White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Long Shadows of the British Empire

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Corruption in Kenya? Blame it on the British and the psychological damage of colonialism. The partition of Cyprus? Step forward the social engineers in London, who underestimated the depth of feeling in the Turkish minority when the British were finally forced out.

When it comes to the Middle East, one can really get exercised about “Perfidious Albion.” The British had their fingers in every territorial dispute: They created whole countries and, with the help of the French, imposed borders from Morocco to China.

Trouble with Iran? Even before the CIA started meddling there in 1953, it was Winston Churchill who, as First Sea Lord in 1913, decided the Royal Navy would move faster, cleaner and have greater range if it switched from coal to oil. So he partially nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the forerunner of BP, to exploit the newly discovered oil fields in Iran. Later, this led to a surge in Iranian nationalism and the CIA plot to restore the Shah.

On to Pakistan and the British legacy in the autonomous tribal lands, now home to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Put the British colonial administration of the 18th to 20th centuries in the dock. Yes, three centuries of British commission and omission.

The British interest in Afghanistan, which they failed to subdue in a series of wars, was largely as a buffer between British India and the growing territorial interests of the Russian Empire. It was here that The Great Game was played: the romanticized espionage that flourished in the region. The British divided the traditional Pashtun lands with the Durand Treaty of 1893, creating a northwestern border for British India, and later Pakistan. It amounted to a land grab. However, the British did recognize the separateness of the people in the Northwest Territories and left them to their tribal and religious ways.

With independence and the partition of India in 1947, the incoming Pakistani government had enough problems without encouraging ethnic strife between the largely Punjabi Pakistanis and their difficult Pashtun brothers in the territories. So the government in Islamabad continued the British policy of benign indifference to the Pashtuns, with whom they were more closely linked by religion than ethnicity or politics.

Yet, the border dispute smoldered and periodically erupted. Kabul and Islamabad do not agree, both blaming the border drawn by the British.

What neither the British nor the Pakistanis wanted was a strong movement for a Pashtun state that would carve out territory from Afghanistan, as well as the tribal territories in Pakistan. There was a failed attempt to bring this about in 1949. Segments of the Pakistani army and the intelligentsia have feared this ever since. They are haunted by another stateless people living on both sides of a border: the Kurds who straddle the border between Iraq, a largely British creation, and Turkey and Iraq and Iran.

The message is that simply being Muslim does not wipe out tribal and ethnic identity any more than borders drawn by others create a new identity. If it were so, Cyprus would not be divided; Yugoslavia would have held together, as would have Czechoslovakia; and Britain would not be considering the possibility of an independent Scotland–after 300 years of union.

The current hostilities in the Pakistani tribal areas, U.S. drone strikes on suspected Taliban strongholds and renewed determination from the Pakistani army to crush extremists in the region could renew a sense of nationhood among the Pashtuns, and a movement toward the creation of Pashtunistan across the British-drawn border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In the long reaches of the night President Obama’s special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, may wish one of the following had happened in the days of the British Raj: 1. the British had stayed home; 2. the British had insisted the Pashtuns submit to central authority; 3. the British had created a new country, Pashtunistan; or 4. the British had never created that troublesome border.

One way or the other, he can blame the Brits.

 


First the Party, Now the Hangover

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By the time the Washington press corps struggled into the Washington Hilton for the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, we were pretty bedraggled.

So much news. There was the Obama puppy; the White House vegetable garden; Michelle’s arms; Barack’s chest, his hot dog, his mustard; and to cap it all, the knife-edge issue of whether Miss California would keep her crown. One suspects the Supreme Court was ready for an expedited hearing on that one.

So 2,600-plus journalists (most of who have never been near the White House) and guests, after many fights over tickets, struggled into the crowded confines of the Hilton to drink too much, fawn over actors and other celebrities, and talk on a leveled playing field with cabinet secretaries and service chiefs.

Make no mistake, this is the big one in Washington: the must-be-seen-at event.

This is Washington’s Oscar Night. Every year, many news organizations throw elaborate before and after parties. Organizations that value their dignity–like The Washington Post and The New York Times–or those, as so many are, that are in bankruptcy, do not throw parties. But ABC, Atlantic Media, Bloomberg, Business Week, CBS, CNN, Congressional Quarterly, Newsweek, Time and Reuters all vied to give the working press the works. The press drank deeply.

