The Gatekeepers: Why the White House Chief of Staff Matters

I think that we can stipulate that experience and competence matters in most things. And while you may not like all of their decisions or products, we wouldn’t want a neophyte to run Goldman Sachs, or General Motors, or Boeing or Apple,

Yet in many cases that's exactly what we’ve done with the entirety of the executive branch of the US government. And no, I don't mean the men who have been elected President. But rather the White House Chiefs of Staff.  Traditionally their
job has been to focus the President, to execute policy, to engage in Washington diplomacy and to deal with both the minutia of who uses the White House tennis courts, and at the same time have a 30,000 foot view of how America is governed.

In the modern era there have been 17 White House Chiefs of Staff, and all of them participated in a new book The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency, by esteemed journalist and documentary filmmaker Chris Whipple.

My conversation with Chris Whipple:

What does the GOP do now?

After its loss in the Presidential election of 2012 the Republican Party felt it needed to do its own after action report. In the end, it was determined that all was basically ok and that the party only needed to broaden its tent and do a little better with Hispanic voters. Enter Jeb Bush.

How did that work out?  Not so well!   What we are seeing today is a total repudiation of a Republican establishment that for 40 years has held onto many of its voters with cultural, racial and religious issues, while delivering nothing of economic value.  For the GOP, today the chickens have come home to roost and we understand exactly "what’s the matter with Kansas."

Covering all of this and telling the story from those first days after the 2012 election is BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins in his new book The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party's Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House.

My conversation with McKay Coppins:

Obama's Foreign Policy Advice

Today we are starting to see the first outlines of the Obama foreign policy.  As we try and understand it, perhaps the foreign policy writings of Obama's new Deputy Chief of Staff, Mona Sutphen could be helpful.  About twelve months ago she published a book entitled The Next American Century: How the U.S. Can Thrive as Other Powers Rise

In it, she lays out the case that the United States must get its own house in order, making sure that American children can compete, American workers can adjust, America's military remains cutting-edge, and American diplomacy entices rather than alienates. While America must be prepared for the possibility that a hostile superpower may one day emerge, it has to be careful not to turn a distant, uncertain threat into an immediate one. Washington should welcome the pivotal powers into a vigorous international order to share the burden of solving pressing global problems of peace, climate, health, and growth.

My conversation with Mona Sutphen: