‘Troubling’: Federal Judge Orders Obama Admin. to Disclose Document It’s Been Trying to Keep Hidden
By Jason Howerton
A federal judge Tuesday ordered the
disclosure of a government-wide foreign aid directive President Barack
Obama signed in 2010 but wanted to keep hidden from the public, Politico reports. The judge called the scope of the government’s argument for “presidential communications privilege” rather “troubling.”
The Department of Justice has argued
that the Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development was covered
by executive privilege, even though the information is “non-classified”
and sends directives to agencies not to the president of the United
States.
...Huvelle also lectured the federal government on its “cavalier attitude” when it comes to public oversight and transparency.
“The government appears to adopt the
cavalier attitude that the President should be permitted to convey
orders throughout the Executive Branch without public oversight…to
engage in what is in effect governance by ‘secret law,’” she wrote.
The Obama administration will now be
required by law to make the document available. It’s unclear why the
administration has fought to keep the document hidden from the public.
Experts: Authoritarian leader has blood on his hands
By Adam Kredo
The White House is facing questions after a photograph surfaced of
President Barack Obama smiling next to the leader of an authoritarian
separatist group known for its past terrorism and what experts dubbed
egregious human rights violations.The controversial photo in question appears to capture a smiling President Obama standing next to Mohamed Abdelaziz, the leader of the Polisario Front, a Moroccan separatist group in Algeria that commits massive human rights infractions and has been cited as a “prime recruiting grounds for al Qaeda.”
The picture was supposedly snapped at last week’s Nelson Mandela memorial ceremony in Johannesburg and then featured on an Arab language news website, which dubbed the encounter as “the first official meeting between the Polisario and the U.S. president.”
Former U.S. officials and other foreign policy insiders expressed outrage over the photo, saying that it is embarrassing for the U.S. president to be seen smiling next to the longtime leader of a violent Marxist movement known for torturing innocents, snatching children, and working with one of the deadliest terror groups on the planet.
....Former U.S. officials such as Rubin said that it is surprising President Obama’s handlers allowed Abdelaziz to get so close to the president.
“No one bothered to ask who this guy sitting with foreign dignitaries was? And why a so-called dignitary would act like a campaign rally groupie?” Rubin asked. “Unfortunately, this is probably exhibit 203 in how Obama has debased his office and embarrassed the United States on the diplomatic stage.”
Obama White House Calls GOP a "Cult Worthy of Jonestown"
By Conn Carroll
....Today, Politico
confirmed that governing-by-executive-fiat is exactly what Podesta has
in mind. The only shocking part of the story is Podesta's justification
for shredding the Constitution:
In effect, I was told, it represents the clearest sign to date of the administration’s interest in shifting the paradigm of Obama’s presidency through the forceful, unapologetic and occasionally provocative application of White House power. Podesta, whose official mandate includes enforcement of numerous executive orders on emissions and the environment, suggested as much when he spoke with me earlier this fall about Obama’s team. “They need to focus on executive action given that they are facing a second term against a cult worthy of Jonestown in charge of one of the houses of Congress,” he told me.That's right. Obama's new counselor, the man in charge of saving his presidency, believes the Republican Party is a murderous cult and that this justifies Obama's extra-constitutional use of executive power.
Budget Battle: Democrats Block Amendment to Restore Military Retirement Benefits for Wounded Warriors
By Katie Pavlich....A final effort by Senate Republicans to halt cuts to pensions of military retirees failed late Tuesday, after Democrats blocked an amendment to the controversial budget bill. The two-year budget agreement, which cleared a key test vote earlier in the day, was expected to get a final vote no later than Wednesday.Think we don't have the money to offset the $6 billion? Think again. Apparently illegal immigrants collecting IRS tax money is more important than making sure our veterans are taken care of after voluntarily putting their lives on the line for our country.
Ahead of the final vote, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., tried unsuccessfully to use a parliamentary tactic to force a vote on the amendment, which he wrote to undo the cuts for military retirees.
Sessions wanted to instead eliminate an estimated $4.2 billion in annual spending by reining in an IRS credit that illegal immigrants have claimed.
He and fellow senators argued the bill unfairly sticks veterans and other military retirees with the cost of new spending.
The Crony Obama Donors in Charge of DHS
By Michelle Malkin....On Monday night, Senate Democrats voted 57-37 to end debate on the nomination of Jeh Johnson to head DHS. That's three votes short of the traditional 60-vote filibuster threshold that Reid nuked last month. Johnson went on to win his appointment by a 78-16 margin.
