Julia Azari is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Marquette University. She is the author of Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate and a regular contributor to the political science blog The Mischiefs of Faction.

The return of Bowe Bergdahl has prompted the latest round of criticism about Obama’s weakness in foreign policy. For Obama’s domestic opponents, calling him weak and ineffective on the world stage is nothing new – we’ve heard it repeated ad nauseam on events from Ukraine to Syria, Venezuela to the South China Sea. And he’s not the first chief executive to face this charge. Harry Truman’s critics complained that he had “ lost China.” Jimmy Carter was lambasted as weak due to his response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, his failure to recover American hostages in Iran and for “ giving away” the Panama Canal. What has been distinct about Obama’s situation is that his critics have simultaneously accused him of being both weak and excessively strong, with words like “tyrant” and “dictator” popping up regularly.

Does this make any sense? How can Obama be both a dictator and a weakling?


The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart picked up on the contradiction this spring, after a number of right-wing commentators compared Obama unfavorably with Russian President Vladimir Putin. But the two competing narratives go back further than that. In the spring of 2010, just weeks after Obama was accused of tyranny and “ shoving health-care reform down the American people’s throats,” his response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill off the Gulf Coast invited criticism of weakness. It’s not just that both narratives exist as part of the discourse about the Obama presidency; sometimes both come from the same person.

Take Sean Hannity. In spring 2013, the Fox News host declared the president weak because of his response to the situation in Syria (Obama was “ sucking up” to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, Hannity said). During Obama’s first year in office, Hannity criticized the president’s position on waterboarding, suggesting, “Now, this president is taking us back in time exposing us to the very same dangers that left us vulnerable before September 11,” and noting, “this president who bowed at the feet of the Saudi king.” Yet in 2012, Hannity registered his dissatisfaction with an executive order that he said would allow Obama to declare “ martial law” and with presidential actions that “ignore the basic principles of our Constitution.”

In March, Ted Cruz, the voluble Texas senator, announced at the Conservative Political Action Conference that we no longer have a president because Obama has declared himself our dictator. Two days later he was quoted in the Washington Examiner stating that “Obama’s weakness” was a factor determining Putin’s decision to act militarily in Ukraine. As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank points out, former senator and Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint also experienced made a quick shift from accusing the president of being a “playground bully” to pointing out his weakness in facing down the Kremlin.

What’s going on here? First, let’s look at the content of these critiques. Sometimes they have been aimed at the actual substance of policy: that the Affordable Care Act is too strong, the president’s policies toward Syria or on torture too weak. But the narratives about dictatorship sometimes focus on process rather than substance. These critiques suggest that the problem lies not with the policies themselves, but rather with Obama’s disregard for constitutional limits and for the separation of powers.

Being seen as simultaneously too strong and too weak is a structural condition for presidents. The framers of the Constitution debated about how to design an executive strong enough to protect the country, but still constrained by the rule of law. Writing from the vantage point of the mid-twentieth century, the political scientist Richard Neustadt argued that when presidents resort to unilateral “command,” it means their efforts to persuade others have failed. In this sense, it would certainly be possible for the president to both lack the necessary strength to govern and to have the capacity to use the powers of the office in excessive and even constitutionally questionable ways– in both foreign and domestic policy.

In recent decades, presidents have been even more vulnerable to this conundrum. Support for strong executive leadership declined after Vietnam and Watergate, as did trust in government across the board. Yet the need for “ energy in the executive,” as Alexander Hamilton described the original design of the office, never went away. Neither did our obsession with the man in the Oval Office; witness how George W. Bush was blamed for the decades-long failings of the Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans, or how Obama has taken political hits for the actions of VA hospital officials in Phoenix. Two conflicting sets of expectations about presidential leadership have coexisted for about 40 years: Do we want our presidents to micromanage everything, or do we want them to share power—and with it, responsibility?

The politics of the 21st century heightened the stakes of this contradiction. First the war on terror, then the economic collapse of 2008, inspired calls for strong leadership and created opportunities for sweeping changes in policy. A number of factors, including party polarization and ambivalence about executive power, contribute to a backlash against presidential action even in the face of such calls.

But it’s not all about structure. It’s possible that Obama is such a polarizing individual that figures like Cruz, Hannity and DeMint will take any opportunity to criticize him, even if it contradicts what they said a month ago. George W. Bush, however, was a fairly polarizing figure, too, and this dual narrative never emerged. Bush, in the eyes of his critics, had dictatorial qualities that included resistance to nuance and to dissenting perspectives. But despite his inability to make headway on signature domestic policy initiatives, including immigration and Social Security—to say nothing of foreign crises like Iraq and Georgia—we simply did not hear opponents call Bush a weak leader. He talked tough, and for many, that was enough.

Instead, there’s a case to be made that this dual narrative is specific to the Obama presidency. Subliminal and not-so-subliminal messages about Obama’s nationality and masculinity are rife in these critiques. Comparing Putin and Obama, Sarah Palin famously commented that Obama wears “ mom jeans.” On matters abroad, the implication—as with the Bergdahl case—is often that Obama demonstrates excessive sympathy for foreigners at the expense of American interests. Dictatorship narratives often include either Soviet or Nazi imagery. The factor tying the two narratives together is the idea that Obama’s very loyalties are suspect. In other words, dictatorship and weakness are both logical extensions of the claim, prevalent in some conservative circles, that Obama is not quite one of us and not an appropriate symbol of American identity.

When Cruz declared Obama a dictator in March, he stated, “If you have a president picking and choosing which laws to follow and which laws to ignore, you no longer have a president.” But presidents pushing the boundaries of their authority—and getting attacked for it—is nothing new. George Washington invited criticism for abusing presidential power when he led troops to subdue the Whiskey Rebellion; Andrew Jackson was depicted in cartoons as “King Andrew” dressed in royal garb.What’s new is the dual narrative, and it has popped up again in the debates about Bowe Bergdahl: Alongside claims that Obama has been too weak, we now hear criticisms from Democrats and Republicans about the illegality of Obama’s actions to bring him home.

What’s especially frustrating about all this is that there’s a real debate to be had about President Obama’s policies—one that we’re not getting from the likes of Ted Cruz. Is the president too focused on getting the United States out of Afghanistan, at the expense of doing more on crises like Syria? Are there other ways to stop climate change, without resorting to end runs around Congress? These are complex issues. Throwing around words like “dictator” is a great way to guarantee that only a fringe minority will take you seriously.