I’m Only Making Plans For Nigel Excuses For Obama…

Mary Dejevsky on the problems facing America’s Obamassiah:

…the slew of early departures from Obama's team, the most recent being the head of the National Economic Council, Larry Summers. Again, early departures in themselves are not novel. Clinton suffered a similar haemorrhaging of his early appointees. Arguably, George Bush was unusual in the number of senior figures who served two terms. Some people fail to settle in Washington; others find the work of government, as opposed to campaigning or advising, not to their taste. Sometimes chance intervenes, as with the unexpected decision of the long-serving mayor of Chicago not to run for another term, which could deprive Obama of his White House Chief of Staff. Or it could be that a new president has a relatively limited pool to choose from and tries to play safe, while a more experienced President discovers that there are people better suited to his purpose out there.

The only people 'experienced at being President', Mary, are those who've done it before. There aren't many of those...

Give her credit, she's quick to realise that error:

This is not to argue that presidents require more experience before they take the job.

That's lucky, eh? So, since no-one in the progressive world wants to lay the blame at the feet of America's Sining One, what's the problem?

Would you believe, it's the Constitution?

…make the case for more continuity higher up the echelons of a new administration. Would the system not benefit from something more akin to Britain's non-partisan civil service to advise and manage both the official Transition and beyond?

No, she isn't joking...

Worse, because it unnecessarily hobbles a new administration, is the extent to which possibly significant proposals broached by another country to the outgoing administration can go missing. While the US takes it for granted that a new administration starts with a blank page – outgoing officials take their files with them – others do not appreciate how total the disconnect is, and may feel offended when the new administration fails to follow up.

Ah, right. You see, when the voters decide to 'throw the bums out', they don't really mean it. They actually WANT all the policies and promises that the incumbent guaranteed them. It's just that they want a new figurehead at the top.

It works so well here, after all..

The functioning of government is predicated on a degree of bipartisan give and take in the two houses of Congress. Fiercely adversarial party politics was for the likes of Britain and its Parliament. What the US faces now is a Republican Party that will brook no compromise, within a system that requires members to reach across the aisle. Nor is there any immediate prospect of that changing, as the Republican mainstream feels the populist Tea Party movement pushing it further right.

And god forbid that any government do what the voters want, eh? Mary has hope, though. She's looking to the future:

It is possible that the stalemate will turn out to be temporary; possible, too, that the Tea Party tendency will turn out to be the last gasp of a dying demographic group and that US politics will slot back to the more productive equilibrium of before. The sharp decline in social conservatism and the greater tolerance charted in surveys of younger voters – attitudes which helped Obama to the presidency – could eventually shift the centre of US politics to a different, more European, place.

Those attitudes that helped him to the Presidency are slowly coming to realise that they bought a pig in a poke. And now they have the biggest case of buyer's remorse we've ever seen...

But that is to jump ahead. In the meantime, the US Constitution and the way US politics functions are looking somewhat frayed around the edges. President Obama's inexperience may have made his first 18 months more difficult than they might have been, but his country's outdated institutions made things much, much worse.

Well, I suppose it's a little better than the progressives usual cry of 'change the voters, not the government!'.

Has as much chance of coming true, mind...