Of course, not all those enjoying the largesse of the publishers had tickets to the dinner. Many jumped into dinner suits or evening gowns (show lots of skin, darling) and enjoyed the cocktails and the celebrity-watching, before going home to see the show on television.

Actually, these crashers are smart and necessary. They fill the cocktail parties, so the hosts feel loved; they meet their friends, schmooze and scram before they make fools of themselves. They also are spared the pitched battle for tickets that precedes the dinner every year.

It is a battle between those with the big bucks and swagger, like the television networks, and those who actually write or broadcast about the White House. It is an unseemly struggle. The big outfits want as many as eight tables of 10, whereas many smaller outfits, like Human Events, do not pass the glamour test. Even Barron’s complains.

I used to fight to get one table. Now, I settle for four seats for my wife and myself and two friends. But every year, trade associations, lobbyists and journalists, who are not members of the White House Correspondents’ Association, implore me to get them in. I have started to affect hearing loss.

Year after year, the drill is the same. An inebriated audience listens to the president making jokes, usually at his own expense, then a comedian, chosen exclusively by the president of the association, tries to better the president and the effects of the liquor on the revelers.

Comedian Drew Carey, who can handle just about any audience, from Las Vegas to “The Price Is Right,” told me that the WHCA dinner was the one that had made him the most nervous of any standup engagement, and that he thought it was a difficult audience.

One year, Laura Bush stole the show when she spoofed her husband. In other years, George W. Bush stole the show with his self-mockery.

This year, Obama was funny but not uproarious.

Things were headed down the predictable slippery slope of after-dinner festivities when Wanda Sykes, the comedian known for her acerbic and sometimes blue humor, intimated that she would not shed a tear if Rush Limbaugh went to the great studio in the sky.

This did not cause supporters of Rush to walk out en masse. On Monday Fox News, which was well represented at the dinner and had Todd Palin as their prized guest, decided that a sacrilege had been committed against the sainted Rush. Led by Bill O’Reilly, Fox wanted an apology for the keeper of the conservative covenant. Their indignation was right up there with, you know, the Obama puppy, the White House vegetable garden, Michelle’s arms and Barack’s torso.

For those of us who are not in the small space to the right of Fox News, a vulgar comedian made an unfunny joke about a vulgar broadcaster. We should concentrate on the big stuff, like Miss California and her political philosophy.

The Smell of the Ink and the Roar of Presses

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It was a simple calculation: If I could not make history, I wanted to have a front-row seat to watch it unfold. I would be a newspaperman. What is more interesting to me is that I made that calculation when I was just 11 years old.

After more than 50 years, I am as much in love with newspapers as I was then. But alas, my love is in failing health.

One after the other, the great newspapers are stumbling; and some have fallen, never to get up again. The Boston Globe is on life support, as are many of the titles of the Tribune Group and The McClatchy Company. Two of the country’s most revered titles, The Washington Post and The New York Times are losing money. The venerable Christian Science Monitor and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer have ceased daily print publication and now haunt the Web. Gone is The Rocky Mountain News.

Newspaper closures are not new, but this time the sickness is pandemic. Long gone are titles like The New York Mirror, The New York World-Telegram, The New York Herald Tribune, The Washington Times-Herald, The Baltimore News-American, The Chicago Daily News, The Baltimore Evening Sun, The Washington Star and hundreds of others.

The first great infection was from the impact of television on afternoon newspapers. That changed the whole pattern of newspaper reading. No longer did the newspaper fill the evening hours, television did. Ironically H.L. Mencken, maybe the greatest newspaperman, worried about the health of morning newspapers in a time when evening papers dominated the market.

Television also swept away the great magazines like Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers.

The message here is clear: Few survive, despite long wars of attrition, and despite the best efforts and deep pockets of some publishers.

I am sure that the World Wide Web will grow into its mission as the substitute carrier of the news. But it has a long way to go before it reaches the basic standards of the lowliest daily newspaper.

First, the Web lacks a viable business model. It costs money to maintain a worldwide system of bureaus and correspondents. Then the Web has to find discipline. Its writers need to learn their trade–with respect to the veracity and provenance of both their news and the news on which their opinion is based. The Web also needs an appellate procedure. With a newspaper you can complain to the editor, the publisher and even, in some cases, the ombudsman. Also you can sue. If you are libeled on the Web, it is an indelible stain. So far among the millions of web wannabes only Slate, The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast are showing the way it might be.

