The question, and challenge, that immediately follows from the last post on the challenges of change 
and the internecine battles (as well as its predecessors) is what changes? As well as how are we doing, what's the situation and, in general what's going on? Let's set the stage with a little Bon Jovi riff channeled thru Dragon Ball Z - It's Your Life. In other words you, we and us can choose to tackle these things or continue to pretend, posture and politic. Letting a heroic fantasy cartoon be the front page for a teen angst and rebellion warsong carries a bunch of mixed and subliminal messages, don't you think? You pick what you want but at heart they are about change, tackling things and a belief that it can be done.
So think what you like, take what you want and/or think we're reaching to far for metaphors and implicit puns (we readily admit) but hey, if they can't take a leg-pull then F em.
Getting Serious: Inherited Major Challenges
A little more seriously one of the major agenda problem sets is all the major domestic issues that have accumulated and metastasized over three decades. Here we pick up on several of the major ones that we're actually tackling, at very deep levels indeed. that are mandatory to fix if we're going to re-ground our society and economy on a sounder footing.
Each of these is a serious national problem, and one we've had a pretty good idea how to tackle for years. Take Energy for example. The current Climate/Energy proposals in Congress and the regulatory changes that have been decided by the EPA move us rather far along. But just as an example of mis-interpretation the Climate Change Bill(s) aren't about climate, or just about climate. They're about Energy, Economics and National Security. Do you think we'd be spending $Bs in the ME were it not for oil? Or that it helps our economy to be hostage to desert oil reserves and have to keep shipping money we could better use here, as well as lives, over their? With the best intent of course it'll still take 30 years to change our dependencies. But it didn't have to be that way. The current energy policy actually bear a striking resemblance to the National Energy Policy published as the first major policy framework by the Bush Administration around Sept. 9, 2001! Think about it and the ironies. To make it worse both bear a striking resemblance to the proposals put forth in the late 1970s, at a very detailed level.
Change IS Hard: the Depth Problem
How much West Wing did you ever watch? We readily admit to being a die-hard fan on many levels - not least because it captures the personalities, accurately represents the day-to-day hecticisms and the politics. You could teach graduate workshops on politics, policy and change management from those shows. Not least because their representation of the policy issues is pretty accurate. One thing you might not have noticed, telling in that the arc of the show is pretty much an accurate reflection of the 90's and the Clinton Administration as well as some more au courant problems, is that what's under discussion is almost always incremental, tuning changes.
Anytime any policy is being proposed you have to look far ahead (look back at the first chart and notice the multiple steps in the timewave ripples of any decision, especially if the original good intentions didn't take them into account). In the UL you get a sense of this by an expanding band of uncertainty, which means that the straightline intended policy will have to be tuned and administered. It also means that if the band is to wide, or more typically, not well thought thru and implemented it's easy to fall outside into disasters (the good surprises are few and far between). The problem (the UR corner) is that incrementalist policy change, while intending to build on a presumed steady-state foundation, all too often leads to a deeper deterioration. That's in essence where we're at now.
What we need to do, for each of these major policy areas and myriad others, is re-think and re-initiate policy, define a new and more thoughtful trajectory and (in the LL corner) move ourselves close to the green boundary of constructive implementation. That means, wherever we're at, that Policy has to start with where we're at and look for non-incremental change (LR corner). In the readings you'll find a sampling of readings excerpts across the foreign, economic/financial and domestic policy areas taken over the last several months that sample the state of things. You may be surprised to see how far we've come in how short a time.
The Power of Interests and Partisans
Other sections of the readings start with a quick introductory summary of where we're at as a whole (sort of to frame the whole evidence-based collection and define the context), surveys the positioning of interest groups and the political opposition and then moves on to discuss (and provide assessments of) the decision-making processes and principles, including some assessments of the President's character and style. Including, for example, his marriage; about which he and Michelle were remarkably candid as well as realistic, pragmatic and modern. Really fascinating, at least to us, is the evolution of key commentators opinions over these last six months. From David Brooks' "The Question of Tenacity" to the widespread applause for his West Point and Nobel speeches, especially the latter. Which is, IOHO, the finest foreign policy speech we've ever heard. And lines up startlingly well with our take on what US foreign policy should be, philosophically, politically and implementation-wise.(Our complete strategic framework and assessment, which again line up startlingly well the Oslo speech, are embodied in these two white papers: Good Government for a Stable World and Brave New World: Constructive Engagement and US Foreign Policy).
The problem we all face is that in any given situation, as it evolves over time and previous incremental decisions accumulate, that interest groups coalesce around the state of things as they are. Which leads to the "Iron Rice Bowl" effect. They find it more rewarding to invest resources to tuning policy decisions to their own advantage and become rent-seeking instead of focusing on what really needs to be done. This has happened thruout history, recent and ancient. In fact the accumulation of organizational sclerosis (a hardening of the administrative apparatus and its capture by interest groups) has brought down ever major civilization in history. Beyond that certain power groups both align with the interest groups and fight to protect their own positions. Sad to say, very sad in fact, in wrestling with the biggest serial set of crisis in generations the political opposition has chosen to maneuver in pure opposition instead of being constructive. Possibly the worst possible strategy from the view of the well-being of the whole country though tactically advantageous for the opposition. You could call it irresponsible independence where having no responsibilities for effective governance they are free to pursue their own partisan advantages - and have!
So Where Are We At? Strategic Policy Inventory & Assessments
Let's get to the most important part of this dicussion and look at where we're at in this summary graphic. Part of the message here is for us all to realize the sheer number of policy challenges and decisions that have had to be faced up to. And to think about how serious they are. For example in the ForPol arena Pakistan almost collapsed this last Spring and was only held together by US intervention. For another major decisions that's received almost no public attention Gates and the President have changed spending priorities and decisions in the Pentagon more than they've been changed since Truman's days. A final point you really need to grasp - actually a twofer - about all these changes. Each of them is huge and composed of many major subparts, each of which would have been major policy items and agendas for previous Administrations. The other thing to know is that on each of them, which are being attacked systematically and systemically instead of piecemeal, that the level of change being proposed is appropriate to the scope and scale of the problem. And on each and every one we've made more progress in less than a year than, in almost all cases, has been made in decades.
So look at the Inventory, sorted in categories and, roughly, by time within category. And the four assessment criteria we applied to define a framework for judgment and analysis. The criteria we used were Importance, Threat, Urgency and Status. By Importance we meant the impact, size and effort associated with the problem (bearing in mind that nothing on this level is anything like merely major). We define Threat by the harm that can be caused by the current state of things, relative to the nature of the problem, an assessment that varies with the nature of the problem. So, for example, the G20 meeting in the Spring HAD to arrive an an agreed and coordinated worldwide response to the Financial/Economic crisis yet no clear consensus emerged. Somehow or another the President, inaugurated less than two months (closer to six weeks before) stepped into the breech and provided the leadership that has brought the entire world to a much healthier place. Urgency is defined as the immediacy of a problem, that is must it be worked on now. That has to vary by problem and approach. When Pakistan was about to blow that could have become immediately existential. The problems with our relationships with China, Asia and India weren't and aren't resolvable in anything short of decades of sustained and consistent effort. What was urgent was to take effective first steps to re-establishing the relationships on a workable foundation for going forward. And some things were Urgent, Important and immediate Threats. Like the Stress Tests for the Banks whose successful implementation and conclusions restored confidence in the Banking sector that might otherwise have been lost and resulted in another credit and financial crisis as bad as last Fall.
Existential Angst: My Neighbors Scream
Looking at this picture you can probably already guess what our point is going to be. It was painted by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch in the early 20thC, before WW1 be it noted (if you want to see real anguish of the rawest sort go look up the German post-war Expressionists painters. Since this is a family blog we chose not to reproduce any of them; plus they were a little off topic). The real point is that the last "Long Decade" (as discussed and dissected by Jacques Barzun in his monumental magnum opus From Dawn to Decadence (From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present ) from 1890-1910 is when European Civilization reached a point of exhaustion. That is when the arc, arguably. of "progress" over the last 400-500 years had reached the point where reason and rationalism weren't going to create a perfect world.
