Category: Barack Obama

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Barack Obama Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Buck Up, Democrats!

Andrew Sullivan, who was largely responsible for derailing Bill Clinton’s 1994 health care reform, likewise urges Obama and the Democrats to seize the moment:

[Obama should] tell the American people that he understands their anger and frustration (hence the big swipe at the banks last week), but that he refuses to stand by and do nothing. If the American people want nothing, they should support the opposition. If the American people want something, they should back the president they just elected in implementing a health reform plan he campaigned on.

Jonathan Bernstein explains why the “safe” choice of trying to appease your partisan opponents has little effect:

Democrats can be assured that Republicans will attack them, regardless of what they do.  Democrats could eliminate the estate tax permanently, slash the capital gains tax, repeal the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, invade Iran, and pass a Constitutional Amendment outlawing abortion, and Republicans would still attack them — with exactly the same vehemence and vigor that Republicans have now.  That’s politics.  It’s how partisan politics is played.  It is absolutely impossible to avoid attacks from one’s opponents; nothing you do gives them license to attack, because they will attack whatever you do.  Oh, and this isn’t partisan; Democrats are going to attack Republicans, whatever the Republicans do.

Don’t believe me?  Republicans are attacking Democrats for taking away people’s guns, even though the Democrats basically surrendered on that issue fifteen years ago.  They are attacking Democrats for cutting Medicare and for allowing Medicare to grow so fast that it’ll bankrupt the nation — sometimes in the very same speech (I’ve seen it in the same paragraph)…

My advice to Democrats unsure about what to do is this: think about the actual bill, and what its effects would be if it became law.  If in your judgment those effects would be bad for your constituents, then odds are they will dislike it, blame you for it, and you’ll be in trouble.  If those effects would be good for your constituents, then vote for it.  Then figure out how you’re going to sell the thing and yourself, based on that vote.  But don’t back off of it because you think it will open you up to attacks; you’re wide open right now, and you’ll remain wide open regardless of what you do.

Jonathan Cohn writes a letter to the House Democrats who are considering not voting on the Senate bill:

I don’t want to mislead you: You could pass the Senate bill, which you may really not like, and still lose reelection. But passing health care reform would seem, if anything, to improve your odds of political survival. And if it doesn’t–if you’re doomed to lose anyway–enacting health care reform would give you a meaningful accomplishment in your record.

Think of everything you could do while serving in Congress. Would any single act be bigger than this? However imperfect, it will make a huge difference in people’s lives–and, quite likely, the evolution of the American social welfare state. You’ll be sparing financial or physical hardship for thousands of Americans every year, while delivering peace of mind–and safer, higher quality medicine–to literally millions of others. You’ll be saving the American economy and, along the way, helping people to stay healthy.

You can be a part of this moment in history–and, if you play your cards right, stick around in Congress long enough to enjoy it. It just takes some common sense–and maybe a little mettle.

In other words: Vote for the Damn Bill!

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Health care

The Economist’s Podcast Entitled “The Democrats lose Massachusetts” Is “an insult to people’s intelligence.”

The Economist is far and away one of my favorite magazines – providing insightful commentary and analysis from a normally steady perspective on the world as well as America. But the podcast I heard today entitled, “The Democrats lose Massachusetts” featuring a conversation between Adrian Wooldridge and Christopher Lockwood was atrocious – combining terrible analysis with factual inaccuracies – suggesting that the participants hadn’t actually paid any attention to the health care debate they were commenting upon, but instead had gathered clichés from the 1990s to bat around.

The single most frustrating portion of the conversation was this description of what how Obama approached the Republicans during the health care negotiations:

Had Obama not got himself into a position to ram health care through on a straight party line vote using his 60 seats in the senate and saying, “Okay, fine, we’ll do it without any Republican votes.” There might have been the possibility of making a deal but essentially he’s the man who says, “I’m not going to pay attention to you. I’m going to do it my way. Oops, I can’t. Can we come back and do it your way now?” And they say, “Sorry, you had your chance. You could have dealt with us. You could have given us more of what we wanted: proper cost control, and things like tort reform. But they didn’t do that.” And now for them to turn around and say, “Well, okay, sorry, we got that wrong.” They are more likely to say, “It’s too late for that. The midterms are on their way. Why should we get you out of the hole in which you dug yourself?”

