SALENA ZITO: TOO MANY YES-MEN, NOBODY TO SAY NO:

Every U.S. president needs people around him who are not afraid to tell him that his latest idea is terrible. Otherwise, he just keeps getting into trouble.

“Presidents are cut off from reality when they don’t have some trusted adviser willing to save them from their own worst instincts,” said Mark Rozell, public policy professor at George Mason University.

And if a president elevates himself too far above the people who were hired to help him out, then how can those people presume to challenge him? . . . In Rozell’s opinion, Obama “has this tendency to claim that he is a better speechwriter than his own speechwriters, or a better policy analyst than any of his own policy advisers.

“With all respect to the man, no one is that good at everything.”

Such behavior is only a slight variation on what President Lyndon Johnson did in the 1960s, according to Zelizer: “Oh, he put a variety of voices in the room on Vietnam and public policy, and then would get a lot of pleasure out of arguing them out of their concerns.”

LBJ wound up being a one-termer, after committing the country to a disastrously expensive project that failed miserably.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

“LBJ wound up being a one-termer, after committing the country to a disastrously expensive project that failed miserably.”

That’s true, but what drove him out of office was VIETNAM.

Heh.