We will little note nor long remember Wednesday’s breathless kerfuffle, with the White House deciding to schedule a speech in front of a joint session of Congress without actually asking Congress first — and planning for it during a long-planned Republican debate.
The White House spin doctors told some fibs, realized they looked petty and unseemly, then backed off and moved it a day. This won’t even rise to the level of a Jeopardy question in a year’s time.
But supporters of President Obama outside the White House have every reason to be terrified by what happened on Wednesday — and I choose the word “terrified” carefully.
For the incident suggests that the White House’s sense of how things work has grown dangerously distorted. And if this White House is broken, it’s not good for anyone.
A successful presidency tends to run like a well-oiled machine. The Reagan White House was a famously fractious place; its aides did great damage fighting and leaking against each other. But the work product — the White House’s political communication and interaction with Capitol Hill, with the rest of the executive branch and with the public — was technically proficient and highly professional.
I spent six months working in the Reagan White House in 1988, and in a working life of 30 years, I’ve never seen any organization function as smoothly. Everybody knew his job; everybody knew how to do his job; there were systems in place to handle conflicts and arguments.
In September 1991, I began a reporting project on the re-election efforts of the White House of George H.W. Bush that carried through to the election he lost in 1992. As I watched and interviewed, it was clear that the White House organization Bush had inherited from Ronald Reagan had ceased to function effectively.
Senior officials failed to relay work goals and aims to their underlings. There was no effective process for determining policy, and the process by which the White House communicated to the rest of the government and to the public was even worse.
One telling result of this confusion and chaos was that all kinds of little things began to go wrong. Events were poorly planned. Rival drafts of speeches circulated, and no one knew which one was the official draft and which was the effort to undercut it.
The sense of directionlessness and confusion was crystallized when President Bush went to New Hampshire and read the words “Message: I Care” off a card provided by his staff. He wasn’t supposed to speak them, but to talk extemporaneously and give the impression that he cared. But no one had bothered to tell him that was the approach of the day, or that the cards weren’t speech texts.
Such gaffes were indicative of a political organization that had gone off the rails. But, to be fair to the elder Bush, a man and president of uncommon dignity and unrivaled comportment, he would never have stood for a piece of petty gamesmanship like trying to use the powers of the office to attempt to trump the rival party’s debate.
Obviously, even a disastrously managed White House — like Bill Clinton’s — can make it through the worst of its own behavior if conditions are optimal for its survival.
Obama is his own man, of course. He has nothing of Clinton’s cold self-indulgence and little of Bush’s patrician forbearance. But like them, he has no idea how to manage his own operation.
The glimpse we got of that on Wednesday gives his supporters every reason to fear that his re-election campaign will resemble his triumphant 2008 bid about as much as the bumbling White House of the first President Bush resembled the extraordinarily accomplished White House of Ronald Reagan.
The book I wrote as a young conservative about the Bush White House was called “Hell of a Ride.” I hereby grant rights to a resourceful young liberal willing to open his eyes to the truth about the Obama White House to “Hell of a Ride 2.”