White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Placemen Cometh

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After the deluge, the deluge. That is right. The upheaval in Washington that follows every presidential campaign where the incumbent, or his vice president, is not reelected is massive and affects the routine governance of every aspect of the nation.

 

Essentially, it is a period during which much of the federal government is rudderless. Scholars, like John Fortier of the American Enterprise Institute, say it is also a period during which the United States is more than usually vulnerable to its enemies and to crises.

 

Although the framework for transition is put in place before elections, it is immediately afterwards that everything begins to roll. The very first appointments the new president makes are not to the Cabinet but to his transition team, which bears the brunt of seeing that a new government takes over without chaos or endangerment of the country.

 

Think of General Electric. It is a large, diversified company with interests in locomotives, jet engines, nuclear power plants, consumer goods, finance and broadcasting. Now, think of what would happen if all of the company’s executives, from the chairman down to the shop-floor supervisors, were to leave within days of each other. You would expect decision-making to be frozen, and GE franchises to be under attack from competitors. Yet, on a grander scale, that is what will happen in Washington in the weeks ahead.

 

In a hypothetical remaking of GE, the stockholders and their new chief executive officer are free to hire whomever they wish, and to shuffle them without the media blowing a fuse. The president of the United States does not have that luxury. His key managers–all 1,100–have to be confirmed by the Senate. But first, they have to be vetted by the newly installed White House staff. Assuming they will take the jobs, the candidates are cleared informally with their home state senators. Then it is on to confirmation, and all that that has come to entail.

 

For critical Cabinet posts, such as defense, state, treasury and the Office of Management and Budget, the Senate likes to give the president his choice of executive. But in contentious political times, nothing is guaranteed in the confirmation process.

 

Some 7,000 government jobs change hands with a new administration, and the process among the president’s inner circle can be bloody. Those who labored in the campaign believe they are entitled to first dibs. The best thing a new president can do is identify his chief of staff early on, and let this appointee shield him from contention among those who helped elect the candidate.

 

An administration is inevitably shaped by the people a president knew before he was elected. Ronald Reagan had a major advantage. As the former governor of California, and an established national figure, Reagan’s Rolodex was bulging. Jimmy Carter’s Rolodex was not bulging, nor was Bill Clinton’s. George W. Bush had a fat Rolodex, but it was stuffed with the names of his father’s operatives.

 

Each appointment tends to initiate the next one. Caspar Weinberger and George Schultz both worked for the Bechtel Corporation, as did others who served in the Reagan Administration, including Kenneth Davis, deputy secretary of energy.

 

Many ambitious people with institutional backgrounds are poised to serve in government, and they have been advising the campaigns in the hope that this will buy them favor. These potential placemen are poised n their institutions to take up high office in Washington, whether they are at Harvard University, the Rand Corporation, The Brookings Institution, or one of the plethora of new think tanks around the city.

 

The poet Lord Byron said of sex, which he knew a thing or two about, that the pleasure was momentary, the position ridiculous and the scandal damnable. Of politically appointed service, it might be said that the pay is meager, the scrutiny intolerable and the damage considerable. Consider Colin Powell, Scooter Libby, Paul O’Neill and Paul Wolfowitz. Yet still they want to come to Washington, and a huge new crop has to be harvested under pressure between now and Jan. 20, 2009.

 

Presidents do not manage very much, but they do appoint talent and validate the decisions and policies of those they appoint. They also must guard against rogue appointees, like Ollie North and Bob Haldeman, who can hurt and embarrass an administration.

 

 

Requiem for Reporting

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The newspaper of the Newspaper Guild tells the terrible truth: traditional newspaper journalism is dying faster than anyone thought. Almost every major newspaper is making drastic cuts in staffing, from The Washington Post to The Chicago Sun-Times, from The St. Louis Post-Dispatch to The Philadelphia Inquirer, and from The Dallas Morning News to The Modesto Bee. Forty percent of the Newark Star-Ledger’s newsroom staff will depart in a buyout wave. Jim Wilse, editor of The Star-Ledger, said 151 buyout offers were accepted in a newsroom of about 330 people.

Here in Washington, the all-important bureaus which make up most of the Washington press corps are being decimated; and I mean that in the current usage of cut by 90 percent, not the original usage of cut by 10 percent. Colleagues and friends abound who are writing books, trying public relations or seeking government jobs.

