The Czars - A Thought from the Leadership Czar

Ha, I really have made nothing of this until now, but I think it is time for the Obama admministration to appoint an official leadership Czar, and since I am am already The leadership Czar, it seems to me that I am the one and only candidate qualified to hold that title.

But then, I started to think about the idea and realized that I would probably be the only one so appointed who actually was qualified to hold the title. Obama, like his last two predecessors, seems convinced that the best way to execute their policies is to have Czars appointed by them, who are accountable to nobody but the President. The beauty of the Czar strategy is that no Czar is approved (through advice and consent) by the Senate as the Cabinet officers are. Indeed, these czars work out of the ever expanding White House staff, and have no responsibility to either manage or be accountable to anybody but the President. The poor Cabinet Officers are the "political front men" for the President, but are increasingly without "Policy portfolio." This is not just an Obama illness, it has been developing for some time. The "thinking" is being done by people who have nothing else to do, but think, and have absolute open access to the Oval office. On the other hand, the Cabinet officers have the spralling beurocracies to manage, and all the public "fly the flag" responsibilities, with essentially no time to think. Further, they are weighed down by the government employees who are "lifers" and have nothing more to do but wait until the administration changes so they can start all over again, doing nothing.

I am actually sympathetic to the Presdidential tendency to have these White House staff people available so that they can actually have some control over policy formulation, but the tragedy is, it is an other example of how the huge government just gets bigger, and more complex. The tragedy is further compounded by the fact that these inner circle people have no responsibility to defend their policy positions against alternative opinion, because the White House staff is picked inevitably to mirror the political bias of the Commander in Chief. Hence, the Congress, the second leg of the governmental balancing act, gets no input into the process and thinking. Even the members of the President's party are unable to provide input into the policy process. That is tragic, because it means the the White House is inevitably even more isolated from the core values and positions of the broad constituents they are expected to serve.

Now that I have thought about this, I am not likely to be appointed the Leadership Czar for the White House, but you all know that I am the Leadership Czar, and that it would be a great deal of fun to see how the insular Obama White House would deal with somebody who actually respectedthe word leadership, as opposed to the transformational and essentially revolutionary concepts of Rules for Radicals.

Comments

[Jay Stone]

Gerry, I have a unique perspective on this, since I worked as a Special Assistant to President Reagan for Legislative Affairs and I also served as the Chief of Staff to the Deputy Secretary of Energy during the Bush I years.
You are absolutely correct as to how the system works. When I was at the WH, we were always complaining about Cabinet Secretaries "going off the reservation" and not carrying out what POTUS wanted to do. This caused lots of friction and strong Cabinet Secretaries could really manipulate the system. I still remember how HHS Secretary Bowen (led by his liberal Chief of Staff) pushed Catastrophic Health Insurance, even though we hadn't given him the okay to make a deal with the Congress. Rosty passed it and as a result got beat in the next election when the seniors rioted in his district.

On the other hand, when I was at DOE, the Cabinet officers couldn't really make big decisions unless Dick Darman at OMB blessed them. That drove some of them crazy. Others were happy they didn't have to make any decisions and live with them. Some were political hacks who couldn't manage thir way to the bathroom. We always felt that the WH didn't have any clue as to how the government really worked because the Economic Policy or Domestic Policy Councils in the WH were made up of eggheads and abstract thinkers who could not appreciate the real world of DOE.

I expect this new system will turn into a quagmire one of these days, because not only do you have the WH and Cabinet Secretaries butting heads, but the Democratic Committee Chairmen think they are the king bees and they tell the WH and the Cabinet what to do. This has already made for some blood on the floor (witness the current CIA debacle with Panetta and Pelosi and now Reyes). More will follow, I am sure, if the media will report it. Even if they don't the conflicts will still rage and government will suffer. What happens is that the WH or the Secretary will try making their best deal with Congress without the other one knowing what they are doing. This makes for great inside baseball fireworks.