White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

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.

 

 

 

 

Confessions of a Potted Plant at the White House

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Excuse me, but I am a potted plant. Well, at best an extra, who has been sent over by Central Casting to fill in the numbers.

I am not alone. There were at least 350 other potted plants, aka White House reporters, who gathered in the East Room on Tuesday night to watch what the White House itself called “the program.”

The thing was concocted, stage-managed and went off well enough, given that the White House press office had wrung anything like spontaneity out of it. It was indeed as they had billed it: a program in which President Obama took his time to respond at length to some really bland and uninspired questions, posed by largely the same people–from the television networks plus the Associated Press–who are called upon daily in press secretary Robert Gibbs’s briefings.

At those briefings, the rest of us sit there in our potting soil. We wave our arms in the hope we might be recognized towards the end of a long, rambling session that seems more like the press secretary chatting with his pals who have seats assigned in the front.

Keep this up and reporters morph into courtiers, which serves neither the larger purposes of democracy nor the specific strategies of the administration. At some level, it is also very insulting to the large number of reporters who ply the journalism trade in Washington.

Clearly, the White House is defining reporters by where they work rather than what they do. This is an inversion, lacking in understanding of the realities of the media craft.

The truth is that newspapers trump television every time when it comes to original reporting. Their nature and tradition makes it that way. Television– and I have worked in it and contemporaneously with print for many years–is the friend of the instant and the enemy of the profound.

The written word, not the broadcast one, is the beacon of liberty. It is durable, more accountable and requires more coherence than its powerful but fleeting electronic cousin.

It is neither right nor possible for the White House to balance out the competing claims for the right to question the president or the press secretary. The solution lies in the past: In the old days of a forest of hands, the earnest cries to be recognized by eager questioners.

It is messy, but it works. Actually, 350 people shouting “Mr. President” is an affirmation of a free press rather than the pre-selection of an elite with a predictable roster of questions–usually right out of that day’s newspapers.

The old free-for-alls, where the president or the briefer selected from a clamoring throng, was disorderly, noisy and rather glorious in that the world could see how open the media is in the United States. As it is now, it appears scripted even though the questions are composed only by the reporters (I hope).

Sure, the open system looks and sounds like feeding time at the animal shelter. But most of us would rather be seen jumping for attention than sitting around like plotted plants, honored to be allowed in but with nothing to do except fill out the numbers. Heck, you can do that with computer animation.

This administration gives every indication that it is enthralled by new media: Web-only publishing and bloggers. If it is to include their interests, it has to stop its rigid press handling and free things up in the interface between the White House and those who report on it.

The alternative is the kind of quota system that was emerging this week, designed to mollify those who were upset after President Obama’s first press conference: the military press, the Hispanic broadcasters and, in concession to new media, Politico which tries to be both print and Web.

Personally, I do not like shouting questions in crowded “programs.” I am quite relaxed as a potted plant.

 


Showtime in the East Room

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There should be a morning-after pill for journalists. As access to White House insiders has decreased over the decades, journalism has obsessed over the rare lifting of the curtain—particularly press conferences with the president.

This week has been no exception. The Tuesday evening press conference in the East Room, which I attended, has been analyzed, dissected, examined, scrutinized; deconstructed and reconstructed, praised and excoriated. I heard Fox’s Bill O’Reilly call in his body language expert so that his viewers would know not only what Barack Obama said but also what he was thinking when he said it. There’s alchemy in the no-spin zone!

Forget O’Reilly, though. For sheer perspicacity, the prize goes to a commentator on CNN who said that the press conference, held on the 64th day of Obama’s presidency, revealed that he would be a one-term president. This sort of fantasy in the name of analysis deserves a Hall of Fame of its own.

The media does the morning-after thing for good and sufficient reason: Over the years the White House, under both parties, has become more and more impenetrable to reporters. We don’t roam the place as we once did in the days of Johnson and Nixon. In those days, reporters could walk the West Wing freely and could interview staffers without the intrusion of the press office, and the numbing effect of trying to conduct an interview in the presence of a press office minder.