The cause of the hollowing out of newspapers is well known: the Internet is getting the information out faster, it is mostly free and the reader can access it selectively. The trouble is that the information on the Web is, if it is any good, first appeared in a newspaper somewhere.

Newspapers still keep the record, but they are woefully behind the times. Today’s newspaper makes no concessions to the passage of time. It is produced in a factory in the middle of the night, transported through the traffic, and entrusted to a child for delivery.

 

Worse, the business model is hopelessly outmoded. It relies on a healthy stream of advertising revenue to make up for the poor income from actual sales of the product.

 

The story is the same in all advanced countries. Newspapers are in trouble, serious, mortal trouble. Only in emerging markets are newspaper sales growing, and that often reflects poor penetration of personal computers and government control of broadcasting.

 

Newspapers have suffered electronic competition in the past and survived. They were portable and kept a tangible record of events. You cannot hook up a printer to a radio or a television set, but you can to a computer. Advertisers can even distribute coupons via the Web.

 

H.L. Mencken, America’s greatest journalist, feared for the morning newspapers in his day because all the circulation and wealth was in the evening papers. Television put paid to that.

 

In Washington, until the 1960s, the dominant paper was The Evening Star. After its purchase and merger with The Times Herald (a weak morning paper owned out of Chicago) in 1954, The Washington Post became the most important political newspaper in the country and a cash generator for its owners. The 40-year golden age of the morning newspaper was dawning. Now it is fading.

 

The mighty New York Times lost money in one quarter this year and may repeat the sorry event. The Washington Post is being subsidized by a test-cramming company, Kaplan, Inc. Two once-proud titles, The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times, are at the mercy of a man who, in newspaper terms, is a Philistine—loud-mouthed, vulgar and insensitive to the journalistic craft.

 

There are those who would take pleasure in the agony, and what might be the death throes, of the mainstream media, but they would be ill advised. With the death of newspapers goes the health of the Republic. Democracy only works with a vigorous, disrespectful press, demanding and providing transparency in every aspect of life. The press may be disreputable and eccentric, but it is the indispensable partner of the ballot box.

 

Freedom of the press is the freedom to comment and to criticize. But more important, it is the freedom to investigate. Without investigation, government, corporations and even science goes about its business in the corrupting dark.

 

Already, reflecting the collapse of the Washington reporter corps, there has been a falloff in the number of Freedom of Information Act requests. There are fewer newspapers which can afford to have correspondents travel with the president. Newspapers are not detaching reporters for investigative work of the kind undertaken by The Washington Post on the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Foreign bureaus, in critical places like Baghdad and Kabul, are not being staffed, let alone Moscow, Beijing and Tokyo.

 

No entity in the blogosphere has the resources to take up the newspaper role.

Opinion is cheap. Reporting costs money–a lot of money. The unintended consequence of this collapse is that the Associated Press will become more important politically and socially than is good for any organization in the news business. The shafts of light will be fewer in the long winter for news ahead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crocodile Tears for Small Business

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There has been a death in my neighborhood. I speak of another independent, small business killed by an influx of chain retailers. In this case a grocery store, which opened its doors in 1875, has expired.

No more will I stop there to buy meat, talk to the butcher about the various merits of New Zealand and American lamb. No more will I ask the manager

to see if he can get yellow corn rather than the white corn favored in Northern Virginia.

One could shrug off another small business going to the wall as a sign of life in the age of chain retailing, if it were not for the relentless rhetoric from politicians about the need for and virtue of small business. John McCain lauds it. Barack Obama genuflects to it. And all 535 members of Congress get weepy about it.

Their argument for small business is that it creates jobs. To me, the job creation is a given. My argument is that entrepreneurism and small business define who we are as a nation and how satisfied millions of Americans are with their lives.

Yet small business is under relentless attack, mostly lacking the basic tools to defend itself. Credit is an important ingredient, but it can be overrated. Startup small businesses have never been able to look to banks for seed money. Banks do not do that kind of lending, which is why so many small businesses are started with credit cards, family loans, or out of the earnings of a working spouse.

