An Eroding Benefit of the Doubt

As those who have been reading this blog since it debuted about 14 months ago know, I sort of like President Obama, saw some positive qualities in him, have wished him and his Administration well, and given him the benefit of the doubt from starters' blues and other pratfalls of a Presidential first year. I still wish him well, but the benefit of my doubt is fast eroding. My sense overall now is that this is a smart man who nonetheless doesn't know very much and so repeatedly makes bad judgments. I see a pattern here, and I don't like it.

Before listing the main examples of his poor judgment so far, I want to take a moment to explain what judgment is in politics. The way I see it, there are four stages in the policy process. People who've never been in the government seem to think they all amount to more or less the same thing, but that's just not so.

The first stage is analysis: How does one define a problem and how does one understand it.

The second stage is prioritization: Based on the analysis of what's wrong, what needs fixing first, second, and so on. You can't do everything at once even if politics lets you, and it rarely lets you, so you have to choose.

The third stage is policy formulation: Once you know what you want to do, you have to plot a way to do it. This is NOT the same at all as stage two, and this is what outsiders to government tend most often to misunderstand. Once you have defined a goal, you have to assign the task, organize it, and budget for it. This will almost always involve a fair number of people in different parts of government. Anyone who thinks this sort of thing somehow just takes care of itself is very naive.

The fourth stage is policy implementation. Once you have all the people organized and pointed in the same direction, you have to actually do what you plan to do until the outcome you seek is achieved. Again, this does not happen automatically because reality can be recalcitrant. Stuff happens. Others react, and you have to adjust, push, pull, bend and otherwise see your policy through. (This is what the Bush Administration was especially bad at.)

In my view, the Obama Administration seems to be messing up at very basic stages one and two. Here are a few examples, and I will keep it brief, since I intend to elaborate in future posts.

First, let's talk about health care and domestic policy.

The first major policy initiative the Administration should have taken on was not about health care. Health care was going to be hard from the start. It is large, it is encrusted with lobbies and special interests, it is very complex and people disagree sharply about it. That was obvious a year ago and more. The Administration should have focused on energy. Today there is less disagreement on energy policy than there used to be; whether one is a conservationist, a politicized environmentalist, a national security expert or whatever, everyone wants to do more or less the same things in energy policy. It would have been wise to have had an energy bill before Copenhagen. It would have been wise to start with something on which a victory would not have taken more than a year, just to get these newbies' feet wet. It would have conduced to a more bipartisan atmosphere, too. But no: These guys made the same mistake the Clinton Administration made (also with health care), and the Carter Administration (with energy, ironically) before them: Starting out with the hardest thing, failing to do it right, and losing political momentum and capital instead of gaining it as a result.

If anyone had asked me, I'd have said, "Start with energy, and focus on innovation and job-creation within that area." Of course the Administration had to focus on the economy, and it did; but it did not stay focused. Financial reform has lagged and its creative swath has been diminished over time by lobbies because the White House was obsessed with health care. Is this an example of blindness caused by ideology? The ideology of redistributive justice for the poor? Could be.

Ah, but you say, Obama succeeded with health care in the end, did he not? No, he didn't. He got a bill passed, yes, but it is simply wrong to call it a health care bill. It is not about health care; it does not even address the reasons for the rising costs, inefficiencies and perverse incentives in the health care system. The bill that passed is only about the insurance aspect of the system. And it is a bad bill, and a disingenuous one as it has been "explained" to the nation. I am glad it passed anyway, or which more in a moment, but, as I have said, this bill does nothing about the real issues: the for-profit structure of most of the system; the technological dynamism that is the main reason for rising costs; the twin monsters of tort disfigurement and defensive medicine that spends wildly disproportionate sums on old people who are not going to get well; the costs of medical education and re-education; and I could go on. All this bill does is make larger an inefficient system. I don't care what the CBO says: This bill will not prove budget friendly or even budget neutral, not least because most of the things that have to happen to make it budget friendly are extremely unlikely to happen--and every honest person knows that. And certainly private expenditures on medical care will rise as long as nothing is done to cap the real causes of cost increases, and that means insurance costs will rise all around too. The bill also makes doing business more expensive for the insurance companies (whether justifiably or not is not the issue for the moment), and anyone who believes that they will not find some way to pass along those costs to consumers is a nitwit. And those who think the bill is just great because it taxes tanning salons and obligates employers to make room for nursing mothers and forces fast-food joints to reveal the contents of the crap they serve--well, that's all very nice but it doesn't amount to hill of turds in the larger scope of things.

