White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Obama and the Return of the Great Political Speech

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In this extraordinary political season, last week introduced a new dimension: a minute examination of one candidate’s rhetorical skills. Barack Obama was put under the microscope to see whether he could produce a transcendental speech that would nullify the excesses of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

That this should be is extraordinary in itself. We have heretofore judged politicians on their religious affiliation, but not on the utterances of a particular clergyman.

More, as a people, we have shied away from lofty rhetoric, favoring meat-and-potatoes speech. Our best orators have not played well with the electorate, although sometimes they have handed down memorable thoughts. William Jennings Bryan comes to mind as the preeminent orator of his day. We still remember his mesmerizing “Cross of Gold” speech, but we also remember him as being baited and brought down by Clarence Darrow in the “Scopes Monkey Trial.” Today, we adore the cascading cadences of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But his was a voice of protest, a cry of pain, not a solicitation for votes.

One of our best orators was Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois, who filled the Senate chamber with speech but changed no minds. In that, he was like Winston Churchill before World War II. According to Roy Jenkins’s detailed book on Churchill’s parliamentary life, members of the House of Commons revered Churchill’s eloquence but resisted his logic. Jenkins reports that when it was known that Churchill was to speak, the House would fill up with enthusiastic members who came for the show. But that was all they came for.

Rhetoric had its birth, and maybe its finest hours, in the ancient Greek democracy. The ability to argue brilliantly in public was revered as established as an art form. It continued, but was modified, in the Roman Forum. As the Roman state became more important than the individual, the nature of public oration changed: disputation surrendered to the triumphalism of Julius Caesar.

Through history there were great speakers from the thrones and the pulpits. But the growth of parliamentary democracy in England brought the art of public persuasion back to life, as it had been in Greece and Rome.

Initially, when British parliaments reflected only a small part of the population, debate was erudite with many references to the classics. As the franchise expanded in the 19th century, the language was modified to be more comprehensible to the public.

The House of Commons provided an arena, and rhetorical success there meant success in politics, witness H. H. Asquith, David Lloyd George, F.E. Smith, Charles Parnell, and Daniel O’Connell. The Liberal William Gladstone and the Conservative Benjamin Disraeli, the great rivals, went about it with scholarship and wit, enhanced by their personal antipathy to each other. Gladstone was the greatest orator (he could speak without notes for four hours), but Disraeli excelled at repartee—the quick thrust and the lethal turn-of-phrase were his weapons. So popular were Gladstone’s speeches that he had to employ shouters: men who stood just in earshot and repeated the great man’s words so that people could hear them.

Broadcasting has banished the thundering speech in favor of a more intimate conversation between politician and voter. Franklin D. Roosevelt understood this and changed political speech from big, bold oratory to a crowd to intimate communication to individuals. He also understood the value of scarcity and addressed the nation infrequently, compared to today’s presidents who broadcast once a week to an inattentive nation. Ronald Reagan, always referred to as a great communicator not a great orator, followed the FDR example of delivering big ideas in soft, informal language.

Whether Obama becomes the Democratic nominee and president or not, he has raised the rhetorical stakes. He has melded something of the eloquence of the 19th century with the collegiate delivery of today. He has also raised expectations for his future speeches. People will expect them to be as well crafted and as nuanced as his Philadelphia speech. As a speaker, Obama will always be compared to himself—and that is a high standard.

Eliot Spitzer and the Parallel Life Phenomenon

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The two most effective and reprehensible spies of he Cold War were the Briton Kim Philby and the American Aldrich Ames. They were both professionals in the espionage business who betrayed their countries and caused the deaths of untold Western agents in the Soviet Union.

In style and personality, Philby and Ames did not share much in common. There is no compelling evidence that they yearned for the triumph of communism over capitalism. This separated them from the atomic spies Klaus Fuchs and Julius Rosenberg: They were traitors who believed in the Soviet enterprise.

Perhaps, Philby and Ames shared the desire to live two lives in parallel.

