Last month, the departure of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reminded us of the difficulties that come with being president. On top of owning up to economic downturns, wars inherited by predecessors and national disasters, the president has a group of advisers and bureaucracy to run — and that’s on top of a 2012 reelection bid to think about. In addition to Emanuel, senior adviser David Axelrod; National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones; Defense Secretary Robert Gates; Christina Romer, chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisors, and Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, have all either left the administration or will leave in the near future.

It’s times like these that bring to mind a certain nostalgia for past administrations, not long gone, that enjoyed the benefits of having an alarmingly loyal group of advisers and Cabinet. That exemplary era when president answered to vice president and the word “unilateral” was used liberally to express a unified sense of approval, when a candidate and his running mate could agree that Adam Clymer of The New York Times is a major-league asshole. Evidently, there is still much to learn from recent history.

President Barack Obama doesn’t seem to have any distinguished relationship of this sort, however — not domestically or internationally. It was clear after he “snubbed” former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown during a visit to the White House that this relationship would not echo those of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Nor would it meet the benchmark set by the relationship between former Prime Minister Tony Blair and former President George W. Bush, in which Bush affectionately referred to Blair as his “poodle.”

Indeed, there are few places the president can turn for consolation. Polls have seen his approval ratings plummet at home, and he has done less than anticipated in improving our relationships abroad, particularly in Europe. This insularity could well point to a fundamental flaw in the way  Obama is trying to run the White House. Perhaps the best way to cancel out his low ratings is to become humiliatingly impervious to public criticism. As former presidents have demonstrated, actions, no matter how brash, are what we elect our leaders to take.

And so could it be that partisan gridlock within the White House is behind the enumerated departures? Is it time for the president to put aside his tireless calls for bipartisanship and pursue a less convoluted agenda?

In the future, this question may be answered by the presence, or lack of, highly questionable international declarations, equally questionable word choices, greater acknowledgment of rational disagreement and a subsequently full recovery of the healthy and necessary two-party system. When these explicitly formal conditions have been met is when a president will emerge in control of himself (to a degree) and his party, if not the country. Perhaps, then, a greater acknowledgment of the limitations of the president would fall in line with how the country’s leadership was initially intended.

As disappointing as it may sound, it may also be time for us to finally acknowledge what we have already begrudgingly accepted: Hope and bipartisanship can’t run a country, just as much as a single president is unable to resolve its problems.

Ian Rodenhouse is a sophomore government and politics major. He can be reached at rodenhouse at umdbk dot com.