Over and over again, in this election season, I hear the presidential primary and presidential campaigns reduced to the cult of personality. Will McCain keep us in Iraq? Will Hillary be business as usual? Will Obama be suitable as Commander-in-Chief?America, get over it! The President of the United States is not a celebrity per se. We call it the Executive Branch, not the Crown, despite recent efforts to gut constitutional controls on the power of the executive branch.
When I evaluate a presidential candidate, I evaluate many things, but primary among them is management style.
Yes, the President is commander-in-chief, but the presidents have usually taken that as an advisory position, with rare bouts of executive decision. Legally, the President doesn't even have the right to declare war -- that privilege is reserved in the Constitution to Congress, even though they have abidicated their obligation for every war and "police action" since WWII.
The President is also responsible for negotiating treaties, but usually these treaties are subject to ratification by Congress. But the President is our diplomatic representative, so statesmanship is a worthy category. Our President should be neither timid nor a bull in a china shop, and should have good advisors on political, diplomatic, and cultural affairs who he or she listens to.
The president has the right to veto legislation sent from Congress. In this past administration, signing statements have also given undue power to the executive to ignore or qualify legislation at will.
But here, ultimately, is the greatest practical power of the Presidency: our president appoints over three thousand senior level managers to run the United States. And the president manages their work, and via their offices, over two million civilian government employees.
When you elect the president of the United States, you also elect, by proxy, these departments and offices (from whitehouse.gov):
Cabinet Rank Members
The Vice President
| White House
| |||
Office of Management
| United States
| |||
Environmental Protection Agency
| Office of National
|
The appointments don't just include the Cabinet and their departments, though. With one vote, you empower a man or woman to select the membership of these bodies (again, via whitehouse.gov):
As well as ambassadors, liaisons, negotiators, Supreme Court and lesser federal court judges, and so on.
Over two million civilian employees, without counting the three milllion active duty and reserved personnel in our armed forces. Rounding up, that's 2% of the population of the US, on your payroll, delegated to the leadership of one man or woman, with your one vote.
If you were picking the CEO of a five million person company with a multi-trillion dollar budget, would you evaluate them solely on the merits of their personal character and personality?
Surely this is important. But more important, any investor would say, is the whole executive team.
Appointments should be based on competency and policy directions, but they will also in part be determined by who the candidate owes favors. So, my exercise to the reader is to evaluate the people around the candidates. Who have they co-sponsored bills with? What is the company they keep?
What kind of leadership would they place in the State Department? The departments of labor, education, defense? What sort of Homeland Security chief would any of the three possible presidents appoint? Look carefully through the departments and advisory bodies above, and weigh your vote carefully.
Look beyond gender, race, age, experience -- and start the hard job of guessing who would comprise each candidate's full team.
What do you know about the strong friendships, alliances, promises, mentorships, obligations and debts each candidate brings with them? If you must trust the President, who does the President trust, in turn?
We must judge the candidates on the content of their character, but let us also judge them on the company they keep.
It takes a sizeable crew to move this ship of state
==
Shava Nerad, News and Opinion Correspondent:
Shava's column, Iconoclasm, published irregularly and frequently to Gather Essentials: News, is an examination of the provocative ideas emerging in media and world culture behind the news. Her Iconoclasm columns are now listed as a mainstream news source in Google News.
Shava Nerad has been working on the Internet for over twenty-five years, at the boundaries of Internet and social issues. She is CEO of Indigenis, a consulting group working at the intersection of virtual worlds, social networking, and gaming communities, and recently left her position as development director of The Tor Project to work on a book tentatively titled Rules of Engagement -- healthy risk taking as a path to improving life, work, and society.
She lives in Somerville, MA with her teenage son, her fiance (a professional magician and fundraising coach), and a corgi/dachshund mutt named George. Her wedding in Second Life was recently featured in Business Week, and even she finds this surreal.
Opinions here have nothing to do with my consulting and so on.
You can find all of Shava's Iconoclasm columns at http://iconoclasm.gather.com
Keep up with Shava's other postings and Gather activity by joining her Gather network -- just click here and select the orange "Connect" button on the left-hand side of thepage (colleague connections only please, unless you know me on the street!)
