On Tue, 11 Jun 2024 08:53:28 -0600, Skeeter
<skeeterweed@photonmail.com> wrote:

>In article <v489cf$ncdq$1@dont-email.me>, X@Y.com says...
>>
>> 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
>> billions every year preparing for wars all over the globe and even in outer
>> space that may never take place. The art of presidential leadership is
>> anticipating major problems and coming up with plans to mitigate them.
>>
>> In addition to learning from past administrations, presidents need the
>> ability to anticipate reactions to their actions. The Trump administration
>> has been especially inept on this dimension from the beginning. The first
>> big executive order he issued, largely banning Muslims from coming to
>> America, was so ill-conceived that chaos broke out in airports around the
>> world as people with green cards to work in America and Muslims who had
>> assisted U.S. military forces in Iraq were initially turned away. Airport
>> chaos seems to be a specialty of the Trump administration. It reappeared
>> this past weekend, as Americans came home from Europe in huge numbers
>> following Trump?s announcement to close off travelers from Europe and
>> screen returning Americans. When travelers arrived, they found vastly
>> inadequate staffing at airports and were thus forced into the very
>> situation medical authorities were warning against: large crowds being
>> hoarded into small spaces with constant, close contact.
>>
>> Trump has also failed to fill top government positions and turnover is far
>> higher than in any other recent administration, as Katherine Tenpas has
>> tracked on these pages. The absence of expertise in top government jobs is
>> especially dangerous during emergencies. Also, when positions are filled
>> they have not necessarily gone to the strongest candidates. Take for
>> instance leadership at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the
>> nation?s top agency for infectious diseases. Dr. Robert Redfield?s
>> appointment was opposed by the Center for Science in the Public Interest
>> which warned the administration that Redfield lacked a public health
>> background and that he was under investigation for scientific misconduct.
>>
>> Modern presidents inherit an enormous enterprise called the federal
>> government that employs about the same number of people as the 6 largest
>> U.S. companies and has a combined annual revenue that is larger than the
>> combined revenues of the top 16 companies in the Fortune 500.[2] No wonder
>> modern presidents have had trouble managing this enterprise?in an
>> organization this big, something is always going right and something is
>> always going wrong. A president who understands what?s going right can call
>> on deep wells of expertise to protect himself from the failures that will
>> inevitably be attributed to him. And on the flip side, a president who is
>> aware of what?s going wrong can take corrective actions and try to stave
>> off the kinds of bureaucratic meltdowns that will also be attributed to
>> him.
>>
>> As Oval Office leadership fails while the pandemic spreads, governors,
>> mayors, university presidents, religious leaders, business executives, and
>> health providers are stepping into the leadership vacuum that has been the
>> Trump presidency. They have sent workers home to telework, announced their
>> own social distancing rules, and developed their steps to limit the spread
>> of the pandemic. This tragedy teaches us many things about preparedness and
>> public health, but it also warns us about the dangers of presidents who are
>> manifestly unprepared to govern.
>>
>> [1] These were named after Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) and
>> Congressman William Nichols (D-Ala.) and established a new era of joint
>> activity and preparation among the branches of the United States military.
>>
>> [2] Elaine C. Kamarck, Why Presidents Fail and How they Can Succeed Again,
>> Brookings Institution Press, 2016, page 123.
>>
>>
>> https://www.brookings.edu/articles/trumps-failed-presidency/
>
>What failures?

Isn't it interesting that the article was pages long but didn't answer
that simple question?