Comey may get the last laugh

Comey may get the last laugh

By:

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

BlueRidgeNow.Com

Times-News Online

June 18, 2017

Today Washington is paralyzed at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue by uncompromising zealots in both parties. And worse, they hold sway because there has been an analogous shift among voters. The political center has been systematically hollowed out as the ranks of uncompromising zealots have swelled in both parties.

Who comes to exploit America’s vulnerability? Russia with its sophisticated, substantial, and clandestine effort to undermine our free elections. Make no mistake about it, the Russian attack on our election is right up there with Pearl Harbor and 9/11 in terms of its malevolent, destructive purpose.

And what about the 2016 election and its stunning result and surreal aftermath? The good thing about the election is that it got rid of one of the two horrible candidates. The bad news is that it it put the other horrible candidate in the White House.

The FBI counterintelligence investigation into Russian efforts to interfere in our 2016 election began last July. In March of this year then FBI Director Comey confirmed that the investigation included an effort to determine if there was any coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. He also said that such an investigation would necessarily require, “a credible allegation of wrongdoing or reasonable basis to believe that an American may be acting as an agent of a foreign power.”

Since then, thanks to leaks, Trump’s tweets, his interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, hearings before Congressional committees, and the sworn testimony of private citizen James Comey, we know much more.

We know the President was obsessed with two, and apparently only two, aspects of the FBI investigation, whether he was under investigation and whether he could convince Director Comey to lay off his former National Security Adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn.

According to Comey’s recent sworn testimony we know that the president urged Comey repeatedly to state publicly that he was not under investigation, and to lay off Flynn because he was a “good guy.” We also know that he implied that failure to comply would cost Comey his job. When Comey didn’t comply Trump fired him on May 9. The next day in the White House he told the Russian ambassador and the Russian foreign minister, “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job.” And the following day he said, “You know this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election.”

Is it reasonable to assume that Trump went to bat for Flynn out of loyalty? I doubt it. Trump’s loyalty begins and ends with himself. Much more plausible is that Trump wanted to prevent the investigators from “squeezing” Flynn to see if he would incriminate bigger fish.

We also know that the president attempted to divert attention from the investigation by claiming that the real scandal was an effort by President Obama to wiretap the Trump campaign, a claim wholly without merit and flatly denied by intelligence officials from both administrations.

We know that there are credible reports that the president urged the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, and the Director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Michael Rogers, to push back against the FBI inquiry into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. Both refused, but would not further discuss the matter in recent open testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Their silence will not stand.

We know that former FBI Director Comey has testified that he leaked the notes of his meetings and phone calls with the President. Comey has testified that he believed the release of their contents would lead to the appointment of a special counsel to lead the investigation. Special Counsel Robert Mueller was appointed two days after the leak.

The incredible irony here is that Comey told Trump several times that he was not under investigation. But Trump’s firing of Comey and the way he both did it and described it have now almost certainly caused the special counsel to open an investigation of the president. At issue will be whether or not the President obstructed justice. Comey’s notes and testimony lay a trail of crumbs from Mueller’s office to the Oval Office. If Mueller makes that case, Trump’s a goner. In the meantime Trump has emasculated his ability to govern.

If Mueller charges the president with obstruction, the delicious irony will be that Jim Comey may well have brought down both Clinton and Trump, not a bad day’s work!

If you want a clue concerning the public’s reaction to of all this, watch the special House election in Georgia this Tuesday. It’s a heavily Republican district where the outcome Tuesday is uncertain. It shouldn’t be.

Times-News columnist LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at:

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The problem is the president

By

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

BlueRidgeNow Online

May 21, 2017

I’ve got this feeling I can’t shake. For me, that feeling goes back to late 1972, about six months after burglars were arrested in the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Complex in Washington.

I believed that what appeared to be an insignificant burglary was in fact something much more sinister that reached into the White House. At that time, I was staff director of the Senate Health Subcommittee. I shared my belief with colleagues in the Senate. Every one of them had basically the same reaction: “Dream on, Lee.”

You know the rest. On Aug. 9, 1974, President Richard Nixon resigned to avert impeachment. Happily, that ended a constitutional crisis.

Today we face another constitutional crisis. How and when it will end isn’t clear. But there is no doubt that, only four months into the Trump presidency, the White House is in self-inflicted disarray.

The chaos is now to the point that the president is reported to be considering a wholesale restructuring of his White House staff. That won’t solve the problem because, although the staff is a joke, the problem is the president.

Philip Rucker reported in The Washington Post on May 13 that a GOP figure close to the White House “mused privately about whether Trump was in the grip of some kind of paranoid delusion.” Panelists on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” have reported alleged occasions in which the president is overheard screaming at the television. There are now legitimate questions concerning the president’s emotional stability.

With the exception of Trump’s successful nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, the rest of the past four months has been an unfolding nightmare. But now the president’s firing of FBI Director James Comey has taken him beyond the point of no return. It’s the straw that’s going to break the camel’s back. The straw will be called obstruction of justice.

The unfolding saga of Trump’s firing of Comey is nothing but bizarre. Inexplicable doesn’t even come close. The president summoned Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to the Oval Office and requested a document that laid out the basis for Comey’s dismissal. Rosenstein complied and drafted a document that asserted Comey had done serious damage to the FBI’s reputation by violating Department of Justice policies concerning the 2016 Clinton email investigation.

On its face, the document doesn’t pass the smell test because candidate Trump heaped praise on Comey’s handling of the Clinton email matter several times last year. Nonetheless, that was the basis that the White House press secretary and the vice president used to defend Trump and describe why he had fired Comey. But within 24 hours, they were all made to look like fools by President Trump.

n an interview with Lester Holt of NBC News, the president linked Comey’s firing to the ongoing FBI investigation of Russia and possible Trump campaign collusion. He stated, “I said, you know this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.” He also called Comey a “showboat” and said that he had on three occasions asked Comey if he, Trump, was under investigation.

Finally, Trump said Comey told him he was not under investigation, and he tweeted that Comey needed to be careful by suggesting that their discussions may have been taped by the White House.

The day after firing Comey, Trump met with the Russian foreign minister and its ambassador to the United States. In that meeting, according to The Washington Post, Trump gave the Russians “code-word” information, our highest level of classified information, concerning intelligence on the Islamic State.

It’s inconceivable that Comey would have answered the president’s inappropriate questions respecting whether he was under investigation. The president has trapped himself. It was only a matter of time before the deputy attorney general appointed a special prosecutor (he named former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel on Wednesday). It’s now only a matter of time before Comey tells us his version of his discussions with the president. And it’s only a matter of time before Congress will be forced to initiate impeachment proceedings.

In a piece in The Atlantic on May 12, James Fallows, who began his career writing about Watergate, details the reasons the Comey affair is worse than Watergate. In it, he states that Trump “is impulsive, and ignorant, and apparently beyond the reach of any control, even his own.”

The only way I can comprehend the president’s behavior is to assume that when he goes to sleep every night, he erases all memory of what happened that day. Thus the president awakes with no knowledge of what he did the day before, and no way to learn from his past behavior.

It’s a new Groundhog Day in the Oval Office every day!

Times-News columnist LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at :

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Trump: Puppet master or puppet?

Trump: Puppet master or puppet?

By:

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

Times-News

BlueRidgeNow.com

April 16, 2017

In case you haven’t looked, America is a nation in peril. Its manifestation is everywhere, evident in the self-destructive actions of the Trump administration.

Unfortunately we now face an apparently insoluble problem, a nation so polarized that compromise and accommodation are beyond our reach. We arrive at this sorry and dangerous point in our nation’s history the old fashioned way. We’ve earned it.

The wellspring of national polarization dates back to the utterly unexpected and stunning Republican victory in 1994 when the Republicans gained 63 seats and took control of the House of Representatives and the Senate for the first time in 40 years. Their victory was the electoral culmination of the Gingrich Revolution.

Gingrich and his revolutionaries came to power with a mission to dismantle the sprawling Washington leviathan. But they had no idea how to accomplish their mission. They soon learned that such profound change was beyond their grasp. However, the seeds of discord, distrust and deadlock had been planted.

Since then, the seeds have flourished, nourished by a body politic that is now so separated into warring camps of red and blue that the only acceptable strategy for each of them is a war of annihilation aimed at the other.

On Dec. 1, 1862, one month before signing the Emancipation Proclamation, President Abraham Lincoln sent a long message to Congress. In it, he stated, “We can succeed only by concert. It is not ‘can any of us imagine better?’ but, ‘can we all do better?’ ”

Today, however, the reds, the blues and their elected slaves at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington lack the imagination and the will to act in concert with one another. Lincoln knew that was a recipe for disaster, but Donald Trump, his sycophants on the Hill, the Democrats and most of us don’t.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that last year’s presidential election gave the American people two unacceptable choices. Poll after poll showed that most voters had little use for either Hillary Clinton or Trump. Throughout the bitter campaign, Trump managed to disparage women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, Jews, the media and elites. Nonetheless, he managed to win by a whisker.

Once the campaign was over, many of us hoped Trump would at long last pivot and demonstrate that he understood the only path to a successful presidency was one that demonstrated he was obligated to be president of all of us, not just some of us. Equally important was the need for him to demonstrate that he was up to the job of being leader of the free world in a time of international turmoil and danger.

He’s had more than five months to make that pivot. It hasn’t happened, and it’s clear it’s not going to happen. With Trump, what you see is what you get, a thin-skinned bully who’s incapable of faithfully discharging the duties of the presidency. In fact, it’s worse than that. Instead of surrounding himself with a White House team that could help him grow, he’s packed the White House with political hacks.

Look at the results. For openers, we had Trump’s dystopian inaugural address that sounded like it was drafted by an FSB inquisitor deep within the Kremlin’s Lubyanka prison. That was followed by the sloppily drafted Muslim travel ban that predictably flamed out in federal court. When it did, Trump defaulted to his preferred form of fury and tweeted an entirely unwarranted assault on the constitutionally guaranteed independence of the judiciary. Has he ever read the Constitution? No, it’s more than 140 characters.

More recently, Trump threw his gravitas as the supreme deal-maker behind Paul Ryan’s ill-fated health care replacement bill that flamed out in the House. Never mind that Trump campaigned on providing health insurance to all Americans and then failed in his effort to pass a bill that would have taken coverage away from 24 million Americans.

On the international front, Trump has offended NATO, the European Union and the leaders of American allies such as Australia, Great Britain and Germany. In contradistinction, his buddy is Vladimir Putin, the unreconstructed KGB operative who has threatened international order by his actions in the Crimea, Ukraine, Syria and the unprecedented Russian cyberattack on our election last fall.

Nonetheless, Trump unwaveringly coddles Putin. Why? We don’t yet know, but we can smell smoke. Thankfully the FBI is well into a criminal investigation of this matter, including possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. If there is evidence of such collusion, it’s curtains for Trump. And no stream of hyperbolic ejaculatory tweets will save him from that.

Comedian and puppet master Edgar Bergen and his more famous puppet, Charlie McCarthy, were nothing but hilarious together on radio and television. Puppet master Donald Trump and his puppet, Donald Trump, are not. Together they embarrass, enrage and endanger America.

LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident and welcomes comments.  He can be reached at:

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Absurdly, GOP saves Obamacare

Absurdly, GOP saves Obamacare

By:

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

Times-News

BlueRidgeNow.com

March 29, 2017

Forget the Republican rallying cry of “Repeal and Replace Obamacare.” The Republicans at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, in an act of absurd stupidity, have rescued it!

Late last Friday afternoon, after President Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan had no choice but to pull down their star-crossed bill that was headed for certain defeat on the House floor, Ryan admitted that “Obamacare is the law of the land.”

There’s abundant blame to go around. But at its heart are the three blind mice: Ryan, House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows and Trump. Have you ever seen such a sight in your life? Let’s see how they run.

In 2010, widespread public opposition to Obamacare enabled Republicans to win the House. In 2014, they captured the Senate. And last November, the election of Trump gave them the trifecta, which they have now squandered. It’s what happens when you combine incompetence, ideological zealotry and hubris.

Speaker Paul Ryan

Ryan became House speaker on Oct. 29, 2015. In an op-ed column published that day in another newspaper, I warned of the coming catastrophe: “He could have turned the tables on the House Freedom Caucus ... . Instead Ryan has trapped himself. ... Ryan blundered badly, sold himself short, and has set the stage for his own demise as speaker.”

Last week, Ryan’s Freedom Caucus chickens came home to roost.

But Ryan’s blunder goes way beyond not being able to bring the Freedom Caucus to heel. His bill was stillborn. Among its many flaws, the fatal ones were those that would take health insurance away from 24 million Americans and give the wealthy an enormous tax break. No competent policy wonk or congressional leader could ever expect such a proposal to pass in the House.

Although Ryan was correct in his postmortem on the failed bill by bleating that “governing is hard,” he missed the point. Governing isn’t possible when stupidity of this magnitude is at the center of one’s legislation.

Rep Mark Meadows

There are about three dozen members of the Freedom Caucus, all uncompromisingly rigid conservative Republicans. They exercise outsized power over all House Republicans by sticking together and thus denying the GOP the ability to move legislation when, as is too frequently the case, the caucus’ allies are all the Democrats.

This was the case with the health care bill and will likely be the case with much of the rest of Trump’s forthcoming legislative agenda. Think of members of the Freedom Caucus for what they really are and don’t realize: a front organization for Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats.

The caucus humbled and destroyed former Speaker John Boehner. Now they have emasculated Ryan. But to what end? Their uncompromising rigidity has rescued Obamacare.

The more House Freedom Caucus Chairman Meadows forced the bill to the right, the more mainstream Republicans jumped ship. If Meadows’ intention was to kill the bill, humiliate the speaker and save Obamacare, his strategy was as brilliant as it was destructive. That’s madness.

President Trump

The president promised to repeal and replace Obamacare. He failed. The tortured history of health care reform makes it starkly clear that it’s the third rail of domestic politics. Even a neophyte like Trump should have known this.

He should have led with something else, anything else. And he should have told Ryan not to talk to him about health care until he had a bill that enough Democrats would support so they would succeed on a bipartisan basis and not have to worry about the Freedom Caucus crazies. Such an accord would have been possible because Obamacare is imploding, and that’s sufficient motivation for Democrats to support a bipartisan effort to repair it.

Trump didn’t and thus revealed himself as the apprentice, not the deal-maker. Even worse, last week’s events underscore that Trump is the puppet of those who disembark from Clarabell (Reince) Priebus’ clown car that pulls up to the White House each day and from which the president’s pathetic White House staff tumbles out.

There may be a tiny silver lining in this fiasco. Perhaps Trump will realize the only way to fix health care is to call Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell and open a genuinely bipartisan dialogue. That is, after all, how Washington is supposed to work!

Since these three blind mice don’t have tails, were I the butcher’s wife with a carving knife, I’d find something else of theirs to cut off

LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at:

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Yogi couldn’t have said it better

By:

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

BlueRidgeNow.com

Times-News Online

March 19, 2017

“It’s deja vu all over again” is one of Hall of Fame Yankee catcher Yogi Berra’s best Yogi-isms. Little did he know he would be a prophet when it came to health care reform.

What that means is that in 2017 the Republicans are successfully cornering themselves on health care reform just as the Democrats did in 2009.

