Given Woodward’s rep, the pre-release hype, and anticipation of some good dirt on Obama …. I downloaded the Kindle version as soon as it became available.
I thought it was tedious with relatively little new news … reminded me of most movies: all the good parts are in the 2-minute trailer … rest of the movie is filler.
The broad theme – wisely reported — is that Obama is clueless re: how big organizations run, what a CEO does, how a CEO should act, and generally, how to implement ideas.
That shouldn’t surprise anybody since Obama hadn’t run anything before becoming President, hadn’t been exposed to any effective big organization leaders and openly despises CEOS (except the late great Steve Jobs and Warren “Please Tax Me More” Buffett).
Verizon CEO Seidenberg “worried that Obama did not appreciate the importance of business. Sure, he understood it intellectually, but did he really admire the guts and instincts that made corporations succeed, hire workers, and grow America?”
Here’s what caught my eye …
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Obama is broadly disrespected by Congressional leaders (both House and Senate, both parities) … and his own staff.
- Boehner ignored phone calls from Obama … and hated “ …going down to the White House to listen to what amounted to presidential lectures.”
- Pelosi hit the mute button and kept working when Obama would call and pontificate
- Reid allowed a staffer to dress down the President for not having a plan … and confidentially encouraged GOPers
- Staffers (e.g. Summers, Orzag) observed “no adult in charge” … “It was increasingly clear that no one was running Washington. That was trouble for everyone, but especially for Obama.”
- Van Hollen: “The administration didn’t seem to have a strategy. It was unbelievable. There didn’t seem to be any core principles.”
Ken’s Take: I was a bit surprised that even Dems think he’s a tool … they buy in to his ideology, hoped his charisma would make him a good front man – but have been disappointed, and are left trying to cover for his inadequacies.
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Woodward presents a comparatively favorable picture of Dems: Biden, Reid, Pelosi, Van Hollen
- Biden is presented as a savvy legislative pro who builds relationships and tries to work towards solutions … not the bungler he plays in public … McConnell: “ … a man I’ve come to respect as a straight-shooting negotiator.”
- Reid and Pelosi come across as more thoughtful than their public personas … effective leaders of their caucuses … cagey working the back channels with GOP leaders … generally trusted by GOP despite policy disagreements.
- Van Hollen gets points for being a details man re: policy who’s willing to pitch and defend his points
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Obama fails at basic CEO stuff … much like a freshly-minted MBA whose first job is running GE … “When you don’t know what you don’t know, it gets you in big trouble.”
- Disrespects people and their ideas and then expects them to support his ideas … “The polls are pretty good for me right now.”, “Do you think Ronald Reagan sat here like this?”, “I won, you lost”, “This isn’t negotiable” … surprised when folks don’t rally for him when he’s in a bind … “when you need friends, it’s too late to make them.”
- Unable to separate the important from the incidental … “All we were going to do was nick everybody and irritate everybody and not accomplish anything.”
- “There was no agility in the White House, no ability to get organized and move fast on critical issues”
- Absolutely no comprehension of the difficulty of syndicating and implementing decisions … thinks agreements in meeting are the end, not the beginning of the process.
- “Obama had no chief operating officer, no COO to implement his decisions.” … (you know, a Dick Cheney or Hillary Clinton)
- Poor staffing choices … goes for comfort level over effectiveness … only yes-men need apply … notice how the entire economic team has turned over?
- No structure or processes … “Any good manager, any good leader, has a team around him and a structure around him for making things work and making things happen. I never got the slightest clue that there was a structure there.” … ”The place [White House] is dysfunctional.”
- No contingency planning … no anticipation of 2nd order effects … no Plan Bs
- Poor negotiation skills … Coburn: “it showed how inexperienced a negotiator Obama was.”
- No sell-in of ideas … just brute force … expects the power of his idea to carry the the day … Cantor: ”… not on the same page, not in the same book, or even the same library.”
- Poor communications …“Most extraordinary was the repeated use of the telephone for critical exchanges. Especially baffling was President Obama’s decision to make his critical request for $ 400 billion more in revenue in a spur-of-the-moment phone call. The result was a monumental communications lapse between the key parties”
- Poor listening skills … “Obama talked, then seemed to listen — but … was really just waiting to talk again, to make his points, to win the argument.”
- “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.”
- “How badly the White House had played what should have been a winning hand.”
- “It was a failure of presidential leadership. He was not Reagan. He was not Clinton.”
- “Obama really doesn’t have the joy of the game.”
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Obama was (and is) is totally obsessed with 2 things …
- Getting re-elected … e.g. Pushing big decisions past the 2012 election
- Raising taxes on the top 2% … seems to be his driving mission in life
Ken’s Take: Does Obama really think the world will change much if and when he gets his white whale?
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A few Congressional and business leaders mused: “We were here before him and we’ll be here after him” …
- Implication #1: We’ll have to live with this stuff when he’s gone … “Whatever the Congress decided could be undone by a future Congress anyhow.”
- Implication #2: All we have to do is drag our feet and outlast him … “Guys like me can hunker down and wait you out.”
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Best Teaching Point
Barney Frank’s advice to Paul Ryan:
Ryan sat down at one point with Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat known for his biting wit and powerful intellect.
Though they were ideological opposites, Frank gave him what Ryan considered the best advice he got about how to be an effective congressman.
Be a specialist, Frank told him, not a generalist.
Focus on one set of issues.
Get on the committee that you care about, and then learn more about the topic than anybody else.
Talk to all the experts you can find … and read everything you can.
Know these things inside and out.
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Some factoids
- Internal Revenue Service data shows that the current tax system produces about 85 to 86 percent of what it’s supposed to … i.e. 15% non-compliance
- 51 percent of all federal employees, including uniformed military, were at the Department of Defense.
- Pell college grants, a Democratic and Obama favorite aimed at assisting college students, because the annual cost was now more than $ 20 billion.
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Some random snippets
- Golf, a game of recovery. 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. .
- Politics meant sitting across the table from people you might not like or who were annoying. Keeping cool was essential.
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Final note: Woodward’s book would have been a big deal last week … Woodward caught a bad break since the Libya assassination and mid-East uprisings pushed his book out of the news coverage … .
The Homa Files 