White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Last Boulevardier

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When the great actor David Garrick died in 1779, Samuel Johnson said of his friend and pupil, “I am disappointed by that stroke of death that has eclipsed the gaiety of nations, and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure.”

When Winston Churchill died in 1965, William Connor, the great columnist for The Daily Mirror, wrote that “a petal has fallen from the English rose.”

Both great evocations of loss come to my mind as I mourn the recent death of my great friend and collaborator Grant Stockdale. He was an adventurer, an artist, a boulevardier, a businessman, a comedian, a musician, a novelist, a sailor and an intense family man. Together we raged around the world on and off for more than 30 years. We partied in Washington, New York, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, London, Paris, Helsinki and Doha.

You did not meet Grant. He burst into your life. They say his line with women, by whom he was adored, was “You haven’t met me yet.”

I first became aware of Grant’s talents when he followed me across Dupont Circle in Washington, making me laugh so hard I had to sit on a bench, which gave him a further chance to press the case he wished to make: I should hire him. I refused to do so.

The next morning, as I walked to my office in the National Press Building, Grant was lying in wait at the circle and we went through the same routine. I had just started an energy newsletter, but Grant was not a reporter. He had worked as salesman and had moved from his native Miami, via Hollywood, to Washington. I do not remember how such a charismatic and entertaining a figure as Grant had settled on Washington: a company town, if ever there was one. Happily, on fourth day, I succumbed.

Grant looked like no one else I have ever met. Enormously attractive, he had a round face and a compelling smile. He was in his mid-twenties and his hair was bright white; it looked as though it had been stripped of its color, but it had always been white.

Grant’s sister, Susan, said that when he was a teenager, it was “cool” to hang out with him. I thought it was pretty cool for 35 years. He was the best company.

And Grant was so funny; funny as a raconteur, funny as a mimic and sometimes wordlessly funny. One day, in the lounge of a club, he started wrestling with his tie as though it were a bewitched, unruly serpent. He mimed for minutes. A crowd gathered. People asked me whether he was a professional. No. Just a funny man.

His way with words was funny, too. Dawn, a friend of mine from South Africa, instantly became “Daybreak.” A Cuba Libre made with Diet Coke was a “thin Cuban,” a Manhattan was a “skyscraper.” Champagne was the “French friend,” Bordeaux was the “French tribute.”

We adored the movie “Becket” and its stars, Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton. We went often to Downey’s Steak House in New York in the hope of watching the two great thespians drink together. They were never there when we were there, so we did the drinking for them. One night, this was going so well for us, reciting Shakespeare and parts of “Becket” to one another and many bystanders, that I turned to Grant and said, “Have you booked the bridal suite at The Plaza?” “Twenty minutes ago,” he replied.

So he had. In the morning I awoke to find a large man, Grant, lying in bed beside me. I protested. Grant opened one eye and gave me a look that might have passed for disdain. “I think you forgot that bridal suites only have one bed,” he said.

In the 1970s, we played hard and worked even harder. We sold newsletter subscriptions, held conferences and tried many things, which were not always successful.

Grant started many businesses of his own. Always the ideas were wonderful, but they required too much capital. One was The Sergeant’s Program, a physical fitness business that he sold; another was Ocean Television, in which remote cameras watched interesting oceans, producing a kind of white noise for the eyes. There was a fashion publication for which he would photograph well-dressed, ordinary women, walking in parks or boarding buses and would list what they were wearing, where they had bought their clothes and how much they had paid for them. His final business venture was the online EnergyPolicyTV, a kind of C-SPAN for energy.

Maybe Grant was too much of a multi-talent to succeed at just one thing.

He worked with President Clinton to make it possible for District of Columbia children to go to college and benefit from in-state tuition rates at universities across the country. The program compensates for the restricted choices for students in Washington. They met at the Sidwell Friends School, where Grant’s children and Chelsea Clinton were students.

