Harvard: Millions of Americans "Without any visible means of support"

The Harvard Kennedy School of Government offers an interesting insight about poverty in the US. Excerpts of an interview with author Kathrin Edin on the results of 1996 welfare reform are here: "There are big winners and big losers. At about the same time we reformed the welfare system, we made work pay better than welfare by implementing the earned income tax credit (EITC). This credit ensures that if you are a low wage worker, especially a single mom with no other earner in the household, the government pays you at tax time; you don’t pay the government. Families are getting thousands of dollars that supplement their income when they file their taxes each spring.

The problem with this solution is that it’s based on the assumption that everyone can work full time, full year. Because of what’s happening in the economy, lots of people can’t sustain full time, full year work. Then there are sick kids and disabled relatives to care for, very low human capital, and other reasons people can’t maintain a full time participation in the labor market. So there are also big losers. Whereas full time, full year workers who used to be on welfare are now probably better off than they’ve been in a long time – largely because of the tax credit – those who aren’t able to sustain full time work are possibly worse off than they’ve ever been before. At any given time roughly a third of people who used to be on the welfare rolls are without any visible means of support. We know very little about how those people or their children are doing."

Populist Commercials and Oil Money

Hillary Clinton spent April 25, 2008, in Indiana, and gave a speech about economic issues in Bloomington. You can see a clip of it in the video below:

Clinton also broadcasted a populist commercial about the soaring prices of gasoline, an issue very important to Midwest voters. In this spot (see below) she calls for "suspending the gas tax this Summer." 

However, this is the same proposal offered by Senator McCain in a recent speech and is generally considered a gift to the oil companies (it's not clear whether the details of the two plans are identical). An examination of campaign contributions by individuals from the oil and gas industry by the Center for Responsive Politics reveals that McCain has been the largest recipient of their largesse and Clinton comes second. 

So far, individuals from the oil and gas industry have given McCain more than $404,000, while Clinton received $309,363 and Obama $222,309. In fact, nearly 70 percent of the industry’s donations in the 2008 White House race have gone to McCain and other Republicans, which is no surprise knowing that the Bush administration has been a figurehead for the oil industry during the last 7 years.

It's somehow bizarre, instead, that Clinton would attack Obama on this issue, when he is the least connected to oil interests of the three candidates.

The Day After

Pennsylvania spoke, and the two Democratic candidates are more or less in the situation of the two Civil War armies on the morning of July 4, 1863, at Gettysburg (which, by the way, was in Pennsylvania).

The question, today, is: "Does the never-ending battle for the democratic nomination alter the dynamics of this campaign?" It might, but the fundamentals remain on the Democratic side, whoever is the nominee (and Marco Polo remains strongly convinced that it will be Barack Obama). We think significant that at this low point of Democratic Party's internecine war, polls show Barack Obama with a statistically insignificant two-point advantage over John McCain, 47% to 45%. During last month, it was McCain leading Obama by similarly close margins: at this point the two candidates are tied in the preference of voters. In a match-up with Hillary Clinton, McCain maintains the advantage: yesterday, 47% of the vote, while Clinton would get 45% (all data coming from Rasmussen).

This almost perfect parity between Obama and McCain is apparent in the Electoral College, too, and this is what will really matter in November. So far, the race remains a toss-up: the Democrats lead in states with 200 Electoral Votes while the GOP has the advantage in states with 189 ones. When States that “lean” toward one of the two camps are added, the Democrats lead 260 to 240 (the magic number to enter the White House is 270).

All this means that John McCain, at the moment when Democrats are engaged in a dogfight, and mainstream media are romancing him, is not capable of obtaining a significant lead over Obama, and has only a modest advantage over Clinton. Why is that?

The only reasonable explanation is that McCain is the Republican standard bearer in a year when all the the strong currents of American politics favor the Democrats. The economic crisis and the social tragedy of million of people losing their home will be on the forefront of voters' concerns in November. The same can be said for the Iraq war, that vanished from the TV screen, but not from the mind of citizens: two-thirds of them still want the troops home ASAP.

Much will depend on the two Conventions, but in the Fall most Democratic voters will go back to the party candidate, no matter his or her name. Today, only 74% of Democratic say they would support Obama but American politics has been polarized for 30 years, and the two parties has never been so far apart as during George W. Bush's era. Three out of four citizens think that the Country is "on the wrong track." This trend will favor heavily the Democrats and it will matter a lot in November.