My neighbor and I got into a rather spirited discussion at this year's neighborhood Christmas party, engendered by the agita and anxiety she was feeling at the tough times. And much more so about the scope and size of the changes and challenges sweeping around. She expressed a natural concern that too much was being tackled to soon. A fear that is widely shared, compounded by the lack of clear explanations and the speed and force of changes and turned nearly carcinogenic by the partisanship of many in our so-called political leadership. NB: for a detailed discussion of what we should, and have a right to expect, from morally responsible public leadership please see this whitepaper: Heroes, Leaders and Public Morality: Values and a Healthy Public Square.
The problem, to put this whole long post/essay in a nutshell, is that we have no choice. It's either cope or drown. And on our assessment we're coping much better than we have any right to expect in spite of what many spear-carriers have done to try and prevent that. All with the best of pure-hearted intentions of course. Now you tell me - do pure-hearted intentions make up for being a public danger?
=================================================================
Quick Introduction: Representative Readings
Obama in Chains. It is hard for international observers of the United States to grasp the political paralysis that grips the country, and that seriously threatens America’s ability to solve its domestic problems and contribute to international problem solving. America’s governance crisis is the worst in modern history. Moreover, it is likely to worsen in the years ahead. The difficulties that President Barack Obama is having in passing his basic program, whether in health care, climate change, or financial reform, are hard to understand at first glance. Part of the cause for these huge divergences in views is that America is an increasingly polarized society. Political divisions have widened between the rich and poor, among ethnic groups (non-Hispanic whites versus African Americans and Hispanics), across religious affiliations, between native-born and immigrants, and along other social fault lines. American politics has become venomous as the belief has grown, especially on the vocal far right, that government policy is a “zero-sum” struggle between different social groups and politics. Moreover, the political process itself is broken. An equally deep crisis stems from the role of big money in politics. Backroom lobbying by powerful corporations now dominates policymaking negotiations, from which the public is excluded. Finally, policy paralysis around the US federal budget may be playing the biggest role of all in America’s incipient governance crisis. These paralyzing factors could intensify in the years ahead. The budget deficits could continue to prevent any meaningful action in areas of critical need. The divisions over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could continue to block a decisive change in policy, such as a withdrawal of forces. The desire of Republicans to defeat the Democrats could lead them to use every maneuver to block votes and slow legislative reforms. A breakthrough will require a major change in direction.
Think Obama Hasn't Gotten Much Done? Think Again. About one thing left and right seem to agree: Obama hasn't done anything yet. Maureen Dowd and Dick Cheney have found common ground in scoffing at the president's "dithering." NEWSWEEK recently ran a sympathetic cover story titled "Yes He Can (But He Sure Hasn't Yet)." The sarcasm brigade thinks it has finally found an Achilles' heel in his lack of accomplishments. "When you look at my record, it's very clear what I've done so far, and that is nothing. Nada. Almost one year and nothing to show for it," Obama stand-in Fred Armisen recently riffed on Saturday Night Live. Jon Stewart asserts "it’s chow time" for a president who hasn't followed through on his promises. This conventional wisdom about Obama's first year is sure to be flipped on its head by the anniversary of his inauguration on Jan. 20. If, as seems increasingly likely, Obama wins passage of a health-care-reform bill by that date, he will deliver his first State of the Union address having accomplished more in his first year than any other postwar American president. This isn't an ideological judgment. It's a neutral assessment of his emerging record. The case for Obama's successful freshman year rests above all on the health-care legislation now awaiting action in the Senate. Democrats have been trying to pass national health insurance for 60 years. Past presidents who tried to make it happen and failed include Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. Through the summer, Obama caught flak for letting Congress lead the process, as opposed to setting out his own proposal. Now his political strategy is being vindicated. We are so submerged in the details of this debate—whether the bill will include a "public option," limit coverage for abortion, or tax Botox—that it's easy to lose sight of the magnitude of the impending change. For the federal government to take responsibility for health insurance will be a transformation of the American social contract and the single biggest change in government's role since the New Deal. If Obama accomplishes nothing else, he may be judged the most consequential domestic president since LBJ. He will also undermine the view that Ronald Reagan permanently reversed a 50-year tide of American liberalism. Obama's claim to a fertile first year doesn't rest on health care alone. There's mounting evidence that the $787 billion economic stimulus he signed in February—combined with the bank bailout package—prevented a depression. Should the stimulus have been larger? Should it have been more weighted to short-term spending as opposed to long-term tax cuts? Would a second round be a good idea? Pundits and policymakers will argue these questions for years to come. But few mainstream economists dispute that Obama's decisive action prevented a much deeper downturn and restored economic growth in the third quarter. The New York Times recently quotedeconomist Mark Zandi, who advised candidate John McCain (and who now offers guidance to the Democrats), on this point: "The stimulus is doing what it was supposed to do—it is contributing to ending the recession," he said. "In my view, without the stimulus, GDP would still be negative and unemployment would be firmly over 11 percent." When it comes to foreign policy, Obama's accomplishments have been less tangible but hardly less significant: he has put America on a new footing with the rest of the world. In a series of foreign trips and speeches, which critics derided as trips and speeches, he replaced George W. Bush's unilateral, moralistic militarism with an approach that is multilateral, pragmatic, and conciliatory. Obama has already significantly reoriented policy toward Iran, China, Russia, Iraq, Israel, and the Islamic world. Next week, after a much-disparaged period of review, he will announce a new strategy in Afghanistan. No, the results do not yet merit his Nobel Peace Prize. But not since Reagan has a new president so swiftly and determinedly remodeled America's global role.
One problem with Republicans: They've got the wrong Mitch Earlier this week, I found myself in the majestic office of Indiana's diminutive governor, Mitch Daniels, talking about health care. Daniels is a rarity these days, an incredibly popular Republican politician who overcame last year's Democratic tide in his state to win a second term as governor with nearly 60 percent of the vote. His Republican pedigree includes service to Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar and Ronald Reagan before being named director of the Office of Management and Budget in George W. Bush's first cabinet. His belief in free markets, and dislike of high taxes and regulation, puts him squarely in the conservative camp. On this day, Daniels is describing how, in his first term, he won bipartisan support for a program known as Healthy Indiana, which provides health insurance for Hoosiers who aren't poor enough to qualify for Medicaid but earn too little to afford buying coverage for themselves. So far, 50,000 residents have signed up for the program, under which the state contributes up to $1,100 each year to each enrollee's individual health savings account. Participants also contribute according to their income, and when the account is depleted, a catastrophic insurance plan kicks in to cover any additional expenses. It's all paid for with a portion of the state's Medicaid funds, along with an increase in the cigarette tax that Daniels pushed through a reluctant legislature. In fact, Daniels is such a believer in health savings accounts and consumer-directed health plans that he made sure one was offered to state employees. So far, he reports, 70 percent of state workers have signed up -- including himself -- saving millions of dollars each year for themselves and taxpayers. As he's talking, a thought suddenly occurs to me: They've got the wrong Mitch! Instead of relying on Mitch McConnell to lead Senate Republicans into battle over health care (or anything else, for that matter), they should have turned to Daniels instead.
How Politics Changes Our View of Science The fact that Republicans and Democrats differ on whether health-care reform should include a public option is no surprise. That they differ on setting a date for exiting Afghanistan, sure. On Sarah Palin, of course. But on physics? And biology? That the growing list of issues where there is a partisan divide now includes the accuracy of scientific findings may be lamentable for a democracy (if we can't agree on facts, how can we agree on policy?), but it's a gold mine for research on how personality and other psychological factors influence political ideology. The red-blue split on mammograms is particularly striking. In a recent poll, the Pew Research Center asked 1,002 American adults about a preventive-health task force's conclusion that most women can safely begin mammograms at age 50, not 40, and have one every two years, not annually. (Large studies have found that earlier mammograms save almost no lives; since the radiation can cause cancer, it therefore makes sense to minimize them.) Among Republicans, 15 percent agreed with that. Among Democrats? Twice as many. As with mammograms, climate change is also a matter of trust and belief (or not) in experts: physicists, or Glenn Beck? In addition, denying environmental reality reflects, in part, a tendency to justify the existing order, argues Jost. Conservatives, part of whose ideology is to respect and protect the status quo, tend to engage in this "systems justification" more than liberals, tending to view corporations, markets, government, and other institutions as legitimate and benign. Acknowledging climate change means recognizing "shortcomings of the current system" and "admitting that the status quo must change," Jost and colleagues write in a paper to be published early next year. They find that a desire to justify the status quo (gauged by agreement with such statements as "Most policies serve the greater good" and "Society is set up so people usually get what they deserve") accounts for much of the variability in people's likelihood of denying climate change. It's comforting to believe our views on political and empirical questions are the product of rational thought and analysis. But belief doesn't make it so.