For the rest, the Web needs editors. These are the men and women who keep the standards in newspapers, verify the doubtful facts, cut the indulgent writing, and save writers from the humiliation of their own mistakes. The unseen hand of the copy desk is what makes newspaper journalism worthwhile and saves the wretches who write.

For news, neither television nor radio has supplanted the newspaper. They are too ephemeral, too transitory and too inefficient to deal with a complex world. Even at this time, the heavy lifting is still being done by newspapers– newspapers with reduced staffs and demoralized employees.

The production of a daily newspaper is a daily miracle. It involves many disciplines, sometimes many unions, in a management structure that is more horizontal than vertical. The publisher is nominally in charge, but so is the editor, the advertising manager, the printing foreman and the mailing supervisor. In fact, it is the undertaking that is in charge day after day.

The newspaper, especially a big metropolitan newspaper, is akin to a steam locomotive: a great and beautiful beast. In the old days, I loved the clack of typewriters, the smell of ink (it has been reformulated since then), the industrial-scale paper loading, and the tremor when the presses, deep in the bowels of the building, started up. We had pulled it off again.

And I loved the denizens of the newsroom, whether in Harare, London, New York, Baltimore or Washington–my journalistic ports of call. Underpaid sentimentalists posing as cynics all.

I wish the newspaper business well, even as the fever rages. It kept its bargain with me.

Favoritism from the White House Podium

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Like others who ply the newspaper trade here in Washington, I have attended many presidential press conferences, and I am always struck by the same thought when the president steps up to the podium: how alone he seems to be.

Because presidents are nearly always surrounded by staff, security and often other politicians, the essential aloneness of the president can be missed. At press conferences, a president is both alone and on his own. No assistant can whisper in his ear or produce a useful statistic. Unlike the British prime minister who sits among members of his cabinet—and has advance notice of the questions–during Question Time, when a president hears a question he must answer it with the full knowledge that his words are circling the globe, and that later he must defend them.

A presidential press conference is intolerant of slips of the tongue, twisted history or evasion. You might say a press conference is an enhanced interrogation technique.

So it is strange, and unfortunate, that President Barack Obama and his media team leave the impression that his press conferences are rigged.

The appearance of “rigging” came in with George W. Bush and, along with some other aspects of the Bush press operation, has survived. I am referring to the practice of preselecting who will be called upon to ask questions. This gives the impression that the either the reporters in question know they are going to be called upon or, worse, that the president has advance knowledge of the questions themselves.

Until Bush, presidential press conferences were free-for-alls with dozens of correspondents shouting, “Mr. President.” Sure it was untidy, but it was fair and transparent. One imagines that the prescreening now takes place between the press secretary, Robert Gibbs, and Obama. Hence the favoring of television networks, The New York Times, and one black and one Hispanic correspondent, as was witnessed last week. This kind of engineering wrings spontaneity out of the proceedings and causes more and more reporters to stay home and watch the travesty on television.

This trend was obvious in the drop-off in attendance from Obama’s first and second prime-time press conferences to his third. If there is no chance that you will get to ask a question, what is the point in attending?

Many White House regulars, some of whom have covered the White House for decades, are expressing dissatisfaction with Gibbs’s fascination with a handful of reporters–most newly arrived on the beat, like Gibbs himself.

It is not reasonable to expect the president to be familiar with inner workings of the White House press corps. But it is upsetting that Gibbs has clearly not sought to learn from Bill Clinton’s last two press secretaries, Mike McCurry and Joe Lockhart, both of whom were masterful in difficult circumstance. Or, in the spirit of bipartisanship, he might put in a call to Dana Perino, one of the stars of the waning days of George W. Bush’s presidency and his last press secretary.

One of the questions Gibbs might usefully ask of past press honchos is how they kept things running on time. Seldom were briefings late or rescheduled during the day, the way they are now. Clinton was a terrible timekeeper, but the press operation was sensitive to the time demands on correspondents. Not so Gibbs. When it comes to tardiness, the press operation at the Obama White House is in a class by itself.