The DUEL Will Go On And On...

Big Trucks, Big Duel in this cartoon of the "St. Louis Post-Dispatch": the media are enthusiastic about the chance of a fight going all the way to the Convention in Denver, at the end of August. American voters seem more skeptical, and a bit tired. In any event, Obama still has a solid lead in the delegates' count: 1713 against 1586.

Zero Tolerance Comes To Italy

There has been much talk in Italy on the necessity of adopting a "Zero Tolerance" policy toward crime and illegal immigration, talk fueled by the results of general elections on April 13-14, and by a number of violent crimes, particularly against women.

It is striking to note that this fashion of politicians willing to show they are "tough" on crime arrives in Italy at the very moment when in the US many start to challenge the "broken-windows" theory of crime, which is the basis of the so-called Zero Tolerance criminal policy.

It is enough to go to a mainstream media website to find fresh news like this: "Innocent man free after 26 years in prison." And, of course, there are literally hundreds of cases of innocent people executed, or still in the Death Row.

But facts are never enough to have a theory abandoned, and so it is important to show that the theory that has revolutionized policing in the United States and abroad, with its emphasis on policies that crack down on disorderly conduct and aggressively enforce misdemeanor laws is baseless. Although the broken-windows theory has been around for nearly thirty years (it started in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1970s) it has never been empirically verified. Indeed, existing data suggest that it is false. Conceptually, it rests on unexamined categories of "law abiders" and "disorderly people" and of "order" and "disorder," which have no intrinsic reality, independent of the techniques of punishment that a particular society adopts.

How did the new order-maintenance approach to criminal justice--a theory without solid empirical support, a theory that is conceptually flawed and results in aggressive detentions of tens of thousands of our fellow citizens--come to be one of the leading criminal justice theories embraced by progressive reformers, policymakers, and academics throughout the world? The problem is that it appears plausible, it offers "something" to show to citizens, and is highly symbolic: politicians can use it to build a "macho image" and this usually is good in competitive elections. Absent a more complex thinking, and serious research, the media and lobbies interested in a repressive policy easily prevail in pushing opportunistic politicians in this direction. The fact that it is a costly and ineffective policy is never seriously debated.

How ABC Set A Trap To Question Obama's Patriotism

Wednesday night there was the debate in Pennsylvania, considered an important moment before the democratic primary of April 22. Many observers remarked how silly were the questions asked by the two moderators (see, here and here, for example).

However, most pundits failed to note that the question by a member of the public on why Barack Obama doesn't usually wear a flag pin on his jacket was planted by ABC, which hosted the debate, and was in no way a "spontaneous" question surging from the heart of a citizen. What happened was that ABC tracked down Nash McCabe, the woman who asked "I want to know if you believe in the American flag" after she was quoted in a New York Times story about white voters in small-town Latrobe, Pa., being against Obama.

We know that because Joshua Micah Marshall's blog had this: "In this case, the producers put the producers' question into the mouth of a voter, because it made the question seem more authentic, as if people care in large numbers about the flag pin question. That is, the woman was used to legitimize the traditional media's focus on these frankly trivial and, yes, distracting issues."

It may well be that Gibson's and Stephanopoulos's unethical behavior was simply part of the traditional media's focus on trivial and distracting issues, but one might wonder if the long relationship between Stephanopoulos and the Clintons (he worked for Bill Clinton's campaign in 1992 and at the White House later) has really nothing to do with his obvious hostility toward Barack Obama and the plot to question his patriotism. 
In any event, the attack misfired: the latest Rasmussen Reports survey in the state shows Hillary Clinton with 47% of the vote and Barack Obama with 44%. This poll was conducted AFTER the nationally televised debate between the candidates. Last Monday, before the ABC' show, Clinton was leading Obama 50% to 41%.

Hillary Clinton, Religion and The White Working Class

Very often, innocent remarks by a candidate are constructed as "major gaffes," or even statements that are "deeply offensive" to a particular group, or to all American voters. This was the case with Obama's words last week in Los Angeles: "You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years, and nothing has replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Quite unremarkable, to say the least: there are thousands of studies about the "bitterness" of white working class, and the libraries of Political Studies Departments overflow with books about religion, and its role in American Politics. Not so, if you are involved in a dogfight with an opponent who will spin your speech into an "attack" against religion, or at least, against "people of faith." This is precisely what Hillary Clinton did in this video, borrowing another page from Karl Rove's campaign textbook in order to accuse Obama of being an "elitist."