2009 is ending. But is it history? We saw anti-tax tea parties and White House party-crashers; climate summits and beer summits; one war start to wind down and another begin to ramp up. We watched a plane float miraculously on the Hudson, making a pilot famous, and a balloon float aimlessly across Colorado, making a family infamous. We loathed Bernie, mourned Teddy and mispronounced "Sotomayor." We tweeted Iran, lost out to Rio and looked back on Neverland. We inaugurated hope, bailed everyone out -- and then went a little rogue. 2009 had something for everyone, more than enough to fill the top-10 lists and cable news video mash-ups that make up our year-end rituals. But in the sweep of history, where will '09 rate? Will it be deemed a truly pivotal year, or merely another random collection of 365 days, featuring one damn thing after another? Turns out there is plenty of competition in the Big Years department; identifying history's most consequential calendar is a well-worn genre for journalists and historians, producing books such as David McCullough's "1776," Margaret MacMillan's "Paris 1919," Ray Huang's brilliantly titled "1587: A Year of No Significance" and countless more. In 2009, in particular, several works have declared that a given year "changed the world" or was the one in which "everything changed." In an homage to anniversaries divisible by 10, they focus on 1959, 1969, 1979 and, of course, 1989 (though '99 is absent. Too soon?).
Policy Surveys: Foreign Policy,
A surge to believe in President Obama has embraced a strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan that deserves bipartisan support. Its success is crucial to the security of our nation and that of our allies. Despite some well-grounded concerns, the president and his national security team have said there is no arbitrary withdrawal schedule or exit date. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was explicit, saying on Sunday that "we're not talking about an exit strategy or a drop-dead deadline." Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that the transition to Afghan responsibility "will be the same kind of gradual conditions-based transition, province by province, district by district, that we saw in Iraq," where the decision of when a district or province "is ready to be turned over to the Afghan security forces is a judgment that will be made by our commanders on the ground, not here in Washington." Equally important as more troops is the strategy of using these troops to provide security for the Afghan people, operating space for the accompanying "civilian surge" and an opportunity for Afghans to build their own governmental and security institutions. It will take time and great effort, but we can succeed by convincing friends, foes and our own forces that we are committed to success and will not fail; motivating and enabling the Afghan government and people to accept greater responsibility for their future; and helping Pakistan in its effort to put down its own Taliban threat and control its territory. The last goal is paramount. A destabilized Pakistan would threaten regional stability and ensure that Afghanistan could not be stabilized. Success will depend on proving to Pakistan that it has an enduring partner in the United States.Our strategy can succeed in Afghanistan if we are committed to succeeding, not just getting out.
Nobel lecture unlike others The traditional Nobel Peace Prize lecture, given every year at Oslo's modernist City Hall, does not usually include such words as: "I'm responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill, and some will be killed." President Obama accepted the Nobel for peacemaking by delivering an eloquent, often grim treatise on the nature and necessity of warfare. Anyone who doubts his commitment to the war in Afghanistan, which he has escalated with an "extended surge" of 30,000 new U.S. troops, should read a transcript of the Oslo speech. Hawks who suspected -- and doves who hoped -- that Obama was a secret pacifist will see that although he did not set out to be a "war president," he has accepted his fate. Obama's major speeches often lay out not just what position he is taking or what decision he has made, but also the thinking process that led him there. Listening to his lecture Thursday, I had the sense that we were hearing arguments and counterarguments that might have been running through his mind during the long policy review leading to the Afghanistan surge. A senior administration official, speaking not to be quoted by name, told me this week that the day Obama decided on the troop increase was the toughest so far for the president. The options, according to this official's account, were all bad. In his Oslo speech, the president gave a brief history of war -- from the "dawn of history" through the terrible conflicts of the 20th century to the messy "wars within nations" of today, in which "many more civilians are killed than soldiers; the seeds of future conflict are sown, economies are wrecked, civil societies torn asunder, refugees amassed, children scarred." His basic conclusion is that war is always tragic but sometimes necessary: "Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms." And while he reiterated his support of multilateralism, he vigorously defended the role the United States has played since the end of World War II as a military superpower, acting in "enlightened self-interest." So the question about the use of military force is not if, but how and when.
Uphill fight for Wall Street crackdown President Barack Obama plans to use the one-year anniversary of Lehman Brothers' collapse to prod Congress to crack down on Wall Street. It may not do much good. Democrats have vowed to overhaul the nation's financial regulatory scheme this year, but stakeholders on all sides of the issue are feeling increasingly uncertain about the prospects for legislative action this fall. The war over health care reform may leave Obama without the political capital for another huge fight. The death of Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) has set off a chain reaction of committee chairmanship changes that could leave a reform skeptic in charge of the Senate Banking Committee. And lawmakers - especially vulnerable House Democrats who've taken a tough vote on climate change and are looking ahead to a no-win vote on health care - may not be up for taking on another high-profile controversy for the administration. "It's once bitten, twice shy," said one financial industry lobbyist, summarizing sentiments he said he's heard from several members. In a press briefing Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said that it's "very important" that the federal government "move quickly" to ramp up consumer protections and create "a much more stable, resilient, less vulnerable financial system." But even supporters of regulatory reform say that's easier said than done. Their most immediate concern is whether Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) will decide to give up his chairmanship of the Banking Committee to take the Senate Health, Education, Pensions and Labor Committee, which his friend Kennedy chaired before his death last month. Dodd and the White House both want to create a new independent agency to oversee mortgages, credit cards and other financial products. But if Dodd gives up the Banking Committee chairmanship, next in line is Sen. Tim Johnson, an industry-friendly Democrat from South Dakota - and he may be inclined to nix the independent agency idea. If Dodd stays put as banking chairman, the fate of regulatory reform will still be dictated by the health care debate. "The problem right now is that nobody's talking about anything except health care," said a House Democratic aide. "So all this other [legislation] that we need to get done, that everybody knows is really important, it's hard to get any momentum on it because nobody's got the time." Health care legislation, along with climate change and other priority proposals, have "really just clogged up the legislative pipeline," said Tom Quaadman, head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's capital markets center. "And that's not only true for financial services reform, its true for the general legislative process." Lobbyists on all sides of the issue say regulatory reform hinges on the success or failure of health care reform legislation. If Democrats manage to pass a bill and claim victory, Obama will have plenty of mojo to apply to financial reform. But if health care fails or if what passes is so watered down that the White House can't claim a real win, there won't be much momentum for regulatory reform.
Wall Street's Mania for Short-Term Results Hurts Economy Their complaint is that the focus on short-term financial performance by investors, money managers and corporate executives has systematically robbed the economy of the patient capital it needs to produce sustained and vigorous economic growth. Their complaint is that the focus on short-term financial performance by investors, money managers and corporate executives has systematically robbed the economy of the patient capital it needs to produce sustained and vigorous economic growth.
House Passes Far-Reaching Bill Tightening Financial Rules The House on Friday approved a Democratic plan to significantly tighten federal regulation of Wall Street and the financial sector, advancing a far-reaching Congressional response to the financial crisis still reverberating through the economy. After three days of floor debate, the House voted 223 to 202 to approve the measure, which did not get a single Republican vote. It creates a new agency to oversee consumer lending, establishes new rules for transactions that contributed to the meltdown, and seeks to reduce the threat that one or two huge companies on the verge of collapse could bring down the economy.