The election in 2008 gave President Barack Obama and the Democrats control of the levers of government at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. As the newly minted president and his team were being assembled, the nation’s economy was imploding. Nonetheless, Obama chose to make health care reform his top priority.

He chose unwisely, and over the course of his tenure, he and the Democrats on the Hill would make many additional unwise choices regarding what came to be known as Obamacare.

For the Republicans, so long as they have has been in the minority, Obamacare has been the gift that never stopped giving. Voter fury directed at the way the Democrats railroaded it through Congress and at its extensive reliance on coercive federal regulatory and tax power enabled the Republicans to capture the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014. The wave they rode was brilliant and simple to grasp — repeal and replace.

And in 2016, opposition to Obamacare played a significant role in producing the greatest upset in American political history — the election of Donald Trump. The Republicans, to their amazement, had run the table. At last they were in a position to govern, to demonstrate to the nation that they knew what to do and how to do it.

How have they begun? By unwisely starting with their long-standing promise to repeal and replace Obamacare. And that means the rest of President Trump’s legislative agenda — tax and regulatory reform, job creation, the infrastructure rebuild, border security and immigration reform, and more — is now held hostage to the GOP’s ability to successfully deliver on its Obamacare promise.

That’s not a risk you take if you don’t have a winning hand, and it’s clear the Republicans don’t. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that, under Speaker Paul Ryan’s bill, 24 million people will lose their health insurance over the next decade, including 14 million people next year.

In the House, the GOP has cornered itself between the speaker’s bill, which will result in millions of Americans losing coverage, and the strident opposition of the House Freedom Caucus, which is gung-ho for repeal of Obamacare but too unconcerned with either the human or the political consequences of its draconian worldview.

If Ryan’s bill squeaks by in the House, and that’s no certainty, it will be dead on arrival in the Senate. The Senate will rewrite it, and the only successful way to do that is on a bipartisan basis. Major social legislation such as Social Security, civil rights, voting rights and Medicare all had significant support from both parties on final passage and have endured. Obamacare didn’t, and Ryan’s bill won’t. Kapish?

Passing the bill in the Senate under budget reconciliation requires 51 votes. There are only 52 Republican senators, so they can’t afford more than two defections. That’s their Achilles’ heel. Three or more conservative GOP senators, led by Rand Paul of Kentucky, won’t vote for the Ryan bill because it’s too much like Obamacare. At the same time, a larger group of more moderate Republican senators won’t vote for the Ryan bill because it’s too conservative. Mollify either group, and you still don’t have 51 votes.

That reality kills the House bill. The only way to break this impasse is to add Democratic votes. Here’s how: The solution is to enable those millions of at-risk individuals to participate in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP).

The FEHBP has been in existence since 1960. It is a working partnership between private health insurance companies and the federal government. Prior to Obamacare, it was the largest health insurance program in the nation. Try to find one of its millions of insured people who doesn’t like it. You can’t!

Its coverages exceed those of Obamacare. Its enrollees get to choose among multiple fee-for-service or HMO insurance plans during open season each year. Its premiums are reasonable because the federal government subsidizes them. Democrats and Republicans alike have enthusiastically supported the program for decades.

There is, however, a problem — the costs of the premium subsidies for those who would otherwise lose their health insurance. Those costs will be significant. But there is no way to cover all of these Americans now at risk of losing their insurance without some form of subsidy.

The Ryan bill proposes to eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars in Obamacare taxes, principally on the wealthy. The wealthy don’t need another tax break. Instead, those dollars should be used to subsidize the premiums of those entering the FEHBP.

The FEHBP option would replace Obamacare with a program that actually works. It would attract essential Democratic votes in Congress. It would at last make health care reform bipartisan.

