From Politico. The cabinet is marginalized and hardly ever consulted by Obama. It is his White House advisors who run and control the policies and message.
“We are completely marginalized … until the shit hits the fan,” says
one former Cabinet deputy secretary, summing up the view of many
officials I interviewed. “If your question is: Did the president rely a
lot on his Cabinet as a group of advisers? No, he didn’t,” says former
Obama Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.
Little wonder, then,
that Obama has called the group together only rarely, for what by most
accounts are not much more than ritualistic team-building exercises:
According to CBS News White House reporter Mark Knoller, the Cabinet met
19 times
in Obama’s first term and four times in the first 10 months of his
second term. That’s once every three months or so—about as long as you
can drive around before you’re supposed to change your oil.
For
any modern president, the advantages of hoarding power in the White
House at the expense of the Cabinet are obvious—from more efficient
internal communication and better control of external messaging to
avoiding messy confirmation battles and protecting against pesky
congressional subpoenas. But over the course of his five years in
office, Obama has taken this White House tendency to an extreme,
according to more than 50 interviews with current and former
secretaries, White House staffers and executive branch officials, who
described his Cabinet as a restless nest of ambition, fits-and-starts
achievement and power-jockeying under a shadow of unfulfilled promise.
No comments:
Post a Comment