Perhaps, it was New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s desire for a parallel life–a secret but concurrent existence—that propelled his elaborate patronage of an escort service. Spitzer did not pick up a sex worker in a bar, make eye contact with her across a crowded room, but planned, financed and orchestrated the betrayal of his wife and public life.

It seems that Spitzer wanted something more than sex. He was not Bill Clinton redux. He was a man who clearly got some satisfaction from the structure of his infidelity; the pseudo-romance of it.

Here was a man of huge public life, pursuing a private life that he sought to make larger than sex alone would require. The analogy with the world of espionage fits. Here was a man in the sun who wanted to be in the shade at the same time.

John le Carre, the great espionage writer, has explored this lifestyle duality in his characters. In his novel, “A Perfect Spy,” the protagonist, Magnus Pym, tries to explain the rewards of his two lives by telling his son what it is like to be “well run.” Here, le Carre reveals the perfect spy: the person who wants to live two lives at full speed.

Not all secret lives are confined to spies and governors who want complexity in their sex lives. There are, for example, bigamists—people who feel compelled to have more than one family simultaneously, often at great risk. I know a man who maintained two families until the truth came out. The stress and strain must have been terrible, but he was very happy with the parallel families. Playwright and theater critic Kenneth Tynan was the product of a bigamist marriage. The truth was not revealed until his father’s funeral, when the two families collided.

Of course, not all secret lives are dangerous and lead to national betrayal or the suffering of families. Some are quite innocent and involve an escape from the reality of the first life. They include the huge gambit of people who belong to secret societies, mostly innocent, and to cross-dressers.

Clearly for Spitzer, a brilliant academic career, a seemingly perfect family and great success in public life were not enough. He wanted to put his talent to work at diverting money, initiating complex logistics, and spending a little time with a high-priced sex worker in a hotel room. It looks as though he wanted the life of those he used to prosecute.

Alas for Spitzer, his secret life is public and his public life is in shreds. No hiding place now.

Whither Cuba after the Brothers Castro?

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In Havana, the enfeebled fingers of Fidel Castro have handed the baton of dictatorship to the feeble fingers of his brother, Raul. The endgame is in sight, but what will it lead to?

There are those in Miami and Washington who believe that, by some miracle, the status quo ante will return to Cuba, but this time with democracy and transparency.

To understand what might happen in Cuba, let us look at two examples of countries where power was transferred.

First, take South Africa. The white minority government ceded power to the African National Congress by throwing open the franchise, enabling a black government to be elected. Significantly in South Africa, there were independent institutions, a democratic tradition among whites, and organized political groups.

Second, look at Russia. Change came quickly, but Russia was not ready for democratic emancipation in tandem with economic liberalization. While South Africa transferred power smoothly, it did not have to transfer ownership of its commerce. Result: an orderly transition. In Russia, the political transition was smoother than the commercial one. Smart kleptocrats stole Russia’s wealth. This has generated great public resentment; and from it, Vladimir Putin was able to abridge democracy. Of course, Putin was helped by the economic chaos of the early 1990s–another symptom of Russia’s democratic and commercial immaturity.

There are those who think that there will be a transition in Cuba akin to the one in South Africa. The parallel is faulty. They would be better advised to look at what happened in Russia and chart a future for Cuba that avoids the mistakes of Russia.

The great truth about Cuba, as far as the United States is concerned, is that it lies 90 miles off Florida; its economy is a disaster; and it has 11 million people—a goodly number of whom would like to move to the United States.

Here are some scenarios for Cuba:

1. The United States lifts the embargo. In the first week, Cuba is flooded with private aircraft and boats. There is chaos, and the Cubans fear that they are being taken over. Solution: a gradual lifting of the embargo over time.

2. A democratic government is established in Havana. But without political parties, Cuba divides along racial lines. Roughly 50 percent of Cubans are white and the rest are black. Solution: a government in exile is formed in Miami to prepare a constitution that could be adopted in Cuba, allowing for the special conditions on the island.

