Being a part of a corporation has taught me an awful lot about what cooperation looks like in that kind of setting. At my job, we hired a new VP of e-commerce last year, I didn't really understand what that meant for me for months. At first I kind of saw him as a threat, after awhile I realized that having a tech-savvy executive at that level means that the CEO is wanting to grow our department's role in the company and that I should stick around because it could be a huge opportunity for me in a few years.
The main thing about settings where there is a great deal of power flying around is that everything you do matters. You can't not make a decision, not making a decision is making a decision by not taking action. Everybody with power understands this and so learns how to read into these actions / inactions. Even if there's no real conflict, there's just not enough time to have copious amounts of discussion concerning intentions. You just figure it out and adjust your own goals and actions accordingly.
When you have change at the top, the entire executive structure under the new leader adapts to suit the guy at the top's sensibilities. You don't really see the multitudes of little changes or how they add up unless you know what to look for and have been watching it over multiple leaders. These things filter out to the public mostly unnoticed, but can be quite dramatic in their effect.
The biggest change with Obama is that he's an introvert and doesn't feel the need to pander to Congress. It's made a lot of waves and contributed majorly to the gridlock he's had to deal with in trying to push his agenda. Clinton was way more personable and much more pragmatic.
Who is it that we blame for putting soldiers in a position to kill innocents for reasons of such dubious morality?
Here's one gem I noticed, right at the end:
> I don’t blame Presidents George W. Bush or Barack Obama for these wars. Our elected leaders, after all, are just following orders, no different from the Marine who asks if he can kill a man digging by the side of the road.
Exactly. Some people seem to think that the President is the one with the most power, and that he can wield it arbitrarily. It's not true. You don't get to be a President of a country if you're not up to your eyeballs with connections and mutual favour-based relationships. Nobody is going to let you become President if you're the type of person that could seriously endanger the entrenched status quo based on your whims. Such people are filtered out earlier in the process. I suspect that, in a way, the office of President is one of the least real power in actual politics.