A WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS -- The Tyranny of Politics in the Age of Executive Collapse in the Office of the President

A WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS – The Tyranny of Politics in the Age of Executive Collapse in the Office of the President

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 27, 2012

The quadrennial madness of presidential politics seems to get less tolerable as one ages, at least that has been my experience.  When a political ad flares up on the television screen, I hit the mute button. 

Years ago I did this on a commercial ad, and my father-in-law said, “You can’t do that!  How are those people expected to sell their products?”

I answered, “By putting that money to better use by making quality products.” 

Two billion spent by a superfund blitzkrieg of Democratic and Republican ads on television, as I rest my case. 

I watched the score of Republican primary debates, the three presidential debates and the one vice presidential debate, have read scores of articles on the candidates in newspapers, magazines and books.  I’ve even watched Charlie Rose Monday through Friday with his cavalcade of experts giving their two cents on the candidates and the coming election, only to conclude that they are as clueless as everyone else. 

We live in a corporate society in which content and context have led to a confluence of pundits and personalities who believe proximity to the malarkey grants them an advantage, when I think they are part of the problem.

If I was a little green man from another planet, given the debates, alone, I’m sure I would conclude that Barak Obama was the challenger and that Mitt Romney the president. 

Looking and being presidential has taken a real hit, and media, the corporate horn of corporate society, is busy creating empty expressions such as the American president “is the most powerful leader in the world” when facts on the ground suggest otherwise.

Corporate society has spawned corpocracy, which I call the American disease.  It has now settled on the sick American presidency.[i]  We have moved in corporate society to an increasing reliance on the machine at the expense of the man, to drone on forward with robotic zeal not realizing how hapless we have become, and now we see it so clearly as presidential politics are center stage in this quadrennial madness.

FROM THE IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY ….

Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States (1829-1837), was a man not a machine.  He won the popular vote in 1825, but lacked an electoral majority as did his opponent, John Quincy Adams.  The election was thrown into the House of Representatives and Adams was given the nod.  It helped that Adams was the son of one of the Founding Fathers and second president of the United States.  Likeability was even important then, and Adams won on that score but was not much of a president.  Wouldn’t it be something if this election finds its way into the House to determine the winner?

Adams attempted to expand the executive powers of the presidency, but didn’t have the temperament to be successful.  Jackson had the stones to not only expand the powers of the presidency but to establish “the imperial presidency,” intact to this day.

He took on the likes of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, and distracters such as Nicholas Biddle of the Second Bank of the United States.  His detractors looked to Europe for approval, he to the American people in the hinterland.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. writes in “The Age of Jackson” (1945) that the Tennessee country bumpkin established lopsided authority in the presidency not envisioned by the checks and balances in the Federalist Papers of Alexander Hamilton and John Jay.   

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The imperial presidency has been waning since WWII.  Power in the 1950s shifted to the Supreme Court as it stepped into the vacuum of governmental indecision mainly on civil rights. 

Brown versus the Board of Education in 1954 abolished segregation in schools but not in public places such as restaurants.  The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s had Supreme Court support, while Congress was forced to act after the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. 

President Lyndon Johnson took advantage of the moment pushing through Civil Rights Legislation.  This success was quickly compromised by his escalation of the war in Vietnam with the bogus Tonka Bay resolution.

After Johnson, the imperial presidency continued to fad culminating in the Watergate “break-in” and the “Nixon tapes,” the embarrassing defeat in Vietnam, and the near impeachment of President Richard Milhous Nixon, who resigned in disgrace. 

President Gerald Ford completed Nixon’s term, attempted to heal the nation, but lost in his bid for his own term when former governor of Georgia Jimmy Carter was elected. 

Carter couldn’t seem to get on track.  As president, he was a quantitative thinker who couldn’t seem to make qualitative decisions.  With double-digit unemployment and double-digit inflation, he addressed the nation on television as if “it” had a crisis in confidence, not he.  In an open collar shirt and cardigan sweater, apparently to suggest intimacy, which was foreign to his personality, it backfired.  The unfortunate thing is that quantitative thinkers are slaves to data, and never seem to have enough to make timely decisions.

With the Iran Hostage Crisis, the nation went into a tailspin matching its economic woes.  Carter surrendered power to his Republican opponent Ronald Wilson Reagan after one term.  Reagan, hardly an intellectual, was a man from the movies who had treated the governorship of California and now the presidency of the United States as if it was a motion picture in his head.  He pictured a global shield like “Star Wars” and then built the greatest war machine since WWII.  It threw the Soviet Union into bankruptcy and ultimate dissolution. 

Republican George Herbert Walker Bush followed promising “no new taxes,” but pursued the First Gulf War, which forced him to raise taxes, and gave way to his democratic opponent President William Jefferson Clinton after one term. 

Clinton was a dandy.  Quick on his feet, a party boy from a small rural state, Arkansas, where he had been governor, he treated the presidency as if it were a video game in which he always won.

The United States enjoyed an economic boom during the Clinton years, which everyone thought would continue forever.  He managed to balance the budget and create a surplus.  Flying high and mighty, his personal and surreal dandyism caught up with him in a sexual tryst with a White House page, was then impeached, but unsuccessfully.  He left the presidency in moral tatters, only to be succeeded by a reformed party boy as president.

President George Walker Bush expected to have an Eisenhower style presidency, only to be hit with September 11, 2001 when New York City’s Twin Towers were destroyed by al qaeda terrorist attack with the flying of two American commercial jets into the towers.

Nearly 3,000 died.  Shock was followed by the awe of a preemptive invasion into Iraq on the bogus charge that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.  The Iraq war led to the war in Afghanistan, which is now ten-years-long and still unresolved. 

At the end of the Bush administration, an economic crisis surfaced, which resembled the Great Depression of 1929.  President Barak Obama, the first African American to be president, stepped into this maelstrom, but after four years has been unable to end the crisis. 

An ambivalent Supreme Court and dysfunctional Congress haven’t helped as Bob Woodward shows in “The Price of Politics” (2012).

TO CORPORATE SOCIETY CORRUPTED TO CORPOCRACY

Over my long life, I have watched the United States go from a democratic republic to a corporate society.  Born during the Great Depression, growing up during WWII, coming of age going to college and doing my military service then joining the workforce, moving from the trenches to the boardroom, working on four continents, you could say I have been an active corporate participant.

We talk today about the exploitation of workers in Third World not realizing the United States has been so engaged since WWII across the globe.

As a consultant and educator, I’ve conducted seminars across the United States for the Professional Institute of the American Management Association with participants from state and federal government as well as lobbyists associated with these workers.

If congressmen and women covered their suits and dresses with the decals of their favorite lobbyists in the manner that NASCAR drivers cover their, we would have a better representation of who runs the country.

THE PRICE OF POLITICS

Bob Woodward, who with Carl Bernstein gave us “All the President’s Men,” which exposed the Watergate cover-up, tells a story through interviews and observations in “The Price of Politics” (2012) that reads like a horror tale.  It is the high-stakes personal and political struggle between the President and the Speaker of the House and their appendages. 

The House is now dominated by Republicans many of whom are of the “Tea Party” persuasion, while the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd influences many Democrats in the House cowered by the “One percent” who allegedly own everything and don’t pay their fair share in taxes.

The book covers the summer of 2011 when the two sides attempted to come to a grand bargain by cutting entitlements and increasing revenue.  It totally failed, as these players on stage are manipulated the corporate string pullers off stage of corporate CEOs and lobbyists.  Nothing is as it seems.

The President of the United States appears pathetically weak and indecisive matched only by the incompetence of the Speaker of the House.  There is no leadership on display only sound bytes and jargon.  It is cruelly funny and even entertaining if it were not for the fact this is hardly the way to run a country. 