Back to last week in the East Room of the White House. As is the way in these days of tribal politics, the Washington commentariat saw what it wanted to see in Obama’s performance. One conservative friend, John Gizzi of Human Events, thought Obama was in campaign mode. Some fit the press conference to their belief that the president is hell-bent on taking the country down the French socialist road, and that he will not rest until the tricolore flies over the White House and American schoolchildren sing the “Marseillaise.” Others, amazingly, found proof that Obama would be only a one-term president.

I think I can speculate with the best of them and I saw only a tired, slightly impatient but impressively articulate man alone with big troubles.

Obama is trying to fix everything at once. The only person who really pulled that off militarily and domestically was Napoleon Bonaparte. It was Napoleon who gave us the idea that a new leader’s effectiveness should be assessed in 100-day increments–except it was 111days for Napoleon, but the Paris newspapers shortened it to 100 days. And the 100-day timeline was not at the beginning of Napoleon’s reign, but at the end–the time between his escape from Elba and his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo.

 

Waiting for Zuma, Big Man

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What do you call a man who is a self-professed communist; has been accused of rape but the charges have been dropped, along with charges of fraud and racketeering; who practices polygamy and has 18 acknowledged children; and whose favorite song is “Mshini Wami” (Bring Me My Machine Gun)? You may call him a thug, but South Africans are about to call him Mr. President.

Step forward Jacob Zuma, 67, who led the African National Congress (ANC) to a resounding majority in the recent election and who will shortly be elected president by the South African parliament. This is a prospect that has delighted the poor black electorate of South Africa as much as it has terrified the rest of the population, including the country’s 5 million whites.

Once again, it would appear that Africa is throwing up a “Big Man” who will lead them into the Valley of the Shadow of Death–and leave them there. Think of Idi Amin of Uganda, Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, who are just three of Africa’s megalomaniacal villains.

Although much is known about his bizarre conduct and strangely contradictory pronouncements, nobody has any real idea of how Zuma will govern. Already he is suspected of getting a key ally out of a 15-year prison sentence, after 28 months, on alleged medical grounds.

In most things Zuma left a trail of wreckage behind him, such as when he operated out of the ANC office in Maputo, Mozambique, during the struggle against apartheid. Similar stories of wild conduct and corrupt goings on came from Lusaka, Zambia, where Zuma ran the ANC intelligence network.

Zuma did one incontrovertibly positive thing: as a Zulu, he was able to stop the fighting between the Zulus and the Xhosas that threatened to tear the ANC apart and with it South Africa itself, after the fall of apartheid.

This was not an inconsiderable achievement, considering the role of the Zulus in South African history. First the Zulus, at 11 million people, are the largest ethnic grouping among South Africa’s 48 million people. They are also the Prussians of South Africa: proud, warlike and with a distinct sense of superiority. They were formed into a cohesive nation in 1816, under Shaka Zulu; and were the only African tribe to decisively defeat the British at Isandalwana in l879.

For a while it looked as though the Inkatha Freedom Party, under Mangosuthu Buthelezi, would imperil the ANC’s grip on power. But Zuma, with Zulu credentials and a leadership role in the ANC, quieted the Zulu unrest and the ANC prospered.

Although for many years Zuma was a member of the Communist Party of South Africa and has talked of wealth distribution, recently he has been kinder to business and even appears to be fascinated by it.

Encouragingly, some of Zuma’s statements about President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe are stronger and more critical than anything said by Thabo Mbeki, the man Zuma is replacing. Mbeki was committed to “quiet diplomacy,” which meant say nothing and do less. He was part of Africa’s post-colonial omerta: an implicit vow never to criticize another African leader even when he is a problem to you–as Zimbabwe is to South Africa with millions of refugees flooding over the Limpopo River.

White South Africans, and particularly farmers, are terrified that Zuma may yet take a leaf out Mugabe’s book and introduce race-based land redistribution and begin the destruction of the country.

Another concern is Zuma’s attitude to AIDS. Mbeki famously did not support Western therapies for many years and believed in quack remedies that assisted in the spread of the disease. Zuma’s alleged rape victim, the 35-year-old daughter of a politician, is known to be HIV-positive. Zuma said the sex was consensual and he then took a shower to minimize his chances of catching the virus. That suggested that his knowledge of AIDS is not much better than Mbeki’s.

Zuma, who likes to sing and dance at political events, is a conundrum. But there is no mystery about the challenges facing him: his base is poor and believes in instant solutions. While it is in Zuma’s power to wreck his beautiful country as so many other Big Men of Africa have done to theirs, there is little he can do in a recession to fulfill the expectations of his neediest supporters. Will he, like Mugabe, try to deflect public opinion by blaming the prosperous?