This is wrong on so many levels! Most dramatically, Obama bumped his first deadline in order to satiate the demands from Republicans that he slow down. He courted Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Olympia Snowe and any other Republican senator who showed a willingness to support legislation. The administration was willing to re-write the bill to get their support. Max Baucus crafted a bill largely with these Republicans – cutting out the progressives in the Senate from the process. And in all of this, even the more progressive House bill is a slightly beefed up version of what Republicans have been suggesting all along – a bill focused primarily on cost control. But Orrin Hatch stopped negotiating. And then Grassley began to continue to negotiate in private while condemning the bill in public – declaring that he wouldn’t support the bill even if he got everything he wanted in it if the party wasn’t behind him. Even then, Democrats continued to negotiate with him. And finally, Snowe remained on the fence until the Republican leadership chased her back into the fold. It was at this point that Obama finally decided to say, “Okay, fine, we’ll do it without any Republican votes.” After the bill had been amended to satisfy Olympia Snowe – and Chuck Grassley – and Ben Nelson – and Joe Lieberman. But the pressure on the Republicans was too great – so they bolted.

It is also claimed that, Democrats said: “We’re not willing to annoy one of our constituencies – the tort lawyers – for the public good.” Yet the Democrats and Obama explicitly said they were willing to do this if Republicans would only support some form of the bill – and even without their support offered pilot programs to test different methods of government intervention into this area. To attack a component of their base while Republicans offered them no support would be political suicide!

And then of course, there was the inexplicable statement that, “To say you need to have pilot programs and study it is just really an insult to people’s intelligence.” This is an incredible comment coming from an organization that supports limited government. Pilot programs are exactly the modest approach that the Economist should be supporting – as they can help determine what works and what doesn’t with the minimum disruption to the market. Would they rather Obama offer bold ideas and implement them nationally, with fingers crossed hoping that the unanticipated consequences don’t do more harm than good? The type of tinkering that pilot programs are indicative of are exactly what a capitalist, free market approach should support – especially as they later deride the Obama administration as consisting of, “pointy-headed intellectuals with their big social engineering plans.” Eliminating or curbing the rights of patients to sue regarding their medical care is right wing social engineering – which the Economist apparently has no problem with because of who it will benefit.

So, in conclusion, Woolridge and Lockwood of the Economist maintain that Obama’s health care plan was too big and ambitious and so should be scrapped and that it wasn’t big enough to do what they wanted; that they are mystified how Obama took so long to pass health care reform as he rode roughshod over the Republicans. The first is contradictory – and the second betrays that they weren’t paying attention to health care until recently. Which perhaps explains why they come to the conclusion that the Democratic response to the election of a “conservative Republican” (actually a moderate Republican who is pro-choice and supported the Massachusetts model of health care that Obama’s plan is similar to) is that: “They have to overinterpret this result!” and abandon reform.

[Image by Arenamontanus licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Barack Obama Politics The Opinionsphere

Governing Ambition Versus Political Theater

[digg-reddit-me]Noam Scheiber asks what I consider to be a rather annoying question in The New Republic – having written this piece in anticipation of Scott Brown’s win:

After a year of barely restrained governing ambition, has the political system suddenly forced the president into a posture of symbolically resonant tinkering? Has Obamaism descended into–gasp!–Clintonism?

This question annoys me with its two presumptions (and the fact that I normally like Scheiber makes it worse.)

First, it seems a bit off to describe Obama’s first year as being “barely restrained governing ambition.” This use of the phrase doesn’t quite make sense. It seems that “governing ambition” is supposed to be something bad – something excessive – as ambition so often is. The qualifying clause “barely restrained” seems to suggest Scheiber is using it this way. But the phrase “governing ambition” doesn’t mean what Scheiber seems to think. He uses it to mean “overly ambitious political goals” when the phrase actually means the “ambition to govern (or wield power)” or an “ambition that governs (controls) a person or thing.” This is actually a telling slip – as the main flaw in Scheiber’s argument is to confuse politics with policy. Obama certainly does have the “ambition to govern,” to wield the power of his office to tackle the problems facing the nation. One would expect every politician in Washington not in it purely for selfish reasons would have such an ambition. But this shouldn’t be confused with his political ambitiousness – and the question of whether he is tackling too much. The moment seems to call on many issues to be addressed – and Obama, in choosing to address them, may be taking on too much. In this way, he may suffer from the political hubris of thinking he can actually govern in a system that seems designed to thwart anyone who would take on any interest groups – but this is a far more complex picture than Scheiber’s short-handed way of calling on his readers to accept the right wing talking point that Obama is barely able to hold back as he grasps for more and more power.