The fact that Barack Obama was a community organizer in South Side Chicago during the very years spent by Hillary Clinton on the board of Wal-Mart should say something about her cynicism, but apparently her determination to win, even at the cost of destroying her party, has no bounds. However, as the Cook Political Report observed, "For Clinton, the odds are the incident is too late to save her candidacy. But more [Obama's faux pas] would increase her chances of drawing enough support in the April 22 Pennsylvania primary to justify, or even guarantee, her continued run. There are likely to be more gaffes for each of the candidates as this campaign progresses, but in a race like this, each one is exceedingly costly and, cumulatively, can become fatal." The issue of Religion and American working class was the topic of an interesting piece by Timothy Noah in Slate magazine. We shall return to this soon, but first have a look at what we wrote on February 28 here.

Benedetto XVI, George W. Bush and How To Get Through the Week

I borrow here the beginning of an interesting piece by Christopher Hitchens in Slate magazine because it seems to have some relevance to the Italian situation, too. "The visit of his holiness the pope to the United States this week," writes Hitchens, "will be an occasion for all kinds of manifestation of deference and servility from politicians and from the press. There will also be the usual speculation about the growth of a specifically or distinctively American Catholicism [a kind of] of cafeteria Catholicism, by which the faithful pick and choose among the doctrines that do and do not appeal to them, has long been understood. It was Joseph Ratzinger's role, when he was the right-hand man and enforcer of the last pope, to recall the flock to a more traditional and orthodox version of the faith. The chief interest of this trip, at least for Roman Catholics, will be to see how explicitly he addresses himself to a flock that is too used to making up its own à la carte rules. Meanwhile, all this piety and ceremony is a bit of a bore and a waste of media space for the large majority of us who are still not Roman Catholics. How should we get through the week?"

Well, how should we get through the next FIVE YEARS, when deference and servility will be the mark of all political forces present in the Italian Parliament?

Sins, Bad Memory and The Future of The Country

David Brooks, a New York Times columnist I'm not particularly fond of, made a good point in his recent colum about our "Bad Memory Century." He wrote that "International relations experts will notice that great powers can be defined by their national forgetting styles. Americans forget their sins. Russians forget their weaknesses. The French forget that they’ve forgotten God."

While I have the feeling that the French survive very well even if they forgot that they’ve forgotten God, I wonder if a "Chosen People," (or ANY people, for that matter) can really thrive when they forget their sins. "Sins" means errors against humanity, compassion, and care for the common good: unfortunately, they have the bad habit of catching you sooner or later, often when you think that "forgetting" them was the functional equivalent of "erasing" them.

Americans, for example, did commit a number of sins in Vietnam, and sprayed vast areas with toxic products like Agent Orange, indifferent to the consequences. This caused the birth of thousand of handicapped children, born without arms, or severely brain-damaged. But it also provoked a number of deaths among American troops, many because of cancers that stroke years later, as it was the case with Admiral Elmo Zumwalt's son (as Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Zumwalt was responsible for the order of spraying Agent Orange over the Vietnamese jungle).

In the 1920s, American bankers and businessmen did commit a number of sins against common sense, and brought financial havoc to Wall Street, a disaster that was only repaired by Franklin Roosevelt's administration in the 1930s. As Eric Hobsbawm wrote, the XX Century ended early, in 1989; a few years later we entered the Bad Memory Century, with the Clinton administration promoting a financial deregulation that was later triumphantly completed by George W. Bush.

This, and nothing else, was the source of the "subprime mortgages" catastrophe: Bad Memory about bad financial practices.

Unfortunately, all Presidential candidates this year seem have the same trouble of their fellow citizens in overcoming Bad Memory and proposing to Americans the effort to recover the memory of past errors and sins.

Is John McCain A Strong Candidate?

