Locked in the Cabinet - A look inside the Whitehouse

[Missing User]

[quote]Steven Chu is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, a brilliant innovator whose research fills several all-but-incomprehensible paragraphs of a Wikipedia entry that spans his achievements in single-molecule physics, the slowing of atoms through the use of lasers and the invention of something called an “optical tweezer.” President Barack Obama even credits Chu with solving the 2010 Gulf oil spill, claiming that Chu strolled into BP’s office and “essentially designed the cap that ultimately worked.” With rare exception, Chu is the smartest guy in the room, and that includes the Cabinet Room, which he occupied uneasily as secretary of energy from 2009 to the spring of 2013.
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Two presidents later, the Cabinet is a swarm of 23 people that includes 15 secretaries and eight other Cabinet-rank officers. And yet never has the job of Cabinet secretary seemed smaller.
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“We are completely marginalized … until the shit hits the fan,” says one former Cabinet deputy secretary, summing up the view of many officials I interviewed. “If your question is: Did the president rely a lot on his Cabinet as a group of advisers? No, he didn’t,” says former Obama Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.
Little wonder, then, that Obama has called the group together only rarely, for what by most accounts are not much more than ritualistic team-building exercises: According to CBS News White House reporter Mark Knoller, the Cabinet met 19 times in Obama’s first term and four times in the first 10 months of his second term. That’s once every three months or so—about as long as you can drive around before you’re supposed to change your oil.
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Obama, many of his associates now concede, never really intended to be pushed out of his comfort zone. While he personally recruited stars such as Clinton, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, most other picks for his first Cabinet were made by his staff, with less involvement from the president. “[Bill] Clinton spent almost all of his time picking the Cabinet at the expense of the White House staff; Obama made the opposite mistake,” says a person close to both presidents.
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Who’s to say he was wrong? The people closest to the president point out that his approach has won him two elections and helped him cope with a succession of major crises—all while he signed major pieces of legislation into law, including the biggest economic stimulus in American history, financial reform and the health care act that’s so associated with his name. “We were drinking out of a fire hose, but all things considered I think we struck the right balance,” says Gibbs, his first press secretary.

Yet Obama’s unwillingness to empower his Cabinet has not been without consequences. To many I spoke with, it is both a reflection and a cause of the administration’s lurching, improvisational character. The decision to muzzle the Cabinet for all these years means the president now has fewer seasoned surrogates to make his case in public. Putting a premium on political savvy over creativity has made it harder to generate new proposals. Limiting the number of new voices in Obama’s inner circle has given a cramped
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These are just excerpts from the FIRST PAGE of FIVE
[url]http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2013/11/locked-in-the-cabinet-99374.html?hp=t1[/url]

A fabulous read about how the whitehouse is ran

[A B.A. Survivor]

It seems to me like Obama started his own cabinet because the actual Cabinet was too damn difficult to deal with.

[Elecbullet]

[QUOTE=A B.A. Survivor;42860928]It seems to me like Obama started his own cabinet because the actual Cabinet was too damn difficult to deal with.[/QUOTE]

a few presidents, like, never talked to the real cabinet.

was it Nixon who didn't see some members for months at a time?