I enjoyed Joel Achenbach's piece in the Washington Post Outlook section, "What Does a President Really Do All Day?" As he notes at the outset, voters hear about candidates' views often, and they are deluged with information on their chances of winning. But we seldom talk about the day-to-day experience of the presidency. What used to be a manageable job (the president had no assistant until FDR created the Executive Office of the President) has become immense.

We have three applicants still in the running [for president]. What we don't tend to do, despite obsessive attention to this contest, is talk much about what the job entails. We talk instead about hot-button issues, the latest gaffe, the new sound bite, the polls, the electoral map. Presidential campaigns glancingly deal with the institution of the presidency while focusing on the more urgent issue of winning.

The closest thing we've seen to a job description on the campaign trail has been the 3 a.m. phone call ad, a caricature of the president as the national guardian, and one that still doesn't quite tell you what a president does during working hours.

"There's endless months of debating about this job and almost no public discussion of what the job is," Robert Caro, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer now working on his fourth volume about Lyndon Johnson, told me last week. "There's no other job like it. I'm sitting here watching Lyndon Johnson grapple simultaneously with riots in the streets, budget problems in Congress, are the Chinese going to come into Vietnam, what's going wrong with the model cities program, how are we going to get the funding for Head Start, what's Bobby Kennedy doing today, how are we going to blunt what he's saying?"

Achenbach describes the difficulties presidents face making frequent, far-reaching decisions while trying to stay out of the weeds. Not everyone is good at it (LBJ studied terrain maps; Carter supervised the White House tennis courts and parking assignments). It's quite something to read the minute-by-minute notes on the habits and routines of Reagan, Clinton and (the current) Bush.

One thing that comes through clearly: the job is incredibly difficult. Frequent reliance on a wide range of able helpers is a must:

With all due respect to Hillary Clinton's signature slogan, no one is ever completely "ready on Day One" for the job of the presidency. There's no job like it. Anyone who becomes president is making a daring leap -- and asking the country to make the leap simultaneously. To run for president is an ostentatious act.

Here's what is certain: Next January, we'll have a new president. And the president will need help.