It's a Long Way to the Top

"Obama's Way," the much-hyped Vanity Fair article by Michael Lewis, writer of Moneyball among other poplar works, is an interesting read.  Lewis, a liberal, got to meet with President Obama on three separate occasions over a six month time frame and get a taste of what it's like to be president -- or I should say what it's like for President Obama.  Critics and publicists alike have hailed the piece as "groundbreaking" and "unprecedented."  It is very long (about 9 pages worth of material) but there are a lot of political teachings that can be taken from it.

Also, please read Andy Ferguson's look at Lewis's piece.  Ferguson, probably one of my favorite writers in politics, takes down the veil and shows it for what it truly is.

A sample:

In making his decisions, Lewis explains, the president attends meetings. Beforehand, he is given a list of the people who will be there. Many people speak at these meetings. The president listens to their arguments. He considers the actions they recommend. And when he’s not ­satisfied with the actions they’re recommending, he asks them to come up with other ideas, sometimes on short notice. In the end, he adopts the arguments he’s persuaded by and chooses the actions he agrees with. 

It’s incredible. Perhaps he is The One.

A side note to something the Ferguson mentions in passing:  In trying to see Lewis's career as it really is, Ferguson says that the book Moneyball was about a baseball general manager -- Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics -- who applied social science to baseball.  Ferguson deems that this was a failure, because -- though he doesn't say this specifically -- the A's have only recently become relevant again in the A.L. West and have been bad for most of the last decade.  But that's because a majority of the other baseball teams, including teams with money like the Boston Red Sox (which the A's don't have), copied what Beane did.  Most, if not all, baseball teams today have a sabermetrician, who goes through the most obscure stats imaginable.  The leg up that Beane had is now gone.  That's what's happened. (Though Lewis does sometimes take sabermetrics too far.  After all, seeing people as numbers and equations to be solved sounds like something in government:  agencies.)