Grant shared a gift with Clinton. He would find and comfort those hurting. He was the best friend in adversity; the big shoulders thrown back, the big smile holding fear at bay.

His last e-mail to me, shortly before colon cancer carried him away at 61, said, “Damnit, I miss you.” Aye.

 

Politicians and Small Business—just Lip Service

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It’s right up there with Mom and apple pie in the political lexicon: small business.

Everyone knows that small business creates jobs and it creates them quickly. Ergo, politicians are constantly proclaiming their adoration for small businesses. However, their idea of how to foster new businesses seldom extends beyond tax cuts.

Politicians believe small business carries a heavy burden of tax. By implication, the only impediment to the success of small business is tax. In reality, tax is a minor ache in the small business body. To pay taxes, small businesses must show profit. Most are in profit intermittently. So a bill proposed by newly elected U.S. Rep. Betsy Markey (D-Colo.), which extends the period over which income can be averaged from two to five years, should bring some relief.

In the decades since the end of World War II, the owners of small businesses—from restaurants to light manufacturing—have been pushed to the wall by government action at the local, state and federal levels; all of which have favored the growth not of small business but of big business. At the state level, the big lobby and the small are voiceless. At the federal level, big businesses are on the congressional doorstep with campaign contributions, while small business is an abstraction.

In particular, the kindly treatment of chain retailers in local planning has pummeled and even destroyed small businesses. The arrival of a Home Depot in my semi-rural neighborhood meant summary execution of about 25 hardware stores.

Lower prices and some convenience sucked the customers out of the locally owned hardware stores. But it was a dubious bargain. After the initial enthusiasm, indifferent service and total ignorance of the stock reminded those customers that they had traded away expertise and service for a few cents of initial savings.

The big box stores–some of which are now going out of business–not only crush their small retail competitors, but they also crush their American suppliers by demanding prices that compete with those of cheap-labor competitors in other countries.

Got a great idea for a new type of oven mitt? OK, you will have to try and get your product on the shelves of the big retail stores. There are not enough other outlets. Gird your loins because you are about to go into a bruising negotiation with these retailers. To them, you are no more than a sharecropper. They want low prices and you, the small business manufacturer, are going to deliver them or perish–or, maybe, deliver and perish anyway.

How about the predicament of the travel agencies? Like bookstores, there was something genteel and very appealing about operating a travel agency. It was a lot of work for a small income, but travel agencies provided an independent living for tens of thousands of individual operators, and sometimes families. With deregulation the airlines took against the agents, refusing to pay commissions. This parsimony has not saved the airlines, but it has greatly undermined the travel agents and the service they provided.

It is not just the entrepreneurial class that has suffered from chains. We all have. Just look at their natural habitat: the shopping center. From Miami to Seattle, shopping centers are offensive in their sterility and their replicated chain-store banality. Is this the American Dream? Architecturally challenged, bland, homogenized, remotely owned shopping centers. They are not American Main Street replacements.

A thrill goes through me when I find a strip mall showing its age. There I know I will find small businesses with a fist full of employees booking cruises, repairing televisions and vacuums, and selling things from crystal to to yarn. In old industrial parks, small companies make everything from custom chimney pots to industrial fasteners.

This is where American dreamers have found self-employment and have the sense of possibility and the certain knowledge that they are small enough to fail. It is also where the jobs are, my political friends. Small business is driven as much by romance as profit. It offers the individual a chance. It also hires quickly.

 

Tribulations of a Press Secretary

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Sportsmen spend hours studying tapes of opposing teams or players. Presidential press secretaries, however, tend to prefer learning on the job. It is early, and scant on charity, to attack President Barack Obama’s man Robert Gibbs. But he has had a rocky start.

Gibbs seems to be unsure of his game in the White House press briefing room. The crush of journalists overwhelming the small room during his briefings is not there to lead a cheering session for the president. Nor are they an operatic claque come to embarrass the tenor. They want to find out what is going on and tell their viewers, listeners and readers all about it as fast as their skill and electrons can carry it.