 

The French Connection: Bashing an Ally

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France really got it in the neck last weekend. Mon Dieu! On the great tea bag dumping day, Dick Armey, once House majority leader, warned us against creeping socialism and revealed his great fear: “I don’t want to be France.”

During the jolly protest against one-was-not-quite-sure-what, it became apparent that there is fear and trembling somewhere in the right wing (the French gave us left and right as a political division, based on the left and right banks of the Seine River in Paris) that the Republic, and all it stands for, will be subsumed by French values if the wanton spending of President Barack Obama continues.

This is serious stuff, and we should be on our guard. Next thing you know, our supermarkets will be filled with hundreds of unpasteurized cheeses (Pasteur was French, but he never persuaded his countrymen that unpasteurized cheese could be lethal); our women will be wearing haute couture; and tres fast, comfortable trains will be whipping us between cities. Boeing will be merging with Airbus and small, efficient cars will be rolling out of Detroit.

Worse, our culture will be trashed. NASCAR will give way to Le Mans. And our schoolchildren will be corrupted by learning that Toqueville, author of “Democracy in America,” was French; as was Lafayette, Rochambeau and many other heroes of the Revolutionary War. Worse still, they will learn that it was not the French but the perfidious Brits who necessitated the Boston Tea Party in 1773; and those same awful monarchists burned the White House in 1814.

It was the French who gave Jefferson a deal on Louisiana, and the British who held onto Canada.

France just does not get a sympathetic hearing in the United States. The problem is not enough French passed through the Port of New York at Ellis Island. They gave us the Statue of Liberty, but were not front-and-center among the immigrants. Ergo there is not a large Franco-American organization to cry foul when the country, that stood by us many times when it counted, is slandered by Francophobes like Fox’s Bill O’Reilly. Remember, O’Reilly organized a boycott of French goods and services during the Second Gulf War. Mercifully, it was ineffective. Remember also that the French contributed 93,000 troops to the First Gulf War.

Behind the French bashing is a belief that France, which leads the world in railroad technology, nuclear power and has a vigorous defense manufacturing base, is a cesspool of socialism. It is an act of faith on the right that this ill-defined malady, socialism, has had France by the throat since the country withdrew from Algeria under President Charles de Gaulle. In fact, since the present French constitution–the Constitution of the Fifth Republic–was adopted in 1958, only the Mitterand government was really socialist. Only 15 out of 50 years of recent government have been left-of-center. The rest have been center or right-of-center, as is the case now with Nicolas Sarkozy.

However, France does have a statist problem. The blame lies not with its Communist Party and its left-of-center deputies, but with its education system and its prestigious Ecole Nationale d’Administration, created by de Gaulle to democratize access to the senior civil service. This system puts the best-and-the-brightest of French youth on a career path toward public service.

If you put all your talent into government, they will do what talent otherwise would do in the private sector: grow the company. In France’s case, the state has been grown by people who were educated to that as a patriotic duty.

Ergo, social services are very complete in France–truly extending from the cradle to the grave. But France cannot afford its social contract anymore. Globalization has made the French state, comforting as it is for the French, unaffordable. Couple that with low birth rates and aggressive trade unions and France has a dark cloud over its future: the same dark cloud that hangs over the United States, Japan and Germany, for instance. Maybe, it is a little darker in France because of its public service unions. Vive la difference, but it is not that great.

 

If We Get Our Way in Cuba, It Becomes Our Problem

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As President Barack Obama heads to Trinidad and Tobago to meet with leaders from the hemisphere, Cuba must be on his mind. He has slightly, very slightly, eased some of the conditions of the 47-year-old embargo on the island nation–less than many Americans wanted, and more than the hardest of the hardliners wanted.

His temerity is a testament to what a problem Cuba has now become for the United States. Once it was a political problem, involving the vote of Cuban-Americans in Miami. But as the generation that fled Fidel Castro’s revolution all those years ago has declined in numbers and influence, the epicenter of the Cuban problem has moved north from Miami to Washington.

