I have a lot of respect for David Rothkopf but I have a hard to time taking his critique of the president seriously because he really doesn’t back up his argument with much of anything. He says that President Obama is a “lousy manager.” He says that his management grade is a ‘C’ and that it is only that high because his predecessor was so awful.
His main critique is a familiar one. Supposedly, the president doesn’t delegate enough power to his cabinet. I keep hearing this, but I rarely see any examples. Hillary Clinton seemed to shine in her role as Secretary of State, traveling tremendous distances and working so hard that you couldn’t even describe it as tirelessly. She worked to exhaustion. Did she need more responsibility?
Secretary Geithner seemed to run the show at Treasury, sometimes to the point of openly defying the White House. Did he not have enough discretion and power? I would argue the opposite.
Secretaries Gates and Panetta seem to have had few problems exercising their prerogatives. If they felt cut out of the loop, Rothkopf doesn’t provide any examples.
Secretary Duncan seems to have been running the show at the Department of Education without too much interference from above.
Health Secretary Sebelius has been as busy as a bee designing and implementing ObamaCare.
I struggle to see how this cabinet has been shut out and underutilized. Maybe the Commerce Department has been a little chaotic, with unsettled leadership, but that was hardly the president’s fault and, in any case, who really cares?
I would have liked to see a higher profile for Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. Perhaps the criticism would be warranted here.
Even the Transportation Department and Veteran’s Affairs can boast major legislative accomplishments over Obama’s first term.
Rothkopf’s expertise lies with observing the National Security Council and the national security apparatus, and he might have a point if he limited himself to those areas, but that’s not what he’s doing. He’s talking about the Cabinet in general. Just observing that Valerie Jarrett rubs some people the wrong way is not a convincing argument that Obama is a lousy manager.
Rothkopf mentions climate change as one failure arising from poor management. I think it was poor politics to have the House pass a cap and trade bill that had no chance of passing in the Senate, but it was Republican flip-flopping on the issue that caused the failure. Remember that John McCain and Sarah Palin ran on a cap and trade platform.
Rothkopf feels that the administration dragged its feet in dealing with the crises in Egypt, Libya, and Syria, but he doesn’t explain how the management of his cabinet would explain that. It’s seems to me that the administration moved with appropriate caution in all three cases.
I understand his overall point that the American people and the Senate should place more emphasis on management experience when considering candidates for the presidency or to head major departments, but his specific complaints are so sparse and so poorly sourced that his column is basically an ad hominem attack.
Agree completely. He presents no evidence of bad management and there is plenty of evidence a great management.
Three very public examples should smack him cold in the face: two brilliantly run presidential campaigns and his handling of the killing of Bin Laden. Top to bottom he knew and explained the vision, got the right people and let them do their jobs while also making the correct decision at key junctures.
That’s the definition of good management and leadership.
Agree with your comments and Booman’s post. The voters do look at management because we see how the campaign is run and Obama’s ran rings around his opponents’. My first thought with such an article is racism – Rothkop’s not yet able to give an objective assessment of our president. if you look at the media stereotypes (movies, TV etc by White ppl) scary black man is simultaneously scary (with dangerous rage expressed or underneath) and childishly incompetent. So many are still having trouble with real life assessments of real life Barack Obama. Progress in that area is one thing I hope for for the second term.
It’s not going to happen. Rothkkopf is a member of good-standing in Versailles, after all.
I think it is unfair to jump to that conclusion. It’s okay as a hypothesis, but not knowing the man, it seems unjustified. I think the problem is that everyone wants a piece of the president, and if they don’t get enough access or influence, they go bitching to reporters and journalists. But if that is going on to an unusual degree, it must be at the sub-cabinet level, or maybe some of the lower profile cabinet members. Yet, I doubt that because national security is really what Rothkopf covers and his sources would be from that orbit.
I don’t mean racism in a personal, feeling way, just that white culture has certain “identity slots” for African Americans functioning in white dominant sectors, certain role-stereotypes into which a figures fit. In terms of stereotypes, which is how most in Rothkop’s milieu would be functioning, since for white culture, there are very few “types” of Black men and there’s none that fit Barack Obama even closely. I think these stereotypes are functioning (unconsciously) in assessments of Obama but all that will change over time and it’s already much different than a decade or two ago. My classic example is Anita Hill – around that time there were two white stereotypes for African American women, mammy and whore. Look at the video tape of her testimony, what she depicts with her family sitting behind her, is something completely foreign to all those white senators. They absolutely could not absorb her testimony. They had no categories with which to understand her positionality as they say. It’s much changed now, thanks to Michelle Obama especailly
I don’t care enough to do it, but it would be interesting to go back and see if Rothkopf had similar angst over Bush’s “management style”.
(shrug) just more random make-it-up-as-you-go-along Obama-whine. Same as it ever was.
You should amend that. It’s stupid whine from “the establishment.” Speaking of that, I nominate Howard Kurtz as co-wanker of the day. I hope people saw this tweet this morning. Kurtz should go back to his penis fixation.
Speaking of Secretary of Labor, who was the last high profile one? Frances Perkins?
Well, liberals still remember Bob Reich. But Frances Perkins was the greatest Labor Secretary by a long shot. No one has or ever will touch her in terms of influence or length of tenure. The conditions of her (and FDR’s) era put her in a unique position to create progressive change. So as wonderful as Hilda Solis might be, it’s hard to compare her or anyone else to Perkins.
