If you look at the average electronic calendar, it’s chockablock with meetings and calls and out-of-office reminders; see above. Yet because the wording of each appointment follows a different format, it can be difficult to sum up your schedule with just a glance.

For example, one invite I just received says, “Full Team Weekly Tuesday Meeting - 1-XXX-XXX-XXXX; Participant code: XXXXXXX#.” The invite for a recent all-hands confab is titled, “All-Hands mtg.” Another appointment calls for a “newsroom report discussion,” while another one requests my attendance at “TMD Training.”

Wouldn’t it be helpful if all these appointments adhered to a standard format, so that, for example, the first word specified what the given item is? I’ve long been using such a template on my own calendar, and it makes perusing each day’s events much easier. Here’s the format I follow:

• Subject: [Type of Appointment] // [Description of Appointment]
• Location: [Building or Call-in Number] // [Room or Password]

As a result, here’s how my appointments look:

• Meeting: Media Team
• 6th Floor Conference Room

• Conference Call: Workgroup Leads
• XXX-XXX-XXXX // XXXXXX

• Out of Office // Jonathan Rick // Vacation

In addition to consistency in format, it’s helpful to employ consistency in capitalization; in using hyphens rather than periods or parenthesis when listing phone numbers; and in using a double slashes (or something similar) to demarcate a new detail. For maximum effect, see if you can get your entire office onboard, so that appointments sent to you by colleagues aren’t outliers, but appear as if you created them yourself.

The subject of tipping is a touchy one. No one wants to be called “cheap,” yet people can disagree reasonably about what that means. As someone who eats at or takes out from gratuity-based restaurants (as opposed to McDonalds) three to four times times a week, here’s my two sense.

20% is the new 15%. Assuming your bill is less than $100, the difference between 15% and 20% is less than $5. That’s the price of a desert, or a side dish—before tax—which I suspect most people wouldn’t think twice about ordering because of price

Yet when it comes to a tip, suddenly every dollar takes on great importance. We look at the final tab, which can be higher than we thought, and are reluctant to reach deeper into our pocket. Instead, we rationalize that $10 may only constitute a 15% gratuity, but it’s still a healthy gratuity.

Of course, to the waiter, 15% is 15%. So, why haggle over a few bucks when their effect on your wallet is so little and their effect on hers is so much? As one commentator on Andrew Sullivan’s blog noted, “If I can’t afford to tip and tip well, I can’t afford to eat out.”

Tip for tat. Assuming you frequent the given establishment, you want to be known as a good tipper. Good tippers get good service. Aren’t a few extra bucks worth the extra attention they engender—whether additional roles or chips and salsa, or never having an empty glass? While a waiter can’t turn a dry cut of meat into something zesty, she can make sure that your dining experience (temperature, noise, delays, etc.) is as enjoyable as possible.

Of the all the things to cut corners on, tipping shouldn’t be one of them—for the waiter’s sake and for yours.

As some of you know, I maintain another blog, Sprachgefuhl, which chronicles my pet peeves about the English language. Since I haven’t blogged at No Straw Men in such a long time, here are links to my most recent posts at Sprachgefuhl:

1. Do “High-Quality” and “Quality” Mean the Same Thing?

2. Is “News Media” Redundant?

3. Don’t Spell-Out What You Can Abbreviate

* Lest you think I’m ignoring my own advice, I keep Sprachgefuhl separate from No Straw Men because their readerships are so different.

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

—William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style

Related: “A Little History of the Little Book.”

Published on GreenBuzzAgency.com, December 21, 2009; GovLoop, December 22, 2009; and K Street Cafe, December 31, 2009.

It took a recession, but resumes finally are receiving renewed scrutiny. The ability to embellish and obscure shrinks when one out of every six workers is under or unemployed. More than ever, recruiters want to see accomplishments, not responsibilities; numbers, not adverbs.

Certain professions have it easier than others. If you’re a lobbyist, you cite legislation passed or defeated. If you’re a fundraiser, you count dollars raised. If you’re a political operative, you record a win-loss record.

Alas, if you’re a social media consultant, you probably shun such metrics. Sure, you’ve helped clients tweet and blog, but who among us hasn’t? Sure, you have 10 years of experience, but what have you achieved?

With the ever-growing pool of amateurs marketing themselves as authorities, the need to distinguish the talkers from the doers is urgent. And what better way to draw this distinction than through the crucible of numbers.

