One big thing Barack Obama has learned
about being president? The job isn't as powerful as you might expect.
In a new interview with Bill Simmons at
GQ, which is well worth reading in full, Obama explains that he
"didn't fully appreciate" how "decentralized power is" in
the US political system until he took office.
That is, to get anything done, he had to spend a ton of his time
trying to persuade other people. Here's what he told Simmons:
OBAMA: What I
didn’t fully appreciate, and nobody can appreciate until they’re in the
position, is how decentralized power is in this system. When you’re in the seat
and you’re seeing the housing market collapse and you are seeing unemployment
skyrocketing and you have a sense of what the right thing to do is, then you
realize, "Okay, not only do I have to persuade my own party, not only do I
have to prevent the other party from blocking what the right thing to do is,
but now I can anticipate this lawsuit, this lobbying taking place, and this
federal agency that technically is independent, so I can’t tell them what to
do. I’ve got the Federal Reserve, and I’m hoping that they do the right
thing—and by the way, since the economy now is global, I’ve got to make sure
that the Europeans, the Asians, the Chinese, everybody is on board." A lot of the work is not just identifying
the right policy but now constantly building these ever shifting coalitions to
be able to actually implement and execute and get it done.
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