...DHS employs 240,000 people and boasts a $40 billion budget. Johnson, unlike his most recent predecessors, has never actually held an executive position governing a state or managing a complex organization. Let me summarize his relevant experience in border security, port security, airport security or immigration enforcement: Zero. Zip. Nada.
News coverage instead stresses that Johnson is the "first African-American" to hold the No. 1 position at DHS. Because, you know, diversity will keep us safe.
...Perhaps we might comfort ourselves if the No. 2 in charge at DHS had strong qualifications and a record on national security to compensate for Johnson's deficiencies. Sorry. As I reported last week, Dirty Harry Reid exploited the nuked filibuster threshold to ram through Alejandro Mayorkas' nomination as deputy DHS secretary. Mayorkas remains under investigation for a partisan cash-for-foreign-investor-visas scandal by the DHS inspector general's office, which itself remains under investigation for fraud and ethics violations that endanger national security. His appointment is expected to sail through the full Senate on Wednesday.
Five Years Later, Democrats Still Blame Bush
By John SextonNearly five years from the inauguration of President Obama an overwhelming majority of Democrats continue to blame George W. Bush for the nation's economic troubles.
Note the word current in the question. This is asking who is to blame for the conditions right now. By more than 4:1 Democrats say President Bush is at fault. By contrast, Republicans blamed Obama for the current situation 64-21. Among registered voters the results were 50-37 in favor of blaming Bush over Obama.
Is it possible that Dems will blame Bush for the sluggish economy right through to the inauguration of the next President? Assuming that person is also a Democrat, blaming Bush could conceivably extend until 2024.
Global warming will kill us all, warns Common Core-aligned homework
By Robby SoaveFifth grade students at Fremont Elementary School in Colorado were assigned a reading
passage that describes global warming as a dangerous, man-made
phenomenon that will destroy civilization in a few hundred years.The reading assignment was found inside a workbook aligned with the controversial national Common Core curriculum guidelines, and was titled “Homework from the Future.” It tells the fictional story of a visitor to the year 2512 who discovers that the eastern United States is under water and the country’s population greatly reduced, all thanks to man-made global warming:
By the early 21st century, people knew that the massive use of fossil fuels was heating up the planet. But people didn’t stop their destructive lifestyles. They just kept using up Earth’s resourcesAfter reading the text
In 2130. the oceans began to rise over farmland and cities. In 300 years, most of the eastern United States was covered with water.
,
students were expected to answer several questions, including: “What
caused all the problems on Earth?” and “How could the problems have been
avoided?”Sorry GOP, an 'R' Is Not Enough
By Dr. Milton Wolf...The Republican Party faces an identity crisis. What do we really stand for? Conservatives within the party, like myself, believe we should re-embrace the Constitution and stand unapologetically for the divinely-inspired American Idea of individual liberty, limited government, and free-market values.
The GOP establishment, on the other hand, believes we should stand simply for the letter "R." They claim that America’s problems will be solved if we just elect more people with Rs behind their names, but their own history shows otherwise.
...The letter "R" did not save America.
Today, America is in serious trouble because the establishment members of the GOP have, at best, proven themselves ineffective at stopping the Democrats’ unbridled expansion of government. In reality, these Republicans have been complicit with tax hikes, earmark spending, endless borrowing, and debt ceiling increases.
Coal Must Embrace All-Out Battle with Eco-Bullies
Dr Tim Ball and Tom Harris Meekly accepting blame for climate change dooms the industry and the greater economy.
Imagine you have been wrongfully arrested, charged with murdering a child. Although the evidence against you is sketchy, the police have no other suspects, and with the government anxious to appease those demanding justice, your case is rushed to trial. Your lawyer decides that with public sentiment strongly against you, the best course of action is to plead guilty and to throw yourself at the mercy of the court.
But then, police find eyewitnesses who place you miles from the scene of the crime when it occurred. Your lawyer even discovers that the victim’s body has yet to be found — and there is now some question as to whether the child ever existed. With a sense of relief you head to court, confident this new information will lead to the case being dismissed.
But to your astonishment, your lawyer does not even bring up evidence of your innocence. Instead he pleads for leniency, which gives the court moral authority to punish you for a crime you never committed and perhaps never even happened.
This insane scenario is analogous to what is happening to one of America’s most important industries and the source of 40% of the nation’s electricity: coal. Accused of causing dangerous climate change due to its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, coal-fired electric power is in the crosshairs of a president anxious to be seen as taking action to stop global warming and extreme weather.