For instance, does your resume refer to “viral videos”? Sounds impressive, right? Well, how many views have these sensations attracted? Have you supported a Web site redesign? How much did that bolster traffic, and how many unique monthly visitors did that result in?

Did you manage an e-mail list? How many people subscribed to it, and how many joined under your watch? Did you conduct blogger outreach? Name five bloggers you’ve successfully pitched.

Did you execute search engine optimization? By what percentages did that drive up organic traffic and referral traffic, and how many negative and positive stories did you navigate in and out of the top 10 search results?

To be sure, numbers don’t paint a perfect picture. They omit client satisfaction, can elevate quantity to the detriment of quality, and can be massaged.

Moreover, numbers are only a means to an end. So, you doubled the audience for your podcast? Nice! Now tell us how this affected the bottom line. Did it engender a 30% bump in donations? A 50% jump in e-commerce sales? A 100% spike in membership?

Taking these extra steps requires extra work. Yet those confident in their CVs should embrace this charge. After all, there’s nothing like cold hard data to reveal that the common claim, “increased significantly,” in fact was a trivial 8% uptick.

Indeed, like the SAT, numbers serve a crucial purpose: They constitute a uniform, relatively transparent credential. As such, they help to address perhaps the biggest complaint about social media: How to measure its return on investment.

In an article for Fortune recounting his time leading the auto task force, Steve Rattner drops this nugget about the (mis)management of General Motors:

At GM’s Renaissance Center headquarters, the top brass were sequestered on the uppermost floor, behind locked and guarded glass doors. Executives housed on that floor had elevator cards that allowed them to descend to their private garage without stopping at any of the intervening floors (no mixing with the drones).

Contrast this with the milieu at Bloomberg LP:

The central fact about Bloomberg’s new headquarters in midtown Manhattan is that it is nonhierarchical, having no private offices; all employees, from the brass on down, sit in long rows of terminal-laden desks.

Similarly, of Mayor Bloomberg, the New Yorker observed that he “works in a cubicle no bigger than his secretary’s.” Tim Gray, of TMCnet, elaborates:

When … [Michael] Bloomberg took office back in 2002, he ripped out City Hall’s traditional “office” setup and went about constructing a “bullpen” with a series of office cubicles, where he set up shop square in the middle.

The boss … placed himself in the center cubicle right next to new hires and middle rung employees of the country’s biggest city?

You bet he did …

“Walls are barriers, and my job is to remove them,” the billionaire businessman told the New York Times at the time …

The cubicles idea, Bloomberg has said, is to create an atmosphere of openness with the boss out front without anything hidden.

“I’m CEO, bitch.” That is reportedly what Facebook CEO, Marck Zuckerberg, had printed on his initial business cards.

Immature? Certainly. Arrogant? Absolutely. Plausible? Given Zuckerberg’s penchant for wearing sandals to meetings, yes.

Yet the same charges apparently can be leveled at another tech founder, Larry Page of Google, whose fawning press clips have been the opposite of Zuckerberg’s. As reported by Ken Auletta in last week’s New Yorker, Page not only flouted common courtesy in a meeting with media mogul Barry Diller; his co-founder, Sergey Brin, seems not to have minded a whiff. (In fact, in a 2003 meeting with Viacom COO, Mel Karmazin, Brin “arrived late and rollerbladed into the room, out of breath and wearing a T-shirt and gym shorts.”)

Here’s the Diller anecdote:

Barry Diller, the C.E.O. of I.A.C., a diverse collection of Internet sites, including Ask.com and Match.com, recalled visiting Page and Brin in the early days of Google. Diller was disconcerted that Page, even as they talked, stared fixedly at the screen of his P.D.A. “It’s one thing if you’re in a room with 20 people and someone is using his P.D.A.,” Diller recalled. “I said to Larry, ‘Is this boring?’ ”

“No. I’m interested. I always do this,” Page said.

“Well, you can’t do this,” Diller said. “Choose.”

“I’ll do this,” Page said matter-of-factly, not lifting his eyes from his handheld device.

“So I talked to Sergey,” Diller said. “I left thinking that more than most people they were wildly self-possessed.”

Indeed. Were I in Diller’s shoes, I think I would have pulled a Johnny Drama (see above video), said “I’ll do this,” and walked out the door. Rudeness is not Googley, I don’t care who you are.

What’s more, in Google’s early days, Page was nobody. For comparison, can you imagine the President of the United States, an avid BlackBerrier himself, thumbing away on his PDA during a meeting with another head of state?