THE TYRANNY OF POLITICS OVER GOVERNANCE

I share some of my highlighted passages from Bob Woodward's "The Price of Politics" (2012) to give the reader a sense of this:

It (budget) is just math.  Don’t get yourself crazy.  Economics is not politics.

Under Keynesian economic theory, cutting government spending hurt economic growth.

The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president. (This was said later) I don’t want the president to fail.  I want him to change.

The joke among reporters on Capitol Hill was that the most dangerous place in Washington was between (Senator) Chuck Schumer and a television camera.

Allocating goodies in negotiations is a little easier than allocating pain.

Excessive pragmatism meant that Obama’s views and actions were not easily pigeonholed (leaving) the left and right perpetually unsatisfied.

President Obama doesn’t have the joy of the game.  Clinton the game and all the players (Congressmen and women, lobbyists).  Obama really didn’t like any of these guys.

Be a specialist, not a generalist.  Focus on one set of issues.  Get on a committee that you care about, and then learn more about the topic than anybody else (How to get ahead in Congress).

Obama in his gut is a fiscal conservative.  There is a Blue Dog streak in him.

This wasn’t an olive branch.  This was not Bill Clinton, not triangulation, not Simpson-Bowles.  This was game on demagoguery (Congressman Ryan’s take on Obama’s plan).

Why isn’t Obama doing what presidents are supposed to do? (Congressman Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee).

A growing feeling of incredulity came over Van Hollen (Republican).  The administration didn’t seem to have a strategy.  It was unbelievable.  There didn’t seem to be any core principle.

Republicans want Democrats to sell their sisters, to give up everything we (V.P. Biden) hold dear without making any sacrifices themselves.

Jargon on both sides prevailed at the expense of thinking and talking clearly.

Revenue would not need a trigger.

Polarization had increased among the Democrats.

The president and I whupped ‘em pretty good (Speaker Boehner on Obama and him teamed up against V.P. Biden and Ohio Governor Kasich)

Obama seemed energized.

He’s a golf playing, cigarette smoking, country club Republican, who’s there to make a deal (Obama or Boehner).

Tea Partiers were dangerously irresponsible (Obama on his opposition).

You see how crazy these people (Tea Partiers) are (Obama).  Boehner is not one of the crazies.

That’s theology.  That’s your theology.  Just tell us which of these items you hate the least?  Corporate jets? (Democrats on Republicans)

We’re not going to keep going down this road.  We’re not going to keep talking about them until you talk about revenue (Republicans on Democrats)

It’s a scam.  The states were gaming the system, taxing doctors and hospitals so they could get federal reimbursements and then returning the money to the providers.

We may as well call it quits.

Cantor (House Republican) was stunned.  He had no idea that the speaker and the president were planning to hold separate talks (behind their backs).

He (Boehner) did offer a path to comprehensive tax reform.  I (Boehner) want entitlement reform.

I’m (president) for tax reform, but I’m not going to have a situation in which we have a vague promise of tax reform later – because tax reform would take a year, year and a half to actually get done, rewriting the tax code – but all the entitlement cuts are locked in on the front end.

The president asked if he felt they were on the road to a deal.  Let me preface (my remarks) by saying generally that I like John Boehner.  I genuinely think John wanted to get a deal done.  I don’t think he is in his bones an ideological person.  I think he’s a pretty practical old school country club Republican (in other words, out to lunch).  I like him, I mean, by that time I’d quit smoking, but I was making sure he had an ashtray.

Washington was dysfunctional.

Boehner’s probably a little over his skis here (Democrat on the speaker’s competence)

Republicans were demanding the tax code be made more regressive.

(Republican) Cantor thought, gee whiz it’s (White House plan to scuttle talks) going to blow up. The Democrats are going to blow up the Biden discussions and finger me.

The entitlement trajectory here is going to bankrupt the country.  Biden hung up the phone.  His search party had been a failure.

