The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

by John Dickerson

When gun reform measures couldn’t pass the Senate, Republican senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania said Obama’s support had weighed down the legislation. “There were some on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do it,” he said.48

Partisan fucking hacks.

Stumble in an answer and you are either too old or too dumb for the job. Push for incremental solutions on healthcare and you don’t care about the uninsured. Push for tough enforcement of immigration laws and you are heartless. Warn about the danger of coal to a warming planet and you want to close down cities. The stark evaluation scheme makes it easy to dismiss a candidate who shows restraint as too timid for a job of action.

Giving others ownership through your restraint is another lesson Marshall Goldsmith teaches his executives. A leader who hears an idea from an energetic subordinate will feel inclined to add his two cents, but that has a cost most managers don’t recognize. “I am young, smart, enthusiastic. I report to you. I come to you with an idea,” says Goldsmith, laying out the scenario. “You think it’s a great idea. Rather than saying it’s a great idea our tendency is to say ‘That’s a nice idea. Why don’t you add this to it?’ The quality of the idea may now go up five percent from your contribution, but my commitment to its execution may now go down fifty percent. It’s no longer my idea.”22

Atwater repented. “I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not.”44

Beg to differ.

It was indecorous for a sitting president to take a poke at the recently deceased former First Lady. Not so, said Trump’s longtime friend and political adviser Roger Stone, reminding everyone of the primacy of winning: “Well, she’s dead and he’s president. Who won that one?”

Fuck Roger Stone.

Social media, which dominates our public and private lives, has quickened this trend toward the centrality of the self. Our public heroes are those who give us a steady stream of costume changes to keep us coming back for the dopamine hit. The planet now contains beings known as “influencers,” individuals who through their acts of self-expression on social media have become famous consumers, sought out by advertisers to hypnotize the public.

Donald Trump benefited from this in two ways. As a “reality television” star, he gained notoriety as a businessman from playing a cartoonish sort of businessman on The Apprentice—which is to healthy business practices what The Bachelor is to stable relationships.

One root of this phenomenon may be that old devil, pride. We retain our beliefs even in the face of learning we’re dead wrong because we don’t want to admit that we were wrong. Studies have shown that even when people are told, on good evidence, that the information they believe to be true was completely fabricated, they cling to their original understanding.

Social media makes this worse. Recent research in the Journal of Experimental Psychology shows that “social media platforms help to incubate belief in blatantly false news stories, and that tagging such stories as disputed is not an effective solution to this problem.”

person who occasionally drinks and drives is not in the same category as a person who irrigates from the keg he has installed in the passenger’s seat for his long-haul trips.

The normal (and political) human reaction would be to feel shock and horror at the deaths, not to see them as validation of a policy position.

By November 2019, Trump celebrated getting more than 150 federal judicial nominees confirmed by the Senate.6, 7 Since these judges have lifetime appointments, these changes will transform America for the next generation.

Thanks I hate it.

Debate moderators press candidates about how they are going to pay for their domestic programs, but they rarely raise the issue when it involves spending on military adventures. This allows the belief to flower that national security is somehow too important to be limited by prosaic matters of accounting.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

CAMPAIGN PROMISES ARE LIKE VACATION photographs. The number of pictures you take of a spot usually indicates how much you loved it more than does the quality of any one photograph.

As voters, we should ask for more from our lawmakers than red meat. And we should call them out when their answers contain no nourishment at all. There is a difference between an answer and a response. Candidates and lawmakers often give the latter as if they’ve given the former.

The success and prosperity of the United States of America, though, are still not guaranteed. They are dreams that are tested with each new presidency and that will be tested for as long as the office shall last. In our present moment of partisanship, distraction, and expectation, the office is stretched and misshapen. After 230 years, the challenge remains to keep the sun rising.