XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh   
   From: jtem01@gmail.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)