In my mind, after credit, habitat is the great burden of small business. By habitat, I mean a place to work out of at a rent that is not exorbitant. If there is a new shopping center in your neighborhood, look and see if there is any new small business there. Probably not. It will be as bland and homogeneous as the last shopping center you visited. It will be as dead, as lifeless, as predictable, and as antithetical to small business as its developers could make it. All right, they let in a sandwich franchise. Those are not really small businesses: they are big businesses that have laid off their risk on the unsuspecting franchisee. Franchisees, in my experience, are the most unhappy and exploited people in business, the victims of a pernicious system of sharecropping.

If you want to feel the life and vitality of small business doing its thing, you must seek out the older strip malls–often awaiting demolition–or the crumbling warehouse district. The lucky new entrepreneur is the one who can operate from the kitchen table, the basement, or the garage.

The next great burden comes with the hiring of staff. It is the high cost of health insurance. This should not involve employers, but it does–and it involves the small as brutally as the large.

For 33 years I operated a small publishing company, which I founded. It was a success, but we were sorely tried by insurers who charged a lot and would not fill all of their obligations (a cancer patient had the care paid for, but not the pain killers.) Rents also escalated, based more on our ability to pay. I hope there is a special enclosure in hell for property company managers and health insurers.

Where then are the politicians, those who weep so copiously for small business? They are mostly between the sheets with big business facilitating the destruction of the small entrepreneur. Mom-and-pop operations do not have lobbyists, cannot afford white shoe law firms and do not run political action committees. The ability, upheld by the courts, of local authorities to use eminent domain to condemn areas of low economic activity in favor of new developments is an example of the war by the big against the small. It would be biblical, except in this case, David looses and Goliath triumphs.

The damage to who we are as a people is hard to calculate, but it is there. Who would rather not run their own restaurant than manage a chain outlet? Ditto a bookstore. Ditto a hardware store. Ditto an auto-repair shop. Ditto every line of endeavor from exporting to consulting. I have yet to meet one individual who preferred being employed in a behemoth to being self-employed.

For me, the latest outrage is learning that airlines are charging $25 for tickets bought through travel agents. The airlines, in good times and bad, have had it in for travel agents: the quintessential small business. Shed a tear for the travel agencies, along with every courageous individual who wants to have the real promise of the American Dream: a business of one’s own. With that comes a dignity, a sense of worth that is good both for the nation and the individual. And,yes, small businesses make life richer for the consumer while creating jobs.

Newt Gingrich And The End Of Ideology

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Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the House and espouser of big ideas, has discovered two old political verities: our education system is broken and the nation’s infrastructure needs an overhaul. Both have been true for decades. They were true when Gingrich was forcing his tribal doctrines on Congress and when, later, he described George W. Bush as a “transformational” president.

 

For Gingrich, the trouble is he did nothing for education when he had power and he was opposed to funding infrastructural repair. While Gingrich was trumpeting Bush’s ability to change the nation, the president was bringing about change at home through neglect and change abroad through interventionist war.

 

Now, the price is to be paid–the astronomically high price. Get out your wallets, your children’s wallets and your grandchildren’s wallets.

 

Gingrich’s Republican Revolution is a tattered thing now. His “Contract with America” is never mentioned. His term limits idea is no more viable than Esperanto. The man who believes that private enterprise and the free market are the balm of hurt countries is observing the nationalization of a large chunk of the finance sector. It is hardly the kind of transformation Gingrich expected from the Bush administration.

 

Despite this litany of events that has turned Gingrich’s dreams to nightmares, we need thinkers more than ever. If Gingrich had been less wedded to the Republican orthodoxies (now crumbling) and given his ideas free rein, he might have had more enduring successes. Real ideas are more enduring than party fealty expressed though party-speak.

 

Whoever wins in November–now hard upon us–has to approach the business of government in the immediate future as a new paradigm: pragmatism first and ideology second.

 

The problem with ideology is that it inhibits ideas and produces rigidities that inhibit the natural immune systems of countries from functioning. If the Democrats had not been so ideologically wedded to the purposes of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they would have sided with conservatives to control these monsters before things went hopelessly wrong. Likewise, if conservatives had not developed a pathological hatred of regulation (oversight, really), some alarms over the house of cards on Wall Street may have been noticed. As a prophylactic, regulation can only be measured in its absence. There are no bonuses for good regulation.