That global warming stopped 17 years ago, and extreme weather has not increased despite an 8% rise in CO2? This is never referenced by President Barack Obama or his Environmental Protection Agency.
That even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is now backing away from several of its most important claims of human-caused climate Armageddon? Also ignored.
By Ed Driscoll
....There are all sorts of follow-up questions that could be asked of Walters at this point, none of which Morgan is capable of doing — because he too thought of Obama as the next messiah (and very likely still does). Off the top of my head, some of these questions include:
● When you said that “we thought he was going to be…the next messiah,” define “we,” please?
● How could virtually the entire MSM get the biggest story of 2008 wrong? Why did they move in such lockstep?
● This wasn’t a case of single reporter on a crime scene talking live into a mini-cam, and making a snap decision to go with his gut during a fast-moving story that turns out to be wrong — telling viewers that the suspect has a gun, when it turns out later he actually had a knife, that sort of thing. This was a long, slow-moving story that stretched out for years. The cutline on Froma Harrop’s article at Real Clear Politics, titled “Obama Scores as Exotic Who Says Nothing,” was December 26, 2006. Which means that the MSM had over a year and a half to tell potential voters what Mr. Obama wasn’t saying. Instead, in mid-2008, CNN demonstrated how flexible they would be with the truth, first praising hate-filled Obama mentor Rev. Wright’s NAACP, then a week later, tossing Wright down the memory hole on behalf of his most famous parishioner.
● Immediately after the election, in November of 2008, a CNN journalist submitted an article that compared Obama to Lincoln, FDR, JFK and even Bill Clinton before concluding, “The Americans who are comparing him to those remarkable predecessors are putting a lot of faith in a man they barely know.” Who’s fault is that, champ? The weekend prior to the election, Tom Brokaw of NBC and Charlie Rose, then with PBS, pretended that they knew little about Obama, despite having the Internet at their fingertips, and their own vast research departments at their beck and call. Clearly they chose not to tell voters who Obama really was for ideological reasons. Why?
● During that period, Barbara, is there anything from either Hillary’s camp, or John McCain’s, or information from ABC journalists that would have caused you to discard your messianic worship of a fellow radical chic Democrat?
● And of course the ultimate questions: Why should we trust the MSM ever again? Not just Walters, who’s reportedly retiring next year, but the entire ABC news team, AKA, the House of Stephanopoulos, himself a former Clinton aide? And CNN, and NBC?
Obamacare: A Law or a Shakedown?
By Rich Baehr Nice insurance company you have there. Be a shame if something happened to it.
Late last week, the Obama administration made a series of “requests” to insurance companies that are participating in the new exchanges, federal or state, as well as those companies processing renewal requests for individual insurance policies that were initially cancelled and may now be renewed in those states where the state insurance commissioner has given the OK.
....There is another way, however, to see the latest “fixes” that the Obama administration is requesting from the insurance companies, and that is to view them as something far removed from business as usual. The purpose of the requests, as with all of the delays and policy changes to date, is a fairly obvious attempt to shift blame away from the law itself and the president and members of the Democratic Party who drafted the law, promoted it, voted for it, and defended it every step of the way.
The obvious fall guys for the Obama administration are the insurance companies. These firms have never been popular, but they bought into supporting the new law because it promised them 20 million new enrollees on the exchanges, with a public utility model that ensured a certain level of profit for the new policies. The companies are now learning that they are not independent players anymore, free to set prices and conditions for coverage that are consistent with the law that was passed and for which they, unlike the administration, had planned. They are, it seems, now at the whim and mercy of a politically deflated president who needs the insurance companies to change their way of doing business from month to month — this time to prevent a January rollout fiasco when coverage is scheduled to begin for those who have supposedly signed up.
In essence, the Obama administration is now demanding that insurance companies provide free care to those who have not paid for their policies or to those who think they have paid but whose payment or enrollment information never made it to the insurance company. The insurers are being “asked” to backdate the coverage date for new policies to the beginning of the month for those who pay sometime during the month, even if only a partial payment is made.
The Federal Reserve's Century of Failure
by Bruce Walker
December
23, 2013 marks the centennial of a disastrous transformation of the
American Republic. On December 23, 1913, the Federal Reserve System was
created.
Woodrow Wilson believed that central planning could make America better.
...Milton Friedman in 1988 said that no American institution had performed so poorly and yet retained such a high reputation with the people as the Federal Reserve System. The ostensible purpose of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 was to prevent bank panics. Other goals were to keep currency stable and to moderate inflation. It has not worked.