Successive administrations have wrestled with what to do about Cuba; how to satisfy the angry refugees in Miami and to begin to normalize relations with our closest neighbor after Canada and Mexico. At one time, it was necessary to punish the communist regime for its willingness to be an outpost of the Soviet Union and a base for its missiles, and a fomenter of revolution in Africa and South America.

But things change, even in long-running dictatorships. No longer can Castro or his brother Raul, who has succeeded him in the day-to-day running of Cuba, look to Russia for succor, nor thrill to the applause of the unaligned nations.

The Brothers Castro–old, old men–have long since drawn in their international horns and have tacitly admitted the failure of their glorious revolution by tentatively loosening some of the economic reins (small private restaurants, foreign-currency accounts and cell phone ownership) that so enslaved Cubans. Last time I was in Cuba some party officials, over rum, told me that much of the old apparatus of the state–like the block informers—had become rusty.

Nowadays, Cubans seem a lot more concerned with the limits of their failed economy than the oppressive nature of the state. When I visited Cuba in the mid-1980s, the sense of the state was everywhere and was oppressive. You got the feeling that that if a group of people were walking down the street, they would all strive to be in the middle–not in front and not behind. In those days, the Russian presence was palpable and depressive.

As in the Soviet Union itself, government officials kept to the party line. Twenty years later, these same officials made jokes about the communist party and the governing apparatus. Particularly, I found them happy to ridicule the myth of Che Guevara, the mythological Argentine doctor who fought alongside Fidel Castro.

In short American attitudes to Cuba are changing as Cuban attitudes toward themselves are also changing. Theirs is not a yearning for political freedom as for personal mobility. Imagine growing up 90 miles from Miami, listening to commercial radio from Florida and knowing that if things do not change, your future will be one of poverty and confinement? Your face forever pressed against the American windowpane.

A government official, a member of the Communist Party, told me: “We are tired of rice and beans. We can smell the pork. We want some of it on our plates now.” A colleague of this man said that in the time of the Soviet Union, he would not have dared to speak up the way he did, but now it did not matter.

Obama has shown caution–as he does in many things–in edging towards a greater liberalism with Cuba. His challenge is geographic as well as political. If an open society emerges in Cuba, untold numbers of Cuba’s population of 11 million will try to emigrate to the United States. On Florida’s East Coast, thousands of boats are ready to illegally bring Cubans to the United States; likewise aircraft.

Cuba has no great wealth beyond its people; its biggest export is still sugar. Its people long for American goods, but they are penniless. U.S. agricultural exporters yearn to increase sales to Cuba, but the market is small.

There are already about 200,000 Americans who visit Cuba every year, according to the U.S. Interest Section in Havana (an embassy in all but name).

As the end of days for the Castro regime looms in Havana, a crisis grows in Washington: How will we keep the Cubans in Cuba if a new government meets all the well-published conditions for ending the embargo? A few Americans will head to Cuba. But mucho Cubans will be Miami-bound–like hundreds of thousands almost immediately. You cannot build a fence down the coast of Florida.

There Will Be No Respite from the Shouting on Television

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I can do this: put my face where my mouth is. Each week I put my untelegenic face on television in the Washington-based, political talk show “White House Chronicle.” Therefore, I think I have license to comment on how stupifyingly bad political television has become and how it is getting worse.

 

Once, as Newton Minow said, television was a vast wasteland. Now it is much worse than that. Those were the good old days, before producers learned that you can make a talk show for less than any other kind of show, and that there is an enthusiastic audience for partisans shouting at perceived threats to the republic. For liberals, these threats are epitomized by the religious right; and for conservatives, it is liberals who are planning world subjugation.

 

Whether they believe this rubbish (how can they?) or not, the punters apparently love it.

 

Only on the Sunday morning talk shows is there any of the old idea of talk television: a magisterial host, impartial, nice-looking and superbly modulated asking prescribed questions of a subject, nearly always political. The exemplar was Lawrence Spivak, moderator of NBC’s “Meet the Press;” later, it was the self-effacing Bill Monroe. I was occasionally on that program in the 1970s. It was tame, serious, gentle and polite–the guests were seldom rattled.

 

The Sunday morning talk shows have not crumbled completely, but they have grown edgier. Technology and the ability to summon up old footage have made them more compelling. But all the rest, particularly on cable, are on steroids.

