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Washington on Vacation: From Martha’s Vineyard to the Political Vineyards
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That great sucking sound you hear is the annual evacuation of Washingtonians. Tired and weary, but nonetheless self-important, they snatch a little beach time and act like other people.
The upper tier — including President Obama and his family — flock to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. A few — most notably storied editor Ben Bradlee and his fabled party giving-wife, Sally Quinn — enjoy the delights of Long Island and the Hamptons. Alas, Washington incomes aren’t commensurate with Washington egos; hence the Hamptons are only for the few, and those with super-rich friends.
A little pity, please, for members of Congress at this time of year. While bureaucrats, senior civil servants, lobbyists and journalists have boardwalk splinters in their feet and spilled beer on their T-shirts, legislators have to face the voters. Ugh!
This year, that’s an especially nasty experience.
All the polls say only about 11 percent of the country approve of the job Congress is doing. That’s tough enough, but this year there are the unemployed–the same unemployed as last year, but now they are more bitter and angry.
Legislators have forgotten the platitudes used to calm the unemployed last year. But the unemployed have not; and worse, the local TV stations can pull up clips as fast as a member of Congress can say “my record shows.”
If you’ve made a point of denouncing the deficit, it’s hard to explain why you haven’t been more diligent in bringing home the bacon to your constituency. If it’s your summer boondoggle, it’s hard to explain that it’s an entitlement.
You get a holiday in an election year? Get off it. When comfortably re-elected, you can contemplate a little time with you feet up. Unless you want to join the unemployed, better campaign; and campaign some more when fatigue has gripped you by the soft parts. Hit the phones and beg for money.
To stay in Washington, you need to be able to denounce Washington in brutal terms, while yearning for the members’ dining room, the simpering of the staff, and the adulation of the cable television network that agrees with you.
Every day you must praise the wonders of America and your fabulous constituency, while you long for a congressional fact-finding trip to London, Paris or Rome. After all, you’ve been stuffed with barbecue since you got back to the voters: the God-fearing, family-loving, hard-working, ignorant pain-in-the-butt hicks.
What do voters know of the burden of office?
What do they know of you being cajoled in the White House while the TV cameras are lining the driveway, waiting just for you? What do they know of representing our country at dinner at 10 Downing Street or the Elysee Palace? Have they ever had an audience with the Pope?
What do the voters know of the thrill of dropping in on our troops in Afghanistan with a TV crew? If you do that, you can almost book yourself on a Sunday morning talk show. Heck you can feel thrilled on “Meet the Press,” even if David Gregory reads aloud an encyclopedic list of your gaffes, votes, and friends of the opposite sex.
Actually, the worker bees of the nation’s capital just hate to be away. If you are a member of Congress, you’re reminded that there are nasty people with clever advertising agencies, trying to get into Washington and make you part of that unemployment statistic.
Even those who don’t have to run for office feel the burden of free-floating anxiety. Who’s after my job? I make out to be the most important job in the most important city in the world, even if I know in my heart I’m a clerk.
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Tea Party Inspires Memories of Another Time
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I should feel quite at home at the tea parties. I was present at the last round of them. It was another country and another time, but the anger was as genuine, the sense of betrayal by the political class was as real, and the idea of an endangered heritage was as painful.
Also, then as now, there was a certain disconnect from reality.
The place of these tea parties was throughout the dwindling British Empire. There, middle-aged people, who had spread the concept of British exceptionalism and borne the Second World War, felt everything they had built and fought for was slipping away.
What was seen as a terrible leftward drift was opposed virulently by a phalanx of patriotic organizations, but most notably the League of Empire Loyalists, founded in 1954.
The Loyalists were good yeomen who loved the Britain they believed had existed and was endangered, along with the position of Britain as the world’s dominant power. They believed in Britain’s special writ to civilize the world, police it and sometimes settle it. Compared to the militarists of the 18th and 19th centuries, these were soft imperialists but believers nonetheless, held together in a loose federation throughout the British colonies and dominions.
In Britain, the Loyalists formed a political bloc on the far right of the Conservative Party. They were on the fringe in Britain, but they were taken seriously in the colonies as a legitimate expression of wide discontent with the decline of British traditions, British leadership in business and British moral authority.