You know, if I wanted to put together an opinion piece about the shortcomings of the President’s management style, I think I’d go ahead and actually have at least one or two specific examples of how the bad management style led to actual negative results.
“Some people don’t like his management style, and some things haven’t gone so well, so therefor he’s a bad manager,” is an example of one of the more tedious logical fallacies.
There is a fundamental fallacy in his argument–the assumption that delegation can be measured by how high-profile the cabinet secretary or other official is.
Counter to his claims of bad management, I would point to the President’s handling of the surge, Gen. Petraeus, and Gen. McChrystal. And Secretary of Defense Gates’s delivery of the implementation of the repeal of Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell.
There are instances when the White House staff put pressure on departments in dealing with bogus political scandals that were managerial missteps.
It seems to me that the management issue has never been delegations but always establishing legitimacy with the department organizations, some of whom had “burrowed in” Bushies. The problems at Justice and Interior seemed to have arisen from that issue.
The other issue has been the appointment of too many officials who have conflicts of interest with their previous employer and future private opportunity. Too many are inclined to operate counter to their agencies’ mission.
On Hilda Solis:
Secretary of Labor Solis was delegated the huge task or re-establishing the enforcement of labor standards, including a few laws passed early in Obama’s first term. She went off and did it. Exactly how is that a failure of delegation. Seems to me like as perfect an example of delegation as one could get.
True, but she has been very low profile. Almost invisible, really. And I could see her feeling underutilized.
There’s a big difference between profile and utilization. Look at Hillary at State. She kept a much lower profile than Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice, but she was one of the most important and effective Secretaries of State ever.
And I could see her feeling underutilized.
This argument always seems like goalpost-moving to me. In 2008, if someone had described Solis’ role and accomplishments on labor issues during this term, they would have been dismissed as wildly optimistic.
But now, we’re talking about Secretary of Labor not just in terms of running the DoL or even affecting labor issues in this country, but whether she was a core member of the fiscal/budgetary team.
What about Obama’s campaign operation? The one that’s commonly described as the best ever? How is that not relevant to an evaluation of his management abilities?
Although I do think it was a big mistake not to make more use of the organization he’d built during his first term. So that was a poor decision, but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad management. Part of good management is not pretending you’re infallible, and learning from your mistakes. Steve Benen had an item the other day about how he’s keeping Organizing for American going, and how he’s planning to use it to push his agenda.
President Obama has run two superb campaigns.
I think a lot of people, both left and right, have had their entire life’s work challenged by Barack Obama. He is unsettling all that they knew.
.
“Nor does it seem to have built necessary teams and coalitions or anticipated and planned for likely challenges.”
Seems to me the input has to come from his cabinet members. The quality of US foreign policy lies with the State Department. However in the anticipation of challenges like Benghazi and militia or Islamic extremists in the Maghreb, the intelligence branch is the listening posts together with our overseas diplomats and our special forces put in place on the ground. If the President doesn’t get the right intelligence, any decision made will yield poor results. Just like the Clinton administration, my impression is that Hillary Clinton skewed foreign policy decisions on US economic interests.
Just like getting the AQ mastermind Osama Bin Laden, it’s the team effort that leads to results.
Cars can be judged by its mileage, I never knew it to be a qualification for performance as Secretary of State. I welcomed Hillary Clinton by her appointment, however I’ve seen mostly failures [video] during the last 18 months. She gets a C- mainly for her effort, but not based on results. The tremendous optimism when Democrat Obama was elected to succeed a total failure of Bush/Cheney, the international popularity of the Obama administration has ebbed away considerably. See results Pew opinion poll, especially the Muslim states! The high expectations in Cairo speech and the abysmal failure on the two-state option for Palestine. The hatred for the US in North Africa is at an all-time high.
The damage done by Bush (with support of Democrats in Congress) in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo Bay has not been erased and will haunt the US for many, many years.
The turmoil in Libya and now in Syria has provided the jihadists with funds and heavy arms directly responsible for the overthrow of the democracy in Mali and the same extremists were responsible for the Algerian hostage crisis. US special forces have been on the ground in North Africa since 2002.
770 Workers Rescued as Algerian Hostage Crisis Ends In Violent Deaths
All I got out of the article is another round of gum-flapping that we need more business people and management “experts” (there’s no such thing) in government. If only there were more management geniuses like the ones at Enron, Lehman, Moody’s, Goldman, Citi, and HP, why think how much better government would work.
I’ve scanned Rothkopf’s stuff on occasion, but this is the first time I noticed what an ass he apparently is.
Interesting that no one mentions Obama’s worst Cabinet pick, the truly awful Eric Holder, who doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.
Holder goes after easy targets (whistleblowers, leakers, free-informationists, and medical marijuana growers) while ignoring the banksters and pretty much all corporations. True, he went after insider-trading, but that was more to satisfy the traders and investor class than it was for us.
Holder is a true corporatist and the damage he’s doing to the Democratic Party will be with us a long while.
Well, Jonathan Alter said Obama was an excellent manager so now I’m confused. He did a book & actually had access to the WH.
Coal states is why we don’t have a cap/trade bill. Some people think Obama’s cabinet should be on TV advocating for the Admin more. I’ve heard that from Chris M. & others.
The column seemed a bit hysterical to me. Maybe he didn’t get his Inaugural Invite or something. I’ve read him at Foreign Policy & he’s normally favorable to the Admin. Hmm….curious