You Be Obama Let’s say that you are President Obama. You’ve inherited a health care system that is the insane spawn of a team of evil geniuses from an alien power. Pay is divorced from performance. Users are separated from costs. Rising costs threaten to destroy your nation and everything you hold dear. Because you have a lofty perspective on things, you know there are basically two ways to fix this mess. There is the liberal way, in which the government takes over the health care system and decides who gets what. And then there is the conservative way, in which cost-conscious consumers make choices in the context of a competitive marketplace. You also know that these two approaches have one thing in common. They are both currently politically unsellable. Others have tried and perished. There are vast (opposing) armies arrayed against them. The whole issue is a nightmare. This brings you to the final stage, the scrum. This is the set of all-night meetings at the end of the Congressional summer session when all the different pieces actually get put together. You want the scrum to be quick so that the bill is passed before some of the interests groups realize that they’ve been decapitated. You want the scrum to be frantic so you can tell your allies that their reservations might destroy the whole effort (this is how you are going to get the liberals to water down the public plan and the moderates to loosen their fiscal rectitude). The scrum will be an ugly, all-out scramble for dough. You can probably get expanded coverage out of it. You can hammer the hospitals and get much of the $1.2 trillion to pay for the expansion. But you won’t be able to honestly address the toughest issues and still hold your coalition. You won’t get the kind of structural change that will bring down costs long-term. In the scrum, Congress will embrace the easy stuff and bury the hard stuff. Which is why you have MedPAC. That’s the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission that you want to turn into a health care Federal Reserve Board — an aloof technocratic body of experts that will make tough decisions beyond the reach of politics. You can take every thorny issue, throw it to MedPac and consider it solved.
Health-care help from the rookies Finally, there is some good news on the health-care front. The headlines went to a possible compromise on the contentious issue of the public option, but the greater victory may lie in less-publicized Senate action that might actually cut the costs of our impossibly expensive health-care system. This week, the outlines of such a change emerged in a package of amendments proposed by 11 freshman Democratic senators -- who have an abundance of common sense that more than compensates for their lack of seniority and renown. So they reached out to some of the major players outside Congress and, as several of those interest-group experts told me, did the hard work of exploring for themselves how the emerging legislation might be improved. The product of their exercise is a series of amendments that they argue will "broaden and accelerate efforts to encourage innovation and lower costs for consumers across the U.S. health care system." Their work was praised by many who helped develop it for recognizing that parallel changes must come in Medicare and Medicaid, as well as in the private sector of medicine. They also grasped that we need to make more robust use of field experiments in how to do that. This builds on a growing awareness of the fact that buried in the thousands of pages of the legislation passed by the House and pending in the Senate are authorizations for pilot programs testing a wide variety of changes to coordinate care and reduce costs. They have been there all along, but until recently were obscured by the fight over the public option, abortion and other headline-grabbing issues. These pilots would test such approaches as offering a comprehensive fee, rather than billing for each doctor or test when, for example, a heart attack or diabetes patient is first treated, or rewarding or penalizing a hospital depending on its rate of hospital-incurred infections.
Testing, Testing Health-care costs are strangling our country. Medical care now absorbs eighteen per cent of every dollar we earn. here are, in human affairs, two kinds of problems: those which are amenable to a technical solution and those which are not. Universal health-care coverage belongs to the first category: you can pick one of several possible solutions, pass a bill, and (allowing for some tinkering around the edges) it will happen. Problems of the second kind, by contrast, are never solved, exactly; they are managed. Reforming the agricultural system so that it serves the country’s needs has been a process, involving millions of farmers pursuing their individual interests. This could not happen by fiat. There was no one-time fix. The same goes for reforming the health-care system so that it serves the country’s needs. Much like farming, medicine involves hundreds of thousands of local entities across the country—hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, home-health agencies, drug and device suppliers. They provide complex services for the thousands of diseases, conditions, and injuries that afflict us. They want to provide good care, but they also measure their success by the amount of revenue they take in, and, as each pursues its individual interests, the net result has been disastrous. Our fee-for-service system, doling out separate payments for everything and everyone involved in a patient’s care, has all the wrong incentives: it rewards doing more over doing right, it increases paperwork and the duplication of efforts, and it discourages clinicians from working together for the best possible results. Knowledge diffuses too slowly. Our information systems are primitive. The malpractice system is wasteful and counterproductive. And the best way to fix all this is—well, plenty of people have plenty of ideas. It’s just that nobody knows for sure.
The Key to Fixing Health Care and Energy: Use Less Our health-care crisis and our energy crisis are complex dilemmas made of many complex problems. But our biggest problem in both health care and energy is essentially the same simple problem: we use too much. And in both cases, there's a simple explanation for much of the problem: our providers get paid more when we use more. Undoing these waste-promoting incentives — the "fee-for-service" payment system that awards more fees to doctors and hospitals for providing more services, and the regulated electricity rates that reward utilities for selling more power and building more plants — would not solve all our health-care and energy problems. But it would be a major step in the right direction. President Obama has pledged to pass massive overhauls of both sectors this year, but if Congress lacks the stomach for comprehensive reforms — and these days it's looking like Kate Moss in the stomach department — a more modest effort to realign perverse incentives could take a serious bite out of both crises. Everyone knows we use too much energy. Our addiction to fossil fuels is torching the planet, empowering hostile petro-states and straining our wallets. Meanwhile, studies by scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and elsewhere suggest that more than half of our energy is lost through inefficiencies, calculations that don't even include the energy we fritter away through wasteful behavior like leaving lights on or idling cars. We're on course to increase electricity usage another 30% by 2030, which could require trillions of dollars worth of new emissions-belching power plants, so it would be much better to eliminate the usage that doesn't add to our quality of life. By contrast, not everyone realizes that we use too much health care; most of us assume that more treatment is better, that the best doctors are the ones who do the most to us, that our health costs are the world's highest because our health care is the world's most thorough. But a slew of research by the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice has found that as much as 30% of our annual $2 trillion–plus medical bill may be wasted on unnecessary care, mostly run-of-the-mill diagnostic tests, office visits, hospital stays, minor procedures and prescriptions for brand-name wonder drugs advertised on TV. Our soaring health spending is on course to bankrupt the Treasury — along with state and local governments, big and small businesses, and millions of families — so again, it would be nice to cut out the usage that doesn't make us healthier, and can even make us sicker.
A Share in Children's Success With the economic downturn squeezing budgets, college tuition and child care are becoming unaffordable for an increasing number of families. For many, the American dream is seeming more like, well, just a dream. But while you're dreaming, imagine a kid from rural Montana who, after scoring high on the SAT, has investors clamoring to finance his college education. Imagine General Motors investing in Detroit public schools as a long-term survival strategy. Imagine America's largest corporations and investors, after generations of putting fiduciary responsibility before social responsibility, suddenly finding the two to be inextricably intertwined. Imagine that we realize it is insufficient to be a stakeholder society; that we must also be a shareholder society. It seems far-fetched, but we could make this vision a reality by creating an equity market for human capital. It starts with a number: 17. A 17 percent compound annual growth rate, to be precise. That's the astronomical potential return on investment of educational intervention on young children, according to the Nobel laureate economist James Heckman. The return manifests itself in increased future earnings and reduced social costs. Today, that 17 percent compound annual growth rate is inaccessible to investors, but if people could issue shares of their future cash flow, it would unleash that potential, initiating a massive influx of investment in children.
Colleges Failing to Graduate Many If you were going to come up with a list of organizations whose failures had done the most damage to the American economy in recent years, you’d probably have to start with the Wall Street firms and regulatory agencies that brought us the financial crisis. From there, you might move on to Wall Street’s fellow bailout recipients in Detroit, the once-Big Three. But I would suggest that the list should also include a less obvious nominee: public universities. At its top levels, the American system of higher education may be the best in the world. Yet in terms of its core mission — turning teenagers into educated college graduates — much of the system is simply failing. Only 33 percent of the freshmen who enter the University of Massachusetts, Boston, graduate within six years. Less than 41 percent graduate from the University of Montana, and 44 percent from the University of New Mexico. The economist Mark Schneider refers to colleges with such dropout rates as “failure factories,” and they are the norm. The United States does a good job enrolling teenagers in college, but only half of students who enroll end up with a bachelor’s degree. Among rich countries, only Italy is worse. That’s a big reason inequality has soared, and productivity growth has slowed. Economic growth in this decade was on pace to be slower than in any decade since World War II — even before the financial crisis started. Congress and the Obama administration are now putting together an education bill that tries to deal with the problem. It would cancel about $9 billion in annual government subsidies for banks that lend to college students and use much of the money to increase financial aid. A small portion of the money would be set aside for promising pilot programs aimed at lifting the number of college graduates. All in all, the bill would help. But it won’t solve the system’s biggest problems — the focus on enrollment rather than completion, the fact that colleges are not held to account for their failures. “Crossing the Finish Line” makes it clear that we can do better. The first problem that Mr. Bowen, Mr. McPherson and the book’s third author, Matthew Chingos, a doctoral candidate, diagnose is something they call under-matching. It refers to students who choose not to attend the best college they can get into. They instead go to a less selective one, perhaps one that’s closer to home or, given the torturous financial aid process, less expensive.