3. A new Cuban government seeks to privatize state-owned enterprises– the most valuable of which is the pharmaceutical research industry. Any move to privatize industry would put a new government at odds with the Cuban exile community in the United States. Many harbor claims against Cuba for companies and private property that were seized by Castro 48 years ago. These claims are extremely complicated and could bog down a new administration in litigation in Cuban and American courts. Solution: a commission of reconciliation, whose findings would be legislated into law in Havana with treaty recognition in the United States.

If things go wrong in Cuba, they go wrong for the United States as well. A rush to democracy could be as damaging as anything that has happened, including civil war. There are those in Havana who believe that there should be a period for private industry to be established before democracy is implemented. These are people who look not to the South African or Russian examples but to China.

And, of course, there are the Cubans. When I first went to Cuba in the 1980s, at least half of them remembered the days before the revolution and were sullenly angry about what had happened to Cuba. On my last visit, four years ago, the change in generations was apparent. There was less memory of the old days, and Cubans’ aspirations had more to do with their daily lives than with great upheavals. As I could define it, a wish-list included better pay, more meat in the diet, and better-fitting clothes. A distant fourth on the wish-list, and from the young, was to travel. But years of propaganda have taken their toll, and many young Cubans believe that life outside of Cuba is brutal and dangerous. Interviews on the street suggest that they fear the inequalities of the past as much as they resent the oppression of the present.

The Cuban question will not be resolved when two old men leave the scene there.

William F. Buckley, a Life of Fun

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All of my adult life, William F. Buckley Jr. has been a player on the national stage. It is hard to believe that Buckley is no longer with us; that he has to be moved in our mental computers from an active folder to one labeled memory.

Thousands of writers have claimed that Buckley was the father of modern conservatism. Maybe. What is certain is that Buckley has carried the conservative standard from the time he wrote his seminal book, “God and Man at Yale.” He followed this with the founding of National Review in 1955. National Review sought to give an intellectual patina to the business-dominated conservatism of the Eisenhower era.

Buckley was a grandee; a boisterous intellectual who, at some level, never left the debating society at Yale. Above all, Buckley was a man of fun.

His conservatism was never in tow with the conservatism of the Republican Party. It was Buckley conservatism–as much informed by the high spirits of European aristocracy as it was by the yeoman farmers of America.

Buckley was hugely imaginative: He did things that had never been done before. His television program, “Firing Line,” was all Buckley: intellectuals disagreeing with wit and erudition. For 33 years it was a mainstay on PBS–which at the time of the program’s founding, in 1966, was the only network for intellectuals. While many conservatives were damning PBS, Buckley was quietly remaking it with “Firing Line.” In typical fashion, Buckley did not want to see his program become the product of a committee or university when he moved on. So he struck the set: “Firing Line” ceased production, but it is still remembered as an example of how television can do talking heads well.

His son, the author Christopher Buckley, said that Buckley’s contribution to the conservative movement was, among other things, to drive “the kooks” out of it. He broke with the John Birch Society and kept his distance from the radicalism of Pat Buchanan. Buckley thoughts on talk radio and extreme conservatives, like Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham, have not been recorded.

The conventional wisdom is that Buckley paved the way for Barry Goldwater to run for president. And the Young Americans for Freedom, who Buckley organized to support Goldwater, became the foot soldiers in the Reagan Revolution. But it seems to me that Buckley was always outside the conservative movement. His importance was as a provider of ideas and a tutor of young conservative writers, ranging from George Will to David Brooks. Most major conservative thinkers pass through National Review.

Buckley was not a fixture in Washington. He was not published in The Washington Post. He was not a courtier in the Reagan administration, as was George Will.

Many conservatives loved Buckley in principal, but kept their distance in practice. They worried about some of his not-so-conservative positions, like calling for the legalization of marijuana, and his enthusiasm for continental Europe. He loved Switzerland and retired there to write many of his books.

Even in religion, Buckley was not quite part of the movement he was credited with founding. Evangelicals embraced conservatism, and conservatives embraced evangelicals. Buckley, however, remained a very devout, very orthodox Roman Catholic.