It would never, and should never, happen. Rude is rude.

“Success is a lousy teacher,” Bill Gates once quipped. We learn so much more by studying our failures than we do by sipping champagne.

Sadly, this lesson seems to be lost on the organizers of Gov 2.0 conferences. As my colleague, Steve Radick, observes, we don’t need another event to learn about the virtues of transparency or crowdsourcing; we need an event to learn how to secure and expand buy-in for these things from the C suite. Specifically, Steve suggests, we need to:

1. Realize that not all is perfect in the land of Gov 2.0. While we’ve had a lot of success, let’s not sweep our weaknesses under the rug. Let’s identify what’s going wrong and talk about it. We have showcases to talk about all of the successes—why don’t we have an event to talk about the challenges we’re facing and how to overcome them?

2. Identify the skeptics and open up a dialogue with them. Let’s stop talking about how great we all are amongst ourselves. I want a conference where that CIO who continues to block access to social media talks about why he’s blocking it. I want to hear from that Admiral explaining why he’s banned his sailors from using social media. I want to go to an event where I can talk with the guy who decided to shut down the UGov e-mail system and learn more about the pressures he’s facing.

3. Hear the war stories of the people who have gone before us. Listen, I know that there have been people who have been fired, reprimanded, demoted, moved to another project, and just flat-out yelled at for some of their Gov 2.0 efforts. What happened and why? What are the battles that people are facing? What are the battles that have been won and lost? I know that I’ve dealt with people yelling at me, laughing at me, and/or dismissing me for my Gov 2.0 efforts over the last three years—I’m sure there are others out there who would be able to learn from these experiences, just as I have.

Happily, it appears that a remedial confab, The Shortfalls of Government 2.0, is in progress. Here’s hoping this shortfall will become our windfall.

Last week, Google announced better-than-expected earnings for Q3 2009. Predictably, its stock rose 3.76%.

Yet in our worship of the search giant, we overlook that 11 years after its founding, Google remains a one trick pony. As Jonathan Last recently observed,

Its home-grown products, such as Orkut, Knols, Lively, and Google Checkout (knockoffs of Facebook, Wikipedia, Second Life, and PayPal, respectively), have been failures. Google’s biggest successes have come from acquisitions. For instance, Google bought YouTube after its own attempt at video on the web, Google Video, crashed and burned. And did the same with Blogger after its blog platform, Pyra Labs, failed. Even the “successful” acquisitions Google has made—Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Docs, and Blogger were all purchases, too—have taken up resources without creating significant revenue.

Indeed, Google’s latest—the much-heralded Google Wave—has been a flop, and the market share of its much-publicized Chrome browser is a rounding error. Despite restless ambitions and an ever-growing footprint, the company remains stunningly, unhealthily dependent on a single revenue source: advertising.

“Yet even here,” Last continues, its results are mixed.

Those text ads are dynamite, but Google couldn’t master the banner ad business and eventually resorted to simply buying DoubleClick, the industry leader. Eager to extend their tentacles into other ad mediums, Google started selling print ads, TV ads, and radio ads. The print and audio divisions performed so badly that they’ve already been shut down. The TV division is still limping along lamely.

By contrast, Microsoft owes its success not only to Windows, but also to Office.

“And here’s another reality check,” adds Chris Thompson. “Plenty of tech firms are still head and shoulders above Google, at least in terms of revenue.” Apple’s at #71 on the Fortune 500, Intel’s at #61, and Dell is swaggering around at #33.

We may live in a Google world, but that world fades when we unplug from the Internet.

The other day, a friend who I haven’t talked to in a while asked if I am still active in politics. The answer—no—came easily, but the reason necessitated some introspection. Why, after spending four years in college and two years afterward immersed in the field—professionally and personally—have I soured on the subject?

Obviously, that I’ve changed professions accounts for a lot. Yet I think my disenchancement runs deeper. Here’s why.

1. Hyperbole is more common than thoughtfulness. I first commented on this trend in 2007, when I questioned three things: (1) the historically ignorant use of the words “totalitarian” and “authoritarian,” (2) the title of a new blog, TechRepublican, as opposed to TechConservative, and (3) Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandant.

A year later, I lamented that, literally and figuratively, the pugilistic partisan, Grover Norquist, had replaced the courteous intellectual, William F. Buckley.

