onawah
21st August 2010, 06:24
I've posted this elsewhere on the forum, but I don't think it was put in the right place, so I'm starting a new thread. Hopefully it gets the attention I think it deserves here.
It's regarding an article in the September 2010 issue of Vanity Fair about the office of the Presidency today, which is much different than it's ever been; a fact I think people really need to be more aware of.
Vanity Fair, like Rolling Stone Magazine, is noted for some very astute journalism on politics, the economy and more (in spite of the fact that both magazines are noted primarily for their focus on fashion and rock n'roll, respectively).
Washington is broken and yet the expectations of Americans for the one man "at the helm" are incredibly unrealistic.
The link is:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/09/broken-washington-201009?currentPage=all
Here is the article:
" Washington, We Have a Problem
How broken is Washington? Beyond repair? A day in the life of the president reveals that Barack Obama’s job would be almost unrecognizable to most of his predecessors—thanks to the enormous bureaucracy, congressional paralysis, systemic corruption (with lobbyists spending $3.5 billion last year), and disintegrating media. Inside the West Wing, the author talks to Obama’s top advisers about the challenge of playing the Washington game, ugly as it has become, even while their boss insists they find a way to transcend it.
By Todd Purdum•
Illustration by Edward Sorel
September 2010
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
Obama gets roundly criticized for his patience, but his conduct may offer a lesson in how to elude the loonier aspects of our age.
At the hour of dawn, in the same southwest-corner, second-floor bedroom of the White House where Abraham Lincoln once slept, the president awakens. On this spring morning, a Wednesday, Barack Obama is alone; his wife, Michelle, is on her way to Mexico City on her first solo foreign trip. He heads upstairs for 45 minutes of weights and cardio in his personal gym, then puts on a dark suit and navy-blue pin-striped tie. Obama may be surrounded by servants morning till night, but not for him the daily drill of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was dressed by a valet, John Moaney, from inside out—underwear, socks, pants, shirt, tie, shoes, jacket—every morning.
After breakfast and a quick read of the papers, the president sees his daughters, Sasha and Malia, off to school. Then he enters the private, wood-paneled family elevator—installed in the same shaft used by Theodore Roosevelt’s son Quentin to bring his pet pony upstairs—perhaps taking a moment to straighten his tie in the mirrored back wall of the cab. He descends two stories, alights on the ground floor, just outside the White House kitchen, passes down a short, vaulted corridor and through a greenhouse-like antechamber known as the Palm Room, and walks along the colonnade that borders the Rose Garden and leads to the Oval Office. His 450th day in office has begun.
Keenan Mayo surveys the highs and lows of bipartisanship on the Hill.
We think of the presidency as somehow eternal and unchanging, a straight-line progression from 1 to 44, from the first to the latest. And in some respects it is. Except for George Washington, all of the presidents have lived in the White House. They’ve all taken the same oath to uphold the same constitution. But the modern presidency—Barack Obama’s presidency—has become a job of such gargantuan size, speed, and complexity as to be all but unrecognizable to most of the previous chief executives. The sheer growth of the federal government, the paralysis of Congress, the systemic corruption brought on by lobbying, the trivialization of the “news” by the media, the willful disregard for facts and truth—these forces have made today’s Washington a depressing and dysfunctional place. They have shaped and at times hobbled the presidency itself.
For much of the past half-century, the problems that have brought Washington to its current state have been concealed or made tolerable by other circumstances. The discipline of the Cold War kept certain kinds of debate within bounds. America’s artificial “last one standing” postwar economy allowed the country to ignore obvious signs of political and social decay. Wars and other military interventions provided ample distraction from matters of substance at home. Like many changes that are revolutionary, none of Washington’s problems happened overnight. But slow and steady change over many decades—at a rate barely noticeable while it’s happening—produces change that is transformative. In this instance, it’s the kind of evolution that happens inevitably to rich and powerful states, from imperial Rome to Victorian England. The neural network of money, politics, bureaucracy, and values becomes so tautly interconnected that no individual part can be touched or fixed without affecting the whole organism, which reacts defensively. And thus a new president, who was elected with 53 percent of the popular vote, and who began office with 80 percent public-approval ratings and large majorities in both houses of Congress, found himself for much of his first year in office in stalemate, pronounced an incipient failure, until the narrowest possible passage of a health-care bill made him a sudden success in the fickle view of the commentariat, whose opinion curdled again when Obama was unable, with a snap of the fingers or an outburst of anger, to stanch the BP oil spill overnight. And whose opinion spun around once more when he strong-armed BP into putting $20 billion aside to settle claims, and asserted presidential authority by replacing General Stanley McChrystal with General David Petraeus. The commentariat’s opinion will keep spinning with the wind.