Polls give today John McCain with a statistically insignificant one-point advantage over Barack Obama, 46% to 45%. Yesterday, it was Obama leading McCain by that same statistically insignificant margin (it is important to understand that 46-45 may mean any result between 49 Obama and 42 McCain, or 43 Obama v. 48 McCain). In a match-up with Hillary Clinton, McCain would obtain 48% of the vote while Clinton would get 42%.
This almost perfect parity between the two main candidates is reflected in the balance of power in the Electoral College, which is what really matters in November. There, the race remains a toss-up: Democrats lead in states with 190 Electoral Votes while the GOP has the advantage in states with 189. When States that “lean” toward one of the two camps are added, the Democrats lead 243 to 240 (the magic number to enter the White House is 270).
All this means that John McCain, at the moment when Democrats are engaged in a dogfight, and mainstream media are all sweetness toward the Senator from Arizona, is not capable of obtaining a significant lead over Obama, and has only a modest advantage over Clinton. What is the reason of this relative weakness?
The only explanation is that McCain is the Republican candidate in a year when all the the strong currents of American politics favor the Democrats. The economic crisis and the social tragedy of million of people losing their home will be on the forefront of voters' concerns in November. The same can be said for the Iraq war, that vanished from the TV screen, but not from the mind of citizens: two-thirds still want the troops home ASAP.
After the Convention, if Obama will adopt Bill Clinton's 1992 slogan "It's the Economy, stupid!" that will be enough for the Democrats to win.

Even The New York Times Realized That...

It's not by chance that the New York Times is nicknamed "The Gray Lady," giving the newspaper the reputation of being serious, well-mannered, and a bit boring. On 42° Street, it took a couple of weeks to recognize the obvious: the counting of Democratic delegates shows that Hillary Clinton has no real chance to snatch the nomination. "Trailing by more than 160 pledged delegates — those chosen in state primaries or caucuses — Mrs. Clinton has counted on Superdelegates to help her overtake Mr. Obama with a late surge before the party’s convention in August" wrote John Harwood yesterday. "The party’s rules for proportional allocation make it highly difficult for her to erase Mr. Obama’s pledged delegate lead, even if she sweeps the final 10 contests. (...) Yet Mrs. Clinton’s once formidable lead among Superdelegates who have announced preferences has shrunk to 34 by the Obama campaign count." Even if the pool of remaining uncommitted Superdelegates is around 330, many of them will support the candidate who prevailed in their home state, and that means an advantage to Obama, as we predicted on March 26, here. 

The coldness of the "Supers" is understandable: they are politicians in good standing, and can read the numbers of the popular vote so far (advantage: Obama). They can read the polls, too, and Gallup tells us today that "Barack Obama now leads Hillary Clinton by a statistically significant margin, 52% to 43%." Same verdict at Rasmussen's, which gives Obama over the 50-percent-mark for the fifth consecutive day: "Obama now attracts 51% of the vote while Clinton earns 41%. Obama leads by five points among Democrats and by a two-to-one margin among unaffiliated voters." In other words, while Hillary has zero chances of capturing the nomination, how long her campaign will go on is another matter. According to well-respected Cook Political Report, "Generally speaking, presidential candidates don't decide to drop out because they lose primaries and caucuses; they decide when their donors have stopped writing checks and their campaigns run out of money. Unless Clinton wins Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina and a few other places by landslide margins, which is very unlikely, her donors will stop giving and her campaign will grind to a halt."

When Life Imitates Art... It's Not Pretty

John Grisham's latest novel, "The Appeal," was released on January 29, 2008, and is climbing fast the bestseller list. It tells the tale of a Supreme Court race in Mississippi, where a sitting justice is targeted for defeat by business interests. During the campaign, ads accuse the incumbent of being soft on crime and being too tough on business. The stakes are high: the election results could tip the balance of the court to the conservatives. On April 1, 2008, a group of business interests in Wisconsin was able to unseat Justice Louis Butler by launching a campaign of negative ads. A key ad accused Butler of having been the "deciding vote" in a Court decision that resulted "in the release of a sexual predator." But the offender was never released. Another ad from a conservative group, aired 526 times, accused Butler of overturning a murder conviction despite overwhelming evidence of guilt. Problem: the Court based its ruling on new DNA evidence that undercut the prosecution's case.