Inflation, for example, did not exist for the first 125 years of the Republic. The purchasing power of $1.00 in 1789 had declined so slightly by1913 that a consumer would need $1.08 to buy the same things. But during the last century, while the Federal Reserve System was exercising its powers over our money supply, the amount of money needed to buy what cost $1.08 in 1913 had risen to over $25.00 -- or, in other words, one dollar in 1913 is worth only about four cents in 2013.
...The integrity, transparency, and prudence of the bank management determined the financial success or failure of the bank. Moreover, because private banks transferred funds and held debt instruments from other private banks across the country, they had a strong interest in the honest and efficient operation of the American private banking system.
...Self-regulation within industries works very well, because everyone involved ultimately has an interest in the industry's success. There were bank panics and there were dislocations within the American economy as a result, but these problems were always self-correcting. The Great Depression came two decades after the Federal Reserve System was created. Bank panics did sink poorly run banks, but not banks generally.
...What America has today instead of private companies acting with enlightened self-interest is a vast, largely invisible, and almost wholly unaccountable system of manipulators of money supply, interest rates, and banking practices so that the notional wisdom of learned experts, instead of the open operation of market forces, determines our money supply. This "money" is no longer in coin or in paper backed by certain defined quantities of gold or silver; rather, its worth lies only in the opinions and promises of so-called "experts," faceless bureaucrats, and feckless politicians.
As America, and much of Europe, looks over a growing abyss of astronomical public debt and declining confidence in public "money," the only way out is to stop attempting to formulate government answers to market problems. Radical reform and reduction of the Federal Reserve System is an excellent place to start.
By Peggy Noonan
Everyone is doing thoughtful year-end pieces on President Obama. Writers and reporters agree he’s had his worst year ever. I infer from most of their essays an unstated but broadly held sense of foreboding: There’s no particular reason to believe next year will be better, and in fact signs and indications point to continued trouble.
I would add that in recent weeks I have begun to worry about the basic competency of the administration, its ability to perform the most fundamental duties of executive management. One reason I worry is that I frequently speak with people who interact with the White House, and when I say, “That place just doesn’t seem to work,” they don’t defend it, they offer off-the-record examples of how poorly the government is run. One thing that’s clear this holiday season: New York’s Democrats, to the degree they ever loved the president, don’t love him anymore, and have moved on. They are not thinking about what progress he might make in Washington next year, they’re talking about what Hillary might do the year after that.
My worries came home with a certain freshness after the Mandela memorial, where the United States Secret Service allowed the president of the United States to stand for 19 minutes next to the famous sign-language interpreter who, it was quickly revealed, was not only a fraud but a schizophrenic con man who is now said to have been involved in two deaths. In fairness, the event was in another country and the Secret Service wasn’t strictly in charge. That said, it still looks like very basic negligence, as if no one is keeping enough of an eye on the Secret Service, no one’s checking the quality of the advance or sending emails asking: “Hey, what do we know about the sign language guy—any chance he’s a mentally ill criminal?”
It all looks so lax, so loosey-goosey. In the place of the energy and focus that would go into the running of things, the administering and managing of them, we have the preoccupation with spin, with how things look as opposed to how they are. The odd thing still is that the White House never misses a speech, a list of talking points, an opportunity to shape the argument on TV. They do the talking part, but the doing? They had 3½ years to make sure ObamaCare will work, three years to get it right top to bottom, to rejigger parts of the law that they finally judged wouldn’t work, to make the buying of a policy easy on the website. And they not only couldn’t do that, which itself constitutes an astounding and historic management failure, they make it clear they were taken aback by their failure. They didn’t know it was coming! Or some knew and for some reason couldn’t do anything.
And it’s all going to continue. One reason this scandal isn’t Katrina is that Katrina had a beginning and an end. The storm came, the storm left, the cleanup commenced and failed and then continued and succeeded. At some point it was over. ObamaCare will never be over. It’s going to poison the rest of the administration. It’s the story that won’t go away because it will continue to produce disorder. Wait, for instance, until small businesses realize it will be cheaper to throw their people off their coverage and take the fines than it will be to reinsure them under the new regime.
