XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, mn.politics, alt.politics.republicans   
   XPost: talk.politics.guns, sac.politics   
   From: X@Y.com   
      
   Trump’s failed presidency   
      
   Trump’s presidency is failing rapidly. Like others before him, modern   
   American presidents fail when they cannot master or comprehend the   
   government that they inherit. This is a hard concept to grasp in an age   
   when non-stop media coverage leads us to focus on the president’s   
   communication skills and when presidents themselves value spin more than   
   expertise. But in the end presidential failure is about reality, not   
   words—no matter how lofty and inspiring or how crude and insulting.   
      
   Contemporary presidents are especially prone to mistaking spin for   
   reality for several reasons. First of all, they are nominated not by   
   other elected officials who have some sense of what it takes to govern,   
   but by activists and party electorates who value inspiration and   
   entertainment. Second, the importance of mass communication leads   
   presidents to believe that the words and activities that got them into   
   office can work once they are in office: more rallies, more speeches,   
   more tweets, and more television advertising.   
      
   Nothing can be further from the truth.   
      
   Presidential scholars have been aware of the disjuncture between   
   campaigning and governing for some time now. More than a decade ago, Sam   
   Kernell wrote a book called Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential   
   Leadership (CQ Press, 2007), in which he showed that beginning with   
   President Kennedy, modern presidents spent a great deal more time on   
   minor presidential addresses and on domestic and international travel   
   than their predecessors. All this communication, he argued, came at the   
   expense of actual governing. Later on another presidential scholar,   
   George C. Edwards III, writing in Overreach, Leadership in the Obama   
   Presidency (Princeton University Press, 2012) argued that Obama thought   
   he could go directly to the public to get support for his programs, an   
   approach that placed communication over negotiation and that resulted in   
   a stunning midterm loss for his party.   
      
   Reality still matters, and spin has its limits—even in an era of social   
   media.   
      
   As long as things are going okay for most people, Americans tolerate a   
   president’s verbal gymnastics. But when people are in trouble, even the   
   most ardent government haters ask that famous question: “Where’s the   
   government?” And for most Americans, the president is the government.   
   Following the botched federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the   
   collateral damage to the presidency of George W. Bush was extensive. His   
   popularity never recovered and his second-term agenda, including bold   
   changes to Social Security, was destroyed. Nearly a decade later when   
   President Obama rolled out his signature achievement, the Affordable Care   
   Act, the hugely embarrassing crashing of the computer systems meant to   
   implement the act increased Republican opposition to it and undermined   
   public confidence in the government’s ability to implement important   
   executive actions.   
      
   Trump’s failures during the coronavirus pandemic run the gamut from the   
   rhetorical to the organizational. Every time the president speaks he   
   seems to add to the fear and chaos surrounding the situation: telling   
   Americans it was not serious by asserting his “hunches” about data,   
   assuring people that everyone would be tested even when there were very   
   few tests available, telling people that we are very close to a vaccine   
   when it is anywhere from 12 to 18 months away, mistakenly asserting that   
   goods as well as people from Europe would be forbidden from entering the   
   United States, and announcing that Google had a website for testing while   
   the initiative was merely an unimplemented idea, were just a few of his   
   televised gaffes. After every presidential statement, “clarifications”   
   were needed. Trump has the unique distinction of giving a national   
   address meant to calm the country that had the effect of taking the stock   
   market down over 1,000 points.   
      
   We have come to expect verbal imprecision and outright lies from this   
   president, but that is more easily corrected on less momentous   
   developments. When there is fundamental incompetence on matters of   
   tremendous importance, voters punish poor results. And this is where   
   Trump’s actions on the coronavirus have gone far off target. One of the   
   most glaring deficiencies of his administration has been the failure to   
   have enough tests available to identify those infected and to screen   
   others for possible exposure. South Korea, a country a fraction of the   
   size of the United States, is testing thousands more people a day than   
   the United States. The failure to produce tests quickly will go down as   
   one of the biggest failures in the overall handling of this disease   
   because it prevented authorities from understanding the scope of the   
   pandemic and therefore made it difficult for them to undertake   
   appropriate steps to mitigate its spread. Other countries had tests and   
   now state governments are rapidly rolling out their own tests after the   
   CDC belatedly removed regulatory barriers. Even the nation’s chief   
   infectious disease doctor, Anthony Fauci, has admitted that testing is a   
   major failure—a statement that is most certainly not one of the   
   president’s talking points.   
      
   In this and other areas, Trump has failed to learn from the failures of   
   his predecessors. When President Ronald Reagan signed into law the   
   fundamental restructuring of the military known as the Goldwater-Nichols   
   reforms,[1] he did this knowing that he did not want a military fiasco on   
   his watch like the failed Iranian rescue mission that did in Jimmy   
   Carter’s presidency. And following the total breakdown in the Federal   
   Emergency Management Agency’s handling of Hurricane Katrina, President   
   Barack Obama made sure his FEMA director was an experienced state   
   emergency management director. He knew that poor performance during   
   natural disasters would doom his presidency.   
      
   During the Obama Administration, the White House dealt with a precursor   
   of the coronavirus: the Ebola virus. While the scrambling eventually   
   worked out thanks to decisive executive office leadership, it illustrated   
   that pandemics were a fundamental national security threat. They created   
   the Global Health Security Team in the National Security Council to   
   prepare. In May of 2018, Trump disbanded the team allegedly because he   
   never thought pandemics would happen and because “I’m a business person.   
   I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them.”   
   Trump’s hurried justification for abandoning a unit (that was well short   
   of thousands) showed Trump’s limited understanding of why government is   
   different from business—it is in the business of preparing for low-   
   probability events. For instance, the United States military spends   
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)