Second, Scheiber suggests the alternative to Obama’s approach is “symbolically resonant tinkering.” What a depressing prospect that is! Certainly, it does provide a counterpoint to the “governing ambition” as it is more commonly used. If one is no longer able to govern and deal with the problems at hand, then one can only engage in symbolic gestures that do little. If Obama is no longer able to govern, but must instead engage in the same political theater that Republicans have been engaged in since his election, then the country loses as we put off needed reforms even longer.

What drags Scheiber off the rails is his focus on politics rather than policy. Obama’s policies involve moderate tinkering with the status quo; his political challenge though is audacious – to govern and address the fiscal crisis, our dysfunctional health care system, inequality, tax reform, immigration, energy policy, pollution – rather than engage in political theater. His agenda is audacious because the problem facing us are significant – and because inaction and petty sniping have come to define the Freak Show that is our politics.

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Draw Your Own Conclusions

Matthew Continetti:

Scott Brown’s victory exposes NY-23 as a fluke. The trend is clear. Independents have moved sharply right over the course of President Obama’s first year in office, even in Massachusetts.

Matt Bai:

The most prevalent ideology of the era seems to be not liberalism nor conservatism so much as anti-incumbency, a reflexive distrust of whoever has power and a constant rallying cry for systemic reform.

Mike Allen:

By these lights, impatience with the status quo — rather than any rightward turn in the mood of the electorate — is what would fuel a Brown victory.

Jonathan Chait:

But political analysts are more like drama critics. They follow the ins and outs of the tactical maneuverings of the players, and when the results come in, their job is to explain how the one led to the other. If you suggested to them that they should instead explain the public mood as a predictable consequence of economic conditions, rather than the outcome of one party’s strategic choices, they would look at you like you were crazy. They spend their time following every utterance and gesture of powerful politicians. Naturally, it must be those things that have the decisive effect…

Barack Obama:

Here’s my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts, but the mood around the country: the same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office. People are angry and they are frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.

David Leonhardt:

The current versions of health reform are the product of decades of debate between Republicans and Democrats. The bills are more conservative than Bill Clinton’s 1993 proposal. For that matter, they’re more conservative than Richard Nixon’s 1971 plan, which would have had the federal government provide insurance to people who didn’t get it through their job.

Today’s Congressional Republicans have made the strategically reasonable decision to describe President Obama’s health care plan, like almost every other part of his agenda, as radical and left wing. And the message seems to be at least partly working, based on polls and the Massachusetts surprise. But a smart political strategy isn’t the same thing as accurate policy analysis.

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Barack Obama Politics The Opinionsphere

Why Scott Brown’s Election is Good for the Nation and the Democratic Party

[digg-reddit-me]I would have written this post on Tuesday night (before seeing what had become the inevitable results) – but I was busy. And I would have written this post on Wednesday, except my blog had some issues once again, and I was left blog-less.

Now, having the advantage of reading the many responses to Scott Brown’s upset victory from around the opinionshere, let me venture mine:

Brown’s election is a good thing for the Democrats politically. (On a policy level, it makes it less likely a health care bill will pass at all, certainly undermines the chances of a better health care bill, and makes every other policy goal harder to achieve in the short term.) But politically, it works for the Democrats on almost every level.