I’m worried, finally, that lines of traditionally assumed competence are being dropped. The past few weeks I can’t shake from my head this picture: The man with the football—the military aide who carries the U.S. nuclear codes, and who travels with the president—is carrying the wrong code. He’s carrying last month’s code, or the one from December 2012. And there’s a crisis—a series of dots on a radar screen traveling toward the continental U.S.—and the president is alerted. He’s in the holding room at a fundraiser out west. The man with the football is called in and he fumbles around in his briefcase and gets the code but wait, the date on the code is wrong. He scrambles, remembers there’s a file on his phone, but the phone ran out on the plane and he thought he could recharge in the holding room but there’s no electrical outlet. All eyes turn to him. “Wait—wait. No—uh—I don’t think that’s the code we use to launch against incoming from North Korea, I think that one takes out Paris!”
I have to say, I’ve never worried about this with any previous administration, ever.
“They mistook the White House for the government,” said an experienced old friend, a journalist and Democratic sympathizer. We were having holiday dinner and the talk turned to White House management. His thesis was that Obama and his staffers thought they could run the government from there, from the White House campus, and make big decisions that would be executed. They thought the White House was the government, but the government is a vast web of executive agencies that have to be run under close scrutiny, and within their campuses, to produce even minimally competent work.
I have come to see this as “West Wing” Disease. Young staffers grew up watching that show and getting a very romantic and specific sense of how government works. “The West Wing” was White House-centric. It never took place at the Agriculture Department. But government takes place at the Agriculture Department.
Anyway, my friend made me think of a story about Harry Truman. On leaving the White House after the 1952 election of Dwight Eisenhower, Truman made a small prediction about the general and his presidency. From memory: Eisenhower, Truman said, will pick up the phone and say do this and do that, pull this lever, and he’ll be shocked when nothing happens.
Ike was a general used to giving orders within an organization that takes the order and executes. But a government has to be leaned on every day, through management talent earned by experience. Generals can issue orders but federal agencies must be gently guided and clubbed around the head, every day.
People who run big businesses learn these facts of executive leadership early on. So do leaders of small businesses and great nonprofit organizations, and local political leaders in charge of local agencies whose success or failure can be charted.
Most of the Obama people just don’t have a background in executing. They have a background in communicating, not doing. That’s where their talent is—it’s where their boss’s talent is—and it’s a good talent, but not one that will in itself force a government to work well.
Woodrow Wilson believed that central planning could make America better.
...Milton Friedman in 1988 said that no American institution had performed so poorly and yet retained such a high reputation with the people as the Federal Reserve System. The ostensible purpose of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 was to prevent bank panics. Other goals were to keep currency stable and to moderate inflation. It has not worked.
Inflation, for example, did not exist for the first 125 years of the Republic. The purchasing power of $1.00 in 1789 had declined so slightly by1913 that a consumer would need $1.08 to buy the same things. But during the last century, while the Federal Reserve System was exercising its powers over our money supply, the amount of money needed to buy what cost $1.08 in 1913 had risen to over $25.00 -- or, in other words, one dollar in 1913 is worth only about four cents in 2013.
...The integrity, transparency, and prudence of the bank management determined the financial success or failure of the bank. Moreover, because private banks transferred funds and held debt instruments from other private banks across the country, they had a strong interest in the honest and efficient operation of the American private banking system.
...Self-regulation within industries works very well, because everyone involved ultimately has an interest in the industry's success. There were bank panics and there were dislocations within the American economy as a result, but these problems were always self-correcting. The Great Depression came two decades after the Federal Reserve System was created. Bank panics did sink poorly run banks, but not banks generally.
...What America has today instead of private companies acting with enlightened self-interest is a vast, largely invisible, and almost wholly unaccountable system of manipulators of money supply, interest rates, and banking practices so that the notional wisdom of learned experts, instead of the open operation of market forces, determines our money supply. This "money" is no longer in coin or in paper backed by certain defined quantities of gold or silver; rather, its worth lies only in the opinions and promises of so-called "experts," faceless bureaucrats, and feckless politicians.
As America, and much of Europe, looks over a growing abyss of astronomical public debt and declining confidence in public "money," the only way out is to stop attempting to formulate government answers to market problems. Radical reform and reduction of the Federal Reserve System is an excellent place to start.
Incompetence
By Peggy Noonan
Everyone is doing thoughtful year-end pieces on President Obama. Writers and reporters agree he’s had his worst year ever. I infer from most of their essays an unstated but broadly held sense of foreboding: There’s no particular reason to believe next year will be better, and in fact signs and indications point to continued trouble.
