Leaky

I'm finally getting around to reading an article on Obama's decision-making style relative to Afghanistan. I liked it so much, that after reading just the first few paragraphs, I knew I'd be irritated if I lost it, so I downloaded the text and put it on my desktop. As the person who sent it to me said, it's fascinating. It's the sort of thing that you don't see often enough -- how a president goes about making a tough decision. I was watching West Wing yesterday while doing the bike, and one character, describing the method by which the State of the Union address is created, says "It's complicated." In a world where we normally -- and I definitely include myself in this -- like things to be simple, its good to see how complex problems are attacked and resolved. I'm willing to believe that this kind of thing happened in the Bush White House, too, though I don't recall reading about it at the time.

The article mentions Obama getting very angry at the leaks in the process. Again referring to WW, one character, charged with finding the source of a leak, says that it just happens. Junior people try to impress their date, politicians try to impress newspaper people. Washington is a company town, and the company is Politics. It reminded me of an episode at a company I used to work for, where the manager brought in people from a potential client. He wouldn't tell us who the company was -- to this day, decades later, I still recall that he insisted on a code name, which was 'New Shoes' -- and grew irate when people started guessing and trying to figure out the name of the company. It gave me a bit of insight into why people leak information. Certainly, part of it in Obama's case is political leverage, but I'll bet part of it is simply the desire to know, to be in the loop. It makes me wonder how much leaking could be avoided if you started out by telling everyone, and asking them not to spread the information. Of course, you could always start an organization charged with finding and stopping the leaks. That worked pretty well for Nixon, didn't it?