Buckley tried to understand popular taste, but he confessed that he could not get the hang of it–especially rap music. Buckley was born a patrician who would never have to worry about money. He could apply his considerable talents and energy to his interests, including wine, food, literature and sailing.

Sometimes, Buckley seemed bored with politics. It is said that out of the public arena, he did not discuss politics.

Buckley had many favorites, most of whom shared his theatricality but not his political views. He was a close friend of John Kenneth Galbraith, the left-wing economist. He was enchanted by Malcolm Muggeridge, a radical British journalist and roue, who converted to Catholicism later in life and wrote a book about Jesus.

Everyone who worked at National Review, or was a friend of Bill, used the same word to describe the ethos: fun. Buckley was fun to be around and it was enormous fun to have him on the national stage. Sometimes the fun was mischievous, as when Buckley proposed that after he finished his term as president, Eisenhower should run as a vice president on the Nixon ticket. It was a joke, but it was one that sent scholars running to the books and lawyers pondering the legality of it. Then there was the time Buckley ran for mayor of New York. There were strings of bon mots every day, and the press had to discipline itself to cover the serious candidates and not the entertainment provided by Buckley.

Buckley did not like debating politicians: He liked debating clever people such as Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and Michael Kinsley.

Buckley was a prodigious writer and is output ranged from politics to book reviews to travel articles. He was so industrious that he actually wrote a book about his own industry: a snapshot of two weeks in the life of one of the nation’s greatest dilettantes.

Buckley was without peer and appears to be without a successor.

The Back Story of the Breakfast Banana

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To you, the banana may be a fruit that you slice onto your cereal at breakfast. To me it is a slice of history, an examination of a moral dilemma, and an explanation of why the government grows bigger. It is also a tale of mortality because the banana, as we know it, is facing extinction.

Let us begin at the end: The banana that we now enjoy, called the Cavendish, has already been wiped out by Panama disease–a lethal fungus prevalent in Asia and Australia. In the near future, that varietal is expected to be under attack in the large growing areas of the Caribbean and Central America.

The trouble is that the banana cannot fight back: It cannot mutate to meet the new threat in the normal way of plants because the cultivated banana is a clone. Evolution interruptus.

Before the Cavendish was the choice of exporters around the world, there was the Gros Michel banana. But in the 1950s, it fell victim to Panama disease and the Cavendish, in many ways an inferior fruit, had to be substituted.

Bananas, which originated in Asia thousands of years ago, somehow made their way to Africa, and Arab slave traders brought them to the New World. The global banana trade got underway in the 1870s, when entrepreneurs found that they could pick bananas green and they would ripen on their way to market.

American foreign policy in Central America became captive to the banana companies, most famously the United Fruit Company. While the banana trade was a blessing to the campesinos of Central America, it enslaved them to the companies. To support the banana trade the United States invaded, threatened, cajoled and buttressed dictators. The governance of Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama reaped the trade benefits, but paid the price of banana dominance. The banana traders, particularly United Fruit, now known as Chiquita, were vilified in Europe as America’s neocolonial exploiters.

But the truth is more complicated.

In his masterpiece “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the great Colombian novelist and Nobel laureate, wrote poignantly about the Colombian government’s massacre of striking banana workers. But in his memoirs “Living to Tell the Tale,” Marquez also refers to the hope in rural Colombia that United Fruit would return after it had ceased operations in the aftermath of the massacre.

The banana, a nutritious fruit, has often had a bitter harvest. While the United States placed the so-called banana republics of Central America as in its sphere of influence, Europeans, particularly the British, became possessive of banana producers in their Caribbean colonies. As these colonies gained their independence, Europe sought to assist development in the Caribbean by establishing floor prices for bananas. This led to a trade war with the United States, which began in 1993 and ended in 2001.

The banana wars may not be over.

Large fruit exporters, like Dole and Chiquita, with assistance from U.S. laboratories and universities, are seeking to bioengineer the banana to protect it from Panama disease and other lethal attackers that can threaten it at any time. But Europe opposes bioengineered foods and bans their import. Will the Europeans turn their backs on the bioengineered version of a banana that they have known for 140 years? Will they fight U.S. fruit companies that want access to European markets?

