Serious thoughts requested on some 2016 candidates

Politics & Elections
101

Well if you mean “Conversant on”, Clinton did micromanage. But seriously, adaher, I’m going to need some examples. I’ll give you one from Carter. A reporter visited him as he was going over a thick copy of the (I think) the Pentagon budget. Carter seemed to think that it was impressive that he had mastered it. The reporter could only shake his head: that’s the sort of thing you delegate.[sup]1[/sup]

At the other end of the spectrum, David Stockman thought Reagan was out of touch, making budgetary choices on the basis of superficial and contentless checklists, and 3 part icons of military strength.
[sup]1[/sup] That anecdote was worthless: it’s way too vaguely cited. But this is better: it’s from James Fallows (1979). I add emphasis.

[INDENT] Carter came into office determined to set a rational plan for his time, but soon showed in practice that he was still the detail-man used to running his own warehouse, the perfectionist accustomed to thinking that to do a job right you must do it yourself. He would leave for a weekend at Camp David laden with thick briefing books, would pore over budget tables to check the arithmetic, and, during his first six months in office, would personally review all requests to use the White House tennis court. (Although he flatly denied to Bill Moyers in his November 1978 interview that he had ever stooped to such labors, the in-house tennis enthusiasts, of whom I was perhaps the most shameless, dispatched brief notes through his secretary asking to use the court on Tuesday afternoons while he was at a congressional briefing, or a Saturday morning, while he was away. I always provided spaces where he could check Yes or No; Carter would make his decision and send the note back, initialed J.)

After six months had passed, Carter learned that this was ridiculous, as he learned about other details he would have to pass by if he was to use his time well. But his preference was still to try to do it all—to complain that he was receiving too many memos and that they were too long, but to act nonetheless on everything that reached his desk. He believed in the clean-desk philosophy.[/INDENT] Fallows details other managerial errors. A key one was not appointing an experienced Chief of Staff early on. Sheesh. What I’m arguing here is that it’s a right wing fantasy that other Democratic Presidents have had a similar style. They have not, which explains the lack of substantiation for such claims.

102

I’m not sure John Kasich has a presidential campaign in him. He can have a nasty temper and a touch of verbal diarrhea to go with it. I can’t wait until the Immediate Past President of the Keokuk GOP Corn-Booster Committee asks him for an autograph after a long day and he just unloads and it’s all on tape.

103

Ronald Reagan’s shortcomings as a manager are well known and weren’t a great mystery even at the time. The reasons for Obama’s administration looking a lot like Reagan’s complete with the same excuses(“I didn’t know anything”) are more up for debate. One thing that is no longer up for debate is that he’s become extremely insular in his second term, rarely meeting with any cabinet officials and relying on an inner circle of political advisors.

104

And I don’t think governors win because they have less of a record. I think governors win BECAUSE they have a record. Or lose because of it. What they do pertains more directly to the Presidency.

I do think that what the Obama administration proves is that at the very least, we shouldn’t elect freshman Senators. The guy served in the federal government not two years before running for President, and never ran a state government. Or even a city, or even a company. Not even a squad in the army. And it shows in his performance. He’s focused on legislation as if he’s still a Senator because it’s the only thing he knows.

105

But I substantiated them anyway. Incidentally, they only sunk in after Iran-Contra though. Before that, Fortune Magazine ran a fawning and retrospectively hilarious front page piece entitled, What Managers Can Learn From Manager Reagan. Reagan’s sage advice: ''Surround yourself with the best people you can find, delegate authority, and don’t interfere as long as the policy you’ve decided upon is being carried out." That was Iran-Contra in a nutshell.

I’m still going to need a citation. Yes, he doesn’t shoot the breeze with Congress critters too much, but that’s about it. Professor Jackson of Regis College characterizes Obama’ management style of the National Security Council as, “…orderly, calm, rational and pragmatic, with the president expecting focus, energy, and commitment from its staff members. The management model closely follows what is known as the ‘Scowcroft Model’ of NSC stewardship.”

It sounds like you are just spouting the easy and empty assertions of know-nothing and tendentious punditry.

Those aren’t mutually exclusive. The fact is though that having a voting record in Washington can create easy targets for your challengers. This isn’t an insurmountable barrier though, just a well known factor.

American Strength and the Fear of its Enemies
And looking back, Obama’s outcomes have been remarkable. He pushed through a stimulus package in the teeth of unprecedented obstruction by the opposing party, preventing a 2nd Great Depression. He reformed health care, a goal that had defeated a half dozen Presidents before him. He overhauled the regulation of the financial industry and saw us through the worst financial crisis since WWII, despite Republican attempts to delay appointments to the Treasury and starve them of needed expertise. The budget deficit is even in decline. The task that remains though is getting a grip on global climactic change. But while his executive orders necessarily can’t go far enough, at least Obama doesn’t deny science.

