Frum's Advice to Romney

An ex-Bush advisor gives unsolicited economic policymaking advise to Romney. It's a good overview of what to do and not do when the economy is in a rough patch.

How Obama's Initial Economic Team Dealt with the Financial Crisis

Ezra Klein walks us through what happened in the early months of the Obama Administration and how they responded to the ongoing economic crisis.

Blaming Axelrod

Obama's top aide David Axelrod is feeling the heat for perceived the administration's perceived failures.

The Senate Judiciary Committee v the Office of Legal Counsel

Great checking and balancing going on here.

The Office of Legal Counsel is an advisory office in the Justice Department. From its website:
[it] ..."provides authoritative legal advice to the President and all the Executive Branch agencies. The Office drafts legal opinions of the Attorney General and also provides its own written opinions and oral advice in response to requests from the Counsel to the President, the various agencies of the Executive Branch, and offices within the Department. Such requests typically deal with legal issues of particular complexity and importance or about which two or more agencies are in disagreement. The Office also is responsible for providing legal advice to the Executive Branch on all constitutional questions and reviewing pending legislation for constitutionality."

The question is whether two previous members of the office broke the law when they wrote memos authorizing the use of torture when terrorist suspects were interrogated. The Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction over the office in the Senate and is investigating the question.

Related links:

- Senate Committee Hearing on Ethics Report Disappoints
- Inquiry into missing e-mails written by Bush lawyers is demanded
- The Total Legal Clarity On Torture
- Office of Legal Counsel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

David Axelrod

The New York Times has a brief overview of Obama's senior aide:

He arrives at the White House shortly after 7 a.m., a torturously early hour for a man known during the campaign for sending messages until the small hours of the morning. A cup of Earl Grey tea is waiting for him — he hates the taste of coffee and recalls having only two cups in his life — as he walks into his first appointment of the day, a meeting in the office of Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, who has been a friend for 25 years.

He attends the economic briefing in the Oval Office, where the latest news and grim statistics are relayed to the president by a battery of advisers. When the classified intelligence briefing begins, Mr. Axelrod leaves the room. Later, he and a speechwriter sit down with Mr. Obama to review the three-ring binder containing each speech or statement the president will make that day.
Often in the late afternoons, he walks to the Situation Room to attend some meetings of the National Security Council, stopping to grab a handful or two of the M&Ms that are in a large bowl outside the room.

He also helps decide which fights to pick and which ones to avoid, making him a leading voice in setting the political tone in Washington. The recent back-and-forth with Rush Limbaugh, for example, was explicitly authorized by Mr. Axelrod, who told aides that it was not a moment to sit quietly after Mr. Limbaugh said he hoped that Mr. Obama would “fail.”

- Here's his bio from Wikipedia.

Kaplan Loves James Jones

He argues that the new National Security Adviser will be well suited to ensure that the White House will be able to effectively control foreign policy, that is, to coordinate the State and Defense Departments -- a task often beyond the ability of previous presidents:

...he knows the ins, outs, back alleys, and dark closets of the national-security realm.

His former colleagues use the same words to describe him: very smart, very organized, methodical, deliberate. It may be telling that Obama has been seeking advice lately from two other generals who served as national-security advisers: Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft. Anthony Zinni, a retired Marine general who's known Jones for 30 years and followed a similar career path, told me in an e-mail that he sees Jones as "a Scowcroft type of NSA," elaborating, "He works hard to build consensus and has a lot of patience. He doesn't like to seek confrontation but won't shrink from a fight. … He doesn't seek the limelight but will be the hand behind keeping things on track and focused."
Kaplan goes on to argue why Jones will be an improvement over Condoleeza Rice, Bush's first National Security Adviser:

"On track and focused" is precisely where George W. Bush failed to keep things, especially in his first six years (that is, until Robert Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon). As a result, policies drifted, information was suppressed, dissenting views were circumvented, and, sometimes, decisions made by the National Security Council were simply ignored or surreptitiously overruled. (For one crucial instance, click here; for others, read some of these books.)

Rumsfeld in particular was able to get away with this high-handedness—at one point, to prevent a decision from being made, he simply didn't show up for three consecutive NSC meetings—in part because Condoleezza Rice, Bush's first-term national-security adviser, was a weak manager; Rumsfeld, a veteran infighter, ran circles around her; and Bush, a lackadaisical president in this respect, declined to rein him in.

This sort of manipulation and chaos, it's safe to bet, won't be countenanced by Gen. Jones.

Is Loyalty to the President Overated?

Folks like me -- government instructor types -- are supposed to tell folks like you -- government student types -- that loyalty is the most important trait of a presidential advisor.

Jacob Weisberg wonders if it is an overrated virtue:

The demand for absolute loyalty is a relic from the age of patronage, when political appointments were tied to the delivery of votes for a sponsor. A modern media politician does not depend on this kind of machine for his existence and has political control over only a thin sliver of top-level government jobs. The vast majority of public employees is protected by the Civil Service and can't be vetted for loyalty. As the complexity of the government has increased, so, too, has the importance of expertise and experience.

This is part of what has made George W. Bush's loyalty obsession such a throwback. Bush's first job in politics was as an "enforcer" for a father he thought was too nice to discipline traitors and freelancers. His own fixation on loyalty was born from the experience of watching top aides to his dad such as James Baker and Richard Darman put their own careers and images first. When his turn came, the younger Bush made personal loyalty a threshold test—and even seemed to regard private, internal challenge to his ill-considered preferences as an indication of untrustworthiness.

...

Surrounding oneself with die-hard loyalists breeds insularity. Over time, the fixation with loyalty devolves toward a mafia view of politics that lends itself to abuse of power. The circle tightens, enemies are listed, paranoia blossoms. This happened in one way in LBJ's White House, where the president's mistrust of people tied to the Kennedys prevented him from hearing sound advice about Vietnam. It happened another way in the Nixon White House, where an obsession with national security leaks led to the reign of Haldeman and Erlichman. It happened in another way still in George W. Bush's White House, where so little internal dissent was allowed that truth became disposable. While the elder George Bush could live with a continual ooze of self-serving leaks from his friend Baker, who (like the unfaithful Henry Kissinger) was a highly effective diplomat, his son gave full "you are dead to me" treatment to any official—John DiIulio, Paul O'Neill, Scott McClellan—who allowed a hint of daylight between himself and the official White House line.

Conversely, the most successful presidents generate loyalty without sweating it. Roosevelt brought nonsupporters including Herbert Hoover's secretary of state, Henry Stimson, into his Cabinet. Even after his aide Raymond Moley broke publicly with him and became a Republican, FDR had Moley back to help with his 1936 convention speech. It's hard to think of a bigger turncoat than David Stockman, who gave a series of interviews about why Ronald Reagan's economic policies made no sense. But Reagan didn't fire his budget director. He merely asked him to pretend he'd been given a tongue-lashing (the concocted "visit to the woodshed"). After Reagan decided on airstrikes against Hezbollah in retaliation for the Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon in 1983, his secretary of defense, Casper Weinberger, countermanded the order because he thought it was a bad idea. Reagan let that one go, too.