  • Scott Brown will be faced with choice to either split from the Republican Party on significant issues creating discord within the party or losing the seat in 2012.  If Brown moderates his views so, it’s hard to see him maintaining his credibility with the Tea Party right – but it he does, he will represent a person with credibility on the right compromising with Obama rather than the unified front today. After all, this is a guy who supports the idea behind Obama’s health care plan – and voted for the Massachusetts plan which is similar. His grounds for opposing national health care is that Massachusetts residents would be penalized because they already have near universal coverage which he supports.
  • Though the Democrats had a filibuster-proof Senate caucusing with them, there were a handful of members who consistently were willing to hold the Democratic agenda hostage, and the Democrats were only able to muster this filibuster-proof majority on one significant occasion: to pass the health reform bill. Taking this 60th vote away removes the illusion that the Democrats can get what they want done. The Democrats were never organized enough to pull that off. (They only merely have the largest majority in thirty years.)
  • It forces Republicans to take some responsibility as the minority party. The Democrats will still set the agenda – but Republicans and progressives can no longer complain that Democrats just need to get their act together to pass something. If the Republicans continue to vote as a solid bloc against any Democratic proposal in a cynical attempt to win back power through obstructionism, they can block almost everything. But then the focus won’t be on the preening Democrats competing to leverage their individual power to get what they want – but on the Republicans for blocking the passage of legislation and confirmation of nominees.
  • The inchoate anger at the status quo didn’t stop with the election of Barack Obama. Instead, his election radicalized the right wing – those who felt they were “losing their country.” Brown’s election – and the growing anger at the Democrats – doesn’t suggest the country is moving right. Rather, it is a symptom of an anti-incumbent bias. By running as the man who will stop health care reform – and being embraced by the Tea Party crowd – Brown is placing himself, the Republican Party, and the Tea Partiers as defenders of the status quo.
  • Carl Hulse in the New York Times offers an additional reason: “Even Republicans privately acknowledged that the redrawn Congressional landscape could hold benefits for the most vulnerable Democrats in November by easing pressure on them to vote as part of a united 60-member Democratic bloc and sparing them from providing decisive votes on contentious issues.”

Scott Brown and the Republicans will face a choice in the coming months before the midterms: They can either offer to work with the Democrats to actually govern or they can obstruct everything in order to make the Democrats look ineffective and weak. Either way, the 2010 midterms will be a referendum not only on Obama’s agenda but on how the Republicans have handled themselves.

[Image by Rob Weir licensed under Creative Commons.]

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Barack Obama Politics The Opinionsphere

The Future of the Tea Party (cont.)

Markos Moulitsas sees echoes of the rise of the progressive netroots in the Tea Party’s money bomb for Scott Brown (H/t Sullivan) – though he also sees its demand for ideological purity as different from the approach taken by Daily Kos and much of the rest of the progressive netroots. He seems to share with David Brooks the sense that the Tea Party Movement is here to stay.

I’m still not certain. This group seems so similar to the flare-up of similar sentiments from 1992 to 1994 – which was quashed finally by Bill Clinton’s fiscally responsible governance. The Obama administration – if the economy doesn’t enter into a double-dip recession – will try to steer a similar path.

My bet is that the Tea Party will only gain momentum – and have any relevance beyond 2010 if the economy doesn’t rebound.

Categories
Barack Obama Domestic issues Politics The Opinionsphere

The Future of the Tea Party

As soon as I write about all the great columns David Brooks has been producing recently, he goes ahead and writes this one.

Now, it isn’t bad – and it is certainly interesting. But in predicting the rise of the tea party conservative movement, Brooks is extrapolating too much from a short term trend. Brooks himself should be able to see this, as he writes:

A year ago, the Obama supporters were the passionate ones. Now the tea party brigades have all the intensity.

Which is why I would be wary of extrapolating some broad tea party movement sweeping through Congress a year hence – and even more of listing the tea party movement in the litany of defining influential groups of the decade beginning with the hippies defining the 60s, the feminists the 70s, and the Christian conservatives the 80s. (Especially given how similar the Contract with America/Ross Perot crowd was to the tea party – and how that simply fizzled in the 90s.) The tea party crowd may define the coming era – but I would be extremely wary about prognosticating that given our rapidly shifting political environment. I would even be wary of presuming they will help the Republicans win many seats back in the 2010 midterms.

But this observation does strike me as potentially prescient – and I’d like to see Brooks explore the idea more fully:

The Obama administration is premised on the conviction that pragmatic federal leaders with professional expertise should have the power to implement programs to solve the country’s problems. Many Americans do not have faith in that sort of centralized expertise or in the political class generally.

I’ve argued in the past – rather vaguely and putting the matter in starker terms – that this is a potential problem. But to the extent the approach favored by the Obama administration is “tinkering,” as I believe the current evidence seems to show, I think they avoid the worst of this policy trap. The tinkering approach manages to both be technocratic and epistemologically modest – at its best capturing the best aspects of a conservative reticence and a liberal desire to innovate. What it isn’t is especially democratic – which I still believe is problematic.

