The always interesting Cenk Uygur had a diary yesterday asking why we the people tolerate having a political operative like Karl Rove on our payroll ( Why is a Political Operative on the Government Payroll?). I take his point a little further, and ask why we should have anybody in the White House on our payroll.
Let's be clear on what we're complaining about. This is certainly not the first WH to have "Communications Directors" and varied and sundry PR flacks, all of whose sole job is to serve the Preznit's political welfare, feeding at the public trough.
I don't say this to be fair to this Preznit. "Life is not fair", as a former President to whom political life really was decidely not fair, once observed, and the crushing unfairness of life could not destroy a more deserving victim than the incumbent in Carter's old office. I point out that having courtiers on the payroll at the WH is not new, so that once life, with a little help from us, has destroyed this Preznit, we might use the opportunity presented by his example to get some structural reform done that might prevent a repeat performance.
The real question to ask is why the WH staff has anyone on the payroll beyond what is needed for housekeeping -- a few butlers, maids, cooks, gardeners and so forth. No more than a dozen would be required. Okay, throw in a personal secretary to help maintain correspondence with the executive departments, three at most so that one can be available 24/7 in a pinch. Let's go back to a Lincoln or FDR level of WH staff. We won the Civil War and WWII with that WH staffing level, why would any President need more?
The reason we "need" the whole apparatus of the WH, is that the executive departments through which the government of a republic is administered, are subject to public oversight through the Congress. For some reason, mostly I think because we the people would simply rather let George do it, we have seen fit to give modern Presidents the means to bypass public oversight, and control the govt through un-to-barely-accountable WH functionaries. Why do we "need" an NSC, when we have a Defense Dept, State Dept, and way too many intelligence agencies already? The answer, of course, is that we the people don't need the NSC, or the rest of the WH staff. It's the President who needs them, needs them in order to rule without our oversight.
If we're going to give a monarch, elected though he may be, the responsibility for running the country without our further input after Election Day, logically we have to give him the means to carry out this duty. And since we insist, against all logic, in maintaining a false front of public control, in the form of a Congress that must be cajoled into approving the money for things we don't expect it to control, and in the form of the tiresome need for the President and his minions to stand for repeated elections, one of the tools we have to give the President is the staff to do the political jobbery, finagling and outright lying required to stay on top of this greasy pole that we have made of sort-of-public government.
I do not see this Preznit as being even an exceptionally incompetent or evil politician. He is simply the least resistant President we have ever had to the forces of an imperial Presidency we have unleashed, and allowed to rampage unchecked. Incompetence and evil is what the lack of public scrutiny of power adds to the mix, not the result of this particular weakling's weak inclinations. The evil and incompetence can be held at bay somewhat if our imperial Presidency is held by folks who have internal compasses pushing them to the rigorous self-examination and questioning that will result in outcomes similar to those that would result from an open process. If we really are set on letting George do it, and ceding self-government to rule by an elected emperor, we definitely need a process for selecting emperors that gives the job to people exceptional for their ability and willingness to rigorously examine themselves and everything around them. The current "beauty contest" tends in the opposite direction. It tends to give the job to those with the most self-confidence, however woefully unwarranted.
Or, all else having failed, we could abandon our quest for perfection in choosing emperors to govern us, and simply do the common sense thing by going back to self-governance and a republic. Why continue on a course that would require the superhuman ability to discern the inner greatness of true humility and wisdom in potential emperors, when we have the less glamorous, but more reliable, process of submitting the public business to public scrutiny to fall back on? Firing all of the WH staff, except the cooks and gardners, to force the government back into publicly accountable channels, would be the first step on the path back to common sense.