Government-haters lose Here's a story you may have missed because it flies in the face of the dreary conventional wisdom: When advocates of public programs take on the right-wing anti-government crowd directly, the government-haters lose. This is what happened in two statewide referendums last week that got buried under all of the attention paid to the governor's races in Virginia and New Jersey. In Maine, voters rejected a tax-limitation measure by a walloping 60 percent to 40 percent. In Washington state, a similar measure went down, 57 percent to 43 percent. They lost in part because opponents of the so-called Taxpayer Bill of Rights measures (known as TABOR) did something that happens too rarely in the national debate: They made a case for what government does, why it's important and why cutbacks in public services can be harmful to citizens and the common good. The idea that most voters hate government has an outsize influence on the thinking of both parties. Republicans try to exploit this feeling; Democrats try to get around it. Only rarely do those who believe in active government take the argument head-on and insist that many of the things government does are necessary and, yes, good. The media almost never discuss what the sweeping dismantling of public services inherent in the rhetoric of the anti-government movement would mean in practice. It's far easier to replay footage from a few tea-party rallies over and over, and discuss some vague "mood" in the electorate.
The Betrayal So long as Budweiser, the King of Beers, was enthroned in this pleasant and nobly resilient middle American city, the blows of corporate condescension from the other giants who abandoned the Gateway Arch could be endured.But then, last year, came a kidney punch that still hurts: Anheuser-Busch, which had survived Prohibition and the micro-brew craze, was sold to a Belgian brewer. Bud was now Euro-beer. Next they’ll tell us Huck Finn had a taste for éclairs as he floated down the Mississippi.Board members, those solid citizens of St. Louis, made a pile in the merger that created the world’s largest brewer. But everyone else lost, including more than a 1,000 longtime employees given pink slips.It takes quite a bit for Americans to say that the social contract is broken, or look upon concentrated wealth as anything except a virtue.But we may have reached that breach. Our politics are not simply left and right, conservative and liberal. Never have been. Every once in a while, the great middle of independents are stirred to one side. My guess is, if the drift caused by recent actions continues, the United States will be consumed in the coming year by the politics of betrayal, and the winner will be ahead of the rage.Right now, a time when only 20 percent of Americans call themselves Republicans and Democrats are shrinking as well, the independents are disgusted with both parties. In large part, it’s because neither one seems to be on their side.
Re-framing Politics and Civic Discourse
Obama strategy: Marginalize critics President Obama is working systematically to marginalize the most powerful forces behind the Republican Party, setting loose top White House officials to undermine conservatives in the media, business and lobbying worlds. With a series of private meetings and public taunts, the White House has targeted the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest-spending pro-business lobbying group in the country; Rush Limbaugh, the country’s most-listened-to conservative commentator; and now, with a new volley of combative rhetoric in recent days, the insurance industry, Wall Street executives and Fox News. The campaign underscores how deeply political the Obama White House is in its daily operations — with a strong focus on redrawing the electoral map and discrediting the personalities and ideas that have powered the conservative movement over the past 20 years. This determination has manifested itself in small ways: This president has done three times as many fundraisers as President George W. Bush had at this point in his term. And in large ones: Beginning with their contretemps with Limbaugh last winter, Obama’s most important advisers miss few opportunities for public and highly partisan shots at his most influential critics. It’s too early to tell if the campaign is working, but it’s clearly exacerbating partisan tensions in Washington. “They won — why don’t they act like it?” said Dana Perino, former White House press secretary to Bush. “The more they fight, the more defensive they look. It’s only been 10 months, and they’re burning bridges in a lot of different places.” White House officials see things differently. They see an opportunity to corner critics of the president’s policies, especially on health care and financial regulations, and, in the process, further marginalize the Republican Party. Privately, officials have talked with relish for months of the potential to isolate the GOP as a narrow party of white, Southern conservatives with little appeal to independent-minded voters. This won’t happen overnight, but a combination of demographics — especially the explosion of a Hispanic population that has been voting for Democrats — the near-extinction of Republicans in the Northeast and the steady rightward drift of the GOP’s grass-roots activists at least makes it a plausible goal. So is the strategy working? White House officials point to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll to argue the answer is emphatically yes. Only 20 percent of those surveyed identified themselves as Republicans, the lowest in 26 years of asking the question. As bad as that number is, the news about independents is arguably worse. A staggering 83 percent of all independents surveyed said they don’t trust Republicans to make the right decisions.
Enduring Partisan Divide Stokes Skepticism of Washington Americans have concluded within the past year that their financial firms and auto companies don't work very well. Many now seem to be drawing the same conclusion about their government, which, ironically, has been charged with saving those financial firms and auto companies. The evidence for that conclusion arrives in the form of a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, which finds Americans holding in low esteem the government -- and, in fact, much of Washington. To some extent, that's natural in a country weary of war and still scared by the economy. But the level of skepticism -- even cynicism -- is high by historical standards and surprising given the extent to which whole swaths of the nation have leaned on their government for a bailout in recent months. What accounts for this sentiment? Maybe a clue can be found in new congressional voting statistics showing that partisanship is just as entrenched in Washington in the age of Obama as it was before. In the Journal/NBC News poll, Americans were asked how much of the time they trust the government in Washington to do the right thing; 65% said "only some of the time" and a stunning 11% said "never." Various polling organizations have been asking that question for decades, and they've rarely found that level of skepticism about government. It may be telling that the last time the numbers were even comparable was in the midst of the last great recession, in 1982. So is it just the recession, or something else going on? Wasn't last year's election victory by Democrats, combined with a virtual national consensus that the government needed to step in to stem the bleeding caused by the economic meltdown, supposed to signal a renewed appreciation for government's role in America? Maybe not. Here's a not-so-sophisticated theory: Americans certainly want their politicians to debate strenuously about important issues -- the poll's findings confirm that -- but they also want them, at the end of the day, to figure out a way to compromise, come together and solve problems. That's particularly so in times of crisis. For most of the past two decades, though, they've mostly seen the arguing part, not the coming together part. For the past several years, voting patterns tracked by Congressional Quarterly have confirmed that Congress is locked in a deep, partisan divide in which Republicans and Democrats rarely reach across party lines.
The Great American Ideological Crackup The whole thing feels like the last war, or a song that has not worn well, or a guest who has overstayed his welcome. The White House–vs.–Fox News mini-saga belongs to an era that effectively ended last fall, when President Bush radically enlarged the role of the federal government in the economy and Obama won the presidency. It was clear then, and is even clearer now, that the issues which long defined the right-left divide (hawkishness abroad, a limited role for government at home) are in spectacular disarray. We have been here before. The analogous moments that most easily come to mind—moments of economic turmoil and political realignment—are 1933 and 1981. And so the 44th president has the chance—only the chance; success is not at all certain—to follow in the tradition of the two men who defined politics in the last 70 years: Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. FDR's transformed the role of the state, shaping reality for presidents from Truman to Carter. Then, after 1981, the eponymous Reagan Revolution politically replaced the ethos of the New Deal. Bill Clinton's announcement of the death of big government was, in its way, the apogee of Reaganism. But we are now living in a post-Roosevelt, post-Reagan universe. What comes next will not be post-partisan, because faction is an intrinsic human impulse. Nor, for the same reason, will it be post-ideological. The question, rather, is what new ideologies—or what new permutations of perennial ideological impulses—will form to order our politics in the face of asymmetrical warfare, religious extremism, and an intensely globalized economy. That is a developing story that no cable channel is likely to cover very well.