The evidence that Washington cannot function—that it’s “broken,” as Vice President Joe Biden has said—is all around. For two years after Wall Street brought the country close to economic collapse, regulatory reform languished in partisan gridlock. A bipartisan commission to take on the federal deficit was scuttled by Republican fears in Congress that it could lead to higher taxes, and by Democratic worries about cuts to social programs. Obama was forced to create a mere advisory panel instead. Four years after Congress nearly passed a comprehensive overhaul of immigration laws, the two parties in Washington are farther apart than ever, and hotheaded state legislatures have stepped into the breach. Guantánamo remains an open sore because of fearmongering about the transfer of prisoners to federal prisons on the mainland. What Americans perceive in Washington, as Obama put it in his State of the Union speech, in January, is a “perpetual campaign where the only goal is to see who can get the most embarrassing headlines about the other side—a belief that if you lose, I win.” His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, whose Friday-afternoon mantra has become “Only two more workdays till Monday!,” sums up today’s Washington in terms both coarser and more succinct. To him, Washington is just “****nutsville.”
And so it is. But one can also ask: Even if Washington is broken, is it still partly usable? Is there a way to play the Washington game—on its own ugly terms, and even to play it ferociously, because you have to—and yet transcend the game in some fundamental way? This is the central question of the Obama administration, as its senior officials are well aware—because, in countless ways, their boss has told them so. They all talk candidly about that question, which remains unanswered. But a day in the president’s shoes offers a glimpse of the size of the challenge.
Management by Caffeine
In the White House, every day feels like a week. This particular Wednesday is no exception. The West Wing that Obama walks into is an accident of architecture, originally meant to be a temporary office structure that could relieve pressure on the crowded White House residence until something more suitable was arranged. Successive presidents have simply crammed more and more offices into the same crowded footprint. An average corporate law firm has much more space and looks a lot more lush. It was William Howard Taft who first made the president’s office oval, in 1909. But it was not until 1934 that Franklin D. Roosevelt added a second story to the West Wing and rebuilt the Oval Office in the sunnier southeast corner, closer to the residence, allowing him to roll comfortably in his wheelchair along the covered colonnade and through a side door into the office. The room has an 18-foot ceiling and is 35 feet long, yet it seems compact, even cozy. Aaron Sorkin, the creator of The West Wing, once described it as the “single greatest home-court advantage in the modern world.”
When Obama arrives in the office this morning, just before 9:30, the first item on his agenda, as always, is a meeting with his chief of staff for a quick rundown of the coming day: “three minutes, four minutes, five minutes—whatever it takes, but you’ve got to make it quick,” Rahm Emanuel says. On its face, the imbalance between time and task is absurd: three, four, five minutes, to sum up the world. Emanuel himself has been up since 5:15, and in his office since before 7:30, when he holds his first meeting with the rest of the senior staff, followed by a second one with the “expanded” staff and the legislative liaisons.
Washington is hard to govern, above all, because of the radical growth in the scope of the federal government’s responsibilities—it’s an obvious fact, but it’s where explanations must begin. On the eve of World War II, F.D.R. had six high-level aides who carried the title “administrative assistant to the president.” Harry Truman, after the war, had 12 of them: they met every morning in a semicircle around his desk. There are now upwards of 100 people who have some variation on “assistant to the president” in their titles. The sheer number of things the executive branch is responsible for just keeps expanding; the time available to think about any one of them therefore keeps shrinking. This is not just a management issue, it’s a stakeholder issue: every special interest in the country is working zealously to keep what it has, or to get something better. Emanuel, who was a top White House aide through most of the Clinton years, thought the pace was bad back then. It’s much worse now. “Leon thinks it’s a huge problem,” he says, referring to Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, Leon Panetta, who is now Obama’s C.I.A. director. “He says that this is a highly caffeinated speed.”
