What Does a President Really Do All Day?

Everything changed with the New Deal. Franklin D. Roosevelt, supervising the vastly expanded bureaucracy, found himself swamped.

"The president's task has become impossible for me or any other man," said Roosevelt in January 1937. "A man in this position will not be able to survive White House service unless it is simplified. I need executive assistants with a 'passion for anonymity' to be my legs."

"The president needs help" was the instantly famous phrase of the subsequent report produced by the Brownlow Committee, headed by Louis Brownlow, an expert in public administration. The committee suggested that perhaps a half-dozen senior advisers would make the White House a more effective operation. In 1939, Congress approved the creation of the Executive Office of the President (EOP). Today the EOP has about 3,000 staffers. That doesn't include the 15 departments run by cabinet secretaries, or any of the other agencies (CIA, NASA, etc.) that are part of the executive branch.

Richard Neustadt, author of the seminal text "Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents," wrote: "No president can spread himself across the whole of the post-Rooseveltian government."

So the president has to have help. And very well may have to hang on for dear life.

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Experts on the presidency repeatedly returned to a central premise: A president needs to be good at making decisions, lots of them, on complicated matters. This may seem screamingly obvious -- but consider how little most of us know about the decision-making skills of the three people still running for president. We know more about the way they dress than the way they decide.

The easy decisions get made before they reach the president's desk. A president has to be good at sorting through different viewpoints, encouraging debate. Jamie Gorelick, who was deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, said that a strong leader "has to beg for the bad news. Because they will not give it to you naturally."

Bill Clinton was not known to be fond of making decisions. Leon Panetta, who served as Clinton's chief of staff, praised his boss's intelligence, his ability to handle the barrage of data. Panetta added: "Sometimes his biggest problem was when he made a decision, he would continue to ponder it. You know: 'Did I make the right decision? Was it the right thing to do?' I'd tell him, 'You've made the decision, you have to move on, you have other decisions to get to.' "

Worst of all is when a president makes a bad decision -- and sticks with it.

David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, argues that there's a tendency for a president to overreact to the failures of his predecessor. Bush was determined to be good at making decisions, Frum said.

"Some people might say he made them too quickly," Frum said, "and he stuck by them too long."