Finally, on a prominent ListServ of conservative bloggers to which I belong, few seem to mind when the e-mailer calls a politician with whom he disagrees a “douchebag” or “scumbag.” Never mind that the issue is usually trivial, or that the pol is usually a Republican; the rancor toward one’s own party is palpable.

As one who prides himself on no straw men, I find such discourse repugnant.

2. Winning has become more important than doing what’s right. An excerpt from Taylor Branch’s new book, The Clinton Tapes, illustrates this point:

[President Clinton] treated posturing as a natural element. He remarked, for instance, that he had no idea what Senate Republican leader Bob Dole of Kansas thought about the merits of gays in the military. “He may genuinely be for it or against it,” said Clinton. “All our discussions have been about the politics.” He said Dole advised him quite candidly that he intended to keep the issue alive as long as he could to trap Clinton on weak ground, where he would “take a pretty good beating.” Similarly, the president said Dole consistently advised that budgets were the most partisan matters between Congress and the White House, and that Clinton could expect to get few if any Republican votes for his omnibus bill on taxes and spending. Clinton said Dole spoke of the opposition’s job not as making deals but rather making the president fail, so he could be replaced as quickly as possible.

Indeed, as a recent article in the New York Times suggests, the advocacy group, Americans for Limited Government, seems more interested in thwarting Obama than thwarting big government. The subtitle of the blog of the libertarian scholar, David Boaz, “Independent thinking in a red-blue town,” makes more sense to me every day I’m here.

In his book, Politics Lost, Joe Klein deplores “the insulting welter of sterilized speechifying, insipid photo ops, and idiotic advertising that passes for public discourse these days.” Wise words. What a shame they’re so true.

Addendum (10/6/2009): In a recent op-ed, Steven Hayward, of the American Enterprise Institute, elaborates on my point:

During the glory days of the conservative movement, from its ascent in the 1960s and ’70s to its success in Ronald Reagan’s era, there was a balance between the intellectuals, such as Buckley and Milton Friedman, and the activists, such as Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Weyrich, the leader of the New Right. The conservative political movement, for all its infighting, has always drawn deeply from the conservative intellectual movement, and this mix of populism and elitism troubled neither side.

Today, however, the conservative movement has been thrown off balance, with the populists dominating and the intellectuals retreating and struggling to come up with new ideas. The leading conservative figures of our time are now drawn from mass media, from talk radio and cable news. We’ve traded in Buckley for Beck, Kristol for Coulter, and conservatism has been reduced to sound bites.

A high school valedictory I delivered provides the explanation, in words, of this declaration. Now, 10 years later, comes the videotape, filmed this past summer in Alexandria, Va:

Published on GovLoop, August 24, 2009; TechRepublican, August 24, 2009; and K Street Cafe, August 25, 2009.

Everyone these days wants a blog. Blogs are known to be the most frequently updated—and thus most visited—facet of Web sites, and often form the crux of an organization’s online impact. Few, however, realize just how time-consuming and difficult blogging is.

Indeed, running a blogging consists not only in penning posts, but also in corralling them from colleagues and possibly guest contributors, editing them, and promoting them—not to mention moderating and responding to comments. As such, when considering a group blog for your organization, the following questions may facilitate a decision.

1. How many people on your staff can write well? Poor prose is a big turnoff, and crafting snappy paragraphs is a lot harder than banging out 140 characters apiece on Twitter. Put another way, anyone can swing a baseball bat; very few can hit pitches.

2. Do these people know how to write for the Web? Richard Posner and Gary Becker are two highly esteemed and well-published professors at the University of Chicago. But their joint blog—bogged down with long paragraphs and utterly devoid of links, pictures and blockquotes—is a textbook example of why online writing demands more than copying and pasting its offline counterpart.

3. Will managers give these people sufficient time to blog? Securing buy-in at the leadership level is critical. Otherwise, blogging will be treated as a distraction from “real work.”

4. Can these people each commit to X posts per month? One of the biggest reasons for failure in the blogosphere is infrequent posting. To be sure, a solid weekly post can be just as good as daily content, but unless you’re Sergey Brin, you’ll never build an audience by blogging sporadically.

5. Is there a blogger (either on staff or whom you can hire) who can serve as the editor? Not only do editors edit—correcting grammar, adding hyperlinks and pictures where appropriate, suggesting broader themes—and solicit content, they’re also responsible for the blog’s direction, consistency, and visibility. A blog without an editor is like a ship without a captain.*

6. Will the blog’s editor have the connections and standing throughout the organization to request and obtain content? If your editor is off site or lacks the respect of her peers, her ability to do her job will be compromised.