7 more pages at the link
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/09/broken-washington-201009?currentPage=all
It's regarding an article in the September 2010 issue of Vanity Fair about the office of the Presidency today, which is much different than it's ever been; a fact I think people really need to be more aware of.
Vanity Fair, like Rolling Stone Magazine, is noted for some very astute journalism on politics, the economy and more (in spite of the fact that both magazines are noted primarily for their focus on fashion and rock n'roll, respectively).
Washington is broken and yet the expectations of Americans for the one man "at the helm" are incredibly unrealistic.
The link is:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/09/broken-washington-201009?currentPage=all
Here is the article:
" Washington, We Have a Problem
How broken is Washington? Beyond repair? A day in the life of the president reveals that Barack Obama’s job would be almost unrecognizable to most of his predecessors—thanks to the enormous bureaucracy, congressional paralysis, systemic corruption (with lobbyists spending $3.5 billion last year), and disintegrating media. Inside the West Wing, the author talks to Obama’s top advisers about the challenge of playing the Washington game, ugly as it has become, even while their boss insists they find a way to transcend it.
By Todd Purdum•
Illustration by Edward Sorel
September 2010
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
Obama gets roundly criticized for his patience, but his conduct may offer a lesson in how to elude the loonier aspects of our age.
At the hour of dawn, in the same southwest-corner, second-floor bedroom of the White House where Abraham Lincoln once slept, the president awakens. On this spring morning, a Wednesday, Barack Obama is alone; his wife, Michelle, is on her way to Mexico City on her first solo foreign trip. He heads upstairs for 45 minutes of weights and cardio in his personal gym, then puts on a dark suit and navy-blue pin-striped tie. Obama may be surrounded by servants morning till night, but not for him the daily drill of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was dressed by a valet, John Moaney, from inside out—underwear, socks, pants, shirt, tie, shoes, jacket—every morning.
After breakfast and a quick read of the papers, the president sees his daughters, Sasha and Malia, off to school. Then he enters the private, wood-paneled family elevator—installed in the same shaft used by Theodore Roosevelt’s son Quentin to bring his pet pony upstairs—perhaps taking a moment to straighten his tie in the mirrored back wall of the cab. He descends two stories, alights on the ground floor, just outside the White House kitchen, passes down a short, vaulted corridor and through a greenhouse-like antechamber known as the Palm Room, and walks along the colonnade that borders the Rose Garden and leads to the Oval Office. His 450th day in office has begun.
Keenan Mayo surveys the highs and lows of bipartisanship on the Hill.
We think of the presidency as somehow eternal and unchanging, a straight-line progression from 1 to 44, from the first to the latest. And in some respects it is. Except for George Washington, all of the presidents have lived in the White House. They’ve all taken the same oath to uphold the same constitution. But the modern presidency—Barack Obama’s presidency—has become a job of such gargantuan size, speed, and complexity as to be all but unrecognizable to most of the previous chief executives. The sheer growth of the federal government, the paralysis of Congress, the systemic corruption brought on by lobbying, the trivialization of the “news” by the media, the willful disregard for facts and truth—these forces have made today’s Washington a depressing and dysfunctional place. They have shaped and at times hobbled the presidency itself.
For much of the past half-century, the problems that have brought Washington to its current state have been concealed or made tolerable by other circumstances. The discipline of the Cold War kept certain kinds of debate within bounds. America’s artificial “last one standing” postwar economy allowed the country to ignore obvious signs of political and social decay. Wars and other military interventions provided ample distraction from matters of substance at home. Like many changes that are revolutionary, none of Washington’s problems happened overnight. But slow and steady change over many decades—at a rate barely noticeable while it’s happening—produces change that is transformative. In this instance, it’s the kind of evolution that happens inevitably to rich and powerful states, from imperial Rome to Victorian England. The neural network of money, politics, bureaucracy, and values becomes so tautly interconnected that no individual part can be touched or fixed without affecting the whole organism, which reacts defensively. And thus a new president, who was elected with 53 percent of the popular vote, and who began office with 80 percent public-approval ratings and large majorities in both houses of Congress, found himself for much of his first year in office in stalemate, pronounced an incipient failure, until the narrowest possible passage of a health-care bill made him a sudden success in the fickle view of the commentariat, whose opinion curdled again when Obama was unable, with a snap of the fingers or an outburst of anger, to stanch the BP oil spill overnight. And whose opinion spun around once more when he strong-armed BP into putting $20 billion aside to settle claims, and asserted presidential authority by replacing General Stanley McChrystal with General David Petraeus. The commentariat’s opinion will keep spinning with the wind.