You'll find Shava and other News Correspondents, plus celebrity content and plenty of other News experts at News.gather.com
rate
email
print
link to this page
Comments: 12
You've brought up a most excellent point! The president does not "do it all!" There is much to be said about leadership style - and what kind of people the president surrounds him/herself with. That's been one of the major flaws of the Bush presidency - the cronyism and favortism among his friends and cohorts.
The president can only do so much (unless they consider themself outside the law). We ought pay attention to who is running the executive branch - and what judicial appointments might be in the wings.
Excellent, thank you.
With Hillary Clinton or John McCain established in the Oval Office, I would expect them to choose from lists of knowledgeable "usual" suspects to fill out their staff and cabinet positions. Who Barack Obama would choose to fill these offices remains am unguessable unknown to me; and that is one of the primary reasons that he has not won any confidence from me.
Obama has presented himself as a leader/manager who would rely heavily on his underlings. If he wants to build confidence in voters like me, he needs to be trotting out some of those he expects to appoint so that we can grasp a sense of what kind of policies and methods an Obama administration would bring.
Personality (character) is a crucial component to me; but I am not sold on someone just because of their personality. There need to be meat, potatoes and healthy side dishes all around, not just a fancy looking cherry on top.
Thank you for posting this.
I get sooooo tired of the people who whine, we don't know what he/she might do, who they would choose as advisors, etc. Sigh... do I have to do everything for you? Instead of only "knowing" what the main stream media tells you, why not reasearch for yourself?
In two minutes I googled "Obama Advisors" and came up with article after article listing economic advisors, with the school of thought leader Richard Thaler who has influenced all of them, for example.
How about the informational article on the informal debate between Science advisors for Obama and Clinton at the Amer. Assoc. for the Advancement of Science?
Then there's the Foreign Policy in Focus virtual think tank article on ... yup, the Foreign Policy Advisors for Obama. It has their names and their backgrounds as well as their personal focus on the topic.
There's a lot more, I'm just tired of typing and doing your work for you, Bill's Spirit.
What are you waiting for? Find out everything you wanted to know and then some... if your REALLY want to KNOW, that is. Some people are just looking for a respectable reason be against Obama. Maybe that's you, I don't know.
In every case of a bush appointee, they have reflected the policies or rather politics (these guys don't have policies, it's all politics all the time) of the bush/cheney partnership.
In a nut shell, they have all tried not to govern. They all believe in the power of the executive branch. The all believe in "deregulation". They have all tried to dismantle as much of the mechanisms that actually DO keep the government running as possible.
So in this case, we ARE in the huge mess we are in now, NOT just because of bush, but it has been a collective effort, of all these people, to give him as much power as he's asked for, no questions asked, and to do as little as possible to actually run the government departments that they have been assigned to run. Leaving us now with a government that barely functions.
The real question is how the next president will manage the government. That remains to be seen. I can only hope that we will not see more of the cronyism that has characterized this administration.
The dollar falls in value as the bill for the horrific policies of the past 8 years comes due.
None of the candidates now being bandied about as "major" seem to have a clue about the price for arrogant attempts at controlling empire. None of them seem to get that we need to withdraw all offshore pretense of maintaining empire by force.
The dollars we use to arm all the sides in world wars are dollars we owe interest on to varied off-shore power-houses. As the dollar loses value, the stuff we have come to rely on will no longer get delivered.
Perhaps we should look at the silver lining.
If we lose an average of 20 to 30 pounds, as Cubans did when oil got turned off, we will eventually have a lot less Type II diabetes.
Most of our legal medication addictions are filled by off-shore production. Our river fish will eventually receive river water with fewer legal uppers and downers.
In short, as we become poorer, our ability to poison ourselves will lessen.
Our political process requires candidates practiced at promising wild goodies that they have no prayer of being able to deliver. The voting records of these three persons are all over the place as they tried to buy favor from particular constituencies.
When they have gutted the lives of ordinary people to curry favor with wealthy cronies, they need more police and yes-people to insulate them from the people they have betrayed. It's so unpleasant to look at poor people when you have become used to personal privilege.
Local governments had to issue scrip to pay teachers during the Great Depression. I wonder if we'll get to that point this time.
Thanks for shining a light on the mess. Unless you are a friend-of-celebrity, I don't guess there is much that can be done to protect oneself. But at least we will likely be thinner.