Loyalists inside and outside Britain railed against politicians in London, much as today’s Tea Party activists rail against Washington.
In Britain, support for the Loyalists was limited because so much had already changed. The British public had already accepted the dissolution of the empire; after all, its jewel, India, was gone.
Although the Loyalists raged against non-white immigration into Britain, this had not yet been identified by most people as a society-changing occurrence. Mainline British Conservatives feared that the leader of the loyalists, Arthur Chesterton, had been a fascist sympathizer in the 1930s. Even though he had broken with the fascists and written a book about it, he was still suspect.
Where I was in Rhodesia, the Loyalists were seen as the hope for saving Britain, of returning her to greatness and somehow turning the clock back to “the good old days,” whenever they were imagined to have been. Many, including my parents, believed the Loyalists would bring about a glorious new Elizabethan era under the young Elizabeth II, who had been crowned a year before the founding of the League of Empire Loyalists.
For those outside of the British Isles, the league was back to the future. But in London and across Britain, the Loyalists were just a right-wing pressure group (known in Britain as a “ginger group”), claiming support from a handful of Conservative Members of Parliament but shunned by the Tory leadership. In the United Kingdom, they were sidelined as “Colonel Blimps,” a satirical comic figure who ridiculed the conservative middle class and had been enshrined in criticism by George Orwell.
The League of Empire Loyalists lasted 10 years, but its aspirations were sealed after six years with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s “wind of change” speech. The league’s domestic issues — the fight against socialism, the uncontrolled flood of immigrants from Asia and the Caribbean, and the growing power of the unions — were taken up by more sophisticated entities, like The Monday Club, operating inside the Conservative Party.
There is a limit to the analogy of the Tea Party movement to the Loyalist movement of the 1950s and 1960s. But the people are eerily the same. They share a decency, the sense of being let down and the feeling that something has to be done. In the British case, nothing was done until Margaret Thatcher much later addressed some of the concerns of the Loyalists (unions, state ownership, immigration and global stature). She did not bring back the empire, but she did make the Brits feel a lot better about not having it anymore.
Who will do that for the good people of the Tea Party movement?
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Oil Industry’s Deep Well of Fear
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There is an open secret in the oil industry that dare not speak its name: peak oil.
Well, two did speak its name and gained no acclaim for it. One, M. King Hubbert, died years ago. The other and the more controversial, Matthew Simmons, died Aug. 8 at his Maine summer home.
The peak oil idea is simple: Oil is a finite commodity and one day we are going to use up all of it.
Hubbert, a geologist, began speculating on the effects of the gradual decline in worldwide production in the 1950s. He expressed this in a simple graph, known as “Hubbert’s pimple.”
He tended to draw the graph freehand, and it looked more like a Rubenesque breast than a pimple. It was so simple that he drew it over and over again to illustrate his points for journalists and politicians. Later, he would draw lines through the pimple to demonstrate where we had been and where we were going, based on the then-known reserves and rate of depletion.
For his scholarship, Hubbert was eased out at Shell Oil Co. in 1964. He took a job with the U.S. Geological Survey and continued his speculative research — until he was thrust into national prominence by the 1970s oil crisis.
Simmons, in contrast, was a much more apocalyptic predictor than Hubbert. His illustration is a stark tower of a graph, more like the Empire State Building. He saw all the oil on Earth savagely used up in just two centuries, the 20th and the 21st, resulting in international catastrophe probably by 2040.
In one television interview, Simmons sounded like a survivalist. He said he was stocking his home with all kinds of supplies to survive the food and fuel shortages that would accompany the decline in oil availability, and the impending international chaos and hostility.
In the energy industry, which has a definite aversion to bad news and hard questions, Simmons was an agent provocateur and an effective one — effective because he was of the industry, not outside it.
Simmons was an oil man and his firm, Simmons & Company International, was founded in Houston in 1974. It grew to be one of the world’s most influential energy investment banks, with offices in Houston, London, Aberdeen, Scotland and Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It has been responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars of merger and acquisition activity.
The industry loved the deals Simmons made possible, but not his talk of doom and chaos.