The evidence that Washington cannot function—that it’s “broken,” as Vice President Joe Biden has said—is all around. For two years after Wall Street brought the country close to economic collapse, regulatory reform languished in partisan gridlock. A bipartisan commission to take on the federal deficit was scuttled by Republican fears in Congress that it could lead to higher taxes, and by Democratic worries about cuts to social programs. Obama was forced to create a mere advisory panel instead. Four years after Congress nearly passed a comprehensive overhaul of immigration laws, the two parties in Washington are farther apart than ever, and hotheaded state legislatures have stepped into the breach. Guantánamo remains an open sore because of fearmongering about the transfer of prisoners to federal prisons on the mainland. What Americans perceive in Washington, as Obama put it in his State of the Union speech, in January, is a “perpetual campaign where the only goal is to see who can get the most embarrassing headlines about the other side—a belief that if you lose, I win.” His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, whose Friday-afternoon mantra has become “Only two more workdays till Monday!,” sums up today’s Washington in terms both coarser and more succinct. To him, Washington is just “****nutsville.”
And so it is. But one can also ask: Even if Washington is broken, is it still partly usable? Is there a way to play the Washington game—on its own ugly terms, and even to play it ferociously, because you have to—and yet transcend the game in some fundamental way? This is the central question of the Obama administration, as its senior officials are well aware—because, in countless ways, their boss has told them so. They all talk candidly about that question, which remains unanswered. But a day in the president’s shoes offers a glimpse of the size of the challenge.
Management by Caffeine
In the White House, every day feels like a week. This particular Wednesday is no exception. The West Wing that Obama walks into is an accident of architecture, originally meant to be a temporary office structure that could relieve pressure on the crowded White House residence until something more suitable was arranged. Successive presidents have simply crammed more and more offices into the same crowded footprint. An average corporate law firm has much more space and looks a lot more lush. It was William Howard Taft who first made the president’s office oval, in 1909. But it was not until 1934 that Franklin D. Roosevelt added a second story to the West Wing and rebuilt the Oval Office in the sunnier southeast corner, closer to the residence, allowing him to roll comfortably in his wheelchair along the covered colonnade and through a side door into the office. The room has an 18-foot ceiling and is 35 feet long, yet it seems compact, even cozy. Aaron Sorkin, the creator of The West Wing, once described it as the “single greatest home-court advantage in the modern world.”
When Obama arrives in the office this morning, just before 9:30, the first item on his agenda, as always, is a meeting with his chief of staff for a quick rundown of the coming day: “three minutes, four minutes, five minutes—whatever it takes, but you’ve got to make it quick,” Rahm Emanuel says. On its face, the imbalance between time and task is absurd: three, four, five minutes, to sum up the world. Emanuel himself has been up since 5:15, and in his office since before 7:30, when he holds his first meeting with the rest of the senior staff, followed by a second one with the “expanded” staff and the legislative liaisons.
Washington is hard to govern, above all, because of the radical growth in the scope of the federal government’s responsibilities—it’s an obvious fact, but it’s where explanations must begin. On the eve of World War II, F.D.R. had six high-level aides who carried the title “administrative assistant to the president.” Harry Truman, after the war, had 12 of them: they met every morning in a semicircle around his desk. There are now upwards of 100 people who have some variation on “assistant to the president” in their titles. The sheer number of things the executive branch is responsible for just keeps expanding; the time available to think about any one of them therefore keeps shrinking. This is not just a management issue, it’s a stakeholder issue: every special interest in the country is working zealously to keep what it has, or to get something better. Emanuel, who was a top White House aide through most of the Clinton years, thought the pace was bad back then. It’s much worse now. “Leon thinks it’s a huge problem,” he says, referring to Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, Leon Panetta, who is now Obama’s C.I.A. director. “He says that this is a highly caffeinated speed.”
7 more pages at the link
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/09/broken-washington-201009?currentPage=all