Last week, in light of the BP oil spill, Nick Kristof of the New York Times jokingly suggested that the United States needs a king and queen. We expect too much from our presidents, he says:

Our king and queen could spend days traipsing along tar-ball-infested beaches, while bathing oil-soaked pelicans and thrusting strong chins defiantly at BP rigs…

Our president is stuck with too many ceremonial duties as head of state, such as greeting ambassadors and holding tedious state dinners, that divert attention from solving problems. You can preside over America or you can address its problems, but it’s difficult to find time to do both.

Then there was this article in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, which I haven’t read yet but seems to be about how Obama doesn’t feel comfortable acting as head cheerleader of the Democratic Party.

This makes me think back to a book I read in college: The American Presidency, by Clinton Rossiter. Rossiter wrote his book in the 1950s, but his description of the bewildering number of presidential duties still holds up pretty well today. He identified 10 such roles. The emphasis in the following paragraphs is mine.

First, the President is Chief of State. He remains today, as he has always been, the ceremonial head of the government of the United States… [he is] expected to go through some rather undignified paces by a people who think of him as a combination of scoutmaster, Delphic oracle, hero of the silver screen, and father of the multitudes… The President, in short, is the one-man distillation of the American people just as surely as the Queen is of the British people…

The second of the president’s roles is that of Chief Executive. He reigns, but he also rules; he symbolizes the people, but he also runs their government… He alone may appoint, with the advice and consent of the Senate, the several thousand top officials who run the government; he alone may remove, with varying degrees of abruptness, those who are not executing the laws faithfully…

The President’s third major function is one he could not escape if he wished… the Constitution designates him specifically as “Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several States when called into the actual service of the United States.”… He is never for one day allowed to forget that he will be held accountable by people, Congress, and history for the nation’s readiness to meet an enemy assault…

Next, the President is Chief Diplomat. Although authority in the field of foreign relations is shared constitutionally among three organs — President, Congress, and, for two special purposes, the Senate — his position is paramount, if not indeed dominant… Leadership in foreign affairs flows today from the President — or it does not flow at all…

The President’s duties are not all purely executive in nature. He is also intimately associated, by Constitution and custom, with the legislative process, and we may therefore consider him to be the Chief Legislator… [he is] expected, within the limits of constitutional and political propriety, to guide Congress in much of its lawmaking activity… Upon many of our most celebrated laws the presidential imprint is clearly stamped… The President who will not give his best thoughts to guiding Congress, more so the President who is temperamentally or politically unfitted to “get along with Congress,” is now rightly considered a national liability…

Yet even these are not the whole weight of presidential responsibility. I count at least five additional functions that have been piled on top of the original load.

The first of these is the President’s role as Chief of Party… No matter how fondly or how often we may long for a President who is above the heat of political strife, we must acknowledge resolutely his right and duty to be the leader of his party. He is at once the least political and most political of all heads of government…

Yet he is, at the same time if not in the same breath, the Voice of the People, the leading formulator and expounder of public opinion in the United States. While he acts as political chieftain of some, he serves as moral spokesman for all… The President is the American people’s one authentic trumpet, and he has no higher duty than to give a clear and certain sound…

Perhaps the least known of his functions is the mandate he holds from the Constitution and the laws, but even more positively from the people of the United States, to act as Protector of the Peace. The emergencies that can disturb the peace of the United States seem to grow thicker and more vexing every year, and hardly a week now goes by that the President is not called upon to take forceful steps in behalf of a section or city or group or enterprise that has been hit hard and suddenly by disaster… in the face of a riot in Detroit or floods in New England or a tornado in Missouri or a railroad strike in Chicago or a panic on Wall Street, the people turn almost instinctively to the White House and its occupant for aid and comfort…

There is at least one area of American life, the economy, in which the people of this country are no longer content to let disaster fall upon them unopposed. They now expect their government, under the direct leadership of the President, to prevent a depression or panic and not simply to wait until one has developed before putting it to rout. Thus the President has a new function, which is still taking shape, that of Manager of Prosperity…

In order to grasp the full import of the last of the President’s roles, we must take him as Chief Diplomat, Commander in Chief, and Chief of State, then thrust him onto a far wider stage, there to perform before a much more numerous and more critical audience. For the modern President is, whether we or our friends abroad like it or not, marked out for duty as a World Leader. The President has a much larger constituency than the American electorate; his words and deeds in behalf of our own survival as a free nation have a direct bearing upon the freedom and stability of at least several score other countries…

The president is a ceremonial figurehead, leader of one of the three branches of government, commander of the U.S. military, our most visible face to the world, manager of a domestic legislative agenda, head of a political party, collective national conscience, keeper of domestic tranquility, manager of the economy, and international superhero.

So it’s basically an impossible job. And that’s when times are good. When times are bad, I don’t see how any human being can possibly succeed at it.