Obama's Failures

Americans elected Barack Obama because he asked them to take a risk. Hope, the foundation of his platform, always entails a little doubt. Like faith, it suggests optimism in the face of fear or uncertainty. Considering the state of the American psyche in 2008, in which fear of the future and of ourselves dominated everything from our economy to our foreign policy, we needed a boost of hope.

Obama's first months in office reflected this aggressive optimism, as he promised early withdrawal from Iraq, quick release of the people held in Guantanamo Bay and a massive health care overhaul, among other things. In the spring of 2009 I heard Richard Haass speak at the Millbrook Country Club, and he said his major early concern about the Obama Administration was that it had kicked into high-energy emergency mode right from the start. Haass said that he worried, literally, about whether the president and his team were sleeping enough when they had the opportunity, and whether they would exhaust themselves before a real crisis arrived. Whether Obama fully recognized it or not, he was taking a lot of risks early, and that meant that his chances of failing were even higher than they otherwise would have been. He was not taking the cautiously politic approach taken by Bill Clinton, who was re-elected in part because he backed off from such measures.

The 2010 midterm elections demonstrated exactly what kind of risk he was taking. Republicans, led by fire-breathing TEA Party types, whomped on the Democrats and took control of the House. The two-house majority that allowed him to pass the huge health care bill dissolved, and he was left in a very tenuous position.Today, his pproval ratings are horrendously low, and the president has not done much to inspire the confidence so many of us had in him in 2008.

Of all people, National Review columnist Nick Shulz has given Obama the best road map out of this predicament. A few weeks ago, he wrote a piece explaining the enormous success of Steve Jobs. His central thesis is this: "Jobs did what only the greatest entrepreneurs can do: learn from their failures. I don’t mean learn from their mistakes. I mean learn from their abject, humiliating, bonehead, epic fails." He goes on to explain.

Lots of ninnies can give customers products they want. Jobs gave people products they didn’t know they wanted, and then made those products indispensable to their lives.  I didn’t know I needed the ability to read the Wall Street Journal and "The Corner" on a handsome handheld device at my breakfast table, on the Metro, on the Acela, or in any Starbucks I entered. But Steve Jobs did. I didn’t know I wanted to mix and match my music collection on a computer and take it with me wherever I went, but Steve Jobs did. I didn’t know I wanted a portable multimedia platform that would permit me and my kids to hurl angry birds out of a slingshot at thieving pigs. But Steve Jobs did.  All those successes were made possible by failure after failure after failure and the lessons learned from those failures.  

Obama has done too little to explain why his moves are indispensable. We need him, and the Democratic Party he leads, to be more aggressively optimistic. We are in a crisis now, just as Haass predicted, and we can't have the president's energy flag.

In Libya, the president implemented an extremely successful policy of intervention based not on jingoistic hyper-violence, but on cooperation and retsraint. We are not trapped in a a catastophic quagmire like in Iraq and we did not ignore a moral imperative like we did in Rwanda. Other nations are actually willing to work with the United States now because Obama has not asserted a claim to imperialistic dominance the way Republicans would prefer him to do.

All of us, including the insurance companies who fought against reform the most, are better off as a result of the health care Obama pushed despite the political peril it entailed. He has to show us why that is so. Now.

It's fashionable now to compare Obama and FDR, because Roosevelt faced similar problems. I'm not certain of the parallels. But Obama has moved us ahead in the ways he promised. It's not our job to be patient, it's now his to continue.

If the Courts Don't Function, Do we Have a Government?

I was called to jury duty last week, and while my "service" consisted of reporting to a jury room, offering to come back the next day and then being excused, I learned a lot.

The Commissioner began our day by explaining that the State of New York, because it had no money, had restricted the way the court system could operate. In order to avoid paying court personnel, like court reporters, any overtime at all, the state's Chief Judge, Jonathan Lippman, ordered that courts operate under strict time limits: lunch must start exactly on time and court must end no later than 4:30. Furthermore, the position of family court judge was never filled when the last judge retired. As a result, Judge Stephen Greller must fill two roles in about half the time. In the morning he clears his "part" of routine pleas and motions, handles family court issues and deals with administrative tasks. Then he can preside over criminal matters for exactly three hours a day.

As the Dutchess County Commissioner (whose name, oddly enough, had disappeared from the website within the last 24 hours) pointed out to us in the room, one consequence of all these cuts is that the wheels of the system grind even more slowly than usual. Jurors only have to work half days, but for twice as long. Delays in adjudication mean that some people have to settle civil cases when they ought to go before a judge. Criminal defendants must wait longer.

During the Civil War, in a case called Ex Parte Milligan, the US Supreme Court ruled that government could be considered in tact so long as the courts were open for business. If the courts could not function, civil government effectively did not exist and martial law could be imposed. What does it say about the state of New York that our courts are operating at half steam? Might it be worth funding them fully so we could say, in all honesty, that we do have a functioning government?