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?

Power and Governing

One of the lessons of the "Arab Spring" is that having power and governing are not the same thing. Hosni Mubarak, of Egypt, for example, spent far too much time trying to cling to power and too little time governing. He crushed dissent using torture, bribery and naked violence. He funded his efforts with outside (mostly American) money, and so did not rely on Egyptians for his resources; he never really had to appeal to them for much. As a result, his legitimacy eroded over time. Egyptians of all stripes, including, in retrospect, his own military, did not believe he deserved the support he needed to retain his position. Ironically -- but inevitably -- his concentration on power led to his loss of it.

No current American politician equates to Hosni Mubarak. Not even John Yoo ever advocated the kind of widespread use of torture employed by the Egyptian secret police. Not even Karl Rove, one of the most cynical and power-hungry men alive, seeks to refashion the constitution solely to maintain his own power. Barack Obama, no matter what your view of the health care law, is not grabbing permanent power, and Nancy Pelosi may be pushy, but she's not brutal

Over the past ten years, however, and maybe since the 2000 election, too few of our leaders have set aside considerations of pure power for the sacrifice of governing. They concentrate so closely on being elected that they forget what the ultimate purpose of those elections are. The debacle around the debt ceiling is the purest example of this folly, and the debates to come about the budget, the economy, health care, environmental regulation and the use of US foreign policy will all depend of the state of mind of our leaders regarding their final goals.

Over the next few weeks, I intend to focus on these things here, beginning with President Obama's performance in the White House.

What Government is For

Last week I drove along the Blue Ridge Parkway outside of Asheville, North Carolina, as part of a family vacation. Even more than the parkways around New York City and Washington, DC, the Blue Ridge is a park-way. It's not an especially practical way to get from one place to another if you are in any sort of hurry because the roads winds around and through several mountains. The speed limit never exceeds 50 mph. The views are stunning, and hiking trailheads apeear evey couple of miles along the way.

As a feat of engineering, the road is remarkable. The energy, resources and ingenuity it must have taken to carve the road bed from the hills without doing irreparable damage (which, I'm sure is relative) are awe-inspiring. The road was built as part of the New Deal, with federal money.

As I drove along, I was both impressed an saddened as I thought about these facts. At one time in our nation's histort, we allowed our government to acheive things like this. It built bridges and dams and roads and hospitals. Some of things may have been boondoggles, but many helped create a powerful economy and others were acts of beauty; some were all the above. Now we seem to want government only to promote private wealth. Anything the government can do for the common good or the common wealth is disparaged or even outlawed by the courts as an overextension.

We have big problems, and none bigger than the crises that will be caused by climate change. Government -- collective thinking and expenditure -- is the only way we can weather these crises. Will we allow ourselves to succeed as we once did?

Why it's Ridiculous to Complain About the "Human Factor"

Two nights ago the Pittsburgh Pirates and Atlanta Braves played a 19-inning game with playoff implications. It ended on a play at the plate that commentators immediately screamed was wrong. As has become the routine, people called once again for the use if instant replay to fix the "terrible calls" by umpires.

One of those (literally) yelling yesterday for instant replay was ESPN's Mike Greenberg, who used the typical line about the ridiculousness of preserving the "human element." "In every other area of life we try to mitigate human weakness, but not in major league baseball," he said.

This morning, however, he changed his tune, though without acknowledging it. When it was pointed out that by NFL standards requiring "indisputable visual evidence" to overturn a call this one probably would not have been changed, Greenberg said that in this case the approach should be different. "When the throw beats the runner by five feet like this one did, I think the umpire needs to see indisputable evidence that the defensive player did not tag the runner ... that's just common sense." When Greenberg's partner, Mike Golic, disagreed, and said that the only question should be whether the tag was actually applied ("we see a lot of phantom tags in baseball") Greenberg insisted that the situation should matter.

In other words, it's not only a factual question (whether the catcher tagged the runner or not), but an interpretive one (whether the situation ought to call for a default judgment.) That's something only humans can do.

And despite the vehemence of those on talk radio, I'm still not certain the guy was out.

Supporting Gay Rights with Gay Jokes?

Michelle Cottle, of The Daily Beast dicusses Michelle Bachmann's gay problem: apparently, the virulently anti-gay presidential candidate is married to a man many people suspect of being gay. To add intrigue, though not surprise, to the story, Marcus Bachmann is also virulently anti-gay, and even runs a program designed to "untrain" gay youth. Cottle focuses on the problem from Bachmann's perspective -- how she might counter the political effects of her husband being ridiculed as gay when she is so angrily anti-gay.

I'm more interested in the tension inherent in making fun of the guy because he's gay in the name of defending gay rights. Cottle refers, in particular, to a bit on the The Daily Show, in which Jon Stewart skewers Bachmann for hypocrisy. It's clear where Stewart's sympathy lies: he says repeatedly that the "gay repression therapy" Marcus Bachmann practices is "harmful to real people," and even brings in Jerry Seinfeld to extend the skit and reinforce the point. He then uses the opportunity, though, to spout a string of one-liners about gays. ("He's so gay he buys Brawny paper towels just for the label." Or, "He's so gay he refers to Top Gun as that beach volleyball movie."

These are not homophobic jokes, per se. They are jokes based on stereotypes, but so is just about everything Stewart does. The larger question, though -- and I really do not know the answer for sure -- is whether we advance gay rights by making fun of the guy for being gay.

American Sports and the Concept of Fairness

This is only a partially-formed thought, derived in part from my previous post.
I find it odd, though, that American sports commenters have a different idea of fairness that much of the world. On ESPN yesterday Scott Van Pelt whined about how "you can hit a perfect shot" at the British Open, "and still end up off the fairway." He said "you wouldn't design a golf course like that now, but it's called 'Royal' so what are you going to do?" My colleague in favor of disposing of plate umpires said the same thing: if you were inventing the game now, you would not use human umpires."
Somehow these people have reached the conclusion that if a player or a person does his job perfectly the sport owes him success. But that's not true. Success is not owed. Sometimes we do everything right and fail. Sometimes we get lucky and succeed despite ourselves.
Only the most privileged people on the planet, as we Americans are, could believe that bad luck should never play in.