I would add that in recent weeks I have begun to worry about the basic competency of the administration, its ability to perform the most fundamental duties of executive management. One reason I worry is that I frequently speak with people who interact with the White House, and when I say, “That place just doesn’t seem to work,” they don’t defend it, they offer off-the-record examples of how poorly the government is run. One thing that’s clear this holiday season: New York’s Democrats, to the degree they ever loved the president, don’t love him anymore, and have moved on. They are not thinking about what progress he might make in Washington next year, they’re talking about what Hillary might do the year after that.
My worries came home with a certain freshness after the Mandela memorial, where the United States Secret Service allowed the president of the United States to stand for 19 minutes next to the famous sign-language interpreter who, it was quickly revealed, was not only a fraud but a schizophrenic con man who is now said to have been involved in two deaths. In fairness, the event was in another country and the Secret Service wasn’t strictly in charge. That said, it still looks like very basic negligence, as if no one is keeping enough of an eye on the Secret Service, no one’s checking the quality of the advance or sending emails asking: “Hey, what do we know about the sign language guy—any chance he’s a mentally ill criminal?”
It all looks so lax, so loosey-goosey. In the place of the energy and focus that would go into the running of things, the administering and managing of them, we have the preoccupation with spin, with how things look as opposed to how they are. The odd thing still is that the White House never misses a speech, a list of talking points, an opportunity to shape the argument on TV. They do the talking part, but the doing? They had 3½ years to make sure ObamaCare will work, three years to get it right top to bottom, to rejigger parts of the law that they finally judged wouldn’t work, to make the buying of a policy easy on the website. And they not only couldn’t do that, which itself constitutes an astounding and historic management failure, they make it clear they were taken aback by their failure. They didn’t know it was coming! Or some knew and for some reason couldn’t do anything.
And it’s all going to continue. One reason this scandal isn’t Katrina is that Katrina had a beginning and an end. The storm came, the storm left, the cleanup commenced and failed and then continued and succeeded. At some point it was over. ObamaCare will never be over. It’s going to poison the rest of the administration. It’s the story that won’t go away because it will continue to produce disorder. Wait, for instance, until small businesses realize it will be cheaper to throw their people off their coverage and take the fines than it will be to reinsure them under the new regime.
I’m worried, finally, that lines of traditionally assumed competence are being dropped. The past few weeks I can’t shake from my head this picture: The man with the football—the military aide who carries the U.S. nuclear codes, and who travels with the president—is carrying the wrong code. He’s carrying last month’s code, or the one from December 2012. And there’s a crisis—a series of dots on a radar screen traveling toward the continental U.S.—and the president is alerted. He’s in the holding room at a fundraiser out west. The man with the football is called in and he fumbles around in his briefcase and gets the code but wait, the date on the code is wrong. He scrambles, remembers there’s a file on his phone, but the phone ran out on the plane and he thought he could recharge in the holding room but there’s no electrical outlet. All eyes turn to him. “Wait—wait. No—uh—I don’t think that’s the code we use to launch against incoming from North Korea, I think that one takes out Paris!”
I have to say, I’ve never worried about this with any previous administration, ever.
“They mistook the White House for the government,” said an experienced old friend, a journalist and Democratic sympathizer. We were having holiday dinner and the talk turned to White House management. His thesis was that Obama and his staffers thought they could run the government from there, from the White House campus, and make big decisions that would be executed. They thought the White House was the government, but the government is a vast web of executive agencies that have to be run under close scrutiny, and within their campuses, to produce even minimally competent work.
I have come to see this as “West Wing” Disease. Young staffers grew up watching that show and getting a very romantic and specific sense of how government works. “The West Wing” was White House-centric. It never took place at the Agriculture Department. But government takes place at the Agriculture Department.
Anyway, my friend made me think of a story about Harry Truman. On leaving the White House after the 1952 election of Dwight Eisenhower, Truman made a small prediction about the general and his presidency. From memory: Eisenhower, Truman said, will pick up the phone and say do this and do that, pull this lever, and he’ll be shocked when nothing happens.
Ike was a general used to giving orders within an organization that takes the order and executes. But a government has to be leaned on every day, through management talent earned by experience. Generals can issue orders but federal agencies must be gently guided and clubbed around the head, every day.
People who run big businesses learn these facts of executive leadership early on. So do leaders of small businesses and great nonprofit organizations, and local political leaders in charge of local agencies whose success or failure can be charted.
Most of the Obama people just don’t have a background in executing. They have a background in communicating, not doing. That’s where their talent is—it’s where their boss’s talent is—and it’s a good talent, but not one that will in itself force a government to work well.
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