Ridiculing Republican sacred cows, he (president) said, the tax cuts I’m proposing we get rid of are tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires oil companies and hedge fund managers and corporate jet owners

With closely cropped hair, at 6-foot-2, Loper (Boehner’s policy director) was the ultimate Republican efficiency man.

I looked at myself (speaker), looked at the president, and I just started chuckling to myself. Because all you need to know about the differences between the president and myself is that I’m sitting there smoking a cigarette, drinking Merlot, and I look across the table and here is the president of the United States drinking iced tea and chomping on Nicorette. 

There’s discretionary (general and Defense), there’s mandatory (food stamps), and there’s entitlements (Medicare and Medicaid).

We’re not dealing just with talking points about corporate jets or other loopholes (Boehner speaking to the president).

Loper (Boehner’s man) found Lew (president’s man) obnoxious. Jackson (Boehner’s man) found Lew’s tone disrespectful and dismissive.

You realize that all the Democrats think we’ve got you by the balls and you think we’re going to give it up in one fell swoop?

I call that opportunity savings, as nobody knows what the tax rates are going to be.

Boehner’s staff worried that the president thought if he got Boehner in a room with the rest of the leaders and announced a deal, Boehner would fold in front of everybody.

Boehner wondered if Obama was using the meeting as a means of managing Reid (Senate Majority Leader) and Pelosi (House Minority Leader) who were increasingly upset about being cut out of the negotiations.

Boehner had no confidence the negotiations with the president would produce a deal and had to cover his own back by keeping McConnell (Senate Minority Leader), Cantor, McCarthy and Hensaling (Boehner’s team) busy doing something because they were really nervous about what the hell he was up to. And he realized that was an understatement. 

Don’t insult us, Pelosi retorted. You guys don’t know how to count (votes in the House).

There was often theater in these meetings.

The president and Boehner were each red-lining (drawing a mark in the sand) of each other’s proposals.

Golf, a game of recovery, was a good metaphor for what they were doing.  A bad or unlucky shot wasn’t fatal. Follow it up with a good second or third shot, and you could still find yourself on the green with a chance at par, or even better.  Negotiations were similar.

The predominate school of thought in the conservative movement held that you shouldn’t ever negotiate with Obama.

He (the president) calls me (Boehner) and says, you know what?  I’m going to have to walk away from this right now.  And to his credit, he said, I’m not closing the door to ever doing anything on this.

Boehner had realized that doing a deal with Obama would put his speakership in jeopardy.

The White House will not pursue a bigger debt reduction agreement without tax hikes (the core of why the road to nowhere became the only road either side could see).

Was it possible that The Wall Street Journal had such influence? …. What was clear was that Boehner had just got blown up.  If someone doesn’t come back to the table, they don’t want a yes in any form.

Hundreds of years of the history of negotiations suggested, strongly, that this is not the way you do it.

The speaker had to shift the debate to the more abstract issue of tax reform.

Obama was being subjected, dramatically, to the long, tortuous ways of budget negotiations and Washington deal making …. Obama was admitting that he was constrained.

Obama said he would get support for the deal from the business community, the media and the opinion pages.  But that was not enough.  Even at great political cost, he was going to have to be responsible, be the adult.

Prominent members of the House Republicans who are not only prepared to see default (stalemate), but in some cases are welcoming the prospects of default.

Biden (VP) jumped in.  We’re not going to become a banana republic.  So what is it going to be?  Or are we going to live or die on the election?

Votes were a touchy subject for the speaker and everyone knew it.

The president was still pushing for decoupling (entitlement reduction from increased taxes).  Republicans couldn’t believe it.  Even the White House staffers realized that the president still saw it as his sword.

The vice president did say consistently that nothing was agreed to till everything was agreed to.

Boehner had already concluded that the whole thing was a pointless dog and pony shows.  Was the president really naïve enough to think that he could get all these members in a room and come to an agreement on a deal?  That never happened.

