Simple question here: How informed are our presidents (US)?
Case in point, lets start from the last US administration. The Clinton years. Could Clinton have done more to ‘get’ Osama Bin Laden? Did he truly know what and who he was up against? Why Didn’t Billy go after OBL more vigarisly? Did he know all the ‘Rogue Nation’ material? He must have. On this token…is the US a Rogue Nation? [coalition aside]
Lets move on to George Dubya. How informed is this man? Granted his father monarched over the entire Gulf War, and has had much contact and real-estate interests with senior Bin Laden. But exactly how much do we beleive ‘he’ knew about the situation? He was a busy man, governing Texas and doing what he could to start campaign…
How much info do we think our presidents really have? It couldn’t be that much…I mean they were not US government before they were prez…Whats say ye?
I’d say not much. I’ll bring up an example. Clinton in the '92 election bashes Bush quite often on his policy of continued US trade with China. Clinton accuses Bush of cozying up to the Commies in the name of business. Then Clinton gets into the White House, studies the issue, then realizes, hmmmm…I guess Bush had something here, and then goes and detaches the human rights conditions from MFN. Policy is usually quite complicated and not very many people realize quite how complicated it is without actually being in on the negotiations.
Oh, did you mean once he was in the White House? I thought you meant at the beginning of the campaign/term because you mentioned that GWB was starting a campaign.
Once they get to the White House the president has access to just about everything, so far as I know. The president is generally extremely well informed about the topics he wants to know about. Given the amount of topics he has to deal with, the president usually doesn’t have ALL the information handy for EVERY situation. When that happens, the staff/cabinet member in charge of the situation is extremely informed in his place.
But no, he is not on a “need to know” basis. The president wants it, he gets it.
Why didn’t President Clinton go after Osama bin Laden more vigorously? Well, he simply couldn’t. While we certainly did have the airplanes and missiles and bombs that could have done in 1997 just what they’re doing right now, there simply wasn’t the political will to do it. In 1997, Pakistan was a much more pliable ally for the United States, but the fact of the matter is that the World Trade Center was still intact, so an attack on bin Laden was a very hard sale. If you’ll recall, Clinton’s missile attack back then was hard enough to pull off, and was met with a number of Republicans standing up for poor Mr. bin Laden, and endless whinging about American involvement overseas.
The United States is certainly the strongest military power in the world, but we still have to answer to the will of our people—and those in the world around us. Some detractors of the United States fault us for capricious bullying, and while we’ve been guilty of some heinous foreign policy in our past, we certainly can’t act on every whim that suits us—even when dealing with thugs like the Taleban.
It also depends upon the circumstances. When Harry Truman became President after FDR’s death, the military didn’t clue Truman in on the Manhattan Project immediately. They only told him that they were developing a weapon of incredible destructive power. This wasn’t paranoia working, it was simply good sense. They needed to prepare Truman for everything that the Manhatten Project entailed so that he’d be able to make an informed decision on the matter when the time came.
Getting a new President is like a company getting a new CEO. They don’t immediately inform him of everything that’s going on his first day. First they train him as to how things work, and then they start explaining to him what’s being planned, etc.
One of the reasons that a new administration will be made up of members of previous administration is to cut this training time down and ensure a smooth transition from one administration to the next.
What Chance said on on the Clinton/ObL question and also this.
I should hope it’s become clear to most of us by now that the problem we face is larger than bin Laden, and larger than any particular terrorist network. Let me suggest an analogy: historical conditions have arisen that have enabled a particular cancerous growth. You can remove the particular growth as well as some surrounding cancerous tissue but what is to prevent the growth of new cancers if the enabling conditions haven’t changed? So far I see very little evidence that the Bush administration has a long-term policy that will effectively defend against the threat of terrorism in the future in a comprehensive way. Hopefully that will change.
As to the larger question: how informed are presidents? Well there’s little doubt in my mind that our current prez was and remains, in his own person, one of the least informed of US presidents. The man is not exactly deeply learned or profound. OTOH, I don’t believe that he–as the head of an administration–lacks the fundamental capabilities to implement his agenda. So the question for me isn’t, “Is he informed?” I take it for granted that he’s as informed as he needs to be on what he needs to do according to how he sees it. Rather, the question for me is, “Does his agenda conform to what I and other informed US citizens recognize as being an appropriate course?” And the answer there–IMO–is, about 98% of the time, a big resounding No Way Jose.
Partisan alert: some may recall that when Clinton was prez I was critical of many aspects of his agenda. And Bill was undoubtedly one of the smartest presidents–articulate, high IQ-wise–that the US has had.
For an example of what I mean by a contradiction between (on the one hand) knowing what should be done and (on the other hand) doing what’s on the agenda, check out the link I posted to an editorial from a Seattle newspaper in the Tony Benn thread. It very concisely explains why Bush’s energy policy is absurdly counterproductive in light of terrorist concerns.
Does Bush have the resources to inform himself as to this absurdity? Of course. Will he do so? Only if the public demonstrates widespread resistance: as it did when it insisted on federal airport security, and shot down bogus claims that private companies would do the job better even though private companies, driven by profit rather than by safety concerns, have screwed up again and again and again.
This is a nit, and I apologize, Tuckerfan, for seeming to disagree with you so much lately. However, Secretary of War Henry Stinson advised Truman within a few hours that he had some important developments in weaponry to discuss with him. Within a few days, they had a private meeting outlined where Stinson outlined the Manhattan Project and its current status. In view of the fact that they were at a point where the European Theater was requiring day-to-day decisions and there were regularly important developments in the Pacific Theater, and that Presidential decisions (other than agreeing to continue the project would not be due on the use of atomic weapons right away), the time scale suggests that Truman was brought up to date as quickly as reasonably possible.
I suspect strongly that withholding information from the President that he would have a reasonable expectation of needing to know as Commander in Chief is a court-martial offense under UCMJ. Anybody happen to know?
I think it’s safe to say that the president can have pretty much all the information that the executive branch puts out that he would ask for, but remember, that’s a lot of information, and it’s not physically possible for the president to have and be able to read or decide on all of it. That’s the reason that the cabinet exists, and that the federal bureaucracy exists. There’s going to be a lot of things the president isn’t going to know, because somebody else did it, nobody told him about it, and he never thought to ask about it.
Hey, Poly, I don’t see where you’re disagreeing with me! I didn’t say that they withheld the information from him. I couldn’t remember all the details, but I knew that they didn’t just say, “Hey! We’ve got this thing called an ‘atomic bomb’ and it’ll take out a city.” the moment he became President. And in answer to your question:
Advisior from Independance Day, “Plausible deniabality, sir! Plausible deniability!”