Let’s say a big underdog in the presidential race took the lead at the last minute and got herself elected. She is a congressional representative from Iowa with a platform to protect America’s farming interest, protecting union rights as well as the right to bear arms.
However, she steps into office and immediately finds that her work can’t be focused on those things. For one thing, there is a military officer following her around every single minute with the nuclear launch codes to end Western Civilization at her discretion. How does she learn what to do? She understands the role of the Secretary of Agriculture but people tell her she has to have a Secretary of the Interior and a great Secretary of Defense and she has little idea what those people do let alone how to select and guide them.
It all seems so overwhelming and there is no way any newbie could sort it our well. Who carefully explains how things work, assists her in following the traditional role of government, and dictates her meeting schedule? She can’t do any of these things on her own yet.
The General Services Administration has a Presidential transition team whose job is to advise the President-elect and her staff about everything they need to know in the period before her inauguration. Additionally, all the cabinet departments and independent agencies put together transition plans for advising their new bosses and the President-elect on what they need to know.
Also, there’s no way you’d be elected president unless you already had lots of contacts with powerful people who’d served in previous administrations. (IE, George W Bush initially knew very little about Washington, but he had close relations with senior insiders of his father’s administration). All these people will offer advice about how things are supposed to be done.
But the other answer is – no one teaches the President how to do his/her job. The President makes up the job as he/she goes along, and almost certainly will make lots of gaffes and mistakes along the way. That’s just inevitable. Certainly, Bush’s mistakes are well-known, but think back to Bill Clinton’s first term – he certainly made lots of mistakes besides Monica. The trick is just to recover from them as quickly as possible.
A good number of the White House staff are permanent staff, not political appointees, so they will be helpful. But among other things, the incoming president has to fill something like several thousand political appointments (cabinet members, ambassadors, department heads, etc.)
No so! The teachers from grade school to college taught the President and the President learned from that other school called life. The President takes an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”… that takes citizenship… which is learned in school.
Whatever. I think it’s pretty clear the OP was talking about how Presidents learn to do something like, for instance, “Uh oh, New Orleans was just flooded by hurricane Katrina. As President, do I need to do anything or can I just ignore it and let ‘Brownie’ do a heckuva job?”
While it’s undeniable that the Bush administration responded poorly to huricane Katrina, I honestly can’t say that I would have know what to do at the time, either. It would be great if there were some sort of President School where presidents could take classes on how to respond to natural disasters, an uncooperative congress, a terrorist attack, a trade deficit, etc. Unfortuantly, though, no such thing exists. The average person’s life experience simply doesn’t teach you to deal with important issues like that. All the President can do is make what seems like a good decision at the time and then hope for the best.
Serious contenders from the Presidency come from a relatively small pool of careers, schools and social circles. Nobody goes from managing a McDonald’s to snagging a major party’s nomination. Presidents tend to come from congress, governorships and occasionally the military’s upper ranks (as opposed to coming from, say, academia, publishing, or the clergy). These men were, with few exceptions, raised from infancy to be the President.
And he was an Eagle Scout… which proves my point about citizenship.
One of the elementary propositions of the United States is civic education. All Americans deserve the best education. An education that produces good citizens… and good citizens are persons who are good presidents.
Intelligence is said to be the ablility to adapt to the enviroment. Education: not what to think but how to think.
Gerald Ford became VP knowing the likelihood that Nixon would be removed from office. Harry Truman, OTOH, became President just three months into his term, during World War II, having been told nothing about anything by Roosevelt. He managed.
The hypothetical president-elect would know she is the new president about ten weeks before the inauguration. She would have had a large staff briefing her on every conceivable subject during the campaign. After the election she would sit down with her top advisors and plan out every detail of her upcoming presidency. The current president briefs her on urgent security matters just in case. She has everyone in her party in Congress talking to her. She talks to people who are going to be in her cabinet and in the hundreds of other positions that are appointed. Her people are in touch with every political advisor in the United States.
After the election, there is the aforementioned transition team. And the West Wing has about 1300 people in it, IIRC. There are experts at everything a phone call away, many of them career employees who do not change with the political party occupying the White House.
Sure it’s the world’s steepest learning curve. But it starts months or - these days - years before the new president takes office. And there are legions of people waiting to serve 24 hours a day to make the transition go smoothly. And nobody expects that everything will happen smoothly or at all the first few days. It’s hard to remember now, but most people were complaining that Bush had done very little as president by early September 2001, after seven months of being president.
There are several examples where being a raw rookie was a huge disadvantage to being a President. The best in my memory are JFK and Jimmy Carter. JFK was faced with monumental crisis in the infancy of his presidentcy. He had the Bay of Pigs, the summit with Kruschev and the Cuban missile crisis. The inexperience in dealing with what he faced weighed heavilly on his presidency.
Carter had a long learning curve in familiarizing himself with his job. Governor of Georgia to US President is a huge leap. Early on he had a lot of difficulty in delegating and setting priorities. It came back to hurt him. He ran and got elected because he was an “outsider” but when he took office the “insiders”, even within his own party, didn’t want to cooperate and facilitate his success.
Anyone that has gotten a high level executive job in a large corporation will tell you that it takes at least six months to learn the job. It used to be that presidents were given a “grace” period but, like NFL quarterbacks, that grace period gets shorter all time.
JFK and Carter eventually figured it out because of their aptitude but it made for some difficult times. Who knows what would have happened with the JFK presidency? The Carter presidency probably would have been much more productive during a second term but he wasn’t given the chance.
I think you’re misunderstanding the question. I’m with morgan here, I think the OP is talking about procedural issues and so on, not the broad strokes of what it means to serve one’s country.
Although the President is the Boss of the Executive, he or she still has to learn how to deal with Congress and the Judiciary. It’s just like any other job where you have to learn how to deal with different departments of the company.
It’s just that if you screw up, you can launch a nuclear missile or two and vaporize the planet.
Both of these guys moved in with a fully staffed administration, right? Or was Nixon’s staff a mess at that point? If so, that would certainly smooth a tough transition.
I never gave it much thought, but those first 100 days must be a rough ride, especially when the previous president was from a different party.
If he had a bad first term, of course the second would be better. But another chance? The first term was his chance and the American people said nuh-uh to another one.
Hmm. It’s like saying 40 years of my life have prepaired me for 45 minutes.
Has anyone ever had that feeling? And what is the difference between a “procedural matter” and a “crisis situation”. You have an intelligence report or you have a national security emergency. It’s your choice. Sure, you can speak to the FBI and the CIA directors or the National Security Advisor but ultimately it’s the President who acts.
One minute for the President is the equivilent of one hour in real time.
Yes, he had the constitutional right to seek a second term and the voters didn’t give him the chance to serve a second term. What’s not to understand or argumentative about that?
Also, look at the mess he took over. The military was a wreck after Vietnam, the economy was headed downhill with inflation soaring and the Watergate scandal had left Washington in tatters.
On the other hand, look a Reagan’s two terms. The first was quite successful and got him established. Whether you agreed with their politics or not, he had some capable insiders to help him get off to a good start. A significant number of his key staff and cabinet members bailed out after the first term and, comparatively speaking, his second term was a disaster but many people had already formed their opinion.
The President doesn’t have as many procedural issues as you’d think, far fewer than a House or Senate leader, and the few that he does have are generally handled by the chief of staff.
Aside from vetoing bills and making cabinet and judicial appointments, the President’s main role is to rally popular support around legislation that he likes, but has no power to write or pass himself. This is pretty substantial, but involves few actual procedures. The Presidency is almost entirely mostly broad strokes.