Looking at the facts, one has the feeling that Grisham's book was used as a campaign manual in Wisconsin: in "The Appeal," a direct-mail letter accused the incumbent of being responsible for setting a child molester free, while the molester escaped from a local jail and died long before the court campaign. In Wisconsin, as a watchdog group affiliated with the Annenberg School of Communication revealed here, "the sex offender remains in the same treatment facility where he was confined when his case went to the Supreme Court." The challenger supported by business interests, Mike Gableman, won 51% to 49%.

In most States, justices are elected, and the campaigns increasingly politicized. Who sits on the highest courts determines where billions of dollars go: to corporations and insurance companies or compensation for those who have been injured. No surprise that, when the stakes are so high, real-life conspirators get into action, even if that means taking a page from John Grisham.

Are intra-party feuds fatal in November?

Media pundits look restlessly for political events similar to the harshly contested Democratic race in this year's primaries; the 1976 elections (on the Republican side) and the 1980 competition between Edward Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, on the Democratic side, are often cited in the search for historical lessons that might be applied to the present.

However, former US Ambassador Dennis Kux has another example in mind: "I think that all these people are just not old enough to remember the primary that is most similar to the ongoing one; the Republican race of 1952," he told Valentina Pasquali at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, one of the most respected think tanks in Washington DC.

In 1952, Senator Robert Taft, son of former President William Taft and leader of the Republican "Old Guard," tried to capture the GOP nomination against Dwight Eisenhower, the war hero that wasn't even affiliated with the party. The Republican bosses decided that, after 20 years of Roosevelt-Truman domination, they wanted to win the White House at any cost (what happened on the Democratic side was covered here).

Just like today, the incumbent was out of the race, since President Harry Truman had announced he would not seek a second full term (although an exception for him was included in the XXII Constitutional amendment). Just like it might happen this year, the race between Eisenhower and Taft went all the way to the convention and was only decided by delegate-count. Moreover, just like in 2008, a fight over the standing of some delegations happened in 1952, when accusations of rigging in the primaries in Texas and Georgia heated up the convention and gave rise to a litigation over the seating of delegates.

"So many observers keep repeating that the clash between Obama and Clinton will end up damaging the party in November by creating divisions among the democratic voters," Ambassador Kux told Valentina Pasquali. "I really don't agree."

In 1952, despite the prolonged battle inside the party, Dwight Eisenhower went on to take the White House in a landslide, with an 11% victory margin over his Democratic opponent Adlai Stevenson II.

Clinton goes to Jay Leno's show to defuse issue of truthfulness

As we reported earlier this week, Clinton was attacked on the key issue of her truthfulness because of misleading statements made during a visit at George Washington University. Talking about a trip to Bosnia in 1996, Hillary had said that her plane landed "under sniper fire." Quite embarrassing, when footage of the event broadcasted by the networks revealed that there was no fire, and that she was welcomed by a red carpet and a young girl presenting her flowers. Satirical videos promptly appeared on You Tube (see this, for example).

The Senator from New York's skilled communication staff chose to cut short clumsy explanations, and sent her to Jay Leno's show, where she opened with a well-crafted one-liner: "I was worried I wasn't going to [arrive on time], I was pinned down by sniper fire." Leno's interruption, "Really!" made the audience laugh, she "admitted" her exaggerations, proved to be capable of self-irony and now the Clinton's campaign hopes the issue will fade. The (very serious) issues of the role of late-night shows in the American political process were first discussed in an excellent Salon article by Michael Scherer on Stephen Colbert two years ago, and now by  Russell L. Peterson's new book "Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy Into a Joke," below.

For those who thought the crisis was over...

US employers shed 80,000 jobs in March, in the latest sign that the US economy may be falling into recession, announced the BBC, quoting US Labor Department figures. The decline was the third consecutive monthly drop, and worse than market expectations of a 60,000 reduction.The jobless rate rose to 5.1% in March, the highest level since September 2005, and a rise from February's 4.8%. Federal Reserve boss Ben Bernanke warned earlier this week that the US economy faced the risk of recession. While the Labor Department said March's job losses were spread across the economy, the biggest cuts came in the construction sector, badly hit by the free fall in houses' prices.

In fact, the US housing downturn shows no sign of slowing: US house prices fell at an annual rate of 11.4% in January, according to the latest monthly Standard & Poor's/Case-Schiller index, the biggest decline in 21 years. This latest snapshot of the slump in the US property market was confirmed by the main US estate agents body, which said that prices fell 8.2% in February. 