Self-Image and Party Politics I have to say, I’m baffled by what the political parties are doing. The Republicans are behaving like a party with a death wish. They have a golden opportunity to make substantial inroads in Congress next year and set the stage for a possible White House comeback in 2012. But as you point out, a rigid hard-right strategy that undermines G.O.P. candidates who might appeal to moderate and independent voters is exactly the wrong way to proceed. I don’t get it. The Democrats have their problems too. And if anything, their problems are deeper because they are intellectual, not merely partisan. The Obama administration has sent the country off to the right. The president is creating a counter-realignment. Voters don’t identify with the G.O.P. but the number of people who call themselves conservative is now near an all-time high. Meanwhile, Bill Galston, who served in the Clinton administration and is one of the smartest political observers I know, sums up the public mood nicely in an article in The New Republic: Far more independents (35 percent) consider themselves conservative than was the case a year ago (only 29 percent). These findings would be less compelling if they were not linked to conservative shifts on specific issues — but they are, and the Gallup organization enumerates a considerable list. The disenchantment I’m hearing from people who wholeheartedly supported Obama, and not just liberals, is palpable and growing. It’s early, but the big changes people were hoping for have not materialized, and voters don’t seem to be in the mood now for initiatives — even necessary ones — that will cost a lot of money. The Democrats were given a very strong political hand when Obama took office, and they have not played it well.
Chamber Chief Battles Obama Agenda With President Barack Obama bidding to overhaul the health-care system, tighten bank oversight and make industries pay for their greenhouse-gas emissions, some trade-association chiefs have decided to compromise with the party in power. Not Thomas Donohue. On many of Mr. Obama's priorities, the president and chief executive of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is working to defeat the administration—delighting some members, causing some to quit and sparking a furious reaction from the White House and left-wing activists. In the process, he has made the Chamber one of Mr. Obama's most visible opponents.On climate change, Mr. Donohue's group says warmer temperatures could help by reducing deaths related to cold weather.On health care, a Chamber ad says Democrats' approach will kill jobs and slow growth. On financial regulation, one ad says the administration's plan will hurt small businesses, "even the small butcher"—a line that prompted Mr. Obama to denounce the Chamber from the presidential podium this month. Now, Mr. Donohue aims to spend $20 million annually for several years advocating free-market policies such as open trade and less regulation, taking aim at much of the Democrats' agenda. The public-relations campaign is the biggest undertaking in the Chamber's 100-year history. A question hanging over all this is whether Mr. Donohue's aggressive stance will work better than compromise. The Chamber, which says it has 300,000 dues-paying members, has become a political target in Washington's partisan atmosphere. Though Mr. Donohue has strong supporters, a vocal minority of companies, including Apple Inc. and Nike Inc., have recently quit the Chamber or its board.
The Obama-Bush Connection The common wisdom—a phrase 41 uses more often than "conventional wisdom"—is that Obama is an heir of 41's style, particularly in the diplomatic realm. The storyline is clear: Obama is more like George W. Bush's father than George W. Bush ever was. That argument is at best incomplete and at worst wrong. The photograph of the two men, taken from the back (Ike is carrying his hat), shoulder to shoulder, embodies a truth that remains relevant now: for all the sound and fury of the arena, on big issues American presidents tend to have more in common with one another than one might at first think. There is a presidential character intrinsic to the office. Part of this is because what seemed black and white while you were running looks a lot grayer once ultimate power is yours, and part of it is that the country changes presidents more frequently than the country changes itself. We are a center-right nation politically and culturally, which means we value moderate governance—and we punish those who stray too far one way or the other.
What Independents Want Liberals and conservatives each have their own intellectual food chains. They have their own think tanks to provide arguments, politicians and pundits to amplify them, and news media outlets to deliver streams of prejudice-affirming stories. Independents, who are the largest group in the electorate, don’t have any of this. They don’t have institutional affiliations. They don’t look to certain activist lobbies for guidance. There aren’t many commentators who come from an independent perspective. Independents are herds of cats who find out what they think through a meandering process of discovery. Right now, independent voters are astonishingly volatile. Democrats did poorly in elections on Tuesday partly because of disappointed liberals who think that President Obama is moving too slowly, but mostly because of anxious suburban independents who think he is moving too fast. If I were a politician trying to win back independents, I’d say something like this: When I was a kid, I had a jigsaw puzzle of the U.S. Each state was a piece, and on it there was a drawing showing what people made there. California might have movies; Washington State, apples; New York, fashion or publishing. That puzzle represented an economy that was diverse and deeply rooted. We’ve lost that. First Wall Street got disproportionately big, then Washington. It’s time to return to fundamentals. No short-term fixes. Government should do what it’s supposed to do: schools, roads, basic research. It should not be picking C.E.O.’s or setting pay or fizzing up the economy with more debt. It should give people the tools to compete, not rig the competition. Lines of restraint have dissolved, and they need to be restored.Independents support the party that seems most likely to establish a frame of stability and order, within which they can lead their lives. They can’t always articulate what they want, but they withdraw from any party that threatens turmoil and risk. As always, they’re looking for a safe pair of hands.
Tea partiers turn on each other After emerging out of nowhere over the summer as a seemingly potent and growing political force, the tea party movement has become embroiled in internal feuding over philosophy, strategy and money and is at risk of losing its momentum. The grass-roots activists driving the movement have become increasingly divided on such core questions as whether to focus their efforts on shaping policy debates or elections, work on a local, regional, state or national level or closely align themselves with the Republican Party, POLITICO found in interviews with tea party organizers in Washington and across the country. Many of these differences date to the movement’s beginnings last winter in an outpouring of anger about the huge increases in government spending enacted by President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress. But they were overshadowed by the initial explosion of activism that culminated during the congressional town hall meetings in August. Now the disagreements and the sense of frustration they have engendered could diminish the movement’s potential influence in state and national politics. The organizational chaos — combined with a widening apathy at the edges of the movement — has produced a growing consensus among local, state and national tea party leaders that for the movement to evolve from the loose conglomeration of fired-up activists who mobilized this summer to register their dissatisfaction with Obama and Congress at town hall protests and marches across the country into a sustainable bloc with the power to shape the GOP and swing elections, it will require the emergence of a national leader, group or structure.
'Filibusted' In their quest to thwart President Obama, Republicans do not fear the hobgoblin of consistency. For much of this decade, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, now the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, led the fight against Democratic filibusters of George W. Bush's judicial nominees. He decried Democrats' "unprecedented, obstructive tactics." To have Bush nominees "opposed on a partisan filibuster, it is really wrong," he added. He demanded they get "an up-and-down vote." He praised Republican leaders because they "opposed judicial filibusters" and have "been consistent on this issue even when it was not to their political benefit to do so." So now a Democratic president is in the White House and he has nominated his first appellate judicial nominee, U.S. District Judge David Hamilton. And what did Sessions do? He went to the floor and led a filibuster. "I opposed filibusters before," the Alabaman said with his trademark twang. But in this case, he went on, "I don't agree with his judicial philosophy. Therefore, I believe this side cannot acquiesce into a philosophy that says that Democratic presidents can get their judges confirmed with 50 votes." Uh-huh. Ten of the Senate's 40 Republicans, attempting some measure of consistency, parted ways with Sessions and voted with Democrats in a resounding 70 to 29 vote to break the filibuster. But the rest abandoned their deeply held views of just a few years ago. There was, for example, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.). Back in 2005, he demanded "a simple up-or-down vote" for nominees and urged the Democrats to "move away from advise and obstruct and get back to advise and consent." He declared that Democrats wanted to "take away the power to nominate from the president and grant it to a minority of 41 senators." On Tuesday, McConnell voted to sustain the filibuster.
The GOP's no-exit strategy But it's also time to start paying attention to how Republicans, with Machiavellian brilliance, have hit upon what might be called the Beltway-at-Rush-Hour Strategy, aimed at snarling legislative traffic to a standstill so Democrats have no hope of reaching the next exit. We know what happens when drivers just sit there when they're supposed to be moving. They get grumpy, irascible and start turning on each other, which is exactly what the Democrats are doing. Republicans know one other thing: Practically nobody is noticing their delay-to-kill strategy. Who wants to discuss legislative procedure when there's so much fun and profit in psychoanalyzing Sarah Palin? The rules have changed. The extra-constitutional filibuster is being used by the minority, with extraordinary success, to make the majority look foolish, ineffectual and incompetent. By using Republican obstructionism as a vehicle for forcing through their own narrow agendas, supposedly moderate Democratic senators will only make themselves complicit in this humiliation.
