of being made up of elected officials, their roles are highly significant, especially since they serve to check and balance (officially for the former and unofficially for the latter) the efforts of the legislative and executive branches.
The neglect of these parts of government might not be a major issue, but in a book where the transitory nature of government is a major concern it seems odd that Smith is not more interested in the numerous agencies that are, more or less, permanent and carry out much of the government's actual work. Yet this absence also points to the third major problem with Smith's book which is that his focus on the presidency and his secondary emphasis on Congress are direct reflections of the news media's sound-bite and photo-opportunity solution to covering Washington politics. Of course, Smith acknowledges that the presidential, image "is misleading [and] it exaggerates the actual power of the presidency, which is considerably less than suggested by the public attention which gets focused on the single figure at the apex of out political system" (emphasis added, 10). He goes on to explain that "as a nation, we focus obsessively on the president," and this occurs "largely because the president is one person whom it is easy for television to portray and whom the public feels it can come to know" and so "the press, especially television, have fallen into an unconscious conspiracy to create a cartoon caricature of the real system of power" (emphases added, 10). Smith is extremely disingenuous about all this--or perhaps he is merely "unconscious" of what he is doing. He places the blame for the misdirected focus on the public's attention, the people as a nation, or the portion of the public who naively think they can get to know the president, and above all, on television. He is very fond, for instance, of referring to politicians and other people as "video-minded," but his analysis of this phenomenon is e...