell anything about that future or past that isn't already readily apparent. And if it doesn't allow us to convincingly predict anything useful about the future, then who cares? The history has already been written. It doesn't matter whether Bush has screwed us by being passive or active or by blatantly negative about socialistic concerns, or by being foolishly positive about the prognosis in the Iraq war.
Ed says:
Active vs Passive describes the individual's affect toward the office. Bush may be a passive individual – maybe he's afraid to ask women out on a date, or to organize social events, or whatever – but he hasn't been a passive president. He came into office with an ambitious agenda – privatize social security, privatize healthcare, "fix" Medicare, cut taxes, legalize faith-based government charity, NCLB, etc etc. And he has actively done everything he can to expand the power of the office.
Passive presidents have no agenda, or one so limited that you can't even think of something they championed. Coolidge, Eisenhower, Taft….what did they do in office? What did they even try to do?
When students disagree about this in class it's usually between act-pos and act-neg. They seem to agree that Bush is not passive but, based on party affiliation, they differ on his affect. At least they used to when I started teaching this in 03. Now they see pretty clearly that he has the one unavoidably active-negative trait of being psychologically unable to admit that he was wrong or abandon failed policies.
Sam says:
I agree with your analysis of the current candidates, but I want to dispute the idea that Hillary's working from "If I can't have it, no one can." Wait, I do want to agree with that, in the short-term.
But I think that now that the nomination is out of her reach, it's her plan to sabotage Obama so that she can run against McCain in 4 years.
Mike says:
Ok, I see your point. (though I might hedge my argument by saying Cheney, Rumsfeld et al are quite active with the Presidency, with Bush's, as a somewhat uninterested 'decider', has been quite uninterested himself with what is going on.) But doesn't Barber's theory dissolve into a bit of a tautology when analyzed as an equation? One shouldn't get to reference a Presidential record/history while putting together the personality type if that record is what the type predicts; that would make a muddy casual model.
I do agree with your actual point though; Hillary's plan to 'court' (read: threaten) pledged delegates is extremely disturbing. I honestly can't believe it's come to this as her talking points to donors.
Ed says:
That's an excellent point about GWB – it's going to be very hard to evaluate his presidency in the future because we have serious doubts about how much of it was him as opposed to Cheney, Perle, and the others around him.
Reagan has the same problem. His attitude on so many topics was simply to delegate and let someone else handle it. Hence he is usually lumped in with the passive-negatives, but I think he fails to meet many of the criteria for "passive."