Ben Rhodes Quotes
When I first went to work in the West Wing, the most daunting thing was how small this place was... You walk in: it's three floors, and there's a few offices on each floor, and that's it.
Rhodes, Ben. The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House. Random House, 2018.
Precursor to the U. S. Office of Management and Budget. In the middle of the 20th century Congress allotted the White House only a small staff. The Presidency had grown much more complicated with many complex areas of expertise needed. So Presidents began to “borrow” staff from the Bureau of the Budget. Congress steadily increased the size of the White House staff until William Clinton slightly reduced the staff as a symbol of his balanced budget policies. All Presidents augment their staffs for special purposes by borrowing staff from other government agencies for specific needs. By modern standards the early Presidents had tiny staffs of just one secretary. Even in the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln he only had a military aide and two secretaries.
Since Theodore Roosevelt, the Presidency has become stronger and Congress weaker. The original idea of the framers of the Constitution was to have three co-equal branches of government. However Gingrich was so partisan on this point that he lost most of his credibility and lost his position of leadership in the House. He was constantly asserting the power of the House against Democratic President Bill Clinton while he never had when Republican George W. Bush was President. His house impeached President Clinton on charges emanating from Clinton’s sexual foibles and effort to keep his predilections secret. This not only impeded government for a long time, but angered the public. In the end the Republican Controlled House could not even get a majority of the Republican controlled Senate to vote against Clinton, much less the super-majority the rules required. Ironically, by the second term of George W. Bush’s administration most members of Congress and the American public had thought the Presidency had gotten to powerful relative to Congress and Gingrich’s objective became a national one, but Gingrich himself had been discredited and was completely out of office.
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Benjamin J. Rhodes is an American writer, political commentator and former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting under President Barack Obama. With Jake Sullivan, he is the co-chair of National Security Action, a political NGO. He contributes to NBC News and MSNBC regularly as a political commentator. He is also a Crooked Media contributor, and co-host of the foreign policy podcast Pod Save the World.