In particular, Simmons distressed Saudi Arabia by analyzing production data and detailing what he concluded was a decline in the rate of drawdown on the Ghawar oil field, the world’s largest. This was the thrust of his book, “Twilight in the Desert,” and it incensed the Saudis and their oil company, Aramco. It also forced them to increase their field management efforts and make their operations more transparent.
Where Hubbert, who died in 1989, was a gentle seer of trouble ahead, Simmons was the knock on the door before dawn.
Ultimately, both have been betrayed by time and, in Hubbert’s case, technology. But their arguments have not been invalidated.
Hubbert did not foresee the enormous technological advances in exploration and drilling, including greater depths, horizontal wells and 3-D seismic.
Simmons saw all these things and concluded nonetheless that world demand for oil is so high that the end is near. He believed that once global production peaked and the 86 million barrels a day now consumed cannot be provided, oil will rise in price steadily to $200 a barrel and going as high as $500 a barrel as chaos and fear spread.
In recent months, Simmons became even more controversial. Correctly, he estimated that BP spillage in the Gulf of Mexico was many more times than what the company had first claimed. He was almost spot on. But he also said that BP would be forced into bankruptcy and that a nuclear device was the only way to stop the leak. BP responded by ending its relationship with Simmons’ bank. And Simmons ended his lingering involvement with it, as well.
Simmons was a perfect storm of a man, raging against the myths and self-satisfaction of the oil industry. In his absence, there will be a certain quietude in the petroleum clubs of Houston, Denver and Edmonton, Alberta, and elsewhere.
But in their hearts, they fear he was right.
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On Tax Cuts, GOP Should Think like Business
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Mythology in Washington holds that when it comes to economics, Republicans know best. The root of this myth is another myth, which goes like this: When it comes to business, especially small business, Republicans know best.
All of this doesn’t matter until you get to taxes, when the Republicans, buttressed by their mythological understanding of these things, believe they know best.
And what the Republicans believe they know best is that when you cut taxes, everything gets better: Government shrinks, business booms and tax revenues go up.
It’s not that there aren’t shards of truth here; it’s just that everything has to be in the right conjunction to get one or all of these benefits.
Business doesn’t go along with these myths but, like everyone else, it hates paying taxes, so by and large it endorses the Republican position.
The thing is, business believes in a more durable truth: price.
Price means revenue, and business, therefore, believes and practices aggressive pricing. When business needs to exceed the gap between cost and revenue, it increases the price. If the market refuses to pay the price, business exits that market or fails.
Sometimes, however, and increasingly in these hard times, business pulls a con. It lowers or maintains the price, but adds other charges to gain income. The airlines are doing this. The banks make as much or more on fees than they do on consumer loans. Catalog companies do it with “shipping and handling” fees.
Publishers have experimented more with price than most businesses, and their conclusion is to stay on the high side. If the market rejects your high-priced publication, so be it.
I’ve spent a lifetime studying pricing in publishing. All I’ve learned is this: Defend your price.
In London, Rupert Murdoch engaged his Times in a costly price war with Conrad Black’s Daily Telegraph. In the middle of fierce cost-cutting, Murdoch’s camp, with more resources, was triumphant.
Cheap papers were selling.
But when it was all over, the relative positions of the publications had not changed by much and millions of British pounds had been lost. The hope had been that the victor, Murdoch’s papers, would gain so many more readers that they could make up the circulation revenue losses with higher advertising rates. It didn’t work.
Taxes are different, the GOP has averred. Not really. If they’re too high, they will stifle business, choke enterprise and cause businesses to go offshore. Clearly, marginal rates that exceed some magic number (well south of 50 percent) would stifle business.
At one point after World War II, they reached 90 percent in Britain with disastrous results and a few comical ones. The titled, moneyed families fled to Kenya and Rhodesia and the show-business types took up residence in Switzerland. Actor David Niven and playwright Noel Coward were among these.
Now that the tax cuts enacted in the early days of the George W. Bush administration are about to expire, it may behoove us to examine these with a question: What would business do? Things looked pretty bright when these cuts were enacted with the prospect of years of surpluses. But that was before 9-11, two big wars and a recession.
Therefore, if you looked at the tax issue from a boardroom point of view, the unanimous decision would be to go for the revenue and review the result later. Boardroom-loving Republicans ought to know this.
