Executive dysfunction: Obama has done next to nothing to improve confidence in government

His lack of obvious interest in doing so has been baffling. Republicans—at the national level, anyway—run against the government, of course, and any screwup only supports their case. For Democrats the situation is rather different, as Bill Clinton understood. With greater passion even than the Tea Party, his top aides used to call the bureaucracy their enemy; they saw their role as battling the agencies to get action, often via executive order. During a symposium at the Clinton Library in Little Rock, Arkansas, in November, Bruce Reed, who was Clinton’s chief domestic-policy adviser, observed that the default in Washington is to do nothing. “Executive actions were a way to make sure that the agencies were always working,” Reed said. “We wanted to keep the pedal to the floor.” That’s why Clinton was able to stage a comeback after the Republicans shut down the government. Republicans offered Obama a similar opening by shutting the government down again in fall 2013. At almost the same moment, the president rolled out the digital exchange for his cornerstone initiative. Fate could not have contrived a more dramatic opportunity to prove government’s efficacy. Instead, only six people in the country were able to sign up for health care the first day, and, though the system now works and shows signs of controlling costs, its image has never recovered. In that instance, Obama held the central element—the quality of the exchange itself—in his own hands. Though that can’t be said of all the other ways the government has stumbled on his watch, a pattern of inattention, if not disregard, is unmistakable, from the failure of the Minerals Management Service to check on oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, to the sloppy efforts to sort out what to do about children illegally crossing the border.