 

It is up to creative people, like Gingrich, to introduce House Republicans and the party’s base to this big idea: things have changed. All of those robust slogans of the 1990s are obsolete. So is the idea that good results in government will axiomatically flow from personal rectitude, including faith, family, patriotism, a love of small government, and a belief that our institutions of government are irresistible to the rest of the world.

 

In many ways, Republicans are better equipped to prepare themselves for the future than Democrats. Republicans do have leaders, like Gingrich and Rep. Roy Blunt, who are equipped to mold a new party philosophy. They also have a corps of literate thinkers on the op-ed pages, including George Will, David Brooks, Bill Kristol, Kathleen Parker and Charles Krauthammer.

 

These days the Democrats have no living heroes. The Clintons are contentious and Jimmy Carter is a liability. In both the House and the Senate

Democratic leadership is weak. Neither Nancy Pelosi nor Harry Reid can stir the emotions.

 

Most of the print liberals lag their conservative counterparts. Harold Meyerson is the most articulate; but outside of the liberal circle, he is unknown. Maureen Dowd writes well but is too shrill to be taken seriously. And Richard Cohen is read for pleasure, not ideology. Hence, the ridiculous expectations Democrats have for Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC talkmeistress.

 

But one commentator cannot turn back the dominance of broadcast commentary enjoyed by conservatives. Gingrich had a lot to do with that, too. He welcomed right-wing radio-talkers into Congress and gave them workspace.

 

They will not like what, I believe, they will hear from Newt and others next year. The page is turned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Peer Pressure Took the Hand of Greed

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I once asked the chairman of Wells Fargo how his bank had gotten sucked into dubious Third World loans. “Greed,” he responded. “Just greed.”

 

He might have added another motive: peer pressure. We think of peer pressure as the force that gets kids into trouble, but business is as subject to it as teenagers are.

 

When a lot of states deregulated their electric utilities in the 1990s, these formerly conservative companies went on an international binge. They started buying up utilities around the world with a passion—a passion often fed by the fear that they were being left out of the great global bonanza. Some believed that they would not be able to hold up their heads at the meetings of the Edison Electric Institute unless they could discuss their latest acquisition in a faraway land. From Brazil to Indonesia, American electric utilities were into globalizing and loving it.

 

Of course, most of these investments went sour. The expected profits were as often as not consumed by currency variations, confiscatory local taxes and dishonest politicians, who sought to extract bribes from the operators as soon as the ink was dry on the contracts. Many American executives did not know anything about local conditions. For example they were unaware that in much of Latin America, and parts of Asia, up to 50 percent of the electricity is stolen. Governments are powerless to stop the theft for fear of social upheaval.

 

Helping the electric utilities make their mistakes were the investment banks. Mergers and acquisitions, are the mother’s milk of investment banking. The banks often found the deals, researched them and took them to the American companies. Their reward: giant fees.

 

One of these investment houses was the now bankrupt Lehman Brothers. At the height of the madness, as the publisher of The Energy Daily, I was invited to give a lecture to Lehman clients. The audience was half Lehman executives and half newly-minted internationalists. I told them the truth about investing in other people’s infrastructure: It looks good on paper, but it does not work in practice because you will be resented as an absentee landlord. Populist politicians will run against you.

 

On the face of it, this was not what they wanted to hear. They wanted wilder music and stronger drink. One major utility executive who was also something of a king-maker in the Democratic Party told me I did not know what I was talking about. He was invested in Pakistan, and thought it was a great place to do business,

 

Yet privately, the Lehman executives were glad I had called for a reality check. One managing director told me: “We should take their passports away.”

 

As investment after investment went south, many of the utility travelers came to wish they had stayed at home. Lehman, other investment banks and their lawyers knew better, but those lovely fees were irresistible.

 

The utility madness was not earth-shaking, but it was symptomatic of how investment banks regarded money itself as the client not the fee-payers.

 

About this time the world became aware that an obscure and arcane branch of finance, derivatives, was growing and attracting not financiers, but mathematicians and physicists to slice and dice away from prying regulators, troublesome politicians and curious journalists. The linkage between collateral and loans was obscured. A change in the regulations in 2004 enabled investment banks to borrow or leverage their assets by 30-to-1 when it had been 12-to-1. No worries. The market would discipline itself, said the players.