Gibbs must know that the White House press corps takes no prisoners. But in these early days of the Obama administration, he still seems to be in campaign form—even treating reporters as though they are his friends, and by extension sympathetic to the president.

This is an easy mistake to make, and Gibbs is not the first to make it. On the campaign trail, there is a practical necessity for reporters to be cordial, or downright cozy, with the campaign staff.  With the election, any campaign bonhomie evaporates and some remembered slights are exposed.

Gibbs, one hopes, is too smart to believe the right-wing ranters bark that the media is “in the tank” with Obama. In fact, the political press fears plans to continue the arms-length strategy of his presidential campaign in the White House.

Four recent press secretaries set a good example of how to do the job.  They are Marlin Fitzwater, George H.W. Bush’s press secretary; Clinton’s Mike McCurry and Joe Lockhart; and George W. Bush’s Tony Snow and Dana Perino. All did the job with aplomb, defended their employer with skill, and tried hard to answer questions without attacking the questioner.

Poor press secretaries include Clinton’s Dee Dee Myers, and George W. Bush’s Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan. They did not appear to have the access to the president that is vital for the job, and often attacked the questioner by denigrating a question as “hypothetical.” Questioning often requires hypothesis. The press secretary who is not in the president’s confidence and his inner circle will fail with the press. He or she, not knowing the answer, will fall back on the hated evasion: “I refer you to . . .” This does not help someone on deadline.

Gibbs got into this dangerous territory early on. He refused to answer any questions about an unmanned aerial strike on terror suspects inside Pakistan. The question was obvious: Did the president authorize the strike and what were the policy implications going forward? The briefer clearly had not been briefed about something that would come up.

Then there was Gibbs’s problem with lobbyists. Gibbs appeared blindsided when asked why President Obama had signed an order limiting the role of lobbyists day ago and now was nominating Raytheon’s top lobbyist, William Lynn III, to be deputy secretary of defense. Gibbs tried to punt but could not connect with the ball.

No doubt many of Gibbs’s problems had to do with transition difficulties that included an incomplete press list, a total collapse of White House e-mail, and a staff which had never seen the White House press corps after its quarry.

Gibbs is not new to Washington, and has worked on Capitol Hill, but there is no preparation for carrying the message of the president to the world except by learning on the job. The press secretary has to learn that every gesture and gaffe will be dissected globally. Even the variety of his neckties has already drawn attention in, of all places, The Christian Science Monitor.

Requiem for the DC News Bureaus

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Journalism in its modern form owes everything to the spread of general education in the 19th century. In the turbulent decade of the 1840s, governments in the advanced countries added education to their responsibilities. In a generation, millions of people could read and were hungry for reading materials like The New York Tribune, founded and edited by Horace Greeley.

By the 1900s, newspapers were a great business. As there were many newspapers in many cities, only a few had great influence–and those were primarily in the regional centers of New York, Chicago and San Francisco. They included Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, Joseph Medill’s Chicago Tribune and William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. Newspapers were a means to great wealth, power and prestige. Proprietors saw themselves not only as political king-makers but also as arbiters of fashion, taste and public rectitude.

From the birth of the modern newspaper (greatly sped along by the invention of the Linotype machine at the end of the 19thcentury), newspapers have been a good business. With annual profit exceeding 20 percent, newspapers have been among the most desirable businesses in America. In the 1980s and ’90s, they were bought and sold at enormous multiples. The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times looked invincible, eternal.

Then the Internet struck. Sales began to slide and advertising began to relocate to the Web. Publishers realized too late the folly of giving away their content on it. Journalists had favored this because they believed it would mean more readers, and publishers had thought the publicity would benefit them.

Massive adjustment is not new to the newspaper industry. But never has it been so imperative.