Indianapolis, April 4, 1968

On April 4, 1968, forty years ago, Robert F. Kennedy was scheduled to give a campaign speech in Indianapolis, when news of the assassination of Martin Luther King reached him. Rejecting the advice of many advisors, Kennedy continued toward the ghetto playground where he was to give his speech, undeterred by a police warning that they could not provide him with protection if things got out of control. This video features the original sound of Bob Kennedy's remarks disclosing the death of Martin Luther King to an Afro-american crowd.

A VIDEO THAT WILL HAUNT HILLARY FOR A LONG TIME

In a single week, this ironic video posted by "Barely Political" (the nickname of "I Got a Crush on Obama" producer) collected 1.6 million hits on You Tube. Quite damaging for Clinton's reputation.

There would be hell in the party for a long time/5

Even if she is still ahead in Pennsylvania, it appears that Hillary Clinton, facing an uphill battle in the contest to collect enough delegates in the next primaries, is staking her chances to win the nomination on the fight to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations at the convention. Delegate from both States were disqualified because the local party organizations violated DNC rules related to the national schedule of primary elections. Hillary did not campaign there, but her name was the only one on the ballot, and therefore she would add some 300 delegates to the final count, if Michigan and Florida delegations were seated.

“I have no intention of stopping until we finish what we started and until we see what happens in the next ten contests and until we resolve Florida and Michigan,” she told the Washington Post. “And if we don't resolve it, we'll resolve it at the convention — that's what Credentials committees are for.”

It is doubtful that the Credentials committee, where Obama will have more members than Clinton, and where a majority of the 25 appointees by DNC Chairman Howard Dean will side with Obama, could accept Clinton's demand but she could require to vote out a minority report, meaning that both Democratic candidates could have their positions voted on by all seated convention delegates. The prospect of a convention that begins with a contentious vote on a “minority” or “majority” report is “the nightmare scenario," according to many Democratic party insiders. Whoever the candidate, a nomination obtained by a 51-49 margin would mean hell in the party for a long time, and the slimmest chance of winning in November. Such a split might tilt the balance of the election to John McCain (see previous posts 1 to 4, below). A different opinion, by former ambassador Dennis Kux, can be found in this post in From the Field.

WHAT A PRESIDENT SHOULD KNOW

Washington DC - "It would have been difficult four years ago to schedule a meeting with the President to discuss with him the fact that there were too many people in this country getting houses," says Marc Summerlin in response to a question on the crash of the housing market at the book launch of What a President Should Know, which he co-wrote with Lawrence B. Lindsey. "In retrospect this would have made perfect sense."
Marc Summerlin served as Deputy Director of the National Economic Council for President George W. Bush, while Lindsey was Director of the NEC. They both now work for the Lindsey Group, the economic advisory firm based in Washington DC that they co-founded.
Their book,  presented at the Council on Foreign Relations on Monday, offers an insider's look at the Oval Office: Through a review of the history of the office of the Presidency, the authors portray the constraints under which the Executive makes decisions. Summerlin and Lindsey also highlight the difficulties, even for the closest advisers, to have regular visitations with the President. With many competing issues that at all times require urgently the attention of the President, some necessarily end up to the sideline, often those that have longer-term effects.
The history of the architecture of the Oval Office itself stands as a symbol of how access to the President has been restricted through the decades.
The idea of the Oval Office was first conceived under Teddy Roosevelt and was finally built at the beginning of the Presidency of William Taft in 1909, in the shape of an oval precisely because it was the one that allowed for the largest number of doors to be added. Teddy Roosevelt wanted as many people as possible to enjoy direct, walk-in access to him.
Under the first "Imperial Presidency," as Summerlin described Franklin Roosevelt's three-term government of the United States, the West Wing - where the Executive meets - was moved and expanded, and the Oval Office was relocated to a side of the building with only one door opening onto it. "Such change was followed by the creation of the role of the Chief of Staff", said Summerlin at the Council on Foreign Relations, "that from then on strictly regulated access to the President," and with that the flow of information that made its way all the way up to the top.
Today, White House advisers have to fight among themselves to be able to see the President and documents containing important information must be signed by tens of people in order to make it to the desk of the Commander-in-Chief.
The most important advice that Summerlin, and Lindsey, would give the future President is to "truly reinforce those people that are advising him/her honestly, because it is hard to find such people."