A White House of Amateurs

Maybe the source to one of the problems that plagues the Obama Presidency is that the president does not pick good people!

It is more than evident that President Obama’s lack of experience has hurt him significantly in the areas of decisive decision making and more so in his ability to provide strong leadership, two critical traits needed to ensure a successful presidency and that can only be learned through years of experience of which the Jr. Senator and south side Chicago community organizer has very little of.

Another extremely important aspect to ensure a successful presidency is to appoint good people to your cabinet and the various other staff and support assignments.  There are numerous positions that a president must fill covering a vast array of disciplines and knowledge bases.  Filling those positions with competent and trustworthy people whom are experts in the particular field that the position pertains to will make the difference between an administration's success and failure.  

Prior to being elected as the President of the United States, Barack Obama had been in politics for just 12 years, only 4 of which were at the national level, the balance he served as an Illinois State Senator with his efforts almost exclusively focused on issues of equality and rising Chicago’s lower class.  Before his entrance into politics Obama worked as a civil rights attorney and was a part time lecturer then senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School (no, Obama was not a constitutional law professor as he claims).

Neither of Obama's pre-political positions provided him with any practical exposure to those working in the ranks of politics.  Serving on the Illinois State Senate granted him only minimal exposure to national political figures and private sector professionals.  As a Junior US Senator, Obama had hardly gotten his feet wet before choosing to make a run for the presidency.  In short, Barack Obama’s short and very isolated  time in politics left him with a very limited list of potential candidates of which he had close personal knowledge to their unique skillsets and qualifications.

An indictment to Obama’s lack of knowledge of qualified individuals to bring into his administration is the high turn-over rate of his own cabinet members.  Of the 21 cabinet positions, serving in the Obama Administration, only 4 have not been turned over two of which are Vise President Joe Biden and Attorney General Eric Holder, whom will be parting ways with the president shorty.  The remaining positions have all been turned over at least once and some as many as three times.  And while it is not unusual for cabinet members to come and go, the number of turn-overs experienced by the Obama Administration thus far is staggering.  With all things being equal (correcting for cabinet sizes and two full terms in office), the rate of turn-overs experienced during the Obama Administration’s first 5 years puts it on a trajectory to reach 90 different cabinet members by the end of the presidents second term, double that of any other administration looking back as far as JFK, the one exception of course is the Ford administration which had to clean house and nearly start from scratch following the Watergate scandal.   

We have seen it time and again with this administration, as they experience one political folly after another, the problem being traced back to the lack of qualifications of the person in charge, such as was the case with both Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki.  Of course, not all staff members are under qualified and we have seen as well, on many occasions, the president ignore the advice of many of his senior staff members and advisors.

This is not to say that it is impossible for an individual with limited time in politics to put together a good team.  With thorough due diligence and embracing the assistance of trusted senior members, very strong candidates for cabinet and other appointed positions in one’s administration can be sought out.  Selecting from a list of friends, acquaintances and those who have or will provide political favor will only lead to failure as our president is experiencing this very moment.

Obama Should Have Thanked Bush not Blamed Him!

President Bush could not have handed the United States first black president a better chance at success if he tried.

Even before Barack Obama won the democratic presidential nomination in 2008, it was reasonably safe for him to assume that if he were to win the presidency he would do so with Democrats in full control of congress.  A war weary American had already handed control to Democrats during Bush’s 2nd term in office and there was no scent in the air that that was going to change.  Congress was just the first of many political advantages that President Bush provided to Barack Obama, of which he would fail to capitalize on during his presidency.

And so it was, Barrack H. Obama was sworn in as the 44^th President of the United States on January 20, 2009.  With his “to do” list of promises in his breast pocket and congress ready to do his bidding, President Obama set out to make history with his progressive agenda of Hope and Change.

But Obama fumbled away the greatest gift that can be given to a president, a congress controlled by his own party! 

During his first two years in office and with the luxury of a democratic controlled congress, President Obama managed to sign in to law only one major piece of legislation, his namesake healthcare reform law aka ObamaCare.  Certainly the president had his hands full in dealing with the recession however, he squandered away an easy opportunity to move legislation forward on immigration reform, gun control, income inequality and a list of other progressive line items on his “to do” list while the balance of power was in his favor.  

The Gift of the Great Recession

Officially taking office late in the month of January, President Obama went straight to work on his $831 billion plan to buy they economy out of the recession he inherited from the Bush Administration, and on February 17th, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), better known as “the stimulus” was signed in to law.  Popular only amongst democratic lawmakers, even those economists who did support the Keynesian approach of the stimulus felt that the effort was far too small to have any measureable effect on the back broken economy.  Republicans had a different view and saw the stimulus as nothing more than a spending bill to fund the liberal agenda Obama laid out when he was campaigning for president.   As it turns out, both the economist and republicans were correct.

By the time any funds from the stimulus were distributed, the economy had already turned the corner thus robbing the president from take credit for ending the recession, something he did anyway.  The economy was at its lowest point and had no place to go but up making it all but impossible for President Obama to come out smelling like anything but roses even though he arrived late for the party. 

Instead, the failed stimulus, along with a long list of other bad economic policies put forth by the president, all worked together in creating the worst US economic recovery in the history of our nation.  There was so much uncertainty created by Obama’s plan for recovery that people lacked the confidence to spend heavily, fearing that the policies being put in place by the new president were going to slip the economy back into a recession.  President Obama somehow blundered an economic growth opportunity, handed to him by George W Bush, that was virtually impossible to foul up.

A Hole Left in the Job Market

Bush handed President Obama a massive hole in the job market some 8 million deep.  With an economy that was just starting to bounce back, a brief and measurable surge in new employment was expected at some early stage, a phenomena which occurs in every economic recovery, perpetuated by a renewed security in spending.  But in this recovery, a jobs surge never transpired.  

Obama’s plan was to buy jobs.  He vowed that if congress would pass his $831 billion stimulus package, unemployment would drop to 5.6%, by the end of his first term in office.  The president missed the mark by almost 3% with the unemployment rate dropping to only 8.3% (from 9.5%) four years and hundreds of billions of dollars later.  To add insult to injury, when Obama was lobbying for his stimulus package, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that unemployment would have dropped to 6.0% without the massive stimulus.  It seems that Obama’s economic recovery policies were doing more harm in creating jobs than good.

Not since the Great Depression has it taken longer than 2 years to recover the jobs lost in a recession however, it took the policies of the Obama Administration over 5 years to do so.  Another sure fire opportunity for Obama to claim success, handed to him by George W Bush and subsequently squandered away.

Debt and the Budget Deficit

Driven by a large expansion of the federal government and the cost of fighting 2 wars, Bush handed President Obama 8 years of massive growth to the nation’s debt and deficit.  This created an easy success story for Obama, all he needed to do was slow down the growth of both.

When Obama took office in January of 2009, the Status of Forces agreement which marked the coming end to the Iraq war had already been signed and troop drawdown began the following month.  Three years later, all combat troops had been removed from Iraq as well, the drawdown of troops in Afghanistan commenced.  The close of the month of June, 2009 also marked two consecutive months of positive economic growth, officially bringing the Great Recession to an end.  The wheels of debt and deficit reduction looked to be well in motion.

Fiscal years 2009 through 20012 each brought budget deficits in excess of $1 trillion.  In full disclosure, the FY 2009 deficit fell largely on the Bush administration and skyrocketed over previous years deficits due to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) spending which Bush signed in to law as one of the measure to prevent the worsening of the 2007 financial crisis.  The subsequent 3 years President Obama maintained a deficit more than double that of any year during the Bush administration excluding FY 2009 of course.

With the financial crises and auto industry bailout far behind him, the war in Iraq over and the withdrawal in Afghanistan started, President Obama was finally able to reduce the federal budget deficit below the $1 trillion mark in FY 2013 but deficits still remained historically high.  As a result, the national debt has increase by well over $7 trillion in less than 6 years that President Obama has been in office.

President Obama did in fact stand by his pledge to cut the deficit of $1.4 trillion, his administration inherited, in half however, the pledge he made was disingenuous knowing that the FY 2009 budget deficit was an anomaly created by the financial crisis.  In all other years Obama has failed to reduce the deficit lower than Bush’s worst year in office and is likely not going to do so in his final two years as president.

George W Bush could not have provided President Obama with a better chance of look like a political success if he had tried, but the president’s progressive policies and lack of experience turned opportunity into failure.