Is It “President” or “president” of the United States?

Virtually every political observer who has used a pen or a keyboard in the past several decades has asked: is it "President" or "president" of the United States? Should the office or institution be referred to as the "Presidency" or "presidency"? At first blush, such questions appear rather humorous and insignificant. Symbolically, grammatical capitalization reflects the importance of an office or title. Consequently, a change in the capitalization of a constitutional officer may reflect a shift in academic, journalistic, or public perception of that office. Hoekstra (1982) considers the importance of the introduction of the term "textbook presidency" but does not examine the related capitalization change we demonstrate has taken place over the past several decades. A closer examination of these seemingly innocuous observations about capitalization shows a change in common usage that apparently coincides with the evolution and state of the "Presidency" (or "presidency"). If we consider the "President" (or "president") of the United States to be both "a person" and "an institution," and if the Constitution intends the legislative, executive, and judicial branches to be coequal institutions of government, one would expect to see the capitalization of "Congress" and "Supreme Court" and the "President." Yet that is not the current practice. Several examples from political science textbooks illustrate this inconsistency: The Congress could "check" the power of the president, the Supreme Court, and so on, carefully creating "balance" among the three branches. (O'Connor and Sabato 1997, 57) The Supreme Court can declare laws passed by Congress and signed by the president unconstitutional. (Burns et al. 2000, 25) Legally, the president can.., and Congress did not renew it... the Supreme Court declared that.... (Wilson 1986, 349) Indeed, one recent monograph has gone so far as to decapitalize the "presidency" in the title of the book: Foley and Owens's Congress and the presidency (1996). The inconsistent capitalization of the title "president" of the United States and related titles is widespread in political science. It is common to see the decapitalized "president" simultaneously portrayed as the capitalized "Commander in Chief." For example, Dye (1994, 394) states, "As Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States, the president is a powerful voice in foreign affairs." Similarly, Saffell (1981, 323) writes, "The Constitution confers upon the president the title of Commander in Chief of the armed forces of the United States." It is a widespread practice to capitalize the "Speaker of the House" while decapitalizing the "president" of the United States. Consider Edwards, Wattenberg, and Lineberry, who declare "the Speaker is also two heartbeats away from the presidency, being second in line (after the vice president) to succeed a president who resigns, dies in office, or is impeached" (Edwards, Wattenberg, and Lineberry 1998, 297) or Patterson, who asserts "the Speaker is often said to be the most powerful official in Washington, after the president" (Patterson 1997, 337). Why should the "second most powerful" official be symbolically printed in uppercase while the "most important" official appears in lowercase? Although capitalization of the "Speaker" is often justified on grounds of clarity (to avoid confusion with other "speakers" on the floor of the House; see Chicago Manual of Style 1993, 241), it is equally important to distinguish the "President" of the United States from other "presidents." After all, the "President" of the United States frequently addresses assemblages of college "presidents," corporation "presidents," association "presidents," "presidents" of other nation-states, and even other "presidents" in the U.S. Congress. For example, the "president" of the United States typically begins the State of the Union address with the following salutation: "Mr. …