Snippets.
Bush and Cheney were CEOs by background. They did not put a lot of lawyers in policymaking roles around them. The lawyers they did pick, especially in their first term, tended to have these pretty idiosyncratic views of executive power; and, as a result, they’re able to put in these wide-ranging changes, to have the the government run like a business. Overnight, it’s like, “we’re going to have military commissions”; no further ado; no second-guessing.
Obama and his administration are quite the opposite. Obama and Joe Biden, of course, are both lawyers and showed a clear tendency to put lawyers into policymaking roles around them. And this has consequences, having government-by-lawyer and not government-by-CEO. Lawyers are very incremental; lawyers have to really engage with the other side, because they have to prepare for everybody’s argument; they have to value process. That means they are going to be cautious about changing the status quo. They’re going to be cautious about dislodging what Bush has equipped to them.…
I definitely think it’s an interesting factor that people who are out in the world don’t fully understand.
I think there’s a very [mistaken] understanding of how the government works — which is that the president just does these things. Obama just does it. Once you work [in D.C.] for a while, you understand that that’s widely oversimplified. Most of the time, the president never knows about what’s going on. It could appear [so] at the most superficial level, but it’s really the 150 or so senior and mid-level executive branch officials that he’s appointed who are making these decisions and grappling with these dilemmas.
What you’re adding to that when you bring up [the deep state] is that, underneath, there’s this permanent state of security officials who have their own sort of world and expertise and turf and bureaucratic interests. All these forces encounter each other in ways that don’t reduce to “Bush did this” and “Obama did that.”Salon
“A Turning Point for Obama”: How the President Learned to Love the National Security State Elias Esquith interviews Charlie Savage, author of Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post-9/11 Presidency
1 comment:
Not buying it.
To start with, there are all those rumors that young Obama was connected to the CIA, and that his parents may have been connected to the CIA as well. You can't just dismiss the rumors as crazy conspiracy theory because nothing about Obama's life story passes the smell test, and it's an undisputed fact that Obama did a stint for a company (BIC) that was known to be a front for the CIA.
As for Obama's "lawyerly mindset", did the man ever actually practice law? Did he ever try a case in court? Did he ever publish anything in legal journals? Yet somehow he ended up teaching constitutional law at a prestigious university, a position that would normally be held by a legal ace. It doesn't pass the smell test!
It's also a fact that Obama was involved in shady real estate deals in Chicago.
There's no fact-based reason to believe that Obama entered office with an idealistic "lawyerly mindset" only to sell out after the underwear bomber incident, because Obama never stood for anything to begin with. It's far easier to believe that Obama was/is a corrupt CIA stooge, a flim-flam man.
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