Achieving this outcome won’t come from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell or Sen. Chuck Schumer. They’re too partisan. But it could come from President Trump. He’s told us he’s a master dealmaker. It’s time for him to put up or shut up. After all, Yogi also said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at:

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Revenge of the middle class

Revenge of the middle class

By:

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

Times-News Online

Sunday March 5, 2017

 

How did Donald Trump win the presidency when virtually everyone, including errant pollsters, most of the mainstream media and most elites, confidently assumed he was a goner? And will he be a one-term aberration, or a president who will successfully change the nation’s direction and be re-elected for having done so?

America is a deeply and dangerously polarized nation. The middle ground, heretofore the breeding ground for compromise and consensus, has become a no man’s land and a killing field for any elected official foolish enough to venture in. This long-standing polarization is best exemplified by the increasingly predictable split in the Electoral College between the blue and the red fortresses.

It has become a given that the Democrats will win 19 states and the District of Columbia with a total of 247 electoral votes, only 23 votes shy of the 270 necessary to win the presidency. It’s just as likely that the Republicans will win 23 states and 191 electoral votes. That leaves eight swing states and their crucial 100 electoral votes.

It is easy to see why Republicans hold the short end of the stick in this split. They must win at least 79 of the 100 votes in the swing states to get to the magic number of 270. And Trump did not do that. He won four of the eight swing states with a total of 68 electoral votes. Close, but no cigar.

But he won the election because he broke into Hillary Clinton’s blue fortress and won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin with their 46 electoral votes. Trump would have won the election by carrying any one of these states. His formula for success was the same in all three. Let’s look at Pennsylvania.

The Democrats regularly win in these three states by running up huge margins in their major cities, their surrounding upscale suburban counties, and in counties having large universities. The Democrats last lost Pennsylvania and Michigan in 1988 and Wisconsin in 1984.

The Democrats’ rule of thumb in the Keystone State is to carry Philadelphia by about 400,000 votes, its four surrounding suburban counties by about 125,000 votes and Pittsburgh by about 100,000. When they do that, they carry the state almost every time.

Comparing how Barack Obama did in 2012 with how Hillary Clinton did last November is revealing. Obama carried the Democratic strongholds by 676,000 votes. But, contrary to what you might suppose, Clinton did better than Obama. She carried those strongholds by 740,000. She did not lose Pennsylvania because she underperformed Obama among African-Americans or other urban/suburban Democrats.

Her defeat occurred in the votes cast in the rest of the state. Four years ago, Obama lost the rest of the state by 366,000 and still coasted to victory in Pennsylvania. But Clinton lost that same territory by an astonishing 784,000 votes. It cost her Pennsylvania and the White House.

A very large proportion of those votes for Donald Trump came from traditional Democrats angered by their belief that Clinton and the Democratic Party had abandoned them. Call their votes for Trump the revenge of the middle class.

In order for Trump to be a successful president, to have a fighting chance to push an ambitious legislative program through the treacherous waters on Capitol Hill, especially in the Senate, and to win re-election in 2020, he’s going to have to deliver for those middle-class voters, many of whom have been loyal Democrats for a very long time. That’s Trump’s prime directive.

His odds of success are very long indeed. Consider the peril he faces. For openers, he has surrounded himself with a White House staff that’s competent to run a political campaign but not competent to run, let alone transform, the executive branch.

In addition, his address to Congress last Tuesday previews what’s coming legislatively: fixing Obamacare, tax reform, border security and the infrastructure rebuild — a daunting agenda. The Democrats, berserk over Trump’s astonishing victory last November, will stop at nothing to destroy him, while at the same time Republicans on the Hill can’t get their act together. Look at their inability to agree on how to replace Obamacare.

Will Trump end up hero or goat? The Vegas oddsmakers will make goat the heavy favorite. But be careful. Trump has repeatedly proven to Republicans and Democrats alike that he can surprise to the upside against all odds. Fasten your seat belt. There’s turbulence ahead.

LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident and can be reached at:

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My letter to the president

By:

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

Times-News Online

February 19, 2017

Mr. President (with a copy to James Baker):

Have you noticed all the viscous black fluid on the floor of the Oval Office, Mr. President? I’m confident you have since there is so much of it. It’s oil. The White House is leaking oil. With all respect, Mr. President, you are responsible for the mess.

Once your staff gets you copies of what I have written about you in my columns over the past year and a half, I suspect that this letter will have little beneficial effect, although in my defense I’ve been far more critical of Hillary Clinton than of you. But I offer the advice that follows because I believe all Americans are obligated to help any president succeed. Because when the president succeeds, the nation is well served.

I had the privilege of serving as a federal employee for 36 years from 1964-2001. During that time, I was staff director of Sen. Ted Kennedy’s Health Subcommittee, an NIH associate director and a member of the Senior Executive Service. My tenure spanned the terms of seven presidents from LBJ to Bill Clinton, more than enough to see the good, the bad and the ugly.

The challenges you now face, having won an election that most of official Washington and its allies in the media, academe and private sector believed to be impossible, are historic and daunting.

You know Washington is broken. You know the government no longer serves the American people because it spends its energy and our money serving itself. You know that both political parties are part of the problem, not the solution. And you know that you aim to fix that problem. But aiming to fix the problem and knowing how to fix it are not the same thing.

The magnitude of what you hope to accomplish is staggeringly large and complex. The odds of success, even under the best of circumstances, are de minimis. There is no room for unforced errors in your effort to make America great again.

And yet there is abundant evidence that, since your inauguration, there has been a cascade of unforced errors flowing from the White House. Such errors only serve to reinforce the deep and intractable divisions in Washington and in the heartland. Those errors better enable your opponents to thwart your ambitious program.

You can’t reform the Washington leviathan by shooting from the hip, especially 140 characters at a time. You can’t expect a White House staff to serve you and all of the rest of us well when its strength is running a political campaign and not reforming a government that is systemically broken, unaccountable and out of control. The bureaucracy, its allies on K Street and Democrats on the Hill do not regard you and your team as the “Christmas help” for nothing.

Here’s a sampler of the unforced errors: First off is the inaccurate and inappropriate response you made to Bill O’Reilly on Super Bowl Sunday when O’Reilly referred to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “murderer.”

As you know, Vietnam war hero Gen. Barry McCaffrey reacted to your comments by saying, “I’m actually incredulous that the president would make a statement like that. One could argue that’s the most anti-American statement ever made by the president of the United States. To confuse American values with Putin ... .” McCaffrey’s reaction, sir, shakes me to the core. You, too, should find it jarring.

But there is more, much more. It’s now clear that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn misled Vice President Mike Pence with respect to his telephone call to the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, concerning possible sanctions against Russia. His resignation was inevitable.

Press secretary Sean Spicer’s behavior has harmed your administration’s relations with the press and enabled “Saturday Night Live” to butcher him to the delight of its many viewers. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway’s inappropriate lambasting of Nordstrom in defense of Ivanka Trump’s clothing line has led to a bipartisan call from Capitol Hill for an investigation by the Office of Government Ethics.

And on the Sunday talk shows last weekend, senior policy adviser Stephen Miller said that “the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.” Anyone familiar with the Federalist Papers and the Constitution knows that such questioning, called judicial review, is part of the fabric of our government.

If I could wave a magic wand, Mr. President, I would rid your White House of several more of the key individuals you have put in place. They are not serving you well not because they are disloyal. They are not serving you well because they don’t have the skill sets that would give them a fighting chance to properly advise you. I would replace them with individuals equipped to help you govern this great nation.

However, I have no such magic wand. So here’s an alternative suggestion: Pick up the phone and call James Baker. Tell him you need his immediate advice and counsel. Be prepared to hear him out one on one, and be prepared to not like what you hear. Then follow his advice and clean up the oil slick on the floor of the Oval Office, by tasking Pence, not Priebus, to put this right.

Although your administration is young, Mr. President, the hour is late.

LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. I welcome comments.  Please contact me at:

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