 

Mortgages were the new financial manna. You could package them and sell them around the world. But Wall Street was not satisfied with the volume of mortgages being written in the old-fashioned way and thousands of mortgage brokers started loosening the criteria, until there was really no threshold for getting a mortgage.

 

Now the party is over and the administration of George W. Bush, a conservative, is nationalizing a large chunk of the financial markets. He is also tying the hands of the next president, and there is still no transparency. The only thing that is clear is that the taxpayer will pay.

Remembering the Last of the British Empire

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The black Humber Super Snipe, a British luxury car with a soft, American-type suspension, pulled in front of a teenager wearing a coat and tie. The boy dodged around the front of the car and got in next to the driver.

The driver needed a large car because he was a very large man, over 300 pounds. He had a big face to go with his big body and even bigger eyebrows. It seemed that the only exercise the man got was changing gear in the car.

Not only was he a big man in a big car, but he also had a big job. A very big job. His job was so big he could have had a police escort, bodyguards and a chauffeur.

He could have traded up the car to a Rolls or a Bentley, but he liked driving this particular car to work in the bright sunshine. There was nearly always bright sunshine, so no weather forecasts were issued for six months of the year.

The man and the boy were talking animatedly as the car stopped to pick up another passenger: a shoe-less African laborer. After exchanging a few words in the man’s native language, the driver and the boy went back to talking politics.

The driver was well qualified to talk politics. He was the prime minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, comprising the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia and the British Protectorates of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, now respectively Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi.

He was Sir Roy Welensky, reviled in much of the world’s press as the last great colonialist: a scoundrel who stood between the legitimate aspirations of the indigenous people of Africa and their white overlords.

The critics missed the substantial difference between the struggle by men like Welensky and the growing evil on the southern bank of the Limpopo River: apartheid in South Africa.

The uncouth boy, who had the temerity to argue with the prime minister, was myself. And the barefoot laborer was part of the great silent majority about whom the white minority was always arguing, including my daily exchange with the prime minister.

I was in my second year as a journalist and Welensky was still giving me a lift, as he had done when I was in school. Sometimes he would chide me on articles that had appeared in English newspapers, but always with good humor.

The prime minister’s office was on the edge of Salisbury, now Harare, but close enough to everything so that a ride to his office was a ride into town.

This day was in 1957. I remember it because I was about to move out of my parents’ house and to lose my daily briefing from the prime minister.

I also remember it because Welensky was being castigated in the British press as a racist, a monster, a white supremacist and a tin-pot dictator, elected only by the white minority. He was none of the former, but the latter was true.

Ever since then, in my travels around the world, I have been asked, “What was it like in Rhodesia then?” The answer is, it was like the weather — a bit unbelievable. There was this small number of Britons trying to recreate the best of the British Isles in the middle of Africa. The impediment was that another people were already in residence: the Africans.

Twenty years before Welensky became my chauffeur, Evelyn Waugh, the English writer, had described the white Rhodesians as having a “morbid lack of curiosity” about the indigenous people. He was right. If the Africans behaved like black Englishmen, well and good — otherwise they were better off as subsistence farmers. The administration of Africans was to be fair, kind and, above all, paternal. The whites were in the intellectual sway of Rudyard Kipling and Winston Churchill, convinced of an innate moral and cultural superiority.

All this only really applied to Southern Rhodesia. Despite the “federation,” Southern Rhodesia was where the British had chosen to live a special existence as a “self-governing” colony. Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland were protectorates, their future independence assured. Another way of saying “protectorate” would be “not suitable for white settlement.”

What the British had wrought was a paternal masterpiece, where all the indigenous people in Southern Rhodesia were in a kind of welfare state. A servant class, people who knew their place.

The state of people in Cuba today is reminiscent: no rights but survival services. Employers had to provide each servant with 15 pounds of cornmeal a week, some meat three times a week and, if the employee was in domestic service, accommodation.

Medicine and schooling was available, as resources allowed, and both were spotty in delivery. Segregation was enforced.

The British withdrawal from India in 1947 signaled the beginning of the end of that way of life in Southern Rhodesia and Kenya.

It also was the end of innocence and 50 years of peace under a system that had developed in an eddy of the once-mighty British Empire

Sarah Palin as Joan of Arc

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You see Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska; I see Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who vanquished the English in France and facilitated the crowning of Charles VII as King of France, thus ending English claims to the French throne.

