White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

If the House Defunds DOE, It Slashes Science

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There are those who claim the greatest line of advertising ever written was “Drink Coca-Cola.” Maybe. For me, it’s the much more recent “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”

In this past election, the Republicans had the phrases and the ideas that stuck. The constant repetition of “small government” left the belief that it could be done and that it was achievable, no matter that government has grown under Republicans as much as it has under Democrats.

After the tumult, Dick Armey–he of the Tea Party persuasion–introduced us to a new political animal: the small-government conservative. These are the people, according to Armey, who will dictate the conservative agenda in the House and put the spokes in the Obama wheel.

This is my profile of this new class in American politics and on Main Street: They believe the government is too big and should be radically cut. They are sworn never to raise taxes. Never. So it is a good thing they believe in cutting government.

But there’s the rub. What are they going to cut and how?

With a Democratic president and Senate, the chainsaw-wielders have only one course of action: defunding the things they don’t like, which are mostly the things they don’t understand. The Tea Party types and those they have dragged to the right of the Republican Party say, for example, the Department of Energy must go because it makes no energy; besides, it was created by Jimmy Carter. Shudder!

In truth, the Energy Department was created the way presidents create departments; to show they are doing something when they don’t know what to do. That was the genesis of the Department of Homeland Security—a true monstrosity, created by George W. Bush to show that we were serious about terrorism—and of Carter’s Department of Education.

The Energy Department’s responsibilities include the long-range, high-risk research and development of energy technology, power marketing at the federal level, the promotion of energy conservation, oversight of the nuclear weapons program, regulatory programs, and the collection and analysis of energy data.

Day to day the department tries to clean up coal, perfect batteries, improve solar cells, tend the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in salt domes along the Gulf Coast, and operate the military Waste Isolation Pilot Project site in New Mexico. It ought to be doing as much for civilian wastes at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid nixed that, along with about $10 billion of taxpayer money and some great engineering.

The Energy Department operates an extraordinary necklace of National Laboratories and Technology Centers, 20 of them.The jewels in this string are the weapons labs of Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore.

These labs comprise a unique national asset, unmatched anywhere. They employ thousands–that is right, thousands–of PhDs under a unique structure: The Energy Department sets the labs’ agendas and doles out the dollars, but they are operated by a mix of contractors from the university system of California to industrial firms.

To know the national laboratories is to love them. I know them.

The Energy Department has been burdened with indifferent and terrible secretaries, excepting these three: James Schlesinger, who created the department; Don Hodel, who served during the early years of the Reagan Administration; and Bill Richardson, who served under Bill Clinton.

One really wonders whether those who would hack away at the Energy

Department know what damage they would do. If the department were broken up, its functions would have to be housed elsewhere. Interior? Defense? NASA? EPA? No money would be saved.

The department is the largest science—especially physics–incubator on earth. It might more appropriately be called the Department of Science. Sure it could be better run; much duplication could be eliminated. But why close down our primary science institution?

Along with “small government,” there is a also a cry for more “math and science.” Woodsmen spare that department; prune but do not chop it down.

Hey Dick, Add a Spoonful of Socialism to Your Tea

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MAASTRICHT, Netherlands — The English like to say, from an old music hall song, “a little of what you fancy does you good.”  Well, so does a smidgeon of socialism.

Shock horror! Alert Dick Armey, inform Rudy Giuliani and let Rupert Murdoch know. Heresy is dangerous, and the correct authorities should be informed.

Like most people who rail against European socialism, those three have been the beneficiaries of some largesse that might be described as socialistic.

Armey, who is leading the tea bag revolution and who talks of the socialist threat as though a fleet were coming up the Potomac to sack Washington, is the beneficiary of the rights, honors and money that come from being a former congressman, all the way down to a handsome health care package.

Then there is Giuliani, who presided over the second most liberal city in the United States, after San Francisco, added to its amenities and improved America’s largest subway system. Notably, he did not end rent control, now known as “rent stabilization,” nor did he end a plethora of liberal services available in New York. Yet if the former mayor, who wanted to be president, wants to denigrate something, he utters the “s” word.

Murdoch is special. He has played footsie with the Gordon Brown Labor government in London; played up to the Communist Chinese; cooed over the Clintons and booed ideas of assistance to the media; and employed a staff at Fox Cable News who are devoted to castigating Europe and its left-of-center democracies. Worse, Murdoch has benefitted over the years from various government subsidies including the Commonwealth Press Cable Rate, which moved news inexpensively around the world before the Internet. And he has never cried out against second-class postage, another huge government subsidy to publishers.

OK, socialism, even the mild kind favored here in the Netherlands, isn’t the promised land of governance; but it produces, at the street level, some pretty agreeable result. Scads of American visitors groove on the country’s parks, public toilets, bike paths and buses that are easy to use.

This small city of about 200,000 bears its medieval history with pride and its socialist amenities with grace, from miles of bike paths to trains that can whisk you to the next hamlet or to Hamburg, Germany.

Travel to a nearby major city, like Amsterdam, Brussels or Paris, and Europe is yours with its high-speed trains that crisscross the continent at 200 mph, and even plunge under the English Channel to London’s St. Pancras Station, a masterpiece which has been restored to its Victorian glory.

London itself adds public amusements with pride. Three recent ones are the Ferris wheel, known as the London Eye; the foot bridge across the Thames, nicknamed the “wobbly bridge”; and the New Tate, an art gallery in an old power station.

You can put this down to the kind of post-socialism that former British prime minister Tony Blair (a Murdoch man) described as “social-ism;” not the old-school, “Keep the Red Flag Flying” socialism, but the idea that people are entitled to services beyond national defense. A good question for Giuliani might be: “Would you have approved the building of Central Park?”

Where socialism–lite has failed in Europe is in an excess of regulation, particularly the rigidity it has brought to hiring and firing. This has kept small business in Europe operating at the mom-and-pop level, scared to hire because in most European countries firing is subject to a labor tribunal’s approval. Approval seldom comes.

One of the great drivers of entrepreneurism in the United States is the harsh but effective idea that employees serve “at will.” That, the socialists can’t stomach. They want Paradise enow.

A little socialism will do–and we needn’t mention single-payer health care.

 

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.