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.

New Oil Discoveries Threaten Obama’s Energy Strategies

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“When an irresistible force such as you

“Meets and old immovable object like me

“You can bet just as sure as you live

“Something’s got to give …”

— Johnny Mercer

When Johnny Mercer penned those words, he was speaking of love not politics, and not the politics of energy. But he could have been.

In energy, there are two great forces that collide: public policy and the market. Despite the love affair of recent decades with markets, neither is always right.

Consider the struggle between old energy –market-tested and with a mature infrastructure — and new, alternative energy.

Public policy, under Republicans and Democrats, has sought to discourage the nation’s ever-greater dependence on imported oil (about 60 percent). But the market has sung a siren song, tempting us to more oil consumption.

Back in the 1970s, when we imported only 30 percent of our oil, the country was frightened into making great efforts in research and development to find alternatives to oil. Most of those concentrated on oil substitution and new ways of making electricity. None of the new ideas penetrated the market in any serious way, with the possible exception of wind, and that took many years to gain general acceptance and to overcome institutional and technical issues.

The Big Enchilada, oil, proved to be recalcitrant. President Jimmy Carter wanted to make it from coal; a nascent ethanol industry was tentatively testing the forbearance of government in seeking tax breaks and subsidies.

The search for a way out began after the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74, and reached a zenith with the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Many well-intentioned programs were undertaken, concentrating primarily on coal — coal as a gas, coal as a fluid and the improved combustion of coal.

But it was then, as it is now, a wild time for new entrants. Dozens of projects were funded including magneto-hydrodynamics, in situ coal gasification, garbage to electricity, battery research, cryogenic transmission research and energy storage in fly wheels.

Some, if not a majority, of the projects were pure science fiction.

The energy establishment favored not so much the new as the duplicative. Its members leaned to coal, oil shale, more oil and gas leasing and more nuclear. The old Mobil Oil Company paid a whopping $212 million for a Colorado oil shale lease without regard to how it could be worked.

Across the Southwest, banks lent to every energy project that came through the door. Natural gas got short shrift because it was wrongly thought to be a depleted resource.

Then in the mid-1980s, Saudi Arabia opened its oil spigot all the way (10 million barrels a day) and the market annihilated expensive energy from new sources. With gasoline cheap again, SUVs hit the roads in giant numbers; a string of Southwest banks collapsed; and the energy debate turned not to changing consumption but to deregulation, facilitating profligate use across the board.

The market spoke and it shouted down concerns about national security or technological substitution. Public policy surrendered to the market. Despite fine speeches from secretaries of energy on the danger of exporting our security and our money, the market continued its advocacy of excess.

The George W. Bush administration identified our vulnerability in oil and identified a looming crisis in electricity. But it faltered when it came to government coercion of markets; for example, getting more nuclear plants built.

Bush himself fell for the temptations of ethanol from corn and the possibility of switch grass. Now these are under threat from new discoveries of oil off Brazil and far greater estimates of oil production from Iraq. In fact, Iraq is being touted as a rival to Saudi Arabia with Brazil right behind it.

The Obama administration is hell-bent on getting off old energy. It loves “alternatives” and it’s committed to doing something about global warming.

But in research, money does not equal results. While the Department of Energy is chock full of money for new energy research and development, cheap natural gas and new potential oil from unexpected quarters may do to Obama’s new energy hopes what it did to Carter’s: undermine and expose them to ridicule.

Public policy may again be pushed around by the irresistible force of the market, even if it is not serving the national interest.

 

The Virtues and Vices of a Press Secretary

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The stature of some press secretaries grows the longer they are away from the podium in the James S. Brady briefing room at the White House. Others fade quickly. Brady himself is known more for his role in fighting for gun control than he is for his time as Ronald Reagan’s spokesman. His tragic wounding and subsequent disability dwarf whatever he said in his press briefings.

Jerry terHorst, who resigned after only a month in the job because his boss, Gerry Ford, lied to him, was a hero to the press for about as long as he had been press secretary. He ended up working for the Ford Motor Company.

Bill Clinton’s second press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, had a rough ride in the job and a modest career in journalism since then.

Among the revered are Marlin Fitzwater, who served George H.W. Bush; Jody Powell, who was Jimmy Carter’s press secretary and has just died of a heart attack; and Mike McCurry of the Clinton administration. George W. Bush burned through two press secretaries before he tapped the beloved Tony Snow and the admired Dana Perino.

Barack Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, gets mixed reviews. He said that he talked to Powell and others about the job, but he executes it in his own eccentric way. This has some of the White House press corps up in arms and others giving him a passing grade. It is a classic case of where you sit.


The irritation begins with time-keeping. For Gibbs, but not Obama, nothing seems to go on time. The principal press briefing–the one seen on C-SPAN–is scheduled the night before, and reporters are e-mailed this along with the president’s schedule for the next day. Sometimes, this schedule arrives after 8 p.m., making the planning of the next day difficult.

That is only the beginning of the time problem. Invariably, the briefing time slips the next day. Updates delay the beginning of the briefing by one or more hours. But that is not final: Gibbs may make his entrance 20 or more minutes late and without apology.

