by Selina Meyer
As presidents have learned over and over, being president is not the same as being king or emperor. That’s our system, and I suppose we have to accept it. In order to get anything done, you need the cooperation of the House and Senate and, in many cases, the courts, which seem to be able to make a nuisance of themselves almost constantly. And if the media take a particular like or dislike to something you’re trying to do, well, those jackals are perfectly capable of torpedoing it just to satisfy their own limp egos.
At least now I would be in the meetings and I would be setting the agenda. Maybe I wouldn’t accomplish everything I attempted, but I would at least be making the attempt. That said, there are a million different things a president can get behind; she can commit the government to vast new enterprises like rebuilding infrastructure or putting a man (or woman!) on Mars, or she can seek to rein in the size and reach of government by slashing regulations and cutting taxes. And then once you’ve decided if you’re a “big government type” or a “small government type” (and, confusingly, regardless of which one you are, you have to tell everyone that you’re a small government type), you have to get specific and start choosing between, say, school lunch programs or giant mass transit projects or billion-dollar weapons systems. It gets exhausting very quickly. Or—and I don’t know why I’m telling you this because the odds of someone reading this book becoming president are incredibly small—you can kind of wait and see what happens, like a financial crisis or a war, and then just kind of try and deal with it as best you can. That way you’re less likely to get blamed for things. I mean, you can always be blamed for mishandling some situation, sure, but that’s usually a less bad kind of blame than you get for having caused it.
Another thing you can do is wait and see what sort of ideas Congress generates, since those lazy clowns are supposed to be the ones who originate legislation in the first place. And, believe me, every single one of them has a trillion ideas for how to spend the taxpayer’s money, almost always on make-work boondoggles for their own districts. You can’t blame them, really. People like their politicians to bring home the bacon, and politicians, especially congressmen who have to campaign all the godd-mn time, like to have a big slab of bacon like a job-retraining center or, better yet, a sports stadium to campaign in front of.
But if you just represent some district with a hundred thousand people in it, it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going to keep them happy and make them like you. It’s so much harder when you’re president and have to try and please everyone all the time, including millions of people who don’t agree on anything. But the important thing is not to lose sight of the fundamental things that you yourself believe in because, in the end, that’s something you can always rely on when your advisors, the polls, and the press let you down.
So, that’s the important thing. Believing in something and knowing what that is.
Okay, so getting back to the questions people always ask about being president. Is it true that the White House has a swimming pool and a bowling alley? Yes. Yes, it has both. In fact, it has two pools, an indoor one and an outdoor one. The thing is: I’m not really a swimmer or a bowler, so neither the pools nor the bowling alley were of much use to me. And even if I were a swimmer, I don’t think I’d really enjoy using the pool. You see, the indoor pool was a favorite trysting spot for JFK, and even after all these years I think it would be hard for me to escape the sensation that some of his sperm was still alive and swimming around in the pool with me or, even worse, trying to crawl up inside me. Maybe it would be just one or two of them but if anyone’s sperm could survive fifty years in a chlorinated pool, it was JFK’s.
CHAPTER TEN
Crisis to Crisis—The Testing of a President
On the campaign trail, one of my most popular applause lines was a pledge to be “a proactive president rather than a reactive president.” Of course, reading that now, it seems like a pretty lame thing to say. But the word “proactive” was popular then or, rather, it had been popular elsewhere about five years prior, which meant that politicians were just beginning to use it, about three years after most other people had stopped. What does “proactive” mean, exactly? Well, I think it probably means something like “active,” but no one is really sure. In any case, that’s what it meant when I said it; that I would be an active president, that I would do things rather than just have things done for me or done to me. And that’s something I actually intended to do even if the person writing my speeches expressed it in an unnecessarily roundabout way by using a made-up word.
I haven’t always been well-served by the people under me—the case of the dumb speech and meaningless promise alluded to above being a great example. In fact, when cleaning up one of their messes or coping with their latest display of stunning incompetence, I’ve often wondered why the people who go to work in government or for politicians are so uniformly feebleminded. My best guess is that public service seems like a refuge from the real world for people who either are too lazy for the real world or know themselves well enough to understand that they couldn’t really handle it, sort of in the same way that teaching is. Time and time again I would fire some weak sister (or brother!) on my team only to discover in very short order that their replacement was even worse. If one wants to avoid a slow, steady decline in overall quality, one has to then go back and find the person you just fired, fire the new person you hired to replace him (or her!), and then hire the old person back, sometimes at a higher salary. Thus, bad people are constantly getting raises just because they’re not the worst possible people. This incentivization of mediocrity is a big problem in Washington, although people don’t like to talk about it. My view is that you paid good money for this book, and you deserve to know.
This persistent problem of staff mediocrity would not be as severe a problem if one worked, say, in some kind of fast-food business or dentistry, but when it comes to the presidency, we’re talking about decisions that are literally matters of life and death, so you really would prefer to have competent people handling them.