7. Will every post require approval by the C suite? If an executive or lawyer must vet everything, then a blog is more trouble than it’s worth.

On the other hand, a second set of eyes on anything for publication always is healthy—but within reason. The Cato Institute, which each day assigns a different staffer to approve each post, has found a happy medium between paranoia and prescience.

8. What niche will the blog exploit? In other words, why will people want to read it? If the niche is already occupied, how will your blog be better?

For these reasons, many blogs are stillborn. As with any project, a blog needs a strategic plan and ample resources. If you start with these boxes checked, the results can well repay the effort.

Related: Should Blogs Be Independent of or Integrated in Their Host Organization’s Web Site?

* Addendum (9/5/2009): The secret to the success of the many blogs on nytimes.com? Editors.

After all, aren’t all communications “strategic”? Do nonstrategic partnerships even exist?

The truth is, these are differences without a distinction. As any semanticist will tell you, if you can remove the adjective without changing the meaning of the noun, chuck the adjective. It’s a buzzword, ”an important-sounding, usually technical word or phrase, often of little meaning, used chiefly to impress laymen.”

Think of this speciousness the next time you’re tempted to employ such jargon.

Some editors balk at publishing details of their reporters’ fruitless attempts to interview a source. So as to let the story speak for itself, not appear whiny, and/or not burn a bridge, they prefer to summarize such sausage making through boilerplate. “Repeated phone calls and e-mails were not returned,” is a line I often read.

But when the subject of a major story in a major magazine continually stonewalls and reneges, the publication does its readers a diservice by omitting these salient details. Thankfully, in its current issue, Vanity Fair bucks this trend, and allows its contributor, Nina Munk, to divulge her stymied efforts to report on Harvard’s shrinking endowment.

As you may have guessed by now, Harvard refused to cooperate when I was reporting this story. At first, the university’s public-relations apparatus ignored me. Week after week, e-mail after e-mail, I’d be assured that someone or someone else was unavailable—in meetings, or on vacation, or away from his desk, or out of the office, ill. When I did manage to track someone down, I was thrown a sop of evasive prose. (“I don’t feel we’ve made a decision about how to best engage for your piece,” the vice president for public affairs told me in an e-mail.) A formally scheduled interview with the dean of the business school was canceled at the very last minute. (“Glitch” was the subject heading of an e-mail informing me that the meeting was off.) Even requests for basic, public financial information were bungled. When I asked him a simple question about Harvard’s debt, one of the university’s many communications directors stonewalled: “I’m not a numbers person at all,” he said, wide-eyed.

No doubt, most reporters will empathize. As readers, we should too.

Published on GovFresh, GovLoop, and K Street Cafe.

By now, it’s a cliché that Twitter has real-world value. Yet if you really want to appreciate both the usefulness and hipness of microblogging, try participating in a social media conference where live Tweeting is not only encouraged, the Tweets also are displayed on JumboTrons flanking the on-stage speaker.

Such was the case earlier this week at the Open Government and Innovations Conference. Held at the Convention Center in Washington, DC, the two-day conference brought together 700 “gov 2.0” types from the federal government and the consulting community that supports it. As such, not only did most attendees pack a Twitter-appified PDA; many also toted laptops or netbooks.

To meet such demand, the conference organizers established a hash tag—a unique series of characters (e.g., “ogi”), prefaced by a hash symbol (#)—to group together all #ogi Tweets. Tags, of course, are nothing new; what was new (at least for me) were the two JumboTrons that showcased, in real time on a 3×2 grid, each #ogi Tweet, coupled with the Tweeter’s headshot and user name.

Initially, this setup was overwhelming. With so many things competing for attention—the speaker, his PowerPoint presentation, Twitter, the JumboTrons, the legs of the blonde two tables over—distraction was easy. Yet as the conference proceeded, information overload gave way to information empowerment.

How? Instead of indulging our inner ADD, participants stayed focused. At the same time we typed, we listened. At the same time we listened, we read. Multitasking was not optional.

Yes, of course, such juggling can be dizzying. It’s not for everyone, and it’s not for philosophy seminars. But social media isn’t philosophy, especially for those of us who do it for a living. And when we attend a conference on a subject with which we’re already familiar, we learn not only from the speakers but also from our peers.

