Post Partisan Politics

Under the "If I were in Charge" category I thought I would state some of my ideas here.
If I were in the White House I would campaign on and DO the following.

Week One

• Call The majority and Minority leaders as well as major caucuses into a meeting, first individually and than as a group and ask them point blank their priorities and goals for the session.
• Talk with other leaders who I felt were aligned with my goals or had major commitments to any goals I could work with or felt needed to be worked against.
• Advice all of these people that they work for the American people, not their donors and not corporations and that I will use the so called "Bully Pulpit" of the White House and its press corp to speak to the American People about our progress on the issues and who is helping or who is hindering that progress. The idea being that the public needs transparency and should know what is going on.  I will let them know Americans are tired of empty promises and they will be held accountable, not to me but to their voters. I would of course be professional in my dealings but there would be no meetings over golf at the country club.
• Properly staff my office as quickly as possible.
• Assign a staff member (probably under my Chief of Staff) to specifically keep an eye on campaign promises made and the progress towards their completion. As any manager knows you have a lot of fires that need to be put out and can get distracted from your main mission.  I feel it should be obvious this would be even more serious a problem as President of the United States. The goal of this person is to track and work on anything that affects keeping those promises, including shifting alliances.

Month One

• Work with Congress and the Executive Branch to create an independent ethics organization that monitors and reports all ethics issues in a public format. Criminal charges of course need to go through normal procedures but we need to hold ALL our politicians accountable.  This office would also have people with high security clearance levels and be a place for whistle blowers to go to safely with no fear of retaliation.  If members of an organization felt something was being done in violation of law or against the best interests of the American People they could come here and get it looked into and if appropriate addressed.
• Have my team help me draft legislation to handle the issues I ran on and send them to an ally in Congress to submit for voting into law. This would be a strong carrot as they know I would support it and it would have high visibility which they could use next election.
• A key and highest priority item would be forms of government reform to help rebuild the trust so many Americans have lost in our government. Some of these would also be Executive Actions.
• I would create an Executive Order called something like "The Ethical and Transparent President Act" that would require the President to submit tax returns to the public and other items as needed, including adhering to normal ethics considerations everyone else in government must adhere to.  While it is true that a later President can just override this but that would be a public act with high visibility and would immediately raise suspicions.  I would try to get this more teeth by passage into law but the Executive Order would at least be an immediate start.

What would you do if you were President?

Even though we may never run for politics this si the kind of thing we should think about.  After all if we dont do we really expect our politicians to do so?  It is up to US to press them on issues that are important to us and not let them keep making empty promises we forget after election day.

Congress tends to have a very low approval rating (usually in the 20% range) so why do they keep getting away with ignoring our interests?  We have only ourselves to blame for letting them get away with it over and over again.