There is a great deal of back-and-forth in the blogosphere today on the subject of a Financial Times piece (subscription required) that lays the blame for Obama’s floundering first year in office on an advisory staff geared for campaigning, not governing.

Based on extensive anonymous interviews with people around the Obama White House, the Financial Times’s Edward Luce paints a picture of an administration run almost entirely from within the president’s political machine — with campaign-managers-turned-advisers David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Robert Gibbs, along with Chicagoan legislative tactician Rahm Emanuel, in the room for every major decision.

Many of Obama’s highest-profile cabinet members are, by contrast, largely disconnected from both policy creation and messaging decisions:

Perhaps the biggest losers are the cabinet members. Kathleen Sebelius, Mr Obama’s health secretary and formerly governor of Kansas, almost never appears on television and has been largely excluded both from devising and selling the healthcare bill. Others such as Ken Salazar, the interior secretary who is a former senator for Colorado, and Janet Napolitano, head of the Department for Homeland Security and former governor of Arizona, have virtually disappeared from view.
Administration insiders say the famously irascible Mr Emanuel treats cabinet principals like minions. “I am not sure the president realises how much he is humiliating some of the big figures he spent so much trouble recruiting into his cabinet,” says the head of a presidential advisory board who visits the Oval Office frequently. “If you want people to trust you, you must first place trust in them.” . . .
In addition to hurling frequent profanities at people within the administration, Mr Emanuel has alienated many of Mr Obama’s closest outside supporters. At a meeting of Democratic groups last August, Mr Emanuel described liberals as “f***ing retards” after one suggested they mobilise resources on healthcare reform.
“We are treated as though we are children,” says the head of a large organisation that raised millions of dollars for Mr Obama’s campaign. “Our advice is never sought. We are only told: ‘This is the message, please get it out.’ I am not sure whether the president fully realises that when the chief of staff speaks, people assume he is speaking for the president.”
The same can be observed in foreign policy. On Mr Obama’s November trip to China, members of the cabinet such as the Nobel prizewinning Stephen Chu, energy secretary, were left cooling their heels while Mr Gibbs, Mr Axelrod and Ms Jarrett were constantly at the president’s side.

Luce and his subjects also blame the campaign mentality for Obama’s policy failures, from stagnating health-care reform to a nascent Arab-Israeli peace push that died on the vine:

An outside adviser adds: “I don’t understand how the president could launch healthcare reform and an Arab-Israeli peace process – two goals that have eluded US presidents for generations – without having done better scenario planning. Either would be historic. But to launch them at the same time?”
Again, close allies of the president attribute the problem to the campaign-like nucleus around Mr Obama in which all things are possible. “There is this sense after you have won such an amazing victory, when you have proved conventional wisdom wrong again and again, that you can simply do the same thing in government,” says one. “Of course, they are different skills. To be successful, presidents need to separate the stream of advice they get on policy from the stream of advice they get on politics. That still isn’t happening.”

While Luce curiously and conspicuously avoids laying any responsibility for the administration’s failures at the feet of the president himself, it is still an important piece to read, both for those wishing to understand the pathologies of the Obama administration and for our friends on the left hoping (perhaps naively) to fix them. And while there has been some general pushback from Dems on the regime of David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel — Sen. Al Franken (D., Minn.) reportedly read Axelrod the riot act at a closed-door meeting last week, and many Congressional Democrats blame Emanuel for bringing the “Australian-rules football” mentality from his House days to Senate negotiations on health-care — the narrative of an insular and increasingly incompetent White House painted by the Luce piece has yet to get any major play in the MSM. So far, the conversation has largely been among hardcore politicos.

Steve Clemons at the Washington Note, who has written a lengthy commentary on the Luce piece, thinks the story has gotten less love than it deserves, due in part to fears of reprisal from the very White House insiders it posits are at the root of Obama’s problems:

But this Luce piece is unavoidably, accurately hard-hitting, and while many of the nation’s top news anchors and editors are sending emails back and forth (I have been sent three such emails in confidence) on what a spot-on piece Luce wrought on the administration, they fear that the “four horsepersons of the Obama White House” will shut down and cut off access to those who give the essay ‘legs.’