To think that any president in our age would declare an unwillingness to use the levers of government to help relieve a drought or flood because it was not viewed a basic public good is impossible.
Why? Because, as Troy quotes Cleveland, he couldn't find a constitutional basis for such an appropriation and did "not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit."
Congress actually had an effective solution to the problem and still the president said no. In February 1887, Democratic president Grover Cleveland vetoed legislation that would have appropriated money to provide seeds to several drought-stricken counties of Texas. He relates a terrific episode of a president distinguishing between the type of disaster or crisis that should be viewed as a public concern and one that is not. Limits to government involvement in the everyday lives of citizens may seem like a quaint notion at present, but Troy provides us with important historical context. "The more that the federal government takes on," Troy notes, "the less capable it appears to be at handling its core functions."
Four million people now work for the federal government, and its sheer size may be rendering it incompetent. As much as he agrees there are more effective and less effective ways of responding to trouble, Troy wants readers to be clear about the limits of presidential and government action. A plan he helped craft for the Bush administration worked well in response to the swine-flu outbreak that threatened Americans just months after Barack Obama had assumed office. Needs to hold the government accountable for maintaining a robust toolkit of available countermeasures to deal with a variety of possible emergencies . . . . The president should also oversee the development of federal government plans to use those tools and have his team practice those plans so that they can be deployed effectively. Troy, a regular contributor to Commentary, wants to be sure readers understand the nature of crises and in this way find parameters and guidelines to define effective responses. "An incident must have an impact beyond one local area and have at least the potential to cause some kind of systemic breakdown." "To qualify as a true disaster, an incident must have scale and ripple effects," Troy writes. phone call-a reference to the campaign ad from 2008 that is the meaning behind the title of the book-but there is going to be trouble. There really isn't likely to be that 3 a.m. Department of Health and Human Services and author of Shall We Wake the President, is when and how the commander in chief decides to respond. What concerns Tevi Troy, former deputy secretary of the U.S. There are going to be disasters and crises for the next president of the United States, as there have been for all the preceding ones.
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