Saturday, November 29, 2008

What Does Obama Think He's Doing?

David Brooks (on PBS, with Mark Shields) marvels at the dazzling arrray of economic talent on hand for the launching of the Obama administration and wonders how the president expects to keep them all in line.

I don't know how in detail, but I think I know what Obama has in mind. He's remembering the last time he presided over a flock of turkeys, i.e., in his only other adult management job, as editor of the Harvard Law Review.

My guess is that what is true for many law reviews is true for Harvard: the one who gets the top job is not the most incandescent brain, but rather the safest, surest, most responsible manager. By published accounts, I gather this may be a fair description of Obama's job at Harvard, so it's readily conceivable that this is the model he has in mind today.

It's also been observed--perhaps by Brooks, among others--that a question remains whether Obama really wants to lead or whether he intends to stand aloof and let the big brains duke it out. This might well work at law review. It's quite a different matter to see it tried on the presidency. Roosevelt, to take a favorite example, was famously adept at managing conflicting personalities, or at least at playing them off one against another. But Roosevelt virtually also had a view, a goal, a program, and efforts at people management can be understood as a circuitous path to one or another predetermined goal. How it works when there is no goal--that's a model I suspect we've never really seen.

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