The tinkering approach also creates a political problem as it does not yet have a compelling story associated with it – as FDR’s New Deal did, as JFK’s New Frontier did, as LBJ’s Great Society, as Reagan’s focus on cutting back government to release individual initiative – to renew Morning in America did, as Clinton’s triangulation did, as the Contract With America did, as Bush’s War on Terror and Ownership Society and Compassionate Conservatism all did, as Obama’s campaign for Change We Can Believe In did, as the tea party’s hyperbolic screams of protest against Nazi-Communist policies has already, as the left’s chants of “Sellout!” have already. Without this compelling story, this mythic goal, the tinkering approach has been portrayed as centralizing, big government, 1980s-style liberalism – or the embrace of Bush-era policies and the selling of Washington to special interests. The tea party has been able to get traction largely because the Obama administration hasn’t found a compelling story to explain its tinkering approach. If the administration is able to find this story, anchoring it in some series of news events, it could entirely shift the momentum and defang the tea party just as Clinton was able to do with his triangulation in the 90s.

Side note: Brooks is able to describe the tea party’s position in a far more compelling way than I have heard any supporter of the movement (of which Brooks is not.) But I think he gives the movement too much credit:

The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy — with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation.

If the movement evolves in this direction, it would be able to gain more traction – but at the moment all I see are howls of rage.

[Image by Rberteig licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Domestic issues Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

In Praise of Tinkering: Health Care Reform

[digg-reddit-me]Critics of the health care reforms before Congress can be divided into two camps:

  • those who claim that the legislation would simply be a “government takeover” of one sixth of the economy – which is simply nonsense; and
  • those who claim the bill doesn’t do enough, that it doesn’t have an overarching theory, that it merely “tinkers” with the problems with health care.

I won’t be dealing with the nonsense claim today. As to the second claim, I concede that the bill merely tinkers with solutions to our problems – but that is the main reason I am optimistic about its success.

Not everyone feels this way: Opponents use this perception to attack the bill from both the left and right, some on each side seeking to make the case for more radical changes and some for leaving things as they are. The Iowa State Senate Democrats wrote, “As a nation we can not continue to tinker with health care reform.  We must make major transformations.” Donna Edwards warned that the health care reforms being debated without a public option were “just tinkering around the edges.” Then from the right, there are those pressing the radical measure of ending Medicare and Medicaid and every other government involvement in health care – and those who favor allowing insurance to be sold across state lines which would eradicate most regulations as states raced to the bottom to attract the insurance industry. Others say that the bill’s modesty is a reason to give up, lest by trying to fix things we mess things up more. A conservative editorial claimed that “tinkering with a mess only makes a prettier mess.” Chairman of the RNC Michael Steele meanwhile made it his mantra to claim that the Obama administration is “conducting a dangerous experiment” and a “risky experiment with health care.”

Even many of those defending the bill seem disappointed but resigned to its modesty. They often blame Obama for deferring to Congress rather than proposing his own legislation, presuming that if the Obama administration took a stronger hand in shaping the bill it would have a grand logic, a coherent and fully formed strategy for universalizing health insurance and curbing health care costs. (Though the bills now under consideration are almost exactly what Obama proposed during his campaign.)

This perception of mere tinkering rather than some grand social engineering project has been the bill’s political weakness. Without a coherent big idea or story to sell the plan, it created an opportunity for Republicans to take each individual part and make it a bogey-man for some big idea that they would claim was the real reason for the reform: rationing! euthanasia! government-mandated abortion! socialist indoctrination of your children! &tc. Later, progressives, feeling betrayed at the demise of the public option which many had considered the real reason for the reform, and similarly unable to find the big idea behind the plan, quickly settled on the idea that it was a bailout to the insurance industry.

But despite these political disadvantages, a bill that is modest enough to tinker is the best policy solution. This approach is epistemologically modest – it seems designed to avoid hubristic assumptions about the power of government and to take advantage of the process that Nassim Nicholas Taleb called “black swans

Trial and error will save us from ourselves because they capture benign black swans. Look at the three big inventions of our time: lasers, computers and the internet. They were all produced by tinkering and none of them ended up doing what their inventors intended them to do.

This idea of tinkering imbues all of Obama’s policies and his governance so far. It represents a synthesis of the core conservative critique of Reagan, Hayek, &tc with an empirical approach towards government generally favored by liberals. In other words, Reagan correctly saw that there are limits in how well government can address societal problems – as liberal projects of social engineering backfired. He demonized it in his affable way, for example claiming that “The ten most dangerous words in the English language are ‘Hi, I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ”

Barack Obama absorbed this critique – and saw the limits of centralized planning and the power of markets that lay at the core of Reagan. But he did not adopt Reagan’s visceral hatred for government. Instead, he believed government could be useful. Rather than seeing government as something that needed to be attacked, he adopted Hayek’s view that “we needed to think of the world more as gardeners tending a garden and less as architects trying to build some system.”