The1960s saw the first wave of newspaper closures, particularly in New York where five papers folded. Then, one by one, afternoon newspapers died across the country. Washington and Baltimore both supported two afternoon newspapers, but they began to fail in the 1970s and ’80s.

Once, evening newspapers had been the jewels, bought by men and women who went to work early and wanted something to read before and after dinner. But television was changing the way people got their news.

The workforce was changing too; the service economy was replacing manufacturing. The new workforce read early and watched television late. This lifted morning newspapers into the stratosphere, particularly when they were a monopoly in their home cities. From The Washington Post to The Los Angeles Times, things were rosy. And for small town monopolies, things were rosier–almost a license to print money.

Mass circulation magazines, such as Life, Look and The Saturday Evening Post, all hung it up. In their place, there appeared specialized magazines about wine, running, computers and sex. Publishing regrouped and entered what will be seen as a golden age.

The common thread was that the few, the publishers, served the many, their readers. As A.J. Liebling said, “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.” But with blogs, the many are now publishing to the many, commented Andrew Glass of The Politico.

Today, newspapers are an anachronism: perishable products, produced in a factory well before consumption and delivered, as often as not, by 10-year-olds. They are not so different today from the one that Greeley edited. So who needs them? Greeley might have said, “Go to the Web, young man.”

The trouble is you and I need newspapers. We need them to tell us what is happening in Darfur and eastern Congo; why Russia is playing games with gas supplies to Europe; why our veterans are not getting quality health care; and, yes, what are our elected leaders are doing.

Recently, the bureau system of coverage of Washington has collapsed. There is no one to watch the congressional delegation from Atlanta, San Diego or 100 other cities that once employed reporters in Washington who kept their representatives in the light of scrutiny. Twilight has fallen for the news tradition and with it the transparency of government.

There is no indication that Web-only publishers will generate the kind of wealth that will enable them to replace the ailing newspapers. Like radio, the Web favors commentary not reporting. Opinion cannot be better than the reporting that triggered it.

The Glorious 20th, so Very American!

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There is an annual festival in Sri Lanka known as the Esala Perahera. It has everything, including a parade of richly-decorated elephants, drummers and dancers, food and clothing stalls, and all sorts of entertainment for children. But above all, it has people–hundreds of thousands of them. The organizers told me it was a million, but people always inflate crowd numbers, don’t they?

 

I wandered, a sole Westerner through the throng, amazed at its security as much as its size. This, I thought, could never happen in America. If we had half as many people, there would be incidents. By incidents I mean stampedes, violent crime, tension between racial groups, and teenagers just behaving badly. Sri Lanka, I thought, even in the midst of its civil war with the Tamil Tigers in the north of the island, is a place of peace; a civil place, where you can be outnumbered by hundreds of thousands and still feel secure, respected and inviolate.

 

Tuesday made a liar of me.

 

The largest-ever gathering of Americans to descended on Washington came for many reasons, but above all to celebrate America. Nominally, the millions (is that an exaggeration?) came to inaugurate Barack Obama: this slight African-American, who has come to Washington from Chicago like some 21st-century Lochinvar, ready to unite the tribes and lead them away from their tribulations.

 

But it was not Sir Walter Scott’s percussive poem that flooded my mind as I was watching Obama’s inauguration, but the lines from the gloriously jingoistic speech that Shakespeare gave his Henry V to deliver on the eve of his great victory against the French at Agincourt: “…And gentlemen in England now- a-bed/Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,/And hold their manhoods cheap…”

 

The outpouring of feeling on the Mall was spiritual; one of those outpourings that occasionally grips human beings collectively and transcends politics, race, religion, philosophy, and the other manifestations of our tribal rigidities. It was an outpouring of something deep in the human heart, that inner need to celebrate as well as to mourn. It was the happy side of the same thing as the sadness that gripped the world when Princess Diana died. Then it was a need to cry, to acknowledge the pain of the human condition. On the Mall it was the need to celebrate, to rise above our lesser selves and feel a oneness with possibility.