 

The hosts who dominate cable television are grotesques: figures only Charles Dickens could love. Take a sampling, left and right, and in some cases, like Lou Dobbs, an amalgam: Sean Hannity, Keith Obermann, Bill O’Reilly, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck and, just arrived in an act of counter-programming from MSNBC, Ed Schultz. These polemicists are partisan, loud, often rude and more often shallow. Maddow conceals her intellect, Obermann appears to be enchanted with his and Shultz, Beck, O’Reilly and Hannity have laid aside the burden of erudition.

 

Once thought of as a cool medium, television is now hot. Get excited, yell, make it personal, make the reasoning simplistic and you are on your way.

 

The first exponent of loud-and-rude was Morton Downey, Jr. But it was the venerable John McLaughlin who changed television talk forever. He took it from its bed and shook it, oddly on PBS. Gone was the impartial, non-participatory host, replaced by an opinionated loud partisan. That was 25 years ago; and although McLaughlin is still hosting his weekly, 30-minute “The McLaughlin Group,” it has faded compared to the night after night rants on cable.

 

Another remnant of the past is “Washington Week in Review:” the mannerly PBS show that now seems curiously old-fashioned.

 

To get its more outlandish hosts, cable raided radio, which had turned wild to survive. The end of the Fairness Doctrine, an unenforcible idea in today’s world, found an audience anxious for raw, unsophisticated political ranting. Now it is on television. It is the present and the future.

 

Deep down the fault is not the programmers, but the limits of television itself. It favors the sensational and the clownish. When it gets serious, it gets dull. It handles depth poorly and conveys information inefficiently.

 

So how, you ask, does the BBC do it? The answer is it doesn’t.

 

The BBC has huge resources–5,000 journalists, for example–and it does documentaries and dramas very well. Because only the best of its large and uneven output is seen in America, the impression is created that the BBC gets it right. It doesn’t. I know. I worked there years ago. Program after program on the BBC in Britain is as bad, and often worse, as programs on American television.

 

Yet television is compelling. We nearly all watch more of it than we admit to. It also is expensive to make, hence the shift to talk. A drama costs over $2 million an hour to produce; talk a few thousand dollars. Sorry, the grotesques are here to stay. And more are probably on the way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now Meet Those Too Big To Be Denied

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We have all heard about “too big to fail.” How about “too big to be denied?”

Step forward two commercial sectors that are certain to get in the way of President Barack Obama’s reform plans: the nation’s health insurers and its defense contractors.

 

The former are bound and determined to hold their lucrative position in any extension of health coverage to the uninsured. In this way, a new health agenda will be designed as much to accommodate the insurers as the patients and providers.

 

Likewise as Defense Secretary Robert Gates struggles to reform defense procurement and to cancel some weapons systems, he has to deal with the massive power of the defense giants. In defense, the customer is always wrong; and the vendors, through their congressional sponsors, overwhelm the department and get what they want, not what field commanders need or the national interest cries out for.

 

Ironically the Clinton administration strengthened the defense lobby, and its ability to push around the Pentagon, by orchestrating the consolidation of defense contractors into a few behemoths, as part of the downsizing of the military in the 1990s. Norman Augustine, chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin from 1995-97, told me that during his tenure, Lockheed Martin had absorbed 19 small contractors.

 

The big contractors of today–Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, BAE and the European wannabe EADS—have conscientiously scattered their manufacturing among many states. One program has components made in 44 states. That means jobs, and jobs mean political clout.

 

The health insurers, who succeeded in sinking the Clinton health care reform effort, are ready for some concessions, but only enough to insure their dominance. The health insurers and their conservative allies are expert in predicting the arrival of creeping socialism, unless the private insurers retain their supremacy in financing and profiting from the health care system. Ironically, they claim any larger government role in health care will lead to rationing. Yet it is the insurers who ration health care now; and if you are in an HMO they ration it severely, cruelly and sometimes lethally.

 

A favorite argument is that health care reform will substitute the judgment of doctors for the judgment of bureaucrats. One of the more appalling aspects of the current situation is that the insurance companies day to day substitute the judgment of clerks for that of doctors.

 

The health insurers will not be denied, but they feel it is reasonable to deny the evidence against them. When health care was in the operating theater in the l990s, and Hillary Clinton was poised to plunge in the scalpel, the insurers rose up against anyone who had evidence that the system was serving the companies, not medicine and not patients. They succeeded in banning from the debate what they dismissed as “anecdotal evidence.” They wanted the debate discussed on a level where they could dismiss reports of their own shortcomings, and conduct the debate in terms of capitalism versus socialism.