No news will be broken when the minder is there, presumably to keep tabs on both the journalist and the official. Also, as I have often said, the press office presence cuts the White House off from a valuable source of information that is hard for presidential aides to get except from journalists.

In the days when you could get to senior White House players without a minder, interviews would invariably end with, “What have you heard​?” And sometimes,“What do you think?”

Can you imagine any senior official asking those questions in the presence of a de facto double agent from the press office? I can tell you it doesn’t happen and it won’t happen.

As the White House press corps has swelled in numbers, it has lost in access. It is less effective and more completely controlled by the White House press office. With each successive president, the manipulation of the media becomes more pervasive and more obvious.

Take this latest press conference, referred to on the White House address system as “the program.” Twice this happened after the 360-plus journalists and photographers filed into the East Room.

The anonymous voice on the public address system was anything but a press conference in the old sense of the word. It was, indeed, a program. Only 13 reporters were called upon to ask questions. And clearly, the selection of these had nothing to do with their skills as interrogators. Pointedly, no major newspapers were called upon and few reporters, who was not backed by a television network, had any hope of getting the nod. Radio was completely shunned.

How one longed for a real press conference: a forest of hands and a multitude voices crying out, “Mr. President.” That system was ragged but in its way fair. The small radio station could compete with the mighty TV network.

Obama may be an egalitarian at heart but his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, is anything but. He is an elitist with a penchant for a fistful of TV reporters. The rest of us have the morning-after blues–and no medication.

 

Fatigue as the Ultimate Healer

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I first encountered the healthy corrective of fatigue when I was a young writer for a television news service in London. I was chronically late. Every interview I did started with an apology. Every day when I showed up for work, I was late. My supervisor would look at me and at the clock and sigh.

 

One day, I decided that the price of being late was too high: If you have to start with an apology, you never get a decent interview and the long face of my supervisor was painfully reproving. I was tired of my self-imposed misery. I was fatigued with my own sloth. Since that time, I have been fairly punctual.

 

Fatigue, it seems to me, can be motivator in governance and foreign policy. Take the three great revolutions of our time: accommodation in Northern Ireland, the collapse of apartheid in South Africa and the end of the Soviet Union. I submit that in all of these, fatigue played a critical if not seminal role.

 

I have been in and out of South Africa all of my life. Sure sanctions and international pressure played a role in bringing about change. But there was something else at work: fatigue. The people of South Africa were very tired of their own creation. Driving across South Africa in the 1970s with an African relief driver, I ran into what used to be called “petty apartheid”: segregated places to eat. As a result, we took out food and ate it in the car. But at two roadside eateries (they were few and far between), the owners apologized to me for the offensive law. The weight of the injustice was getting to them.

 

That was the first time I saw a sufficient glimmer of hope that peaceful change would come, as it did.

 

In Northern Ireland it appeared that the sectarian violence, which emerged in 1963, would go on forever. Catholics and Protestants were killing each other in barbarous ways and terrorism was spreading into Britain. Over the 15 years I participated in a think tank in Ireland, I heard endless speeches from both sides about the hopelessness of the situation in which the Irish Republican Army, the right-wing Protestant “hard men” and the British Army fought a triangular terrorist war.

 

On a summer’s morning in 1982, there were two terrorist attacks in the center of London. A car bomb was detonated as 16 members of the Queen’s Household Cavalry trotted along a Hyde Park’s South Carriage Drive; and less than two miles away, in Regent’s Park, a military bandstand was blown up. Toll for the day: 10 soldiers killed, 55 injured. The I.R.A. claimed responsibility for the strikes. All of Britain was on a terrorist footing, but that did not stop an attack on Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Brighton, England two years later.

 

By the 1990s, you could sense a change in Ireland: People were tired of the killing and living in fear. Without that fatigue, that revolution, the Good Friday agreement of 1998 and power-sharing, would not have happened.