As I wrote as part of my summing up of the case for Obama last November:

Tinkering is the best we can do in a world we only imperfectly understand. Anyone looking at Obama’s policy proposals can see that he is a tinkerer rather than a revolutionary. For example, he seeks to build upon our current health care system rather than demolish it as McCain does in one manner and socialists do in another.

With the impending fiscal crisis upon us, driven by rapidly rising health care costs, the primary goal of the reform has been to cut costs. (Which counter-intuitively actually is aided by universal coverage, as even the libertarian Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman acknowledged.) A number of health care experts have similarly praised the current health care reform effort for its modest but positive steps coupled. Atul Gawande in an influential piece in the New Yorker asks: “The health-care bill has no master plan for curbing costs. Is that a bad thing?” He concludes:

Pick up the Senate health-care bill—yes, all 2,074 pages—and leaf though it. Almost half of it is devoted to programs that would test various ways to curb costs and increase quality. The bill is a hodgepodge. And it should be.

After the Senate released their version of the bill, health care expert Jonathan Gruber was quoted:

My summary is it’s really hard to figure out how to bend the cost curve, but I can’t think of a thing to try that they didn’t try. They really make the best effort anyone has ever made. Everything is in here….I can’t think of anything I’d do that they are not doing in the bill. You couldn’t have done better than they are doing.

Health care reform is the clearest experiment testing whether the government can work by properly aligning incentives rather than brute, centralized takeover.* It is an attempt to tinker with our unsustainable system – which on its own would be “sure to raise your taxes, increase your out-of-pocket medical expenses, swell the federal deficit, leave more Americans without insurance and guarantee that wages will remain stagnant” – rather than to demolish it and start anew.

It isn’t as exciting as some grand effort to re-shape 1/6th of the economy or a moral crusade to help those being victimized by evil private industry. Rather, it is a bet that out of a million pilot projects, something will help and we will be able to see that it does, and adapt it to a larger scale. It is a bet that it is better to expand health insurance as much as possible and to establish it as a universal right and responsibility than to wait for something better. It is a bet that government can improve things, while acknowledging that unintended consequences will ensue and it should tread carefully. It isn’t the exciting rhetoric of Change You Can Believe In! – but it is a step towards change we can believe in.

Update: I would propose this explanation – of tinkering and epistemological modesty is a better explanation than either of the two described by Ed Kilgore in a very interesting piece for The New Republic:

To put it more bluntly, on a widening range of issues, Obama’s critics to the right say he’s engineering a government takeover of the private sector, while his critics to the left accuse him of promoting a corporate takeover of the public sector.

* Though sometimes, brute, centralized government takeover is best – the military and the courts being two items like this everyone could agree on.

[Image not subject to copyright.]

Categories
Barack Obama Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

The Obvious Truths Neglected in Responses to the Christmas Bomber

[digg-reddit-me]As I mentioned today, David Brooks has been writing some damn good columns in recent weeks – and in his most recent, he reiterated a point I had made earlier. As I wrote:

Few seem willing to admit the obvious truth: No centralized power can keep us safe. No intelligence system will be perfect. No watch list will be all-inclusive. No screening procedures are foolproof. We can make it harder for a terrorist to succeed, but in order to win, we need to prevent every attack; while they only need to slip through the cracks once. And there will always be cracks. Even in a totalitarian regime, there are cracks. Part of the price we pay for a free society is vulnerability.

Brooks compared how the Greatest Generation – which greatly expanded government during the Great Depression and World War II – viewed government to how people presently seem to view government:

During the middle third of the 20th century, Americans had impressive faith in their own institutions. It was not because these institutions always worked well. The Congress and the Federal Reserve exacerbated the Great Depression. The military made horrific mistakes during World War II, which led to American planes bombing American troops and American torpedoes sinking ships with American prisoners of war.

But there was a realistic sense that human institutions are necessarily flawed. History is not knowable or controllable. People should be grateful for whatever assistance that government can provide and had better do what they can to be responsible for their own fates.

