Whole tea plantations in Nepal will now be stripped bare to supply all the leaves needed to read President Barack Obama’s strategy in response to this Republican wave election. Will the president negotiate in earnest for tax reform and immigration? Will he finally come out of his hermit crab shell and engage in the hard, squalid and frustrating business of sitting down with members of Congress to hash out compromises?

Or will Obama seem to do these things, while positioning himself to exploit the ideological divisions within the GOP in a continuing effort to avoid responsibility and shift blame? Perhaps Obama will simply upend the legislative chessboard entirely, and assert unprecedented extensions of executive authority to ram through cherished goals, like the legalization of millions of illegal aliens.



Here’s the only tea leaf you need to read: You can tell the president’s intentions, stance and strategy by whether or not he shakes up his White House staff, beginning with Valerie Jarrett, a staffer who has accumulated the power, resources and the formal trappings of a prime minister.

Shaking up the White House staff is what President Bill Clinton did when he faced a building tsunami of Republican opposition from Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America in 1994. The Clinton White House was disorganized, famously compared to a group of toddlers trying to play soccer. The most energetic of the toddlers was Ira Magaziner, who made a hash out of Hillary’s Task Force on National Health Care Reform. Clinton’s early White House was beginning to resemble his disastrous first term as governor, after which the boy governor lost his bid for re-election and was sent stunned into the political wilderness.

Clinton was not going to make that mistake again. He removed his childhood friend Mack McLarty as his chief of staff and elevated Office of Management and Budget Director Leon Panetta to that position. Nothing Panetta could do could thwart the building wave election of 1994, a midterm shift of 54 House seats that swept out a Democratic House majority that was assumed to be immortal. But Panetta did end the Magaziner era of antics and prepared a more disciplined and effective administration for re-election.



In 2006, just before George W. Bush suffered a blistering midterm loss, the president brought in the quietly effective Josh Bolton as chief of staff. After the election, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was shown the door and replaced by Bob Gates, who brought a more aggressive and focused strategy to the Iraq War.

In France, shakeups are even more personal. Under the French constitution, the elected president uses an appointed prime minister as factotum and buffer. When things go wrong, the appointee accepts the blame and resigns. Of course, the United States Constitution does not describe the office of prime minister – but many in Washington believe that Obama has, in fact, devolved that level of power and responsibility on Jarrett’s shoulders.

Jarrett is often described as the president’s Rasputin, but Nicholas and the czarina never afforded Rasputin the official respect lavished on this White House senior adviser. She has roughly three dozen White House staffers who work directly under her. When Jarrett goes to lunch at one tony Washington restaurant or another, she travels in a motorcade surrounded by Secret Service agents and police motorcycles who cordon off intersections.



Beyond the unseemliness of an aide moving about with the pomp of a constitutional officer, there is the greater issue of Jarrett’s enabling of Obama’s narcissism and lazy approach to governing.

In David Remnick’s 2010 book "The Bridge," Jarrett said of her old friend and boss, Obama: “I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually … So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy … He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”

Ponder that. Obama didn’t just find Columbia and Harvard Law School easy. He possesses such a majestic and luminous intellect that he never even broke a sweat. Now the presidency is a disappointment for Obama, with all of its tedious negotiations with Congress on frankly boring issues such as problems with the management of Veterans Affairs hospitals. He acts as if George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, Ronald Reagan and the other 43 men who held the office before him simply operated as “ordinary people.”