In business, they laugh at people who believe that lower prices automatically will produce compensating revenue. The joke goes something like losing a little on everything and making up with volume.
Many years ago, I had lunch with George Will and Trent Lott. All three of us were speakers at the American Petroleum Institute’s annual meeting in Houston. At the time, Lott and Will agreed that we were an under-taxed country, given the demands on government.
Back then, Republicans thought like business people.
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Where Are the Dog Days of Yesteryear?
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The Greeks started the whole thing by calling sultry summer weather “Dog Days,” blaming it on the brightest star in the sky besides the Sun, Sirius, also known as the Dog Star. But it was the Romans who really took it seriously: They sacrificed brown dogs to appease the rage of Sirius and ameliorate the weather.
Now, could it be that the Dog Days in Washington are a thing of the past?
The weather has been foul enough, but where is the cessation of news? Where are the soft, feature articles masquerading as news that marked the metaphorical Dog Days? Where are the lesser politicians trying to get noticed for bills they have introduced that will died in committee?
It used to be at this time of year, when Congress was preparing for its long summer recess, things just slowed down, practically flat-lined. Washington emptied; the traffic thinned; no reservations were needed in restaurants; and clubs, like the Metropolitan and the Cosmos, opened their doors to non-members.
While there has been some summer flight, the journalistic and political intensity continues apace. Not only is this an election year, but the whole structure of political reporting has been revolutionized.
In a time of journalistic agony in most publications, political reporting is booming, fed by new technologies and cable news. Well, that is on the surface; out of sight, the furnace is fed by money, lobbying money.
If you want Congress to pass legislation favorable to your interests, or not to pass something unfavorable, then you hire a slew of lobbyists. They, in turn, place “advocacy” ads and the political media are off to the races. These ads appear on air, on line, on paper and on our doorsteps. Some media outlets charge hefty subscription fees, like Congressional Quarterly and National Journal, others are given away. But all seek and promise to lift the veil of secrecy in Washington.
The reporters—for Roll Call, The Hill, The Daily Caller, and hundreds of blogs clustered around publications and television channels, mainstream newspapers and wire services–slice, dice, puree, chop, blend, mix, pound, julienne, mince, whip and, sometimes, flavor the news. But mostly they feed the rapacious, 24-hour news cycle by blowing the slightest slip of the tongue, the smallest infraction of decorum, the inadvertent utterance into national events.
The remarkable new entry in the field is Politico, which exploded on the scene with the considerable fortune of Robert Allbritton, chairman and chief executive officer of Allbritton Communications, which owns television stations in Washington and elsewhere. As an example of innovative multi-platform publishing, it is an exemplar.
The impact in the surge in political reporting across the board is questionable: too many peas of news in mattresses of words. There is no time to investigate, and none to ponder. Better to be first and wrong than second and right.
One result of the swelling ranks of political reporter is politicians have clammed up. It is unwise for them to say anything that has not been vetted by their staffs. Hence, their infatuation with social media.
Here in high summer, one realizes that the glorious lazy, hazy Dog Days are a thing of the past; a time to do that interview you had put off, to try to be little more creative with your writing, to talk the bureau chief or editor into an off-beat story. No, instead, hundreds of political reporters are looking for something, anything, to fill today’s void. Was a congressman seen with a pretty woman (Damn, it is his daughter!)? Did a senator misspell something on her Facebook page?
It is this frenzy for faux news that brought us stories like Acorn, Shirley Sherrod, and the endless sightings of President Obama with known socialists? Whew!
Bring back the ancient Dog Days, but spare the brown dogs.
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Reading the tea partiers
August 27th, 2010
Guest: Bob Franken, Syndicated Columnist; John Gizzi, Human Events
Political words, phrases and their origins
August 20th, 2010
Guest: Paul Dickson, author
Richard Whittle discusses his book, “The Dream Machine: The Untold History Of The Notorious V-22 Osprey”
August 13th, 2010
Guest: Richard Whittle, author; Sharon Weinberger, AOL News
Things That Make Us Mad
August 6th, 2010
Guest: Bob Franken, syndicated columnist; Julie Mason, DC Examiner
Barry C. Lynn discusses how the new monopolies are like “weapons of mass destruction” for our economy
July 30th, 2010
Guest: Barry C. Lynn, New America Foundation