For instance, after a panel on how to make the federal acquisitions process more transparent, I carried out a Tweeted conversation, with Jaime Gracia, on how to make RFP responses public. When I wanted to attend multiple panels that were taking place simultaneously, the #ogi tag allowed me to be in two places at once. When questions were being solicited for Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, even though my colleague, Steve Radick, was back in McLean, his tagged Tweet appeared on the JumboTron and soon made its way to Kundra.

The beauty of this live Tweet showcase is its combination of transcriptions with punditry; that is, while some record what’s being said, others prefer to add their own thoughts. Put another way, a live Tweet showcase crowdsources note-taking. The best notes are re-Tweeted, the best note-takers are followed, and, in the end, there’s a digital trail, complete with headshots and links, of contacts made, water cooler gossip, enlightened dialogue, and everything in-between.

But don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself at an upcoming gov 2.0 confab.

Addendum (7/27/2009): Ludo Van Vooren notes that the software used for the live Tweet showcase is called TwitterCamp.

Addendum (8/11/2009): Here’s another innovation from the OGI conference: The first-ever TweetBook, a compilation of hashgtagged tweets (in this case, #OGI). Don’t miss the pull-tweet on page 45.

As legislation to reform our energy use and health insurance winds its way through Congress, it’s worth pausing to ask if we should tweak the system before overhauling it?

To be sure, there’s no reason why an overhaul can’t include these reforms. And there’s no reason why an overhaul can’t be incremental. Yet as two recent articles point out, there’s no reason why we can’t carry out these reforms now.

1. Strengthen energy requirements in building codes. Today’s energy requirements in building codes remain weak across half the country, and at least seven states have virtually no rules. That means that in many places, particularly the nation’s heartland, almost every new home, store and factory that goes up locks the country into unnecessary energy use for years to come.

No new technology needs to be invented to make major gains in saving energy. Products already available permit the construction of homes at least 30 percent more efficient than the national average. With enough political will, a new law can be put in place anywhere with the stroke of a pen, and made even more potent if it is coupled with tough oversight, as in Austin, Texas.

2. Eliminate hospital-acquired infections. Scrupulous adherence to simple but profoundly important practices like hand-washing, proper preparation of surgical sites, and assiduous care and maintenance of central lines and urinary catheters would save tens of billions of dollars every year.

John Gillespie Magee Jr.:

[To] slip[] the surly bonds of Earth … [and] touch[] the face of God.

Aaron Sorkin:

‘Cause it’s next. ‘Cause we came out of the cave. And we looked over the hill and we saw fire. And we crossed the ocean. And we pioneered the West. And we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration, and this is what’s next.

Charles Krauthammer:

We go for the wonder and glory of it. Or, to put it less grandly, for its immense possibilities. We choose to do such things, said JFK, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” And when you do such magnificently hard things—send sailing a Ferdinand Magellan or a Neil Armstrong—you open new human possibility in ways utterly unpredictable.

About four years ago, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency committed a classic Washington gaffe: He let the truth slip in a moment of inadvertent honesty. As the Associated Press reported,

In a rare public appearance Wednesday, CIA Director Porter Goss said he is overwhelmed by the many duties of his job, including devoting five hours out of every day to prepare for and deliver intelligence briefings to President Bush.

“The jobs I’m being asked to do, the five hats that I wear, are too much for this mortal,” Goss said. “I’m a little amazed at the workload.”

Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported on the similarly overwhelming responsibilities of Attorney General, Eric Holder:

[F]ormer colleagues around the District … say they are watching him age before their eyes.

Always lean, Holder has dropped weight from his lanky frame, as he eats less and climbs five steep flights of stairs to his office in a routine that leaves younger aides breathless. His dark hair is graying, and his forehead displays new lines. He travels constantly, sometimes boarding an airplane three times a week even as he fends off a persistent sinus infection and a bad back. He struggles with working long hours away from his three children and his wife, prominent D.C. physician Sharon Malone.

“Under normal circumstances, the attorney general is one of the hardest jobs in government,” said Reid Weingarten, a prominent D.C. lawyer and longtime friend who sat directly behind Holder at his marathon confirmation hearings in January. “There is a constant stream of impossibly difficult policy, case-related, bureaucratic and personnel decisions crossing your desk every minute.

