Would you like that foreign policy straight? Or dumbed down?

Peter Feaver raises a very interesting issue in his recent post on choosing an optimal policy for Syria. He suggests that we should not dwell on policies that would require a vigorous wartime leader, since he doubts President Barack Obama’s ability to play that role.

At one level, this seems an eminently pragmatic suggestion. Different leaders have different strengths. As a nation, Americans just made a leadership choice — why not recognize the constraints that choice may pose and limit the policy discussion accordingly?

And yet … this line of argument puts me in mind of the summer of 2008. Friends who worked for the Treasury Department or White House at that time have told me that they could see the signs of economic trouble on the horizon and knew they did not have tools adequate to the task. Recall that a major reason George W. Bush’s administration did not bail out Lehman Brothers in September 2008 was that it did not think it had the authority to do so.

But there was advance warning of the economic crisis that exploded that fall. Bear Stearns had failed in the spring of that year, six months before Lehman broke. Bear and Lehman had been two institutions noted for their very high leverage ratios. When the first went, there were more than a few hints that the second might follow.

So, if Bush administration officials felt themselves ill-equipped, why did they not seek greater authority from Congress that summer?

The answer I’ve gotten is that it seemed futile to make the request. The Congress of that time was controlled by Democrats who were in no mood to expand Bush’s authority. The president’s public standing and political capital were at low ebb. So the administration took a pragmatic approach of the sort Feaver advocates and did not bother to ask for additional tools. They took their constraints as given.

That was likely a disastrous decision for the Republican Party. It may have cost the 2008 election and thus, in turn, the 2012 election. Had the Bush administration yelled that danger was approaching and had Congress subsequently refused a well-thought-out request to act, there might have been a very different narrative in the fall of 2008. Instead of "reckless Bush administration deregulation driving the economy into a ditch," it could have been "farsighted Bush administration stymied by petty Congress."

Perhaps that’s fantasy. It would have required an objective media, for example. Proposed financial legislation may not have been enough to quell the tingling in the legs of the media we actually had. But it’s hard to believe that it wouldn’t have been better to push Congress to do the right thing, rather than sitting quietly and looking inept and culpable.

I wonder whether there’s an analogy with Syria. If we all sit around and accept that we’re at a constrained optimum and the constraints bind, we effectively excuse leadership failure. Doing that can have long-run repercussions, particularly when we next make choices about our leaders.