The banana, seemingly so benign, illustrates the complexity of foreign relations, the unintended consequences of commodity dependence in poor countries, and why the U.S. government grows like Topsy. Before the banana crisis is resolved, the government will hire more scientists, let more research contracts, and beef up the diplomatic corps with banana trade experts. Banana policy is a slippery business.

The New York Times in Hell; Good Intentions Got It There

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Newspapers are very good at what they do when they do it by rote. News breaks and reporters are assigned, photographers are dispatched, space is allocated, headlines are written, and the miraculous convulsion that is the production of a newspaper takes place routinely every 24 hours.

For journalists, the critical qualification is not the brilliant turn of phrase, the incisive interviewing skill, or the size of the Rolodex. Instead, it is news judgment. It is news judgment that enables an editor to know what to assign; a reporter what to write; a news editor where to place it in the paper; and a whole process of production to move ahead quickly without delay, debate or second thoughts. It is news judgment that allows the idea to exist that journalists conspire to produce similar coverage. If you want to test the news judgment theory, you can do so by watching a political debate, a major speech, or the Sunday morning talk shows. All the major newspapers will cover the same items the next day, as though their reporters had consulted with each other. The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times in isolation will have selected the same newsworthy utterances to display.

This smooth operation of the news machine grinds to a halt when too many editors are involved, when editorial managers inject themselves, and when the publisher’s office is intercedes. Take the current humiliation of The New York Times over its story that intimated that Sen. John McCain might have had an affair with a lobbyist. For all of the talent at The New York Times, the story when it was published had all of the signs that it had been manhandled by a committee. It began by hinting at sexual impropriety by the senator, and went on to a much more valid analysis of how McCain’s confidence in his own rectitude blinds him to ethical challenges.

In most newspapers, this story would have been spiked at the first level of editors. They would have said to the reporter, “This is a story about how you didn’t get the story,” or “This just doesn’t stand up.”

But a strange ethos dominates The New York Times. Long ago, it read its own notices and decided that it was the greatest newspaper in the world. That has made it hard to be self-critical. When it has suspended normal news judgment and fairness, it has gotten into huge trouble–as it did with reporting by Jayson Blair and Judith Miller. When The Times was edited by Abe Rosenthal, he took it upon himself to be the ultimate arbiter; and, in hindsight, he was an excellent editor of The Times. Since his departure, there has been pusillanimity in the editor’s office. In a double blow, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, a fine publisher, retired in favor of his son.

I have seen big newspapers get it wrong and get it right.

In the early 1960s London’s Sunday Mirror, where I worked, got it wrong. It had the biggest story of the decade: the scandal involving party-girl Christine Keeler, war minister John Profumo, and a Soviet military attache. Fearing libel suits, the paper declined to publish. Too many people got involved in the decision; managers, financiers and lawyers overruled the editor.

In sharp contrast, a decade later, I was at The Washington Post when Watergate broke. The editor, the wily Ben Bradlee, took charge of the story with the direct and unequivocal support of his publisher, Katherine Graham.

In both cases the result was the same. In England, the story came out and the war minister was forced from office and members of the aristocracy were disgraced; as was the newspaper that had not had the courage to publish. In Washington Bradlee, Graham, and reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein entered the pantheon of journalistic excellence.

When a major government-shaking story is in the works in newspapers, politics is irrelevant. There is adrenalin in news. Are newspapers politicized? It is an open question. In England, the left constantly rails against the Tory press. In America, conservatives rail against the liberal press. It is probably true that a majority, though far from all, journalists lean to the left. But politics is not a preoccupation of newsrooms: news is.

Kosovo: Now a Muslim Country in Europe

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A new country limped onto the world’s stage on Feb. 17: It is Kosovo. And, true to its Balkan heritage, Kosovo is a problem for most of Europe and Russia. It is also a problem for the United States, which is expected to recognize Kosovo, though mutedly.

Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia has infuriated Russia, which immediately called for an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council. Some European countries, including Cyprus, Romania and Slovakia, have told the European Union that they will not recognize Kosovo—in essence a successful separatist movement in Europe.

