David Axelrod: Part of being president is there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast.
Conservatives have long recommended a solution to this problem. But I’d be interested in hearing how liberals would solve this. What is the solution to a government so “vast”, to use Axelrod’s word, that our elected leaders can’t manage it?
“Too big for X” != “Too big” in the sense the thread-title implies.
I seriously doubt that David Axelrod was implying the government was “too big” with that statement. Look at other countries who have a bigger government as a share of GDP and see how they compare in terms of happiness, productivity, health, and general welfare. In general, countries with “more government” are better off.
Which is going to be true of any modern state bigger than a small town, at best. It doesn’t matter since a President isn’t supposed to be a dictator, controlling every little last thing. If anything it’s a benefit, it forces him into sharing power whether he wants to or not. I don’t want a government that’s just the extension of the will of one man.
I concede that a bigger government could be better, but one thing it can’t be is democratically accountable unless the elected officials can be held accountable for its performance.
So unless I’m wrong, there seems to be only one of two broad solutions(the specifics can be more complicated of course):
Shrink the government so that elected officials can be held accountable
Hold elected officials accountable anyway.
Or rather, some conservatives have long claimed to be recommending a solution to this problem (i.e., shrink government) that they don’t actually make any serious effort to implement when they get into office.
In any case, whatever we as a society consider the ideal size of government to be, it would be stupid to suppose that we could ever bring all of it under direct Presidential oversight. Any modern government capable of functioning is inevitably going to be too “vast” for an individual Chief Executive to supervise all its pieces directly.
This is why the executive branch of the federal government has more than one person in it. Sure, inevitably some of those people are going to screw up sometimes, and when that happens they should be punished and the screwups fixed. But expecting the President to micromanage every aspect of government individually is not a useful solution.
Yeah, that’s what we do. If you think this a big deal, and the Democrats are responsible, you are free to vote against them in the next election. But I’m pretty sure that all the people who think this is a big deal are voting R anyway.
The issue isn’t micromanagement though, it’s accountability. Is the President accountable for what the government he is constitutionally required to manage does, or isn’t he? If he is not, then doesn’t this mean that the government is not accountable to the people?
The latter is how any functional government is supposed to work. The former is impossible unless you want to live in a failed state, assuming as you seem to be that “accountable” = “can be kept track of by one guy”. You can’t run a nation as vast as America with a government composed of less than three hundred people.
So that means when the government is performing poorly, the top guy has to take the blame.
It’s up to you to decide how accountable any electable official is for what he’s in control of. If he doesn’t do what you think is right, vote against him. After Nixon, the President doesn’t really get to tell the IRS what to do. But if you already hated Obama, you are free to use this as a reason to vote against his third term.
Not when the legislative branch is full of people who are working hard to make him fail at everything they can, and openly admit that they are doing so. That buys a guy a lot of slack (and helps demonstrate just how incredibly stupid & amoral the Republicans have become).
That’s the political debate, this thread is about the larger issue that transcends a single administration.
the government is either accountable to the people or it isn’t. If it is, then the top guy gets the blame when things go wrong. And elections aren’t the only way we punish our elected officials. That’s a copout. We also punish them by tuning them out when they have proved they aren’t worth being taken seriously anymore. Congress becomes less likely to pay any attention to them.
If the government is not accountable to the people, then there’s no point to voting. We elect figureheads who are in charge of nothing. Only the permanent bureaucracy wields power.
That’s the legislative branch. You can blame the republicans all you want for laws not getting passed that you’d like to see passed. You cannot blame them for failures in the administration of the executive branch.
I’d also note that when liberals talk about the virtues of activist government, one of the main themes is that government, unlike corporations, is accountable to the people.
Now many of you are saying that’s not the case, that our elected officials cannot actually wield any control over the government. ANd if they can’t, then the people can’t. So shouldn’t that argument be dropped?
Sure I can, they are trying to sabotage the nation at all levels. The Republicans have shown themselves to be morally treasonous; unless you demonstrate that Obama is actively trying to wreck the country, he’s still better than the Republicans, who are trying to wreck the country.
Not when he’s only in charge of part of the government. And not when his opponents are openly acting against the welfare of the country to make him fail.
Only Obama runs the executive branch, not the Republicans. The Republicans didn’t make him fail to notice any of the things he’s failed to notice.
? What do you mean, “elected officials cannot actually wield any control over the government”? It was Obama’s Treasury Department inspector general’s report that outed the IRS practices and their “inappropriate criteria”, and it’s Obama’s Justice Department that’s opened an investigation into the matter.
Sounds to me like a pretty good instance of the executive branch of an elected administration policing itself. Of course, the alleged misconduct should never have happened in the first place, but I trust you’re not naive enough to imagine that there exists any system of government under which no instances of misconduct will ever occur.
Oh, now I get it. This thread is basically a lame attempt to justify Congressional Republican toxic obstructionism. “Since Obama failed to personally notice and correct inappropriate tax scrutiny measures adopted by low-level officials within the IRS, his entire presidency is nothing but a hollow sham! We are henceforth entitled, nay, duty-bound to sabotage and resist and obstruct any policy he attempts to implement, because he deserves to be PUNISHED!”
Complete bullshit, of course, but that’s what apparently passes for a vision of statecraft in the Republican Party these days.
Okay, so you’re making the case that the President can run the government and thus Axelrod has no reason to be making any excuses.
No, just pointing out that in order for a President to demand more government, he has to prove that the government he has isn’t already too much for him. But you seem to think that he is accountable for what’s going on and dealing with it. Good.
Axelrod wasn’t making any excuses. He was just pointing out the obvious fact (well, obvious except to the rabid Tea Partiers for whom any stick will do to beat Obama with) that it’s not possible for Obama or any other president to be aware of every last detail of what’s going on in their administration at all times.
That’s why, as I said, an executive branch has more than one person in it. However, all of those people, including Obama, are fallible and sometimes wrong, and some of them are sometimes downright unethical. That’s why there are oversight mechanisms like the Office of the Inspector General at Treasury and Justice Department investigations.
Like hell they have. The idea of starving the “beast” until it’s small enough to drown in a bathtub is a mandate to destroy government, not make it better.
I’ll believe conservatives are serious about cutting waste in government when they collectively take a significant pay cut. They want to cut everything but their own salary, which proves what sort of cloth they’re cut from.