 

I was five years old when World War II ended in Europe. But I remember the parade in Cape Town, South Africa. I remember waving my little Union Jack (it got torn), my father looking so handsome in his Royal South African Navy uniform, and the mood. Oh, the mood. Blacks and whites, English and Afrikaners put aside all of their bitter history to hug, kiss and dance. They were jubilant.

 

All these years later, there was something of that feeling in Washington; not only because many had repudiated the excesses of George W. Bush, but also because collectively we had put aside the racism of our history for something very, very American: a new beginning.

 

The celebrants on the Mall knew they would look good in the eyes of the world and that made them feel even better. Who doesn’t want to be well thought of, even in “Old Europe”?

 

It was only one day, but what a grand American day. Bigger than a gigantic gathering in Sri Lanka, not quite as wonderful as the end of war, but a vaulting day for the spirit. American exceptionalism is a concept used more for nefarious purposes than honored when it is at hand. It was at hand on Tuesday.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Looking Legacies: Tips for Bush

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President Bush, one gathers from his exit ruminations, believes history will treat him more kindly than today’s polls. But history is tricky. Although it has tended to give presidents the benefit of the doubt–once aspersions are cast, they can stick and grow. Dwight Eisenhower, has been reevaluated upward, as has Harry Truman. But there has been no mercy for James Buchanan, and not much for Warren Harding. And Jimmy Carter is in historical limbo.

 

When we leave these shores, history gets vicious. In French history, untold numbers of monarchs have been pilloried by historians as decadent, feckless and idle. Their queens, too. It is unlikely that Marie Antoinette actually said, “Let them eat cake.” But that libel has stuck to her down through time.

 

In English history things are just as bad, or worse, but the targeting has been more precise. Although appeasement was popular when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain capitulated to Adolf Hitler, he has been vilified ever since. English monarchs have had to deal with English writers. They dubbed Mary I “Bloody Mary” and contrasted her unfavorably with her half sister, Elizabeth I, an all-round favorite.

 

If you came to the attention of Shakespeare, you were pretty well done for. Richard III, is a villain in history, despite scholars’ attempts to rescue him and a relentless disavowal of the popular concept of his villainy in the north of England, where he is still a local hero.

 

Then there is the linkage between the most denigrated English monarch, John, and our own George W. Bush. Not only did he merit a fairly obscure Shakespearian play, but his name was so blackened by his barons that no other English monarch has ever been named John.

 

Actually John was not all bad, but he was definitely luckless. His father, Henry II (whom we know from the play “Lion in Winter”) disliked him so much that he inherited no land and was known derisively as “John the Lackland.” He was totally overshadowed by his elder brother, Richard the Lionheart.

 

But when Richard headed to the Middle East in the Third Crusade, he put John in charge of things in England and the chunks of France controlled by the English crown. John gets no credit, but apparently he was an able administrator and an undistinguished soldier. He also had the unedifying habit of flying into towering rages.

 

The seeds of John’s later humiliation at Runnymede in the Thames River were sown in France, after Richard was killed and the crown passed to John. As commander in chief, John systematically lost English lands to the French. And he picked up a new sobriquet “John Soft Sword.”

With a diminished empire, John increased taxes on his subjects and the barons in particular. Apparently, history does not take kindly to those who increase taxes. But there is no evidence that it rewards those who cut them.

 

Anyway, the barons had had enough of John and forced him to sign the Magna Carta (the Great Charter) in 1215, which embodied habeas corpus (produce the body) to control reprisals by the king. It became the central pillar of English Common Law and its U.S. derivative. It also became a cornerstone for human rights legislation elsewhere and remained such, until George W. Bush and his administration excluded enemy combatants from its provisions.

 

The president might be encouraged to know that there was an attempt by historians to reposition John more favorably in the scheme of things seven centuries later. However, a children’s verse by A.A. Milne in the 1920s which said, “King John was not a good man–/He had his little ways,” confirmed the old view.