They Chose Celebrity Before the 2008 election, almost nobody outside Alaska and Arkansas had heard of Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee. But in a long and crowded campaign season, they were the only Republican politicians who inspired any genuine enthusiasm. And both had the same Achilles’ heel: They seemed unready for high office, and owed their appeal more to personality than to substance. This meant that both faced the same post-election choice. Did they want to take their newfound eminence seriously? Or did they want to cash in on their celebrity? So far, they’ve chosen celebrity instead But they were the wrong moves if either wanted to become president someday. It’s possible to be a celebrity and a serious politician at the same time: Barack Obama’s career proves as much. But Obama’s celebrity status is frequently a political liability, and he’s (usually) wise enough to know it. That’s why he plays the wonk as often as he plays the global icon. For now, no Republican leader projects a similar level of seriousness. Late in the Bush years, it was easy to dismiss conservatism as brain-dead. Among policy thinkers, that isn’t true anymore: the advent of Obama seems to have provided just the jolt that right-of-center wonks needed. But innovative proposals are useless without politicians willing to champion them. True, these ideas won’t sell millions of books, or excite the crowd on Huckabee’s talk show. But they’re what the Republican Party needs if it’s going to be more than just a brake on liberalism’s ambitions. And they’re what voters are going to be looking for, in 2012 and beyond, as proof that conservatives can be trusted once again. This means that there are substantial political rewards awaiting the politician who becomes the voice of an intellectually vigorous conservatism. It probably won’t be Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin. If Republicans are lucky, though, it will be somebody who shares their charisma — but who prefers the responsibilities of leadership to the pleasures of celebrity.
Republicans Eye the Tiger of Populism Via Oprah, Facebook and a bus trip that resembled a campaign swing more than a book tour, Sarah Palin reappeared on the national stage last week, minus her governorship and running-mate status, but with a new role as principled “rogue” to add to her previous credits as plain-spoken patriot and hockey mom. Whatever else it said about America, her return brought into focus a big question for Republicans as they watched the intense reactions she generated: To what extent should they try to energize their electoral prospects by hitching themselves to the powerful but volatile strain of populism — characterized by anti-elitism and deep skepticism of government — that Ms. Palin has come to embody? The renewed potency of populist conservatism has been on display since the summer, when health care town hall meetings became a forum for frustrated voters, angry at President Obama and Congressional Democrats over the issue of government expansion, and also at Republicans suspected of not fighting aggressively enough. But even as conservatives exult in Mr. Obama’s declining job approval ratings, the drive for ideological purity inspired by the populists of the right has left many elected Republicans nervous and concerned. Just ask Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina or Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, rock-solid Republicans who now are accused of being insufficiently ideological. Consider too the recent election in upstate New York, in which a dispute between conservatives and moderates cost Republicans a House seat they had held for generations. At a time when grass-roots anger is being fed by government bailouts of powerful Wall Street firms, Republicans could find themselves as politically vulnerable as the Democrats now seem. It was, after all, President Bush who initiated the rescues on Wall Street in 2008. Even so, the issues now animating tea partiers and other grass-roots activists reflect the Republican Party’s core values: less government spending, lower taxes, lighter regulation. The trick, some Republicans said, is to guide populists’ energies toward an optimistic agenda built on those themes. “If we don’t take this anger and frustration, as legitimate as I believe it is, and channel it into a good, a positive, then we won’t be successful,” said Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator from Pennsylvania.
President and the People: Decision-making Processes & Perspectives
The PDQ Presidency Obama had been secretly plotting his transition since the spring of 2008. He enjoyed reciting the line from the 1972 movie The Candidate in which Robert Redford turns to an aide just after winning the election and mournfully asks, "What do we do now?" Obama insisted that he would not be that man. He had launched a massive transition project involving more than 200 policy wonks offering advice. Everyone knew Obama intended to get going quickly after the election. They just didn't expect that "quickly" to Obama meant hours, not days. Obama's leadership style falls somewhere between Bill Clinton's wide--ranging deliberations and George W. Bush's snap judgments. His ability to integrate complex facts, summarize competing arguments, then announce a crisp decision impressed the more experienced officials around him, including Joe Biden. After one conference call about the economy in early December, the vice president–elect and two-time presidential candidate told his aide Ron Klain, "We got this ticket in the right order." Critics say that Obama's hurry to inject money into the economy resulted in wasteful spending. But contrary to public perception, the vast bulk of stimulus spending went to worthy programs, including long-neglected infrastructure projects like roads, bridges, and local sewage systems. It also included one of the largest tax cuts ever. But here Obama was hampered by political naiveté. Instead of holding his cards close, the president-elect offered huge tax cuts from the get-go—giving Republican critics what they wanted nearly three weeks before taking office. "He should have said, 'Here's the thing: no tax cuts,' " says close friend Marty Nesbitt. "And then he could have said, 'OK, you make some solid arguments—OK, it's $280 billion.' " (The final bill called for $288 billion.) That way, Obama could have made the tax cuts a useful bargaining chip, Nesbitt says, though he doesn't believe the Republicans were ever negotiating in good faith.
The Recession’s Over, but Not the Layoffs Has Mr. Obama lost his oratorical touch? Is the magic finally beginning to fade? Does the White House rely too heavily on his skills on the stump to advance his priorities? It may be too soon to reach such conclusions. The Democrats who lost last week, after all, had fatal flaws all their own. But the results do suggest that Mr. Obama’s addresses these days may not resonate quite the way they did. Speeches that once set pulses racing now feel more familiar. And if that remains the case heading into next year, it could make it more difficult for the Democrats’ own Great Communicator to promote his program and carry along allies in crucial midterm elections. Speechmaking as a president often presents a sharper challenge than it does on the campaign trail. The audience is different, the desired goals are different, the platform is different. Selling another candidate, as Mr. Obama tried to do for Jon Corzine in New Jersey and Creigh Deeds in Virginia, is invariably harder than selling yourself. And pushing policies requires more explanation than inspiration. “The difference now is it’s much more difficult to have to explain complicated policies consistently day in and day out,” said Josh Gottheimer, a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton who now teaches the history of presidential speechwriting and is working on a book on the subject. “The stakeholders have changed. Congress matters a lot more. When you’re on the campaign trail, they don’t matter as much.” Unlike Mr. Bush, who recognized his limitations as a public speaker, Mr. Obama and his team have enormous faith in his capacity for communicating with the American people. Mr. Obama’s aides point to several such moments this year — his first address to a joint session of Congress as he was advocating a large spending package to stimulate the economy, his speech at Georgetown University laying out his vision of a “new foundation” for a post-recession nation, his Cairo speech, his commencement address at Notre Dame where he tried to bridge the divide over abortion and his September return to Congress to argue for his health care plan. While Mr. Gerson contends that months of Obama speeches have not erased deep public concerns with his health care plan, Geoff Garin, a Democratic strategist, called the address to Congress “the best policy address by a president since Lyndon Johnson talked about the Voting Rights Act in 1965.” Following an August dominated by attacks on the health care plan, Mr. Garin said Mr. Obama “was able to lift a debate that had got stuck in the mud up to a much higher place and let Obama and supporters of health care reform retake the high ground.” But the risk for any president is that at some point the public begins to tune out.