Like Palin, Joan was an invigorator: She inspired the French to fight the English. When she failed to win over the generals and the nobles, she went over their heads to the people of France. Soon she had liberated Orleans, after a string of victories, and cleared the way for Charles’s investiture at Reims. Even before his ascent to the French throne, Charles had made the teenager co-commander of his army.

There is dispute over whether Joan actually fought or just carried the French standard in battle. No matter. She electrified the French. And although the 100 Years War dragged on for another generation, Joan had shaped the future of the French nation, giving it a sense of national identity that it had lacked:

She galvanized all levels of French society, revitalized a sick and cautious political establishment, and ignited the new feelings of nationalism in the French army and the peasantry. Essentially, what Palin has done so far for the Republicans.

Joan believed that she was the instrument of God; that she had heard voices from the age of 12, urging her to expel the English from France. Unfortunately, the voices were to be her death knell. She was captured by the English, who handed her over to the Ecclesiastical Court in Rouen, which tried her for heresy. She was convicted and burned at the stake. She was just 19, but she had changed the course of European history.

Later, the Roman Catholic Church decided that it had made a terrible mistake and denounced the trial, finding her innocent after the fact. But Joan was not canonized for another 500 years.

Look at Palin and see the “Maid of Orleans”: She has fought the Republican establishment and energized the rank and file of the party. And that is probably where the similarity ends, although she seems to be quite certain about God’s purposes.

The speculation in Washington is: When will the Palin bubble burst? So far, she has been repeating the same speech on the stump and has only granted one television interview.

The strategy of keeping Palin from the public is beginning to wear thin. And even John McCain himself seems to be hankering for the recognition that he is the nominee for the presidency not the trophy vice presidential candidate from Alaska.

Yet for McCain, it is also all about Palin. If he wins the presidency, she will be credited with attracting women and blue-collar voters to the Republican standard. If she falls apart in the next month, through a combination of hubris and ignorance, she will take down the McCain candidacy.

Also, the speculation in Washington is that Barack Obama’s forces are retooling for an assault to coincide with the one and only vice presidential debate. It is a debate fraught for both the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Joe Biden, and for Palin.

Biden is given to talking too much and he knows too much, which is sometimes a disadvantage. He will be struggling to appear neither avuncular nor condescending. Palin needs to memorize talking points on every issue and stick to them. This is a dangerous tactic, but it is her best option. And it more or less worked in her interview with Charles Gibson of ABC.

Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the late senator from Washington state, who I interviewed on many occasions, answered the question he thought you should ask not the one you asked. He did this especially on television, as I found out when I was part of a panel on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Palin’s strategists will probably also try to give her a disarming one-liner that she can repeat frequently, which George W. Bush did with “fuzzy math” in debating Al Gore. People tend to remember the one-liner and forget the rest of the question.

Although Charles ennobled St. Joan and her family, he resented the fact that she had done what he had failed to do against the English aggressor. History may be repeating itself with John McCain.

 

The Swamp in Washington That Awaits

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Dear John, Barack, Sarah and Joe,

You have come a long way, gang, and two of you are going all the way. Congratulations. All four of you say you are going to change Washington. Here in the nation’s capital, we are not convinced.

For starters, let us take earmarks. They run in the thousands. They may be dented by a new administration, but they will not be stopped. Bringing home the pork is largely why we, as voters, send our senators and representatives to Capitol Hill. Earmarks have become a clumsy redress for the indifference of the central government to local need. They have become the palpable evidence of our tax dollars at work. We cannot sense the value of a missile shield in Eastern Europe, but we can measure the stop-and-go traffic on our way to work.

If all politics are local, so are all earmarks. The courts have said that the president is not entitled to a line-item veto. Ergo John McCain, unless you can substitute a funding initiative that Congress will agree to, or you are prepared to shut down the government often, your promises will go unfulfilled. (Check the shutting-down-the-government option with Newt Gingrich,)

Then, friends, there is the permanent alternative administration: the think tanks. These are the intellectual halfway houses where ambitious public servants park between tours of duty in government. Their influence is pervasive, subtle and continual. Every administration leans on think tanks which agree philosophically with it. And here is always a think tank which is particularly close to every administration. For Ronald Reagan, it was The Heritage Foundation; for Bill Clinton, it was The Brookings Institution; and for George W. Bush, it was the American Enterprise Institute.

