I figure he often defers to Cabinet Secretaries who (a) have relevant experience, and who (b) I figure are usually right – and I figure he overrules them when he thinks they’re wrong. And I figure that, hey, sometimes they are wrong. But I also figure, sometimes he’s wrong, and should’ve deferred to the Cabinet Secretary.
So what happens if you pretty much just defer to those Cabinet Secretaries?
Presidents actually delegate to their Cabinet secretaries, but the most significant decisions are made by White House advisors. The Cabinet Secretaries are usually expected to make sure there are no problems in their agencies that will harm the administration, and if there are, to take the bullet for the President.
Think West Wing. ALl the decisions were made by like four people and you could go weeks without ever seeing a Cabinet Secretary unless they made news in a bad way. That’s not far from how the last few Presidents have done things. The exception is war and peace issues, which still heavily involve State and Defense, but for most domestic issues Presidents seem to lean more on the Karl Roves and Valerie Jarretts.
So basically the answer is that Presidents already defer to the Cabinet Secretaries, almost completely, unless they have some overarching political objective they want to achieve. And the result is that agencies fail, make headlines, and Presidents escape accountability other than a drop in their approval rating(which constitutes the 4% of voters like me who care about this kind of stuff).
The president’s job is to manage the advisers, people who are bright ambitious and have their own agendas. One needs a great deal of people skills plus an incredible ambition oneself to handle them.
It’s simply silly to assume that political novices could manage the job and not get into trouble. More than one major presidential candidate’s campaign has broken down because of staff inner fighting.
(cough) Hillary.
I’ve been trying to figure out which way to read this, and I’m still not sure.
Take, say, Dubya: are you saying he ably handled all the bright and ambitious advisers who had their own ambitions, or that he got into trouble? (And he won re-election, unlike Carter; is Carter irrelevant to your point, were his failures independent of his management style – or is it that Carter had bright and ambitious advisers with their own agendas and couldn’t handle 'em?)
(And before Carter, the Ford Administration had two-years-and-change to impress the electorate; they failed; was it because the man at the top couldn’t manage the bright and ambitious advisers with their own agendas, or do you figure he have that down cold but failed in spite of it?)
(And before Ford, we had the Nixon presidency – chock full of bright and ambitious staffers who, acting on their own initiative, got the gent in the White House into a tricky situation – and he handled it as badly as possible, and he resigned in disgrace. So does that prove your point, or are you saying no, see, if a seasoned pro like Nixon couldn’t do it, what chance does an amateur have?)
(And if you ask the man in the street to talk about Reagan’s time in office, I give him two minutes before he says “Hands-Off Approach To Running Government” – along with “Iran-Contra: What Did The President Know, And When Did He Know It?”)
Then you have an Executive branch without an executive at the top.
Have you ever worked on a project where the manager just let all the team leads do what they thought best? I have, and it was not a lot of fun and not very successful. YMMV.
Regards,
Shodan
I haven’t. But have we ever had a Presidency like that? Which come closest?
That said, I wasn’t, strictly speaking, asking about a Presidency where you only ever defer to the experts in each field; I was asking how you’d do. Sure, I figure you’d defer more often than our past Presidents – but unless you’re saying you’d defer every time, then your answer will fall somewhere on a ‘sometimes’ continuum.
(Some posters might never overrule 'em – but you sound like you would.)
No, I don’t think we have ever had a Presidency like that. But we have had Presidents who were on either side of the line of under- vs. over-management. Carter, for instance, took a speed reading course so that he could read every word of every bill he was presented with, and wound up trying to decide the schedule for the White House tennis courts. Reagan was pretty much hands-off, apart from broad objectives like recuperating the economy and winning the Cold War, and wound up with Iran-Contra.
As the Presidency grows more and more complex, it is more and more common for a President to concentrate on some thiings and leave the rest to his staff and appointments. They aren’t always successful - Bush wanted to partially privatize Social Security and failed. I think LBJ is the last President who was largely able to execute his agenda almost in totot, and that was from his experience in Congress shepherding thru legislation, and wheeling and dealing in general.
I would be a horrid failure as President no matter what I did. I don’t have the experience in managing large projects, and I have never set policy. I am a techie, not a politician (in any sense of the word).
I would pick a good VP and resign. I have never held any political office. I have been the president of my church council, and I am not naive enough to think running the USA is like running herd on a bunch of elderly Lutherans.
Regards,
Shodan
But that’s my exact point: if you had broad objectives (‘recuperate the economy’ and ‘win this war’, say) and were “pretty much hands-off, apart from broad objectives”, then it seems like you’re saying you could maybe do what Reagan did: commit to a pretty-much-hands-off-except-for-broad-objectives approach, and, okay, you maybe wind up with something like unto Iran-Contra, but it’s not like he had to resign over that, and it’s not like he even got impeached-but-not-removed for it, and it’s not like it stopped his VP from smoothly winning the next election – after which, that guy tapped James Baker and Liddy Dole and Nicholas Brady and Lawrence Eagleburger and so on for his Cabinet, because, hey, why mess with a good thing?
Is this hypothetical ignoring congress or not? Assuming you change the constitution to let a non US citizen become President I could do a great job. Balance your budget, create jobs, and give everyone in the US a pony. But nothing I want to do has a snowballs chance in hell of passing congress so I’d get nothing done.
And that’s why we have so many bad Presidents. They want accomplishments that make headlines and rely on Congress, rather than doing their constitutional duty of carrying out the laws Congress has already passed. Too many Presidents treat that as someone else’s problem(delegate and forget), especially when they have no management experience or their management experience consists of failure after failure.
For those who argue that they would be a good president or not a terrible one, how do you define leadership and the role of the Chief Executive?
I’ve worked for companies with mediocre or inexperienced leaders, or dealt with them as customers and the lack of a clear, workable vision causes paralysis, apathy or rebellion.
Good leaders, by definition, rely on their lieutenants for advice. However true leadership is able to do far more than simply make good decisions, which is really only a small fraction of the equation. Good leaders are able to persuade their subordinates to loyally follow. You can make the best decisions in the world, but without loyalty in the ranks, you simply cannot execute them.
The various departments will necessarily be in conflict unless you have infinite resources, which of course you do not. Even the most hands-off of leaders must be able to command respect by various staff and department heads.
Likewise, without a forceful presidency, you are going to get eaten alive by Congress regardless if your party controls it or not.
This may be the first time I’ve agreed with Shodan.
While sounds good on paper. We all make great Monday morning quarterbacks.
Looking at Ford and Carter’s administrations is a good indication of how much worse an amateur would do than these guys.
In Collin Powell’s autobiography, he recounts meeting Jimmy Carter before he had run for the presidency, and said that Jimmy really stood out, that you could tell there was something different about him. Carter had the experience of being a governor and running a successful campaign.
Ford had been a Representative for 26 years, including 16 as the House Minority Leader. He was clearly not a nobody from a message board.
Yet both leaders fell short for various reasons. They didn’t have the perfect Cabinet, but no one does and my argument is that leadership goes far beyond simply lucking into great lieutenants. You must have good ones, but you must also be able to handle them and command their respect and loyalty.
Any of us would get eaten alive in the real world of politics at that level.
If elected president of USA(as a Norwegian citizen?), far, far leaning leftie me would probably combust on impact right away. And that is before taking into consideration all the other things that would probably make me unfit for that position.