 

Winston Churchill, referencing habeas corpus, summarized the legacy of John’s reign: “When the long tally is added, it will be seen that the British nation and the English-speaking world owe far more to the vices of John than to the labors of virtuous sovereigns.”

 

Presumably, history will record that Bush admired Churchill but lacked his enthusiasm for John’s legacy: the Magna Carta.

 

 

How Russia Coerces Europe

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No building in Moscow so much says “Soviet Union” as the headquarters of Gazprom, the Russian gas monopoly. It is more foreboding than the Lubyanka, the former headquarters and torture emporium of the KGB. The romantic charm of the czarist era, epitomized by the Kremlin itself, is wholly absent. Like the state monopoly itself, the structure is gigantic, threatening and very hard to get into.

It is set back from the road, and there are layers of security a visitor has to negotiate to see an official. It is easier to get into the Kremlin, No. 10 Downing Street or the White House than it is to get into Gazprom HQ. I know because I have gotten into all of them. No wonder old KGB hand Vladimir Putin loves the gas company.

As president, and now as prime minister, Putin grew Gazprom and its oil counterpart, Rosneft, not to be normal companies but agents of political implementation. Between them, they were tasked to gobble up the pieces of Yukos when its luckless founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was thrown in jail.

But even more than Rosneft, it is Gazprom that has emerged as the right hand of Russian policy in Europe.

At the moment, in the dead of winter, it is Gazprom that has cut off supplies of gas to more than 12 European countries. Ostensibly, the argument is over the price paid for gas by Ukraine, the transshipper of gas to all of Europe. But the Russian political agenda is not concealed. Putin, and the siloviki (the men of power around Putin and President Dimitry Medvedev) are angered by the defiance of former members of the Soviet Union, especially Ukraine. Despite its large Russian-speaking minority (about 40 percent) it has talked of joining NATO and the European Union–a red rag to Russia. Russia is angry at the West, in general, for trying to route new pipelines from Central Asia through Georgia, avoiding Russia. It is also mad at the West for recognizing Kosovo, and has responded by buying the Serbian gas fields.

Russian gas, which now makes up 30 percent of Europe’s need, does not look such a good idea–particularly to Germany, where pressure from the Green party led to the retreat from nuclear and the push for gas turbines. Before Germany turned its back on nuclear, it was a leader in the development of promising pebble bed technology. Now, sadly, Germany depends on Russia for nearly 40 percent of its gas supplies.

The gas crisis is worst in countries like Bulgaria, where there is very little gas storage and demand is in real time. But it is also affecting Italy and Southern Europe. Having closed their coal-fired power plants and shelved their nuclear plans, those countries now feel the full pain of the Russian bear’s embrace: gas droughts and electric shortages are leaving their populations cold and hungry in the dark.

So dependent has Europe become on Russian energy that every step to ameliorate the situation is a possible irritant to Moscow. If the pipelines bypass Russia, or the hub in Ukraine, that is a provocation. If new gas comes by ship from North Africa, that is an excuse for Russia to try and price its pipeline gas at the higher price of liquefied natural gas.

Belatedly, Britain and Finland commissioned new nuclear power plants. But Germany, whose former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder took a lucrative job with Gazprom, has chosen to increase its energy dependence on Russia.

Most observers believe that the current crisis will not last. Most likely, it will conclude with a jump in the price of gas, and some satisfaction in the Kremlin that Europe has been taught a lesson. But that lesson may have to be repeated over issues far from energy–such as the expansion of NATO and the European Union.

While the Russians appear to take some satisfaction in upsetting Western Europe, it is their Soviet-era satellites that most annoy them. Why, they wonder, can’t all of Eastern Europe remain suitably deferential, like Belarus and Armenia? Both toady to Moscow.

For the rest of Europe, the message is clear: build more gas storage, arrange more imports and diversify away from gas turbines.