Serbia is predictably apoplectic. It claims that Kosovo is “the heart of Serbia,” although less than 20 percent of Kosovo’s 2-million population is Serbian. Serbia blames the United States, the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for the loss of Kosovo. In fact, these entities have been tirelessly trying to find an answer to the Kosovo question. No one wanted to see the last remnants of Yugoslavia broken up, not least because of the fuel Kosovo’s independence provides to other separatist groups. Think Scotland, Northern Ireland, Spain’s Basque region, France’s Corsica or Canada’s Quebec province.

Another problem is that Kosovo will be the first Muslim country in Europe. Much of its population was converted to Islam under Ottoman Turkish rule. And European security officials worry that Kosovo will provide a safe haven for Muslim extremists across Europe.

The new government says that minorities will be protected in Kosovo. But it was the Kosovar authorities’ disinclination to protect minorities that gave rise to the atrocities against the Kosovars by the Serbians under Slobodan Milosevic. This, in turn, led to the bombing by NATO and the de facto independence of Kosovo as a U.N.-administered territory. Now the U.N. will withdraw its forces, and a EU peacekeeping force will go to Kosovo.

Russia’s anger derives both from its fight against separatists in Chechnya, the mainly Muslim region that borders Georgia, and its historic alliance with the Serbians. The Russians are hinting that they will now give material support to two breakaway regions of Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and Transdniestria, which split from Moldova. Russian rhetoric toward the West heated up it became apparent that many Western countries would recognize an independent Kosovo.

A big country, with many ethnic divisions like Russia has reason to fear the whole concept of separatism. It is not just that the Russians want to make trouble for the West: They genuinely believe that there is mortal danger for Russia if the concept of separatism gains international acceptance. Even in the time of the tsars, a primary goal of Russian administrations was to hold Mother Russia together. Moscow has been fighting Chechen separatists for 150 years.

The Balkans are yet another test for the U.S. policy of embracing any democratically expressed will without regard to historical alignments or future viability. Sickly Kosovo, with its endangered Serbian minority and its history of intolerance, is not a credit to democracy, even though the democratic will of the people is for independence from Serbia. Kosovo is the current sick man of Europe: poor, resource-challenged, and with a bitter ethnic history. Unfortunately, Kosovo sees the United States as its vaccine against the Serbs and the Russians.

Our Big Fat Federal Government

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If you want to be president of the United States, it is a good thing to tell the electorate that the federal government is too big and you will shrink it. Yet if you are president, you may find this impossibly hard to achieve.

The problem has two dimensions. First the great sprawling bureaucracy that is the U.S. Civil Service has very low productivity. Second, the population is always calling for more government services not fewer.

In the private sector, the size and cost of the federal government could be reduced by demanding higher productivity and dismissing poor performers. But in the federal bureaucracy, it is nearly impossible to do so. In the private sector, the possibility of losing your job is an ever-present factor. Federal employees have de facto lifetime employment. Unable to introduce the fear-of-firing as a disciplinary tool, reformers have instituted performance bonuses to shake up the federal bureaucracy. But they have not worked.

The problem inside the federal government is that those who calibrate performance are the immediate superiors of employees. These managers have found it nearly impossible to hand out poor grades. Poor grades do not cause the under-performers to leave government service, they simply affect morale. Most federal government managers, who have to live cheek by jowl with those who they supervise, know that pointing out incompetence only builds up department-wide resentment against themselves. Most working groups in the federal government are communal operations, and they are not subject to the normal managerial discipline that abounds in the private sector.

The tolerance of incompetence in the federal government is particularly hard on those who strive and care about what they are doing.

If you work in Washington, it is very difficult not to know something about the incompetence factor in the federal government. An acquaintance of mine who works in national security shakes her head despairingly about what she sees every day: sloth, indifference, incompetence and defeatism. An auditor acquaintance in the Department of Health and Human Services decided that he would make a lot more money in the private sector. He did not: He was fired twice. He went back into the federal government, drawing a salary of more $100,000 a year. Now, in retirement, he is consulting to the federal government for even more money.

