Mitt Romney, from Saturday night’s GOP primary debate:

We don’t need– we don’t need folks who are lifetime– lifetime Washington people to– to– to get this country out of the mess it’s in. We need people from outside Washington.

You hear this a lot, the idea that coming in as an outsider to shake up the Washington establishment is a good way to advance policy goals or solve political problems. Whatever the merits of it — and it’s pretty clear that there are advantages to be an insider and advantages to being an outsider, but not obvious that the latter outweigh the former — I think it tends to obscure a pretty basic institutional reality in DC: the President, regardless of whether he’s spent his life in the Senate or his life farming in rural Montana, is functionally an outsider during the time he is President.

Now, of course the President can be a DC insider in the sense that he/she could have spent a long career in the Senate, have political and bureaucratic connections all over town, know all the lobbyist and journalists, and be a master of the Washington political game. Sure. What I mean is that the presidency itself creates an institutional situation in which President has fully unique goals and strategies, and that those goals and strategies are not only different than what observers typically would describe as the goals and strategies of “lifetime Washington people,”  but in most respects are actually in conflict with them. There’s a lot that could be said about this, but two important aspects are (1) the President has a completely different time horizon than most of the rest of Washington; and (2) the President’s needs to win in ways that Members of Congress do not.

The time horizon is obvious, but sometimes under-appreciated. Presidents have at most eight years to accomplish any objectives, while Members of Congress, senior executive branch officials, and private sector DC political actors may very well expect to be around for decades. Consequently, the president almost always seems more in a hurry than Congress to Get Big Things Done. And from this, of course, flows one of the basic political differences between Members and Presidents: Members are often more naturally risk-averse. The micro-result is that presidents tend to be frustrated by the long and slow congressional policy-making process, and the macro-result is that DC often appears to be in the situation in which a President is prodding a recalcitrant Congress to take up his policy proposals.

There’s more to it than that, though. In the long run, the basic bargaining outlook for the President and a Member of Congress differ. The President’s short and known time horizon suggests that he should accumulate as much political capital as he can, but also that he should leave office with the tank on empty: if he can put to work every last chit and favor and piece of patronage he has in order to call in every last vote or favor he needs, that’s a solid utility maximizing strategy. Similarly, he doesn’t have to worry too much about burning bridges, especially as time goes on. In other words, the short time horizon not only incentivizes the President to work quickly, but it also suggests a slash-and-burn strategy, at least in comparison with Members or bureaucrats, whose long-term incentives suggest maintaining capital, using it shrewdly, and avoiding the creation of permanent enemies.

The second aspect I brought up — that the President needs to win in ways Members do not — is something that often drives people batty when they watch C-SPAN. It’s not at all uncommon to see a contentious vote taking place on the floor of the House or Senate, and for the Members to be having friendly, casual conversations with one another, even if they voting on opposite sides of the issue. Beyond the basic civility of a legislature and the need for maintaining long-term friendships, there’s a good institutional reason for this: Members of Congress do not have to win in order to keep their jobs; they simply have to vote the right way. As David Mayhew put it in The Electoral Connection, if Members of Congress had to win on the floor in order to get re-elected, they would tear each other to shreds. But they don’t: in the typical situation, the job of a Member is to well-represent his constituents, and since no individual Member can control the outcome in Congress, voters (quite sensibly) mostly take into account how a Member votes, not if the Member’s side of the vote carried the day.

This is mostly not true for the President. While position-taking is of some use to a President (especially in situations of divided government), results are far more important. For a President to go to the voters and say that he stood for the right things  is a weak argument indeed. And the consequence of this is often revealed, once again, in the political temperament of the President. No one in Congress likes to lose, but no President can really afford to lose. And so while all Presidents strive to be good Neustadtian bargainers, most also cannot resist the temptation to lash out on occasion, and to take risky actions in the hopes of delivering victories.

When you combine the need to win with the short time horizon, the sum total is an institutional actor who is quite seriously incongruous with the other political actors in and around the government. As Neustadt wrote, no one else sees what the President sees. And so  it’s not surprising that Presidents tend to create bunker-like mentalities within the EOP and especially the White House staff. Nor should we be surprised that that the White House often has rocky relations with its own congressional party. Or that the President finds Washington or the pace of congressional action too slow or the tactics of the existing DC political establishment too risk-averse.

The President may be the center of political power in Washington, but as an institutional actor in the federal government, he’s mostly a lonely outsider.