The epicenter of neoconservatism, The American Enterprise Institute provided the Bush administration with ideas, personnel, moral support, and rationales for the invasion of Iraq and the formulation and promotion of the troop surge. Vice President Cheney has been especially close to AEI. His wife, Lynne, is a fellow there and many old colleagues inhabit its halls on 17th Street. They include Newt Gingrich, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Lawrence Lindsey and David Frum. You have to admire the place and its initiative in seducing an entire administration.

Growing in influence on the conservative side, and waiting for a friend in the White House, is the Cato Institute, which has been strengthening its roster of libertarian/conservative thinkers.

Meanwhile, the liberal Brookings Institution is churning out policy papers on everything from education reform to Pakistan. A team of powerful liberals is ready to take Barack Obama by the hand and lead him down the path of liberal righteousness. Already Brookings experts are advising the Obama campaign, including Susan Rice, Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for African affairs. Of course Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, is president of the think tank and the nation’s leading liberal columnist, E.J. Dionne, Jr., hangs his hat there.

The point is not that the think tanks are bad but that they are powerful, and they generate the ideas of government. Remember you may not be interested in them, but they are interested in you. The press tends to point to the lobbyists of K Street as controlling Washington. The lobbyists influence Congress, but the think tanks influence an administration.

Finally, White House hopefuls, there is the bureaucracy: permanent, entrenched and bloody-minded. The civil service approaches each new administration with skepticism and often hostility. With every administration, the bureaucracy gets a new senior management team in the form of political appointees (secretary, deputy secretary, assistant secretary, etc.). Often, the bureaucracy frustrates these appointees from the get-go. Many a cabinet secretary has had to bring in a small group of loyalists in order to wage war on the larger staff. One agency head told me that she felt she could only confide in her chauffeur and her secretary.

You two lucky victors in this presidential contest will learn that it is easier to invade a faraway country than it is to reform the Washington establishment. Orthodox or maverick, liberal or conservative, Washington is waiting for you.

 

The Swamp in Washington That Awaits

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Dear John, Barack, Sarah and Joe,

You have come a long way, gang, and two of you are going all the way. Congratulations. All four of you say you are going to change Washington. Here in the nation’s capital, we are not convinced.

For starters, let us take earmarks. They run in the thousands. They may be dented by a new administration, but they will not be stopped. Bringing home the pork is largely why we, as voters, send our senators and representatives to Capitol Hill. Earmarks have become a clumsy redress for the indifference of the central government to local need. They have become the palpable evidence of our tax dollars at work. We cannot sense the value of a missile shield in Eastern Europe, but we can measure the stop-and-go traffic on our way to work.

If all politics are local, so are all earmarks. The courts have said that the president is not entitled to a line-item veto. Ergo John McCain, unless you can substitute a funding initiative that Congress will agree to, or you are prepared to shut down the government often, your promises will go unfulfilled. (Check the shutting-down-the-government option with Newt Gingrich,)

Then, friends, there is the permanent alternative administration: the think tanks. These are the intellectual halfway houses where ambitious public servants park between tours of duty in government. Their influence is pervasive, subtle and continual. Every administration leans on think tanks which agree philosophically with it. And here is always a think tank which is particularly close to every administration. For Ronald Reagan, it was The Heritage Foundation; for Bill Clinton, it was The Brookings Institution; and for George W. Bush, it was the American Enterprise Institute.

The epicenter of neoconservatism, The American Enterprise Institute provided the Bush administration with ideas, personnel, moral support, and rationales for the invasion of Iraq and the formulation and promotion of the troop surge. Vice President Cheney has been especially close to AEI. His wife, Lynne, is a fellow there and many old colleagues inhabit its halls on 17th Street. They include Newt Gingrich, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Lawrence Lindsey and David Frum. You have to admire the place and its initiative in seducing an entire administration.

Growing in influence on the conservative side, and waiting for a friend in the White House, is the Cato Institute, which has been strengthening its roster of libertarian/conservative thinkers.