The result of such work-life imbalance is predictable. To continue the quotations, recall a scene from the West Wing, wherein Leo McGarry, the White House chief of staff, explains to his wife why he forgot their anniversary:

LEO: This [my job] is the most important thing I’ll ever do, Jenny. I have to do it well.

JENNY: It’s not more important than your marriage.

LEO: It is more important than my marriage right now. These few years, while I’m doing this, yes, it’s more important than my marriage.

Sure, you can argue that Goss is a lightweight, that Holder should delegate more, that Leo is a workaholic. Each statement is true. Yet the fact remains that as government grows, so do the responsibilities of its top officials.

One solution is to hire yet more bureaucrats, entrenching and perpetuating the status quo. Alternatively, we can rethink the scope and size of the state, and pare back both so that those who run our country can at least get a good night’s sleep.

Two months ago, Hank Buntin, the longtime head coach of the Summit Area YMCA Seals Swim Team, retired. Upon hearing the news, I e-mailed Hank the following letter, which I thought I’d share here.

Hank,

My mother told that your retirement party was richly deserved, well-attended, and fun. I wish I could have been there, so that I could have shared my respect for your steady, storied leadership of the Seals.

Swimming was the rock that, from age eight until 18, brought together therapy, exercise and camaraderie for a couple hours each night. Indeed, had you not chosen me to be part of the Seals after I showed up for try-outs in a baggy, decidedly un-Speedo-like swimsuit almost 20 years ago, my life might have taken a far different direction.

Swimming taught me myriad life lessons–the importance and fruits of hard work, of ethical behavior, of esprit de corps. And you, Hank, taught me that fun and purpose are not mutually exclusive but complementary.

I still wear my Seals t-shirts to the gym, still think of myself as a swimmer, and still experience great pride and fond memories whenever I enter the Summit Y.

Thanks for taking a chance on me, for staying with me, and for inspiring me.

Very respectfully,
Jon

Published on the Next Right, July 13, 2009.

In his Pulitzer-winning biography, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, Barton Gellman recounts a conversation between former vice president Dan Quayle and newly sworn-in VP Dick Cheney:

“Dick, you know, you’re going to be doing a lot of this international traveling, you’re going to be doing all this political fundraising,” Quayle [said]. “I mean, this is what vice presidents do. We’ve all done it. You go back and look at what I did, or what Gore did.”

Cheney did that thing he does with one raised eyebrow, a smile on just the left side of his face.

“I have a different understanding with the president,” he said.

What exactly what was this “different understanding”? Gellman captures it perfectly in another reported nugget:

Days after [Hurricane Katrina] had passed, when he finally returned to Washington from Crawford, [President] Bush assembled his senior staff in the Oval Office. He was going to form a cabinet-level task force, he said.

“I asked Dick if he’d be interested in spearheading this,” Bush announced. “Let’s just say I didn’t get the most positive response.” Bush nodded ironically toward the vice president, putting on a show for the others: Card, Rove, Bartlett, Condi Rice. His expression, the tone of voice, had a hint of edge. Can you believe this guy?. . . .

“Will you at least go do a fact-finding trip for us?” Bush asked.

“That’ll probably be the extent of it, Mr. President, unless you order otherwise,” Cheney replied.

Leave aside for the moment whether you like or agree with Cheney. Can’t we all appreciate the sui generis power he wielded? The consequence-free autonomy? The chutzpah? Consider:

• He maneuvered the search committee he was leading to select a vice presidential candidate for then-Governor Bush such that he himself became the running mate—while maintaining a treasure trove of personal information about his would-be competitors.

• He argued, all the way to the Supreme Court, his right to keep private the names of those with whom he had devised a national energy strategy.

• He, rather than the president, issued the order to shoot down the unknown jetliner racing toward Washington on 9/11.

• He unilaterally exempted his office from the presidential order that requires executive branch personnel either to submit periodic reports on the classified information held in their offices, or to allow National Archives staff to conduct in-office inspections.

• He accidentally shot a friend in the face while quail hunting, and kept the incident under wraps for a full day.

• He, rather than the president, ordered the CIA to withhold information about a secret counterrrorism program from Congress.

Others have written at length about Cheney’s predilection for secrecy and executive power. But what fascinates me is Cheney’s psychology. He doesn’t care what you think. He’s a millionaire in his 60s who’s survived four heart attacks. He does what he wants, when he wants, and lets the chips fall where they may (for instance, a 13% approval rating upon leaving office).

There’s something wondrous, if not necessarily wonderful, about that.