For our part, we can help our friends and allies by thinking through our own actions, from the European missile shield to the willy-nilly expansion of NATO. This is a European problem. But if Europe has to make geopolitical compromises with Russia, it becomes problem for the Western alliance. That is us.

Obama’s Foreign Policy Cocktail

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Here in Washington, we were just settling down for the enervating business of projecting the future from the first tranche of President-elect Barack Obama’s Cabinet, when an ill wind from Chicago reminded us that all politics is human, and that political success does not equate to wisdom or simple common sense. Also, it reminded us that we love to see politicians fall.

The allegations against Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich have diverted even the most serious policy wonks from their ruminations. But this will pass, and most likely Blagojevich will go to his disgrace. The wonks will go back to puzzling how Obama’s foreign policy appointments will work together, or who will work against whom. It is not titillating, but it is engrossing.

This brings up the subject of Hillary Clinton, Obama’s pick for secretary of state.

What makes Clinton tick? Why would a woman who has been a successful lawyer, the first lady of a state, the first lady of the United States and a successful U.S. senator want more? Her ambition is Napoleonic, vaulting and incomprehensible. Those who are not addicted to the narcotic of power cannot understand it any more than we can grasp what drives Rupert Murdoch, the most successful publisher in history, to expand his empire at the age of 77, when he might reasonably be expected to be enjoying his family and reveling in his achievements.

But Clinton’s ambition, together with her husband’s position in the prompter’s box, does not auger well for harmony in foreign policy. First, there is National Security Adviser–designate James Jones to consider. He will see the president every day and, unlike Clinton, does not have to preside over the management of the State Department with its 50,000 widely scattered employees. More, he is fresh out of his Marine general’s uniform, and generals have more difficulty than most in accepting orders.

Then there is the possibility of a three-way struggle between Clinton, Jones and Susan Rice, nominated to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She was an assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration and signed on early as an adviser to Obama. She did not throw her weight behind Hillary–and the secretary of state-designate notices things like that.

Foreign policy is not just caught up in a triangle of strong egos. There is another player: the vice president. Vice President-elect Joe Biden has made foreign policy his area of expertise for many years, serving on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and traveling widely. Biden is not malicious, but he is garrulous and wont to say things he wished he had suppressed. Loose lips in the veep’s office could be a nightmare for all concerned, especially Clinton.

Clinton, herself, has one other problem: her husband. The former president made a speech in Hong Kong, after his wife had accepted the job of secretary of state. If this is not a conflict, it is at least a possible harbinger of things to come. Awkward things.

Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, may be called upon to keep the peace, but he has baggage too. He is known to be abrasive and to have strong ties to Israel, where he served in the Israel Defense Forces during the Gulf war. Obama might want to keep Emanuel out of foreign affairs even if, as chief of staff, he is forced to keep the peace between the super-egos. Of these, Rice is the gentlest, but she will have to answer a lot of questions about the Rwanda genocide during her Senate confirmation hearing. She was on President Clinton’s Africa team at the National Security Council during the genocide. As they say, it was not our problem, but it will force Rice to answer hard questions about the slaughter now taking place in Darfur and the eastern Congo.

Hillary Clinton is smart and energetic, but if she has diplomatic skills, she has not used them to date. In China, I watched her lecture women on becoming lawyers. The women, who had expected somebody more sympathetic, looked at her agog. Few of them probably knew what a lawyer was, and Clinton clearly had not bothered to find out what was on their minds. Not a good beginning.

The sorry thing is that it will be years before we know how well the Obama foreign policy team meshes; before the books are written and memoirs lift the curtain.

Bad Choices about Detroit

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The case for saving Detroit is lame. The case for letting the three domestic car companies fail is terrifying. Good choices, there are none. It is reasonable to expect a third way to be proposed, but it has not yet. It is urgently needed.

 

The nation needs a capable domestic vehicle manufacturing base for defense capability; but does it need three moribund companies that have lost their way, compared to their global rivals who are, in some cases, manufacturing competitively in the United States.

