What Obama Shouldn't Do

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Government Ineffectiveness

"There is mounting evidence that government is big rather than strong; that it is fat and flabby rather than powerful; that it costs a great deal but does not achieve much," Drucker wrote 40 years ago in The Age of Discontinuity. Three decades later, in an article in The Atlantic, Drucker's frank assessment hadn't changed much: "Government everywhere—in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, the former Soviet Union—has proved unable to run community and society."

Drucker didn't just lash out, however. He also offered up his share of prescriptions. Among them: building "the habit of continuous improvement" into all federal departments and introducing "benchmarking," in which the performance of various agencies would be compared annually, "with the best becoming the standard to be met by all the following year."

But, as Drucker saw it, the thing that government needs to do, most of all, is to stop doing. "The purpose of government is to make fundamental decisions and to make them effectively," Drucker declared. "The purpose of government is to focus the political energies of society. It is to dramatize issues. It is to present fundamental choices. The purpose of government, in other words, is to govern.

"This, as we have learned in other institutions, is incompatible with 'doing.' Any attempt to combine government with 'doing' on a large scale paralyzes the decision-making capacity. Any attempt to have decision-making organs actually 'do' also means very poor 'doing.' They are…not equipped for it."

Obama, for his part, seems to have embraced this philosophy. It makes no sense to push for "an era of no government," he told The New York Times Magazine last summer. "What we need to bring about is the end of the era of unresponsive and inefficient government and short-term thinking in government, so that government is laying the groundwork, the framework, the foundation for the market to operate effectively and for every single individual to be able to be connected with that market and to succeed in that market."

In the end, the surest route to "Yes We Can" will be for the President sometimes to say, "No, I'm afraid I can't."

Rick Wartzman is the director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University.