Then the fault lines within the press corps really open up. They have to do with who gets to ask questions and who is shunned—and this, in turn, has to do with who has assigned seats and sits in the first two rows.

There is ugliness here. Here is class warfare by employment, and here is an unwitting exposure of the White House’s hand.

Clearly, television counts more than print–even dominant print outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post. Likewise, it is revealed in Gibbs’ world that the Associated Press trounces Reuters and Bloomberg. The foreign press gets very short schrift.

Gibbs’ clear favorites are the television networks and a new crop of correspondents he got to know on the campaign trail. Correspondents like Chuck Todd of NBC are often engaged in a colloquium to which the three dozen or more other correspondents are just spectators.

If you are not one of the favored, you sit in one of the back rows with your hand in the air for favor of recognition to ask a question. It does not happen often.

There is much less criticism of the substance of Gibbs’ answers than there is with his tardiness and favoritism. Gibbs will contentiously argue a point with a reporter, but he also will refreshingly admit when he does not have the answer. Also he does not indulge in dead-end referrals, such as “I refer you to the CIA,” or “I refer you to the vice president’s office.” George W. Bush’s first two press secretaries, Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, did this with exasperating frequency. Snow turned away wrath with philosophy and Perino handled heckling press with humor and efficiency.

Unfortunately, Gibbs’ fascination with a small number of TV reporters has carried over to the full-blown press conferences. The chosen few are again the chosen few. The rest of us are right there with the plotted plants: to be seen but not heard.

Favoritism from the White House Podium

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Like others who ply the newspaper trade here in Washington, I have attended many presidential press conferences, and I am always struck by the same thought when the president steps up to the podium: how alone he seems to be.

Because presidents are nearly always surrounded by staff, security and often other politicians, the essential aloneness of the president can be missed. At press conferences, a president is both alone and on his own. No assistant can whisper in his ear or produce a useful statistic. Unlike the British prime minister who sits among members of his cabinet—and has advance notice of the questions–during Question Time, when a president hears a question he must answer it with the full knowledge that his words are circling the globe, and that later he must defend them.

A presidential press conference is intolerant of slips of the tongue, twisted history or evasion. You might say a press conference is an enhanced interrogation technique.

So it is strange, and unfortunate, that President Barack Obama and his media team leave the impression that his press conferences are rigged.

The appearance of “rigging” came in with George W. Bush and, along with some other aspects of the Bush press operation, has survived. I am referring to the practice of preselecting who will be called upon to ask questions. This gives the impression that the either the reporters in question know they are going to be called upon or, worse, that the president has advance knowledge of the questions themselves.

Until Bush, presidential press conferences were free-for-alls with dozens of correspondents shouting, “Mr. President.” Sure it was untidy, but it was fair and transparent. One imagines that the prescreening now takes place between the press secretary, Robert Gibbs, and Obama. Hence the favoring of television networks, The New York Times, and one black and one Hispanic correspondent, as was witnessed last week. This kind of engineering wrings spontaneity out of the proceedings and causes more and more reporters to stay home and watch the travesty on television.

This trend was obvious in the drop-off in attendance from Obama’s first and second prime-time press conferences to his third. If there is no chance that you will get to ask a question, what is the point in attending?

Many White House regulars, some of whom have covered the White House for decades, are expressing dissatisfaction with Gibbs’s fascination with a handful of reporters–most newly arrived on the beat, like Gibbs himself.

It is not reasonable to expect the president to be familiar with inner workings of the White House press corps. But it is upsetting that Gibbs has clearly not sought to learn from Bill Clinton’s last two press secretaries, Mike McCurry and Joe Lockhart, both of whom were masterful in difficult circumstance. Or, in the spirit of bipartisanship, he might put in a call to Dana Perino, one of the stars of the waning days of George W. Bush’s presidency and his last press secretary.

One of the questions Gibbs might usefully ask of past press honchos is how they kept things running on time. Seldom were briefings late or rescheduled during the day, the way they are now. Clinton was a terrible timekeeper, but the press operation was sensitive to the time demands on correspondents. Not so Gibbs. When it comes to tardiness, the press operation at the Obama White House is in a class by itself.

Back to last week in the East Room of the White House. As is the way in these days of tribal politics, the Washington commentariat saw what it wanted to see in Obama’s performance. One conservative friend, John Gizzi of Human Events, thought Obama was in campaign mode. Some fit the press conference to their belief that the president is hell-bent on taking the country down the French socialist road, and that he will not rest until the tricolore flies over the White House and American schoolchildren sing the “Marseillaise.” Others, amazingly, found proof that Obama would be only a one-term president.

I think I can speculate with the best of them and I saw only a tired, slightly impatient but impressively articulate man alone with big troubles.

Obama is trying to fix everything at once. The only person who really pulled that off militarily and domestically was Napoleon Bonaparte. It was Napoleon who gave us the idea that a new leader’s effectiveness should be assessed in 100-day increments–except it was 111days for Napoleon, but the Paris newspapers shortened it to 100 days. And the 100-day timeline was not at the beginning of Napoleon’s reign, but at the end–the time between his escape from Elba and his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo.