Posted by
Tim Blessing on Tuesday, February 26, 2008 7:18:13 PM
The US Political System is an organization of massive complexity. Such anybody who say's they can order the other actors around is smoking dope.
For a President, that mean's raising money, getting the nomination, winning the Presidential Race, organizing an administration, and hopefully pushing his or her agenda through the both houses of congress, getting implemented by the bureaucracy, satisfactorily adjucated by the courts, without resistance by state governments, getting the press to buy into it, and ultimately the public to buy into it is an enormous task.
Even Lyndon Johnson stalled in 1967 because of the unpopularity of the Vietnam War.
One or more policies is going to cause friction with some player in the system.
Reagan and Kennedy were stellar speechmakers, but Kennedy never got traction and after Reagan's first year the momentum slowed down dramatically.
Each House of Congress has its own rules, timetables, and individual memers with agendas.
Each house must come to agreement with the other house on a combined version of a bill.
Rather than discoursing on the complexity of the system its better to read David Stockman's book The Triumph of Politics to get an overview of what a President faces in getting his program through the system.
Tip O'Neil wrote a good book on the system, but only 3 times in 50 years of politics did he lead a transformation and those were limited.