That mature attitude seems to have largely vanished. Now we seem to expect perfection from government and then throw temper tantrums when it is not achieved…

Brooks got a minor point wrong here – as he claims we “expect perfection from government.” My impression is that we demand perfection from the government and expect incompetence, which I would suggest has something to do with government clusterfuck that the 1970s represented along with the demonization of government bureaucracies by the Republican Party starting with Ronald Reagan coupled with the constant invocations of an all-powerful and competent government national security apparatus in mainstream thrillers and right-wing politics. Brooks continues:

At some point, it’s worth pointing out that it wasn’t the centralized system that stopped terrorism in this instance. As with the shoe bomber, as with the plane that went down in Shanksville, Pa., it was decentralized citizen action. The plot was foiled by nonexpert civilians who had the advantage of the concrete information right in front of them — and the spirit to take the initiative.

For better or worse, over the past 50 years we have concentrated authority in centralized agencies and reduced the role of decentralized citizen action. We’ve done this in many spheres of life. Maybe that’s wise, maybe it’s not. But we shouldn’t imagine that these centralized institutions are going to work perfectly or even well most of the time. It would be nice if we reacted to their inevitable failures not with rabid denunciation and cynicism, but with a little resiliency, an awareness that human systems fail and bad things will happen and we don’t have to lose our heads every time they do.

Greenwald is able to overcome his ressentiment for once (“I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but David Brooks actually had an excellent column…”) Greenwald continues to develop the idea:

The Constitution is grounded in the premise that there are other values and priorities more important than mere Safety.  Even though they knew that doing so would help murderers and other dangerous and vile criminals evade capture, the Framers banned the Government from searching homes without probable cause, prohibited compelled self-incrimination, double jeopardy and convictions based on hearsay, and outlawed cruel and unusual punishment.  That’s because certain values — privacy, due process, limiting the potential for abuse of government power — were more important than mere survival and safety.  A central calculation of the Constitution was that we insist upon privacy, liberty and restraints on government power even when doing so means we live with less safety and a heightened risk of danger and death.  And, of course, the Revolutionary War against the then-greatest empire on earth was waged by people who risked their lives and their fortunes in pursuit of liberty, precisely because there are other values that outweigh mere survival and safety.

I have yet to see any right winger continue to histronically attack Obama while acknowledging either of these two (essentially undisputed) points. Instead, they are forgotten or shunted aside as Obama is accused of all sorts of malfeasance and naïveté.

[Image not subject to copyright.]

Categories
Barack Obama Politics Reflections The Opinionsphere

David Brooks Is Writing a Damn Good Column These Days

David Brooks has been writing these extraordinary columns recently – providing a remarkable sense of historical perspective in his commentary on contemporary events. First was his column on Obama’s Christian Realism, placing Obama firmly in the tradition of Cold War Liberalism, of Reinhold Niebhur, of George Kennan and George Marshall, of Scoop Jackson and Peter Beinart. Brooks explained a core difference that he saw between Obama and many other contemporary “secular” Democrats and liberals:

Obama’s speeches [at West Point and Stockholm] were thoroughly theological. He talked about the “core struggle of human nature” between love and evil.

These speeches are grounded in an approach – according to Brooks – that acknowledges our own human frailty:

[A]s you act to combat evil, you wouldn’t want to get carried away by your own righteousness or be seduced by the belief that you are innocent. Even fighting evil can be corrupting.

Then Brooks attempted to explain the long-term shift in America’s economy from manufacturing to “protocols.”

In the 19th and 20th centuries we made stuff: corn and steel and trucks. Now, we make protocols: sets of instructions. A software program is a protocol for organizing information. A new drug is a protocol for organizing chemicals. Wal-Mart produces protocols for moving and marketing consumer goods. Even when you are buying a car, you are mostly paying for the knowledge embedded in its design, not the metal and glass.

Brooks examines the implications of this shift moving forward. He doesn’t address the long-term consistency of America’s manufacturing output as a percentage of global output though – as we continue to produce large numbers of “things” while employing fewer workers to do so. He also doesn’t address the extent to which government policy, most specifically under Ronald Reagan, deliberately favored the financial sector over manufacturing. But, in only a few hundred words, he conveys quite a bit of this broad shift.

His next two columns were his annual Sidney Awards (Part I and Part II) for best long-form magazine reporting. Always interesting.

And then finally, in his latest he makes the same points I did regarding the infantile response of so many citizens and reporters to the latest attempted terrorist attack.

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