Quite frankly, I’ve always had the feeling that the president, while having great influence, really isn’t the person in charge and in truth, there are powerful groups who work behind the scenes who really pull all the strings in areas like national security, the economy, and domestic policy.
Now I know this will make me sound like a conspiracy nut but quite frankly, I feel that the people in charge either do not tell the president what really goes on or they do tell him but tell him to keep quiet about it for fear of retaliation. Something as minor as bringing up old dirt to the extreme of threatening either them or their families.
What secrets? It could be things involving our spies, our secret weapons development, our domestic spying, government control of the media - heck it could go all the way into areas such as the truth behind the JFK assassination to what really has been at Area 51.
What makes me feel this way is the way groups like the CIA plus many other “black box” government agencies have these secret budgets and little executive or congressional oversight. The government has done things in the past which it covered up like say CIA involvement in foreign government overthrows.
Plus the fact that the President is really only a civilian, working a job which may or may not change every 4 years and they dont need that person learning all the nations secrets, then 20 years after leaving office, deciding to tell everything to the world including our enemies. Or what if some bizarre fluke happens and some 3rd party candidate like Ralph Nader gets elected.
So I ask, do you think the President is REALLY the person in charge? Is the President kept out of the loop on certain things?
Well, maybe not quite all the strings, but yes. However, one must recognize that this is inevitably how government and power works, and is true not only of the US President (and the presidents, prime ministers etc., of other democracies) but even - perhaps even more so - of dictators such as Hitler, Stalin, or Kim Jong-Un. Individuals only hold power inasmuch as they can balance and play off various power groups against one another. If you are a dictator, for instance, you had better have the army and police on your side because if you don’t, they will use their power (like the weapons and such they have to have to do their jobs) to take over from you. One of the most reliable ways to make sure they are both on your side is to have the army afraid of the police and the police afraid of the army.
The American system (and other democratic systems) do not run on the naked fear different power blocs may have of one another as much a a dictatorship does, but it still relies on balancing power blocs against one another (and power may come from money, or special knowledge, or even moral prestige, not just force). The President is no doubt by far the most powerful individual in the American system, but that does not mean that he does not have to listen to, and even very often bend to the will of, others if he wants to be able to get anything done, and those “others” are not only the groups, such as Congress, that the constitution mandates should have some power over him. If the President wanted to arrest all the top bankers, for instance, he almost certainly would not be able to, as they have the power to make the country completely ungovernable, if they want, by completely screwing up its finances. So bankers do, in a sense, control the country in certain respects, but they are far from the only such group with important powers (maybe in certain spheres only) that any government needs to take into account.
I don’t feel there’s any secret group running the country. Secret groups may exist but they’re hiding in the shadows. It’s not like somebody comes into the Oval Office and tells the President he has to go along with something like an assassination. The reality is that somebody goes ahead and does the assassination without asking. Even if the President learns about it after the fact, how can he find out who in the government was responsible? Or if anyone was?
The entrenched civil service has some influence, but there’s really no mechanism for keeping large quantities of information from the President. Most folks who are smart enough to become president know how to delegate and know that there are some details that are not in their own best interest to know about.
But I think in general you are wrong - there is not shadow group pulling any strings or keeping anything from the President. There is no way for them to organize nor is there any common interest among the factions that would allow it to perpetuate. The reality is that it’s a complex world and no single person can accomplish major tasks without cooperation and compromise.
If there was some shadow organization calling the shots and making all the decisions behind closed doors, you’d think they could get a lot better results than what we’ve been seeing the last few decades.
He is the President. He presides over the political/constitutional apparatus (of the Federal polity). He is not God-Emperor. Once you are past a certain level of complexity you have to rely on a distributed organization with the different components doing their jobs properly.
True, it is a common strategy from the Leaders to plant in the public the image that they are completely and totally in charge, or in a modern democracy, that the institutions are ever faithful to the “Will Of The People”, and it may look “wrong” when this is not exactly that way. But even more important than that is to inculcate and prove to those aforementioned components of the organization that any attempts to undermine, cross or deceive the Leader will cost them dearly.
OK, that is the only evidence you’ve cited. Now, which of those involvements did the sitting president not know about? If you can’t name one, then you’ve offered no evidence to support your thesis. You have an interesting opinion-- nothing more.
There’s no way the POTUS can possibly know everything that’s going on and there are almost certainly things he’d be pissed to find out and that the people involved aren’t in any hurry to expose.
That being said, the same is true for any huge organization. The CEOs of major multinationals would probably freak out if they knew every little dirty thing that went on in their organizations. Sometimes these are major issues that eventually come to light and often it’s infighting and power struggles that negatively effect the performance of the organization.
My neighbor from North Korea, Mr. Chiun, says that the U.S. is ruled over by an “Emperor Harold Smith”.
Logic and reason tell me that my neighbor is talking out his ass…but self-preservation tells me to shut the hell up and never talk about it again for the rest of my life.
In the OP’s defense, it isn’t that nutty in all cases. There have been a few real conspiracies that the executive branch has distanced themselves from by saying that they had little to no knowledge of their own branch’s activities.
The Iran-Contra affair was the biggest of those. That is a true conspiracy worthy of a fictional novel that involved the U.S., Iran and rebel groups in Nicaragua yet Reagan’s simple defense was that he was blissfully unaware of the whole thing. I don’t believe that was ever truly the case but the official response actually supports the OP. There have been others as well. The United Fruit Company’s (now Chiquita Banana) dealings in Latin America were roughly equivalent to Iran-Contra but predates it by many decades and also lasted for decades. Good luck finding any president during that period that admits ever knowing much about it even though it was a major operation that toppled and partially controlled several other governments.
More recently, NSA activities also fall into the same category. Congress knew very little about their existence at all for years even though they built a giant headquarters close to Washington DC. They went on to build much more impressive facilities in places like Utah and no presidential administration has taken direct responsibility for most of their activities either.
I don’t find it hard to believe that there are rogue agencies including the CIA and NSA in the executive branch that do not get much presidential direction at all. That was demonstrably true in the past and is still probably true today simply because the President doesn’t want the political exposure if something goes wrong.