So the Administration chose the wrong issue to start with, and it chose the wrong part of health care to start with as well. I think this was bad judgment based on bad analysis.

As I said, I am still glad the bill passed -- and now I will detour to explain why.

It is because, for one thing, in this country we pretty much never solve any problem with one bill. Now we've shaken things up at least a little, and maybe five bills and a decade from now we'll have made some progress. Maybe. A good sign is that the Republicans are not saying they want the status quo ante but something better. That's a good sign.

As important, there is an ideological and dare I say it, moral aspect, to this issue--and here I share the President's view--if I'm right about what it is.

We have a still-undeveloped social idea in the United States, a legacy of how the nation formed from immigrants on a large continent. But that social idea has been growing, little by little, and of course the civil rights movement was the big event in that regard in the second half of the past century. We as a nation increasingly care about basic fairness for all American citizens, and that's a good thing; that's the sound of our social idea building. And now, finally, for reasons I won't go into for reasons of space, the concept of fairness has been applied to health care.

How did this happen? Partly it has been a matter of spectacle. There has long been something profoundly unjust, as well as inefficient, about the availability of decent health care in this country, especially for children. But what changed is that the insurance companies have been especially stupid lately in their sheer venality and cruelty. No one in the political class in this country, or almost no one, really cares about poor people. But the insurance companies were stupid enough to fuck with middle class people who know how to make a racket, i.e., who are not silenced by the collective action problem. The complaints and outrages of a couple dozen middle class cases made more difference politically than the continuous shafting of genuinely disadvantages people. And the companies did not plan on Barack Obama being elected President. Unlike Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, he actually cares about poor people and about basic fairness.

Americans are not born on a level playing field still. That's just the way it is, and Obama knows this. In my view, government's job in a truly liberal vision (not leftist vision) is to create a level playing field for basics -- education, health/nutrition, public safety. It is not to tilt the field toward anyone, whether toward the poor as a form of reparations, or toward the rich in all the entitlements and corporate subsidies we put up with. This is the now-obsolete liberal vision of Teddy Roosevelt and William Allen White, the way "liberal" was defined between around the end of the 19th century through to the New Deal. It is the kind of domestic policy liberal I am. I think that as an effort to level the playing field in basic health care, the bill helps to build our social idea. It tells our poor that society does care about them; that they are part of this nation, too, and deserve to be treated fairly.

And I have to say it: The Tea Party types who are shouting "socialist" at this White House are really saying, rather a lot of them anyway, that we don't give a shit about poor people, they are not part of "my" America, not part of "my" in-group. A lot of this is just ethno-chauvinist selfishness, adorned with not a little bigotry.

Of course, not all of them see things this way. In their simple-minded world, they think there IS a level playing field because, as true Enlightenment-deluded Americans, they believe in primordial individualism. If someone is poor and can't afford health insurance for themselves and their children, it's because, the Tea Partiers believe, they don't have good values: no work ethic, no sense of provenance, no ability to delay gratification, no sense of inter-generational responsibility. From a strictly sociological point of view, a lot of poor people in fact do lack these values, but it's not because they're morally inferior to those who have them. It's because, for the most part, they have been born into social matrices that have made it hard to impossible to acquire them. There's no level playing field in the critical, defining social context of family, extended family and community. And blindness of this among those who are railing against the Administration and this bill is what, in my view, a Republican makes. This is why I have never been and can never be a Republican, though I have worked on the foreign policy side of a Republican Administration. Their basic analysis of what is wrong, is wrong. The President's basic analysis of what is wrong in this regard is right; it's just that, unfortunately, all his other judgments are wrong. He is not, I think, a level-playing field liberal like me. He is a tilt-the-playing field, de facto pro-reparations left-liberal, all dressed up in a pettyfoggery of legalisms. I think he is, anyway. Not my cup of meat, as I have tried to make clear, but still better than a Tea-Party Republican.

Now let's look at bad judgments in foreign policy. There is so much to discuss; one hardly knows where to start. So let's start with the Jews.

Obama shows every sign of being Jewcentric. He seems to think that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the key to all issues in the region, and the Palestinian issue the center of the center. He believes in linkage (as does, it seems, Jim Jones, his NSA). And he is mainly wrong; his analysis is in error, and so his priorities are wrong. The Arab-Israeli conflict is not the center of the universe, or even of the Middle East. Most Arabs who are not Palestinians do not give a practical shit, only an abstract one, about the Palestinians, whom they have taken turns abusing for the past half century. And the idea that Israeli settlements are at the center of the center of the center is also wrong.