Political appointments do not solve the problem; they complicate it. Only in the Department of State can high-performers really rise to the top positions. Many ambassadors are drawn from the ranks of career Foreign Service officers.

But there is no such ladder of opportunity in most of the federal government. Ergo, the only incentive to perform well is to improve your grade, but you cannot hope to manage an agency. In that way, it is a little like working for a family corporation.

It is hard from anecdotal evidence to gauge how overstaffed the federal government is and where the overstaffing exists. Air traffic controllers are overstressed and do a superb job. But there is evidence that the departments of Labor, Housing and Urban Development, and Education have a high percentage of the slothful.

Yet they are all politically protected. If they work in Washington, and live in Maryland or Virginia, federal government employees are catered to by their elected political overseers. The same thing happens if you get a concentration of federal employees elsewhere. If you want to see how it works, look at base closings. Federal jobs are good jobs–and jobs are the opium of the political class.

The larger question of reducing the federal government divides over what people say they want and what they demand. They say they want smaller government, but they demand more federal services year after year. Every national crisis spawns a new bureaucracy: a buildup of personnel that becomes permanent and immutable. Today the buildup is in national security, immigration management, border security, safety standards for Chinese imports, global warming, and arcane but real problems like the shortage of honeybees. As society grows more complicated, the demand for the government to do more increases exponentially.

So if you were president, what could you do to reduce the size of the federal government? You could close the departments of Education, Energy, and eradicate more than 1,000 programs. But most of the functions of the axed departments would be glommed onto other departments; and most of the programs would reappear elsewhere in the bureaucracy.

Every president tries to reduce the size of the federal government, and mostly they fail.

The Beauty and Burden of Mythology

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Myths are part of the fuel of foreign policy. The Roman Empire was driven by the myth of its own invincibility. The British Empire was driven by the myth of British superiority. Wherever they raised the Union Flag, the British believed they brought civilization; defined by laws, social order and Christianity. Ditto the Romans, but they did not export their religions.

Sometimes myth is reality. And sometimes it is just that: myth. Here are some of the prevailing myths that dominate our policy debate:

The first myth is that the United States is the freest country in the world, and that our freedom imposes a moral obligation to export it to the rest of the world. Reality: We enjoy great freedoms in the United States, but they are not notably greater than the freedoms enjoyed by people in Canada, Scandinavia, and many other functioning democracies. Australians, for example, do not feel deprived of freedom any more than Arkansans do.

A second myth is that nothing works in countries whose social order is left- of-center. By and large, Europe works very well and its people enjoy standards of living that are comparable or superior to people living in the United States. The French may need to pull their socks up and work a bit harder, but do the British or the Finns?

A third myth is that hundreds of millions of people around the world are yearning for democracy. China and Russia are powerfully indifferent to democracy. Both are huge players and in the world and will shape the future of it. But they will not do so at the ballot box. People who yearn for a democratic future tend to set up governments in exile to propagandize their situation. This is an option open to the Chinese, and not since the uprising in Tiananmen Square has there been any indication that the Chinese are anything but satisfied with what they have. Many Chinese intellectuals told me in Beijing, and around the country, that they consider their form of communistic mercantilism “a third way.” Russia is moving away from democracy without a fight.

Wherever there are Muslim majorities in the world, from Morocco to Indonesia, there are dissident movements. But many are not seeking democratic governance. They are seeking governance under sharia law.

Another powerful myth, favored by progressives everywhere, is that multiculturalism increases creativity and productivity. Periods of great creativity around the world suggest that there is as much output by homogeneous societies as there is by multicultural ones, and maybe more. In Japan, China and much of Europe, the periods of the greatest output have been in times of homogeneity. This is hard to gauge in the United States, which has always been a multi-ethnic nation.

The myths that govern us that have an historical basis, tend to be myths favored by conservatives. Liberals tend to favor myths that are speculative and have no track record. These include the myths surrounding energy and the environment; and the myth that universal comity is possible, if it is fostered.