In some cases, as when you send our fantastic military forces into a situation in which some of them will probably die, the “life or death” aspect of the decision is obvious, especially to the men (and women!) who get killed and their families. But in other cases, like complicated choices involving health care or tax policy, the consequences may not seem so dire at first, but you can wind up killing millions in the long run if you’re not careful. Let’s say you decide to take some money away from disease research in order to help fund, oh, I don’t know, something involving making the Panama Canal wider. And then, fifteen years later, some kind of previously unknown disease starts killing people in Africa (which is where these kinds of things seem to always happen) and, before long, it has spread to the rest of the world, perhaps through the now slightly wider Panama Canal. Now, if you hadn’t cut funding for disease research, maybe you could have stopped it. But here’s the thing: The connection is always going to be a bit tenuous, and because it took so long for the problem to develop, you’re probably out of office and, even if someone did find a way to blame you, it wouldn’t do much damage. Whereas if you go ahead with the Panama Canal thing, you get to cut a ribbon and get a lot of donations from shipping companies, both of which will benefit you when it really matters, in the here and now rather than in the if and when.
My publisher has suggested that providing a revealing window on presidential decision-making would really set this book apart from other presidential memoirs, in which former presidents tend to mince words in order to paint themselves in a flattering light. No president ever writes a book called Boy, I Sure F-cked Up, though if they did I bet it would sell a lot more than one called My Story or My Journey or some other very “first thought” kind of idea.
Presidential decision-making works much like other sorts of decision-making, except that instead of “Should I go to the store?” you’re asking yourself, “Should I bomb Yemen?” But to stick with th
e comparison for a moment, much of your initial calculation is likely to be the same. You’ll ask yourself, “Can I do it?” “Should I do it?” “Can I afford it?” “Will it accomplish what I want?” etc. In the case of going to the store, those questions are usually fairly easy to answer. As a prominent public official for several decades, I’m not really much of a store-goer, but back when I used to go, before I had someone to go for me, I always used to find myself putting all kinds of extra things into my shopping cart that weren’t on my shopping list. These impulses can be very hard to control when shopping—or when bombing Yemen.
The process of presidential decision-making should always include input from knowledgeable experts. Listen to the experts! Even if you’re one of those people who knows everything about everything (What are those people called, again? There’s a great word for it.), there is so much on the president’s plate that it’s impossible to have the relevant facts and cogent analyses at the ready for every situation. Where is Yemen, again? Aren’t there two of them? Which one is our friend? Why are we bombing them, again? These are the kinds of questions you must ask and probably not ones you can answer all by yourself.
Being a good judge of people and having cultivated a strong team of independent thinkers as advisors, I was as able, many people have said, as any president in history to deal with both ordinary day-to-day business and extraordinary events. In addition to smart, experienced go-getters, a president’s core team must include confident, strong-willed individuals who will challenge decisions with contrary notions and worst-case scenarios. Thinking about what might go wrong with a particular course of action is essential. How many of the regrettable decisions made by past presidents, from ill-advised wars to unwanted space shuttle explosions, could have been avoided if only someone had said, “Now, wait a minute . . .”
That point bears a little elaboration.
As valuable as it can be to hear alternative and opposing viewpoints, I think we all know that there are certain people in this world, some of them reasonably smart or, at least, good with words, who get an unwholesome “kick” out of disagreeing with other people and constantly trying to prove them wrong or just confuse them with “but”s and “what if”s. I honestly have no use for these kinds of people. Even when the advice they’re giving has some basis in fact, you just can’t get the idea that they’re bringing up some problem or issue just to be annoying and show how smart they are. Government is full of these kinds of aggravating smarty pants, and unfortunately, because of my deep belief in the importance of always hearing the unvarnished truth, I have sometimes ended up with one or two of them in my inner circle.
The lesson for anyone reading this who is considering a career in government is to know the facts, sure, have a questioning mind, fine, but learn to feel the room a bit, too, so that you’re not always “that guy” (or “girl”!) who slows down every decision and makes every meeting run longer than it’s supposed to. There’s a fine line between being conscientious and being a self-centered narcissist who always makes everything all about you. If you’re working for the president, it’s not like anyone’s going to blame you anyway. They always blame the president for anything that goes wrong. Anything. It’s not fair, it sucks, and your stupid know-it-all objections really aren’t helping.
In order to illustrate the sort of decision-making process that I typically followed while president, which is something my publisher thinks people might be very interested in, let me give you a hypothetical example of a crisis and walk you through how I would resolve it. So, what’s a good hypothetical example of a crisis? Thinking. Okay, how about this: After years of brutal military dictatorship, the small African nation of Bugumba democratically elected the former opposition leader, Joseph Mbaba, as its president. Mbaba ruled increasingly autocratically, enriching his family and cronies at the expense of his desperately poor nation. In order to do that, he made deals with a number of international conglomerates, including some American ones, to exploit the country’s mineral wealth, in particular, its large deposits of cobalt, which is used in the manufacture of electronics, especially cell phones, and also solar panels, which are essential for a clean-energy future.