You do not be disrespectful of the office of the president, he (Republican Barry Jackson) told the staff in Boehner’s office.  You just don’t.  It’s the worst job in the world.  They don’t need people kicking them in the shins for the heck of it.  But in the speaker’s office, respect for the office didn’t extend to the man who occupied it.  Jackson believed that Obama lacked courage, was a poor negotiator, and was completely out of his element in dealing with Congress.

Boehner said.  The president talks a good game, but when it comes time to actually putting these issues on the table, making decisions, he can’t quite pull the trigger.

WHAT DOES THIS ALL SEEM TO MEAN?

Journalist Woodward puts it succinctly when he says that historians won’t write about the Boehner (Speaker of the House) administration, nor will they write about the Reid (Majority Leader in the Senate) administration, but they will write about the Obama administration. 

He goes on to say that Obama cannot blame the Bush administration or the collapse of the Euro Zone, or the turmoil in the Middle East, or the rapacious nature of China’s economic policy or currency manipulation for his woes.  He has to lead!

According to the journalist, Obama is not comfortable in that role, or psychologically motivated to fulfill its demands.  He would prefer the comfort of bosom of his family.

The principals highlighted here talk largely in code and metaphor.  They also swear a lot (except for the president) and hardly ever display a touch of eloquence (again with the exception of the president).  

Woodward shows in the president to be a man still on a steep learning curve, a man out of his depth, and a man that would undoubtedly be happier doing something else, possibly writing the great American novel. 

I have purposely left out many passages where people of both parties in Congress show disrespect for the office of the president as well as its current occupant.

In the age of corporate society, civility has retreated to bluster.  President Obama is, on the other hand, inclined to civility but is not comfortable with the pull of corpocracy. 

What comes through is that the president is a very decent man, indeed, a very good man, but a man who lacks the anger or angst that motivated an Andrew Jackson to rain on the parade of his enemies, which were many, and not make a backward glance.  Jackson knew fear keeps people in check and nice guys don’t make good presidents, especially of the imperial kind. 

That said presidential historians are likely to compare President Obama to the “great liberator,” Abraham Lincoln.  Obama has the same fine mind and the same sorrowful gravitas, a man more comfortable with his own counsel than any other, a man who feels the best way to keep his adversaries at bay is to keep them close at hand. 

Lincoln was president just as corporate society was taken hold.  The Civil War hastened the Industrial Revolution.  Now, CEOs and their army of lobbyists run an invisible government that most of us don’t see but all of us experience.  I wonder how Andrew Jackson would have dealt with this.

Gridlock in Congress is a product of corpocracy.  It is the reason why whomever wins the election is bound to disappoint because the office of the president is never an independent contractor, not even for the interests of the American people.  Corpocracy rules and it never rules well.

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[i] Corpocracy is a virus common to the corporate society.  It has metastasized through the American system first in business after WWII, and now in all quadrants of the private and public sector impairing the ability to function and/or govern.

It has spread also to Europe and Asia (India, China, Japan and South Korea), and now Latin American, notably Brazil.  Paradoxically, through the draconian practices of the Putin administration, it would appear to have stalled in Russia.

Common to this virus is:

(1)     Management is insensitive to employees other than rhetorically,

(2)     Internal politics dominate and negatively impact productivity,

(3)     Secrecy and paranoia are a measure of what is communicated,

(4)     The principal activity is nonproductive electronic dalliance,

(5)     Endless meetings, boards, committees and task groups are a blind to avoid tackling problems,

(6)     Trapped in business as usual practices as potential markets disappear,

(7)     Short term planning creates an inability to think beyond the next quarter,

(8)     Individual initiative is the mantra, but those who get promoted follow the party line,

(9)     Bottom up partnerships is the talk but the top down power is the walk, and

(10)  Transparency is advocated but covert hostility rules the game.