 

It is only now, with business crying out for reform, that the issue is being aired again.

 

My anecdotal evidence is this: I have lived under government-run medicine in England. It works well enough. The young are favored over the old there, whereas here the old are favored over the young here. Now I am on Medicare,which is remarkably like being on the National Health Service in Britain, except I am being favored over the young.

 

For 33 years, I ran my own publishing company in Washington. After payroll, the biggest expense was health care. To keep the cost down we changed the carrier frequently, to everyone’s inconvenience and a lack of continuity. When one employee had a rare and painful cancer, the insurance company paid for radiation and chemotherapy but denied payment for painkillers.

 

For years, ATT ran the telephone system and ordained that plugging in a phone could not be performed by a customer and black instruments were all that should be offered. They were, they thought, too big to be denied.

 

Robert Gates has shown guts in trying to deny the oligarchs of defense. Congress will need bravery in denying rent-takers in health care. Meanwhile, those who are too-big-to-be-denied are pumping dollars into Washington’s K Street, where the lobbyists carry their water.

A Tale of Two Summits: London and Vienna

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Truth be to tell, the Group of 20 meeting in London was not much of a summit. That honor belongs to the Congress of Vienna which met from September 1814 to June 1815, and hammered out a peace that lasted for about a century.

 

The London summit has been a largely a European-American affair. But it did include the next stage in the coming out of China; the first was the Beijing Olympics.

 

It also was the international coming out of President Barack Obama, who was hailed by the European press as the most popular politician in the world. That was a real problem for the continental Europeans, who wanted to be seen to be his best friend while admonishing him that he was, economically speaking, full of it.

 

From the start, the G-20 delegates seemed to have only one goal: to write a communique that implied they were all on the same page when clearly they were not. Those in the eurozone could not accede to Obama’s stimulus ideas, even if they wanted to, because legally they cannot go as far in deficit spending as the United States without violating the rules that created the euro. Also the European Central Bank, which just lowered its key interest rate to 1.25 percent, when it was hoped it would go lower, is much more conservative that the Federal Reserve and its independent chairman, Ben Bernanke.

 

The Euros are also deeply suspicious of the Obama administration’s plans to save the car industry. Nearly all of them have been down that road over many years with disastrous results. They also have been trying to create jobs with government programs, incentives and retraining which have not put a dent in their structural unemployment. “Look, we know a thing or two about messing up,” is their message to Obama.

 

The Euro pols could not have agreed with Obama, even if they had wanted to, but they wanted to wrap themselves in the magic, the popularity and the originality of the American president and his wife. Who would have believed that first lady Michelle Obama would outdazzle Nicolas Sarkozy’s wife, the gorgeous former model Carla Bruni.

 

The big news, according to the participants, was the $100-billion trade credit plan and the strengthening of the International Monetary Fund.

 

The real news, not missed by the storied British tabloids, was that the first lady hugged the Queen–something that has not happened in all of recorded English history–and that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper missed the de rigueur group photo because he was answering the call of nature.

 

More than anything else, the London summit was brief. The delegates only met in plenary session for few hours–a time frame that guaranteed that they could neither overhaul the international banking system, nor really get to know each other.

 

How different from that greatest-of-all-summits in Vienna with its parties, Lipizzan stallions walking on their hind legs at the Spanish Riding School, and chefs and musicians composing great dishes and exquisite ballroom music.

 

The congress was convened by the great Austrian foreign minister Klemens Wenzel von Metternich to tidy up after the French revolutionary wars, the Napoleonic wars and the end of the Holy Roman Empire. It never met in plenary session and relied on an endless informal exchanges between the delegates from more than 200 states and princely houses. But the big states dominated and pushed the lesser states around, assigning them new borders, monarchs and sometimes names. Europe was carved up on conservative lines, with a determination to lesson the impact of the French Revolution and the American Revolution.

 

Some of the arrangements had to be modified and there were some wars followed (the Franco-Prussian), but nothing like the endless fighting on the continent that had preceded the congress. It set in motion the consolidation of Germany and established Vienna as the place to be for New Year’s.

 

The London summit may be remembered not for its economic achievements, but for the first American president who has no of hint of Eurocentricity, and cannot trace all of his ancestry to that continent.