"All the President's Men" and "Citizenfour"

[selenak]

Not so coincidentally, I just finished reading, for the first time though of course I'd watched the movie by Alan Pakula a dozen times, All the President's Men, the book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about the Watergate case and their reporting of it. It still holds up incredibly well. Despite knowing a lot about the Watergate affair in

Comments

[selenak]

Someone in recent weeks - may have been Frank Bruni - pointed out that neither Bush the Younger nor Obama ever experienced losing a campaign before becoming President, and that it showed with both, because going through the experience of losing and having to try again is a good way to find out whether you actually like the political process and working within it enough to go through such a humiliating experience, possibly repeatedly. And that both Bush and Obama gave/give the impression of finding out they don't like Washington politics and politicians while in the highest political office in the country, which is fatal.

To be fair, re: Obama's lack of experience as a Senator - wasn't Kennedy Senator for a relatively short time as well, or at least one who didn't spend that much time in the Senate before running as President? (Robert Caro in his multi volume Johnson biography argues this was a major reason why LBJ underestimated Kennedy, thought JFK was a too young political lightweight he'd have no trouble dominating the way Cheney would later dominate Bush, and was flabbergasted to find himself sidelined into unimportance during the Kennedy presidency instead.) I.e. it wasn't unprecedented. Either way, though, I agree that lack of practical longer Washington experience seems to have been a big problem for Obama. Though whether an older, more experienced Obama would have found the strength to curteil the mass surveillance at least somewhat instead of stepping it up, I have no idea.

[amenirdis]

The Kennedy comparison is very apt, I think. One of Kennedy's biggest problems, the one that led to less than stellar decisions like the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam, was his reliance on his "whiz kids" like Robert McNamara. (You may already know all this, and if so please pardon me.) He wanted to get rid of old school voices like George Marshall and replace them with young, energetic new thinkers who had brand new ideas. Like the idea that wars could be won with strategic bombing, which Marshall's generation had concluded was impossible. Bombing civilians only caused tremendous loss of life, and did not actually succeed in bringing anyone on either side to the table. Unless one was willing to use nuclear weapons, which we weren't, strategic bombing had already been proven worthless to "break the enemy's will" unless accompanied by a forceful ground invasion. And so we got into a situation based on a premise that old professionals already knew was flawed, but that was a new idea from bright young men. (Excellent book on the subject, Dereliction of Duty by H.R. McMaster.)

Which is very much what I think has happened in the Obama administration. Take my former coworker D. In early 2009 he was appointed White House liaison to NASA. Now, D knows about as much about space as I do about Formula One racing, which is to say almost nothing. He's an attorney with a background in civil rights lobbying. D is a nice guy. He's a smart guy. But he is absolutely, utterly unqualified to brief the President on space! He's a bright young man, yes. But he has no relevant experience or professional expertise. My understanding is that D's appointment is typical. Over and over, bright young "whiz kids" have been brought in to do things they don't know how to do. The Obamacare rollout, an utter disaster, was because of that. The people at the top had no idea how to oversee people doing this because they knew too little about it to understand what had to happen. I would guess that the same issues are in play with Afghanistan and other issues, especially the Justice Department.

There's a reason why people spend thirty or forty years learning these things -- because they're not easy. You can't just hand the top jobs to bright young things and expect them to walk away with the prize just because they're gifted and passionate. Governing isn't actually easy. And they have acted like it is.