Myths are essential in the national enterprise, but they move from asset to liability when they are transformed from mythology to inflexible doctrine. Great leaders are men and women who add to mythology and do not govern by it–for example,Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. All four leaders used mythology for their purposes and created new myths for their successors.

The most pervasive myths are the ones that we live by; the market is infallible (So why did Mozart die a pauper?); sport builds character (as long as steroids are available); organic food is better than other food (There is no such thing as inorganic food.); American football is innately superior to soccer (Tell them in Brazil.).

Will the World’s Cheapest Car Curry Favor?

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What should have been a modest piece of commercial news out of the 2008 New Delhi Auto Show has seized the world’s imagination. Tata Group, the Indian industrial conglomerate, whose Tata Motors is the world’s 18th largest automobile company, unveiled a new “People’s Car”: the Nano.

Given the reception the Nano has received, one would think that it is a new weapon of mass destruction. In fact it is a very small, slow, basic four-seater, designed to operate in Indian cities at speeds of not more than 50 mph. The bombshell is the price: $2,500, according to Tata.

This is great price, but it is not much of a car. Tata seems to know this because it has been frugal with information; releasing a list of specs, but not allowing automotive journalists to even sit in the car. What we know is that the Nano has two cylinders and develops between 30 and 40 hp. This is basic transportation. Very basic.

Tata’s hope is not that the Nano will elbow Ford Neons out of the market, depress the sale of Toyota Camrys, or hobble the market for its own conventional range of cars. No, this car is several orders of magnitude less of a vehicle than anything now being sold on the world automobile market.

You would have to go back to the 1930s to find something with the same range of performance and economy as the Nano. I would suggest that you look at the Jowett Bradford light van, made in the English city of Bradford from the 1940s to the 1950s. It boasted a two-cylinder, horizontally-opposed, water-cooled engine, and probably developed about 35 hp. It was rated at 8 hp under the British system of measuring horsepower at idle. What the Bradford lacked was hydraulic brakes and a synchronized gear box. Even so, it met many of the targets of the Nano. Of course, it was not a sedan but they were easily converted.

The People’s Car has intrigued automobile manufacturers throughout their history. While the term goes back to 1938 and the design of the Volkswagen Beetle, it could be claimed that the first People’s Car was the Ford Model T.

Aspirants to the title of the People’s Car, besides the most successful of all, the Beetle, include the French Citroen Deux Chevaux and the English Morris Minor. But only the Beetle saw global distribution and really earned the title.

For a People’s Car to work, it not only requires a price point that will tempt people who have never owned cars to buy, but it also requires a classlessness that makes the rich and the poor alike comfortable behind the wheel. There are a few things in society that are classless: blue jeans, sneakers, and hamburgers come to mind. The Beetle, the Morris Minor, and the Honda Civic triumphed in this regard.

There is a good place for a classless car in the world. It would have to be inexpensive, fuel-efficient and safe—and ideally a hybrid. This is not the Nano. It is not even clear that Indian families will buy the Nano because it meets so few of today’s motoring criteria besides fuel efficiency. It has very little space for luggage; it would be murderous on a long trip; and despite protestations from Tata, it would not meet most Western safety standards.

There is also considerable doubt whether Tata can hold its declared price for the car. This has been achieved by skimping on features, using cheap labor, and receiving massive subsidies from the state of West Bengal.

Don’t know much about West Bengal? It is India’s most densely populated state; its major city is Kolkata, formerly Calcutta; and it has had a Marxist government since the British left India in 1947. Like all Marxist governments, it has been economically ruinous. Its subsidy to Tata to build the Nano is a blatant attempt to paper over the economic stagnation of the state. It is unlikely that the subsidies will last or that Tata can build a car, with or without, subsidies for $2,500. Automotive economists believe that the real price of the Nano will be about three times the introductory price.

Despite the huge publicity that the Nano has received, it probably will revolutionize the world automobile industry. Remember the Proton? Of course not, but it is a Malaysian car that has been trying to revolutionize the world automobile industry since 1985.