 

When a choice between two is too fraught, the need is another option. Fail or nationalize is too stark a choice. Something else is needed and the time-honored option is to appoint a commission to weigh the assets of the car companies and to decide on how they can be capitalized upon.

 

The three domestic vehicle manufacturers, which are far from being wholly domestic, do have assets, mostly overseas–especially General Motors and Ford. For decades, their operations in Europe have been prosperous. For more than 20 years, Ford has looked to Europe for its profits and GM has been enormously successful in China and Russia and with its German subsidiary.

 

 

It is one of the mysteries of the automobile world that Japanese and German manufacturers have been able to bring to America successful cars first marketed somewhere else, but the Big Three have not. Never was this more apparent than after the first oil crisis in the l970s. Detroit did try to meet the demand for smaller cars but by producing some ghastly lemons: cars with a poor power-to-weight ratio, while the Japanese and the Germans simply upped their imports of proven cars. The choice between the Ford Pinto and Volkswagen Rabbit was no choice. Remember the Chevrolet Chevette? Bet you’d rather not.

But at the time a whole crop of lemons was coming out of Detroit, the same companies were making excellent small cars in Europe: GM under the Opel name in Germany, Chrysler as Simca in France, and Ford under its own name in England. Why did these companies have to make small cars from the bottom up in America? I have asked this question many times and have received no good answer. Only guff about the American consumer being different. Put that in your Toyota and smoke it.

 

A bailout on the basis now being discussed has another problem. If Congress directly finances the Big Three, it is only a matter of time–a short time–that Congress will be designing cars. That will guarantee catastrophe.

 

If you doubt it, look what happened to the motorcycle industry in Britain. As company after company fell to the twin evils of bad management and Japanese competition, the government, under the socialist leader Wedgwood Benn, stepped in to consolidate the one proud and dominant world of British motorcycles—marques like Aerial, BSA, Matchless, Norton and Triumph were swept together to make the super British bike. The only thing missing from the mix were the customers; they bought Hondas, Suzukis and Yamahas.

 

There is an old joke about a refusenik family that resettled in Israel. They wanted to operate a shoe shop and the Jewish Agency, which handled such things, provided them with a great little emporium, complete with stock. They were delighted. A month later, the father was back at the agency. “We have a small problem,” he said. “You forgot to order our customers.”

 

The empirical evidence is not reassuring that American consumers will again want to buy from Detroit’s finest.

 

 

The Things They Say

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As the global credit crunch begins to bite, the Old Un wanted to pass on some illuminating research that will surely help us through these gloomy times. Firstly, a survey has been carried out on behalf of the Cooperative Bank shows that as the economy nosedives our bottoms are set to pay the price. According to the research, eight out of ten people have decided to ditch quilted lavatory paper in favor of the cheaper stuff. As if that’s not momentous enough, sales of colored loo rolls are predicted to fall as bog standard white paper is cheaper. Meanwhile research conducted by online bank Cahoot has revealed that one in four Britons are now less likely to split up from their partner as economic prospects worsen. This, of course, is bad news for divorce lawyers—which just goes to prove that every credit crunch has a silver lining. —The Old Un’s Diary in the British magazine The Oldie, November 2008

The way to stop financial joy-riding is to arrest the chauffeur, not the automobile. –Woodrow Wilson

These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men. –Franklin D. Roosevelt

It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours. –Harry S. Truman

Depression is when you are out of work. A recession is when your neighbor is out of work. A recovery is when Jimmy Carter is out of work. –Ronald Reagan

Recession is when the woman next door loses her job. Slump is when the woman in your house loses her job. Recovery is when the woman in No. 10 loses hers. –Len Murray, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, alluding to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, 1983

Our Lord commonly giveth Riches to such gross asses, to whom he affordeth nothing else that is good. —Martin Luther, Colloquies

A man’s true wealth is the good he does in this world. –Muhammad