So what does Obama do, with the help of his Jewcentric Jewish friends Emanuel and Axelrod, he goes blundering into the Palestinian morass without understanding how it works, and gets burned. He makes things worse, throws things backwards. That we are even using the phrase proximity talks just shows how backwards this all is.

I thought they had learned a lesson, but apparently not: With the Biden trip affair, they did the same dumb thing again, and made it all worse again. They are now back to where they were: bashing the Jews, holding out engagement to the Iranians, and, as a result, scaring the feces out of the Saudis, Jordanians, Gulfies, Egyptians and so on. And over what? A housing project in East Jerusalem that, even by Palestinian standards, isn't a big deal. Everyone knows this neighborhood will remain part of Israel if there is ever a settlement.

The analysis here, of linkage, is wrong, and the priorities assigned, are as well. Iran and its weapons programs are the problem, and the regional audience is watching, knowing full well that great powers are essentially in the protection business. If you bash your friends and propitiate your enemies, whether in Iran or Syria or Lebanon, you will make your enemies bolder and your friends search for alternative cover. This is not a country-club tennis court kind of competition; this is the Middle East.

How on earth can an urban politician, from Chicago of all places, not understand this? Ideology perhaps, like the kind that seems to have persuaded Obama that the only justification for Israel is the Holocaust? What this man does not know about the Middle East seems pretty extensive.

Or let's take, finally, Russia and arms control. The problem we have with Russia is pretty complicated, to be sure. A lot of it happens to be our fault.

The Russians are in a surly historical mood. They lost an empire, and blame us for taking advantage of them. They don't think they lost the Cold War; they think, not without some justification, that they got rid of their damned Communists mostly themselves. They accepted a territorial settlement to the Cold War that put them in borders from back around the time of Catherine the Great. They were reconciled to losing Eastern Europe. Many if not most were even OK with losing the non-Russian Soviet space, but only so long as the West did not inhabit it de facto in an aggressive manner. So what did we do? We expanded NATO in their face, not once but three times, pushed the Partnership for Peace into Kazakhstan and promoted, the Russians think, anti-Russian color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. We kept telling the Russians that none of this was directed against them, when all our local partners made it only too clear by their body language, at the least, that oh yes it was.

What is at stake really is whether the Russian government accepts, or can be persuaded to accept explicitly, the post-Cold War territorial settlement of 1991. It is very much in the American interest that it does, and we are stupid to do things that lead them to want to overthrow it. Not all the Russians' surliness is caused by Western, and U.S. policy, of course. They are capable of being thuggish without our help. But why help them?! We, with our EU friends, have a choice to make: We can privilege the maintenance of the 1991 territorial settlement with Russia, or we can privilege a political crusade in former Soviet space that will jeopardize that settlement. There is an argument to be made for both options; but as a realist, I prefer the former. But I at least know it's a choice.

The Obama Administration, I hope, sees things the same way, and I have some reason to think it does--though with Joe Biden aboard, a man who seemed to want to invite Georgia into NATO while Russians troops were invading it, one doesn't know what to think. But to use arms control as a vanguard issue here makes no sense to me. That does not link to anything, and linkage is what we need. The grand deal with Russia right now is pretty clear: You help with Iran (in a serious way, not just words) and in Afghanistan, and also agree no more violence against Georgia and subversion in Ukraine, whether over Crimea or anything else, and we'll back off from around your periphery. We will not militarize our pledges to the new NATO allies, and we will not interfere in the Caucasus or with your energy pipeline plans. If you want something serious from the Russians, you have to put up a serious stake to get it. We seem to want and want and want, but not ever understand what it is that's important to them. So sure they're going to fuck with us every chance they get. Why not? I really don't blame them in a way, even though, of course, I wish they wouldn't do it.

Mr. President: It's energy and the economy, not health care; it's technology and organization, not insurance, within health care; it's Iran and company, not Israelis and Palestinians, and within the latter it's philosophical rejectionism and incitement, not settlements; it's the post-Cold War territorial settlement with Russia, not arms control rituals; and, by the way, it's the real future of the WMD programs in Iran and North Korea, not the mostly pointless NPT Review conference in May; and so on and on and on. The analysis is wrong at each and every point, so the judgments about priorities and policies are wrong, too. Sorry Barack; it's just too much accumulating evidence now; the pattern is too clear. No more benefit of the doubt. My good wishes have now to be earned. Please don't let me down.