The only person in over his head is Osama Bin Laden, caught, killed and currently residing a mile under the Indian Ocean. George Bush called off the hunt. Obama resumed it.

Contrast recent experience with George Bush, who delivered us a pointless war that he thought could be fought quickly and cheaply, as well as budget busting tax cuts for his fat cat friends.

106

This is starting to remind me of conservative commentary on the Iraq war circa 2005. Except this time it applies to the entire management of the government. I guess the media just isn’t reporting enough of the success stories.

107

Obama in 2012 had more experience leading the country than everyone on earth except for four living people. This “experience” meme you constantly harp on (like most of the things about Obama your bias is unable to overcome) is total bullshit.

108

Experience is useless if it’s just experience screwing up and not learning from it. If you can’t actually distinguish between the experience of Bill Clinton and the experience of George Bush as governor, then there’s a problem here.

What makes experience useful is that we can fairly accurately predict their future performance from their past performance.

109

All of this is fine, it’s just not particularly applicable to Obama. Sure, it would have been nice if he had been a governor – but he wasn’t. And there’s no reason to believe he would govern any differently had he been a governor. And he is still far, far better than the alternatives would have been.

110

People who have no taste for running for office are also unlikely to work well with Congress. And there’s a pretty low limit to how successful a Presidency you can have if you can’t do that.

111

Ah yes, the Chauncey Gardener theory of Presidential competence.

But I’m not criticizing the media, not yet anyway. I’m challenging you to to substantiate your claims. Now personally I’m a Bill Clinton fan, probably more so than Obama. But Obama simply has a better track record, objectively. It’s possible that I’m assigning credit in too rough a manner: surely Pelosi deserves some, as do the politicians and officials who focused on building the nation up, rather than dividing it or chasing chimera. The facts remain however: the 111th congress was the most productive in post war history and that legislation was passed during a period of record obstructionism by the minority party.

The budget is even on the mend. Last October the CBO noted that deficit was only 2.8% of GDP, below the 40 year average. That was the 5th consecutive year that the budget deficit share had shrunk. Now frankly, that was bad policy: following the 2009 burst of spending with federal austerity hurt the economy. I’m just saying that these hard facts are in sharp contrast to the screaming hysteria and hair rending drama acted out by Tea Partiers and their friends at Fox News.

112

Hey, how about Rick Scott for the Republicans? Two-term governor of a very purple state and all that…

113

Forgot this was the serious thoughts thread. <3

114

And the government is dysfunctional and broken and faith in government is at its lowest level since Watergate:

And this isn’t just some kind of malaise with government. State governments are faring quite well in trust. Most of which, I’d note, are Republican-run.

115

Still no facts from adaher, only opinions albeit public opinions. Thanks for the link though: I’ll note the table gives more detail than the chart. As I see it a 10 point break occurred between Sep 2012 and Sep 2013, capturing the Republican takeover and the dysfunction of government shutdowns. Before that, the numbers coasted only a little below recent averages.

So yeah, Americans react poorly to obstructionism. Republicans know that which is why they typically won’t man up and take responsibility for their behavior. I can’t blame them, as false equivalence is ubiquitous among commentators.

116

Obstructionism is the cause? So Americans don’t care about all the mismanagement, they just wish more legislation was passed giving the President something to do that he could also fuck up?

117

Most Americans don’t have the same personal bias that you have against Mr. Obama, even if many of them express disapproval (a disapproval that is shrinking a bit, based on the latest Gallup polling).

118

You said something about this in another thread, and when I asked you about it, you gave a bunch of penny-ante examples of mismanagement that pretty much demonstrated how clean an administration Obama has run.

Under Bush, the administrative fuckups caused one city to drown, and arguably caused the towers to fall. Reagan and Bush the Elder sold arms to both Iran and Iraq. Nixon…well, you know about Nixon.

The last GOP President who ran an Administration that rivaled Obama’s for good management and lack of scandal was Eisenhower. (And his administration had Sherman Adams, which was considered a big deal at the time.) And Ike would be a centrist Dem today. (Too bad today’s GOP wouldn’t agree to a nice big infrastructure project like Ike’s, or even the much smaller ones that Obama has proposed.)

119

Eh, if Carly Fiorina of the “Fenton the Death Sheep From Hell” commercial can get some love on this thread, surely whatever you wrote can’t be all that out of place. :slight_smile:

120

Obama’s scandals aren’t at the level of Watergate or Iran-Contra, but they are real and there are a lot of them. Not so much due to corruption but because as he has said many times, “I didn’t know until I read it in the paper.”

Generally, when bad things go on for a long time and they don’t make it up the chain of command, that’s evidence of bad management. It’s a pattern of behavior and there’s no sign it’s going to stop. There will be more such stories over the next two years, and the media will report the President’s excuses with the derision they deserve. The public’s faith in the competence of government will continue to decline, which will continue to make any Democratic attempts to have it do even more things difficult to impossible.