When he was campaigning for office, Joseph Mbaba pledged that he would serve no more than two four-year terms, but now, as the end of his second term approaches, he is showing no signs of preparing to preside over the election of a successor. Instead, he has been making inflammatory speeches about the threat posed by the People’s Revolutionary Front (PRF), which has led an insurgency of poor farmers and herders in the eastern part of the country, where Bugumba shares a border with the Republic of Zongia, which is the regional power and believed to be the patron of the PRF. All signs indicate that Mbaba will declare martial law, cancel the election, and rule by decree.
So what should a president do in this situation? The United States has no vital national interests in the region, but it does have business interests, and those people are probably going to look to protect their investment at all costs, even if it means propping up the sort of dictator who dissolves his enemies in acid as their families are forced to watch. Are those American businesses with interests in Bugumba donors? Do they have good lobbyists? These are factors that would unquestionably play a role in our cash-crazy political system. Are either of the combatants radical Islamists? Well, you know what? They d-mn well might be. That’s the sort of wrinkle that is always turning up in these kinds of international situations. Mbaba has probably started catering to Muslims and begun allowing them to enforce Sharia law. That’s exactly the kind of thing he would do for entirely cynical reasons (although he claims to be a follower of “all” religions, it’s hard to believe a guy like that believes in anything other than whatever gods support stealing, rape, and hideous public architecture).
The PRF, on the other hand, are Christians or animists, so I guess we would naturally want to support them. Trust me, f-cking evangelicals in this country love to make a big fuss about Christians being persecuted elsewhere. I guess it makes them feel like big-shot tough guys and victims at the same time. But frankly, I’ve pretty much given up trying to get into the heads of those a-sholes. Generally speaking, though, the United States isn’t big on supporting the violent overthrow of governments, even in a place like Africa, where the residents regard that as the normal state of affairs. The thinking is that world leaders, especially the ones on the crooked and violent end of the spectrum (on the opposite end, for example, of Sweden), might be hesitant to sign treaties and let us open military bases in their country if they thought we might change our minds all of a sudden and let them have their genitals cut off and stuffed into their empty eye sockets by a violent mob. Moreover, the State Department is being their usual bitchy, sanctimonious selves about the regional and continental balance of power, and they don’t want to tip things in Zongia’s favor. Does that mean the State Department is going to tell you what you should do? Uh-uh. No way. Foggy Bottom, as I call it, is a great place to go if you want to find some new problems, but I would bet doubloons to donuts that the secretary of state and his State Department have never come up with a single g-ddamned solution in their entire two-hundred-plus year history.
So you see how hard it is to be president? Plus, maybe there are some American hostages, probably being held by the PRF. They don’t give a sh-t, so they’d probably grab a few hostages if they came across some. And the thing about these hostages is that it often seems like they were the kind of people who were basically asking for it by going somewhere they weren’t supposed to in the “spirit of adventure” or to save the endangered mountain tortoise or because they are self-appointed “journalists” who work for a website you’ve never heard of. Still, you can’t just write them off, much as you might want to. You have to express concern and have your picture taken with their fat, trailer park parents, at least one of whom, I absolutely promise you, will be wearing an American flag sweater and have eccentric facial hair in a style that hasn’t been se
en since the Napoleonic Wars.
By the way, while you’re assessing all these variables or, for that matter, just trying to figure out the basics, like where the h-ll Bugumba is on the map or whether Kululu or Rumpenda is the capital (it’s Kululu), you’re trying to deal with everything else a president has to do to keep the country running and advance her (or his!) agenda, not to mention all the ceremonial h-rseshit like state dinners, meeting with Girl Scouts and sports teams, or lighting the White House menorah on Menorah Day.
That’s why presidents hate crises. Because there are never any good, easy solutions, but doing nothing isn’t an option (even though it would probably be the best thing to do in almost every case) because then you look weak and indecisive. As soon as you look weak, those hyenas—the general public—will jump all over you and eat you alive.
What would I do in the hypothetical Bugumba situation given above? It’s difficult to say. I’ve done such a good job of constructing a realistic scenario for you that it’s hard to figure a way out. To tell you truth, I really don’t like Joseph Mbaba, and I think that making a deal with him, even if it preserves the region’s delicate balance of power, will just embolden him. Even if he distances himself from the Islamists now, he’ll go running right back to them the next time there’s trouble. Sooner or later, the a-shole is going to start a real shooting war and cause a massive refugee crisis, which, of all the different kinds of crisis, I can assure you is the absolute worst.