 

Likewise by the late 1980s, the Soviet Union–the edifice of communism with its incompetence, its privations and its paranoia–had lost the loyalty of the people and the terror apparatus of the state was failing. Russians were tired of it and Poland was in near revolt. Mikhail Gorbachov loosened the reins and things hurtled forward.

 

Alas fatigue is not a policy, not even a strategy. It is just a reality; a factor in protracted disputes, oppressive governance and pervasive injustice.

 

When, then, will fatigue set in between combatants in the Middle East, the oppressed of North Korea or the misgoverned of Africa? According to my theory of fatigue, these things are overdue. But it is easier to fix your own timekeeping than history’s.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Pickens and Obama Energy Plans: How Smart Are They?

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The billionaire T. Boone Pickens and President Barack Obama have something in common: a plan for saving us from imported energy. In doing so they hope to reduce air pollution, create jobs and head the country towards a more sustainable energy future.

But Pickens and Obama do not have the same plan. In fact, Pickens has been critical of Obama’s plan; and Obama has been silent on Pickens’ plan.

Where both plans converge is on the billions of tax dollars that will be needed to upgrade the now ramshackle transmission system. This is often called the grid. The fact is it is not a grid at all, but a series of local grids that are sometimes interconnected. Texas is not connected to the rest of the U.S. system, for example.

The first problem with the two plans is that they are aimed specifically at foreign oil but deal with electricity, which we import in small quantities from Canada. Electric imports are not a problem. Both have ideas about how a greener, smarter electric grid will help toward cutting the astonishing amount of oil–20 million barrels a day–we consume in the U.S., 70 percent of it from overseas.

The Pickens plan is fairly straightforward. He wants to build wind farms up the spine of the United States, from Texas to Canada–hundreds of thousands of windmills in the best wind belt in the country. This electricity will be transported from the relatively underpopulated Intermountain West to the heavily populated coastal cities of the East and West.

This electricity would be moved on the new smart grid that everyone is sure is desirable, and on the way if the government foots the bill and there is enough use of eminent domain to force the new lines across private property. One of the reasons the grid is not larger and more flexible today is that it often takes as long as 20 years to overcome the local protest and litigation. Even the abusive use of eminent domain does not block lawsuits over issues like the health effects of large power lines.

To Pickens, this electricity will make it possible to back out the 30 percent of natural gas now being used to generate electricity; and that resource will substitute for oil in large trucks and eventually domestic autos, after the new filling stations are built.

Neat, huh? Maybe in 25 years?

Obama’s plan is more ambitious, but less specific. It seeks a huge increase in wind generation; the use of solar panels in cities; and, of course, the building of a really smart grid, which will give consumers the option to turn off their appliances when electricity is expensive and back on when it is cheap, mostly late at night and early in the morning–midnight suppers and 3 a.m. showers. The relief from imported oil comes in the use of electric cars, hybrid cars and possibly the electrification of some rail lines, where high-speed trains are envisaged.

Under the Obama plan and with his grid, your house will be monitored 24 hours a day for energy usage and it will get helpful directions on energy conservation. Ergo if you are growing plants in the basement, you might not want to sign up. Privacy is an issue. Also, will we go smart? Those who cannot program their VCR might want to dodge the smart grid.

There will be winners and losers. The winners will be the equipment manufacturers (lines, poles, meters, wire, insulators, turbines), civil engineers and, of course, lawyers and consultants. The losers? If the scheme collapses under its own grandeur, it will be taxpayers; job-seekers and ultimately the environment, if the utilities keep burning coal for more than half of their production. If the windmills are built under either scheme, birds and bats will get it. Both species are already slaughtered by the tens of thousands by flying into wind turbine blades.

While gasoline is cheap, the lights are on and the thermostat is set either too low or too high, it is going to be hard to tell people they have to change–and pay for it.