When I read the headline of this article on RealClear Politics , I thought the authors were making a familiar conservative case—that Barack Obama’s learning curve in the Oval Office is impossibly steep, that he was (and remains) underqualified for the job. I think I know the answer to the question “Is the Presidency too big a job for Obama?”
But no, that’s not their point. Rather, they insist that the demands of the presidency are too big for anyone to handle. It’s not Barack Obama, it’s the job, which seems to have grown into a caricature of The West Wing , itself an airbrushed portrayal of an omnicompetent and hyperactive Clinton Administration (with a virtuous and Catholic president).
The authors seem to think that there’s something inexorable about the growth, as if, for example, it’s impossible to conceive of a president not wanting to exercise substantial control over our healthcare system.
All they can offer is nostalgia for simpler days, some deprecatory remarks about our 24-hour news cycle, and a forlorn endorsement of shorter memos for the President (the demand for which was, as I recall, widely regarded by critics as a symptom of intellectual vacuity in the Reagan Adminstration).
It never occurs to the authors to ask whether all the things the White House does are properly jobs for federal, as opposed to state, government, or whether these responsibilities even belong to government at all. I’m not necessarily doctrinaire about these matters, but surely there’s room for discussion here.
It strikes me that there’s also room for discussion about whether the President need be involved in everything with which he has chosen to distract himself, from the contretemps about Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod to Henry Louis Gates’s altercation with the Cambridge police. This kind of attention to things that are properly beneath the dignity fo the presidency is reminiscent of nothing so much as a previous occupant of the Oval Office—the much (and rightly) maligned Jimmy Carter.
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