Hope Springs Eternal From time to time the American people participate in a mass delusion about how their government works. Such a delusion took place exactly a year ago, when a 47-year-old African-American who had once been accorded little chance of prevailing was elected president of the United States. History will judge Barack Obama over the long haul. But we've learned something in the short term that is simple, obvious, and has less to do with him than with the Founding Fathers. This is a country that often has transformational ambitions but is saddled with an incremental system, a nation built on revolution, then engineered so the revolutionary can rarely take hold. placeAd2(commercialNode,'bigbox',false,'') Checks and balances: that's how we learn about it in social-studies class, and in theory it is meant to guard against a despotic executive, a wild-eyed legislature, an overweening judiciary. And it's also meant to safeguard the rights of the individual; as James Madison, president and father of the Constitution, once said, "I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." But what our system has meant during the poisonous partisan civil war that has paralyzed Washington in recent years is that very little of the big stuff gets done. It simply can't. This president promised to tackle the big stuff, swiftly, decisively, and in a fashion about which he was unequivocal, and voters took him at his word a year ago. For those who yearned for a progressive agenda that would change the playing field for the disenfranchised, he promised to do good. So far he has mainly done government, which overlaps with good too little in the Venn diagram of American public policy. It's best summed up by the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. She served as an aide in the Johnson White House, and her voice still carries the vibrato of excitement when she recalls that time. "LBJ promised the members of Congress that they could someday say they'd made history," she says. "This Congress has never known the joy of that accomplishment. They haven't ever been part of an institution that moves collectively to change history for the benefit of the American people." She also notes that the presidents who have made real change have always done so in the same way: "Each of them had the country pushing the Congress to act, the people and the press both. The pressure has to come from outside." So if the American people want the president to be more like the Barack Obama they elected, maybe they should start acting more like the voters who elected him, who forcibly and undeniably moved the political establishment to where it didn't want to go. After all, in our system, even great, audacious change is never as audacious as it seems: calls for a national health-care system can be traced all the way back to Roosevelt—Teddy Roosevelt, in 1912. When Sen. Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine, broke with her party to vote a health-care bill out of committee, she said, "When history calls, history calls." And it's not asking for baby steps.
Reactions, Judgment & Judgments and Assessments
The Tenacity Question Today, President Obama will lead another meeting to debate strategy in Afghanistan. He will presumably discuss the questions that have divided his advisers: How many troops to commit? How to define plausible goals? Should troops be deployed broadly or just in the cities and towns? For the past few days I have tried to do what journalists are supposed to do.I’ve called around to several of the smartest military experts I know to get their views on these controversies. I called retired officers, analysts who have written books about counterinsurgency warfare, people who have spent years in Afghanistan. I tried to get them to talk about the strategic choices facing the president. To my surprise, I found them largely uninterested. Most of them have no doubt that the president is conducting an intelligent policy review. They have no doubt that he will come up with some plausible troop level. They are not worried about his policy choices. Their concerns are more fundamental. They are worried about his determination. The determination vacuum affects the debate in this country, too. Every argument about troop levels is really a proxy argument for whether the U.S. should stay or go. The administration is so divided because the fundamental issue of commitment has not been settled.
The Analytic Mode Many Democrats are nostalgic for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign — for the passion, the clarity, the bliss-to-be-alive fervor. They argue that these things are missing in a cautious and emotionless White House. But, of course, the Obama campaign, like all presidential campaigns, was built on a series of fictions. The first fiction was that government is a contest between truth and error. In reality, government is usually a contest between competing, unequal truths. The second fiction was that to support a policy is to make it happen. In fact, in government power is exercised through other people. It is only by coaxing, prodding and compromise that presidents actually get anything done. The third fiction was that we can begin the world anew. In fact, all problems and policies have already been worked by a thousand hands and the clay is mostly dry. Presidents are compelled to work with the material they have before them. The fourth fiction was that leaders know the path ahead. In fact, they have general goals, but the way ahead is pathless and everything is shrouded by uncertainty. All presidents have to adjust to these realities when they move to the White House. The only surprise with President Obama is how enthusiastically he has made the transition. He’s political, like any president, but he seems to vastly prefer the grays of governing to the simplicities of the campaign. The election revolved around passionate rallies. The Obama White House revolves around a culture of debate. He leads long, analytic discussions, which bring competing arguments to the fore. He sometimes seems to preside over the arguments like a judge settling a lawsuit. His policies are often a balance as he tries to accommodate different points of view. He doesn’t generally issue edicts. In matters foreign and domestic, he seems to spend a lot of time coaxing people along. His governing style, in short, is biased toward complexity. The advantage of the Obama governing style is that his argument-based organization is a learning organization. Amid the torrent of memos and evidence and dispute, the Obama administration is able to adjust and respond more quickly than, say, the Bush administration ever did.
The disadvantage is the tendency to bureaucratize the war. Armed conflict is about morale, motivation, honor, fear and breaking the enemy’s will. The danger is that Obama’s analytic mode will neglect the intangibles that are the essence of the fight. It will fail to inspire and comfort. Soldiers and Marines don’t have the luxury of adopting President Obama’s calibrated stance since they are being asked to potentially sacrifice everything. Barring a scientific breakthrough, we can’t merge Obama’s analysis with George Bush’s passion. But we should still be glad that he is governing the way he is. I loved covering the Obama campaign. But amid problems like Afghanistan and health care, it simply wouldn’t do to give gauzy speeches about the meaning of the word hope. It is in Obama’s nature to lead a government by symposium. Embrace the complexity. Learn to live with the dispassion.
Opinion: Obama defines the use of war in an age of terror I’ve covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and many insurgencies and acts of terrorism for the last 15 years and I have never heard anyone more clearly and powerfully articulate what it means to conduct a “just war” or to strive for a “just peace” amid the dark and shadowy struggles against terrorism, a struggle made more ominous by the nuclear threat. Despite the soaring rhetoric, a loud irony echoed inside the hallowed halls of Oslo City Hall as Obama was made a Nobel Prize laureate. What made the speech more than just lofty oratory was the way in which he presented a list of deliverables that he will need to achieve to deserve the award he has already received. And what made it resonant was the way in which he captured the hope and hard work that goes on every day in every corner of the world in trying to work toward peace:
- A Noble Lecture How does a rookie President, having been granted the Nobel Peace Prize, go about earning it? Well, he can start by giving the sort of Nobel lecture that Barack Obama just did, an intellectually rigorous and morally lucid speech that balanced the rationale for going to war against the need to build a more peaceful and equitable world.
- War and peace Obama's eloquent, often grim treatise on the nature and necessity of warfare
- An American triumph at Oslo Obama's Nobel speech marked the moment he became a leader.
The Obamas’ Marriage In the end, what seems more unusual than the Obamas’ who-does-what battles — most working parents have one version or another — is the way they turned them into a teachable moment, converting lived experience into both a political message and what sounds like the opposite of standard political shtick. “If my ups and downs, our ups and downs in our marriage can help young couples sort of realize that good marriages take work. . . .” Michelle Obama said a few minutes later in the interview. The image of a flawless relationship is “the last thing that we want to project,” she said. “It’s unfair to the institution of marriage, and it’s unfair for young people who are trying to build something, to project this perfection that doesn’t exist.” IN THE HISTORYof Barack Obama, his landslide loss against Rush is now regarded as a constructive political failure, the point at which he shed some early dreaminess and hubris and became a cannier competitor. For the Obamas, this period was also one of constructive personal failure, forcing them to reckon with their longstanding differences. Michelle Obama accepted that she was not going to have a conventional marriage, that her husband would be away much of the time.
Words that matter One of the things that sets Barack Obama apart from most politicians is how much can be learned from listening to his speeches. The president is sometimes criticized for the volume of his public appearances, and, in truth, he is out there orating a lot. But we learned in the course of his campaign -- and it was reinforced in this first year of his term -- that it's a mistake to think of these talks as routine. They have no equal in providing insights into the way his mind works and the context that guides his decisions. The striking thing is the consistency with which he places concrete actions into the broadest historical or philosophical setting, and how much he is influenced in his decision-making by the reach of his intellectual exercise. In Oslo, the obvious challenge was to explain why a president leading a nation engaged in two wars should be singled out for the peace prize. Rather than avoiding the issue or burying it in cliches, Obama took it head-on, beginning in the first minute of his speech and devoting half the text to that question. He focused on the meaning in today's world of the ancient concept of "the just war" and found himself arguing that, contrary to the wishes of those who awarded him this prize, "We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified." Afghanistan is such a case, he said, as was the Persian Gulf War to repulse Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. But he made no such claim for the war in Iraq that George W. Bush launched, and he insisted that the many moral compromises made by the previous administration in the war on terrorism were unjustified as well.