Meanwhile, the liberal Brookings Institution is churning out policy papers on everything from education reform to Pakistan. A team of powerful liberals is ready to take Barack Obama by the hand and lead him down the path of liberal righteousness. Already Brookings experts are advising the Obama campaign, including Susan Rice, Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for African affairs. Of course Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, is president of the think tank and the nation’s leading liberal columnist, E.J. Dionne, Jr., hangs his hat there.

The point is not that the think tanks are bad but that they are powerful, and they generate the ideas of government. Remember you may not be interested in them, but they are interested in you. The press tends to point to the lobbyists of K Street as controlling Washington. The lobbyists influence Congress, but the think tanks influence an administration.

Finally, White House hopefuls, there is the bureaucracy: permanent, entrenched and bloody-minded. The civil service approaches each new administration with skepticism and often hostility. With every administration, the bureaucracy gets a new senior management team in the form of political appointees (secretary, deputy secretary, assistant secretary, etc.). Often, the bureaucracy frustrates these appointees from the get-go. Many a cabinet secretary has had to bring in a small group of loyalists in order to wage war on the larger staff. One agency head told me that she felt she could only confide in her chauffeur and her secretary.

You two lucky victors in this presidential contest will learn that it is easier to invade a faraway country than it is to reform the Washington establishment. Orthodox or maverick, liberal or conservative, Washington is waiting for you.

 

On a Blind Date with Annie Oakley

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In Washington, and around the world, we are waiting for the first torpedo to hit the hull, as they say. Having been broadsided ourselves in the extraordinary selection of Sarah Palin by John McCain for his running mate, we who cover politics are treading water.

Predictably the polemicists are out in front praising, or damning, with a terrible tribal loyalty. If the tribal leader says it is so, so it is. And why not say it is brilliant, or catastrophic, while you are about it? Talk is cheap, and the Internet and talk radio makes it plentiful. Oh so plentiful.

Nobody really will have much idea about Palin until that first torpedo fired is on its way. It could be a gaff on economics or foreign policy or something her Democratic antagonists have dug up from what appears to be a Doris Day past. We will begin to know her by how she responds.

We know that she is a kind cartoon Westerner, a huntin’, fishin’, gun-totin’ Annie Oakley who is going to draw a bead on easy money in Congress and easy virtue along K Street. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We know all about that one. We also know that, with the exception of Dick Cheney, no vice president has had the power to effect much.

If the heroin from the tundra makes it to Washington, Palin will have to do more than face down oil lobbyists and wayward legislators; her big challenge will be the party chiefs and their financiers who helped get her elected.

Washington may be corrupted by special interests, but it is also sustained by them. Lobbyists not only control a lot of campaign money they also own a lot of knowledge. Because they know the industries they represent, in a complex world, legislators need lobbyists–lobbyists they feel they can trust. At some level, every expert is a lobbyist. There are precious few people with deep knowledge on any subject who do not hold opinions about what they know. The smart legislator can sort out the frauds, like Abramoff, from those who work in the vineyards and know the grapes.

The selection Sarah Palin tells us very little about her. But it tells us, again, mountains about John McCain. (Disclosure: I have known McCain almost since he came to Washington, and he has spoken at defense conferences I used to organize.)

Yes, what McCain’s pick again tells us about McCain is that he is the most capricious of senators, and that he can see no contradiction in his own contradictory positions. McCainism is not conservatism. It is a view of the world peculiar to the man who holds it. His grip on Republican orthodoxy, outside of a right to life and a strong military, is tenuous.

Most of the delegates now assembling in St. Paul would, one suspects, leave a private chat with the man they are about to nominate shaking their heads. They believe money is speech, he does not. They believe in drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, he does not. It goes on and on.

More, they are opposed to tokenism and quotas. But in selecting Palin, McCain has perpetrated what must be the most cynical act of tokenism and quota acceptance in recent political history. He also has again demonstrated his unique capacity to be on both sides of an issue.

McCain’s rap on Barack Obama is that he is inexperienced. Now McCain has propelled the neophyte’s neophyte into the small group of people who might sit in the Oval Office and lead the free world. Nearly one in three vice presidents have become president. And McCain is not a young man.

His choice of Palin suggests that McCain is either a cynic or a fatalist—much more likely the later. The fatalist has no faith in orderly progression, but expects happenstance to intrude and change the course of events. It was fate that got McCain shot down and captured. It is McCain coercing fate that has put Palin on the national stage. Win or lose, she will be there for a long time.