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No, it is actually a bad thing for handlers and bureaucrats to be doing as they please and shows that there is a lack of electoral accountability because then the handlers can bypass the president. The president is the guy who is elected to actually decide, not merely to delegate, to direct his advisors, listen to them and reject their views when he disagrees with them which actually always happens on various issues. To actually also change the team if they show themselves incompetent.
If not the president who is actually deciding this? Does one handler dominate the rest? Blackmail? Who exactly runs things? A clique of advisors? These are genuinely problems and you ought not to so easily disregard them.
Of course when it comes to people running departments this includes people who have never been elected like the permanent neocons. The Nuland's and those that replace them. These unelected Bureaucrats then can more easilly bypass the control of the public which ideally happens by electing someone.
Just by the act of electing a politician, doesn't mean a political party has carte blanche to do as it pleases.
Since the presidents are pressured to select people by powerful organized interests to get elected, and there are organizations with agendas that can and will go against common good and voter's preference, there is in fact room for disagreement as we saw aplenty with the Trump administration. But even among President's not pressured in this manner they can select advisors with conflicting outlooks or who they disagree with in part, but think might have some things of value to say.
If you are fine with the president being a decorative item, and handlers being in charge then indeed you have changed the system to a much democratic one, and much less transparent and accountable one. One where the permanent deep state becomes more powerful. Or maybe revealed something about what was already happening.
Just downplaying the whole thing as democracy working as it ought to, is excusing something that is a genuine problem. And in fact the lack of accountability and transparency of the rulers is a slippery slope to worse unaccountable tyranny and corruption and bad decision making.
If some of the decisions taken by the late Biden administration on Ukraine and elsewhere end up catastrophic, who is going to take accountability for them? Who exactly among the people in American goverment by their position close in power have been made the people in charge?
It is the job of the president to steer things in line with the common good of the people and get the bureaucrats in line. This applies for any administration because of the issues I elaborated above of disagreements, need of leadership, the fact that who knows who dominates in such cases, electoral accountability which also includes people who take bad decisions losing their job, and of course the permanent swamp of certain kind of groups with common agenda marching on institutions whose agenda can be unpopular among the public, such as the neocons. Weak and diminished presidents can lead to some factions who find it more difficult to get elected but are influential (including with said presidents) to act more brazenly, arrogantly and push for more. While a president who lets say is 60% a neocon, might be willing to disregard them and care maybe a little about the public's disagreements with said agenda. Just one example but there was in fact some conflict of this nature during the Trump administration and even to an extend with the Obama administration.
There is in fact a difference between having some vacations, and being there when needed and mentally acute, and being mentally diminished from your role. But certainly it is quite possible that right wing politicians were too asleep at the wheel and they failed to impose on themselves.
Still, it is actually a genuine weakness of especially right wing governments that they a) went too much along with the same agendas promoted by the left and failed to do differently, especially on issues that don't have to do with big donor approved economic differences. b) We have Nixon's leaked tapes that shows a discontinuity between his personal views and the more left wing way he governed. In addition to their failure to govern in a way that sufficiently was different, they failed to restrain sufficiently the kind of people who marched on institutions and to change the leanings of the people running institutions. So there is an even greater need there for the presidents to be involved since there is in fact a difference between the deep state and what kind of policies are prioritized and what the public and even more so the base who votes for a president wants.
I don't think there's ever been a President intelligent enough to actually do this across the span of domains. It's always been a job of delegating.
Who exactly run things in any major power structure? Never a single person. Your complaint is so breathtakingly naive. Visit any Fortune 100 boardroom and see how they do it. If anything, the President gets a leg up on most of them since he gets to select his entire set of advisors fresh. Of course those people wield influence over the Prez and over each other: they are positively selected for that!
Of course there are genuine problems, but those are problems inherent to the leadership of any large institution.
Indeed. And they can't actually do that without delegating a broad swath of authority to their cabinet and advisors because there is simply too much, even for a non-diminished President, to possibly try to steer.
There is no democratic accountability in the US political system between elections! None. Never has been! This was a specific intentional choice of the Founders as compared with the contemporaneous systems in Europe in which elections could be called at any time.
The only democratic recourse we have is every 2 years to vote new people into government and the back pressure this causes on officials that don't want to tank their chances.
At best, what I take from this is that Presidents should make a habit of pre-announcing their high level appointments before the election so that voters can better assess the entire package of leadership they are voting for, rather than after.
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