Reforming the Establishment

quotes from "Patching the Presidency" by David Brooks, New York Times editorial, Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005:

Ronald Reagan hired David Abshire as a special counselor halfway into Reagan's second term to help recover from the Iran-contra scandal. In his new book, "Saving the Reagan Presidency," Abshire said he had four main tasks:
1. "puncture the bubble of intellectual conformity that marks every administration by breaking the spell of groupthink and self-serving spin"
2. iron out internal "feuds and tensions" between executive branch departments
3. "repair relations with Capitol Hill"
4. help "kick-start a new policy agenda" by bringing in new staff, having Reagan take responsibility for failure in a contrite public speech ("his approval rating jumped nine points" afterward), and launching new domestic and foreign policy initiatives ("including the speech calling on Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall")

Brooks says that "every president since Grant has had a miserable second term," primarily because working in the White House is "psychologically corrosive." "There is a tendency to curl inward under the barrage of criticism, much of it ill informed. The sheer busyness of life becomes enveloping and isolating, and slowly an un-earned disdain builds for those who are not in the bubble."

After he left office, Calvin Coolidge wrote: "The political mind is the product of men in public life who have been twice spoiled. They have been spoiled with praise and they have been spoiled with abuse. With them, nothing is natural, everything is artificial."

According to Brooks, the president needs to bring in "like-minded but objective people who haven't been molded by five years in power, ... people more akin to peers. (The White House staff is too emotionally dependent on the president to be brutally honest with him.) It means humbly acknowledging, as Peggy Noonan wrote, that change has to start with oneself. As Lincoln showed, humility is the only antidote to the corruptions of the insane life-style of the presidency."