Sunday's New York Times carried a front page story on Genentech lobbyists perverting the health care debate, such as it's been. Seems that lobbyists provided copy to House staffs, which made its way into the record verbatim, thus leading to a bunch of Congressmen saying exactly the same things. Genentech had of course earlier poured dollars into these Congressmen's campaign coffers. This is mildly embarrassing, but what Genentech and related lobbyists said about the episode was not embarrassing--it was outrageous.

Note the quote from Even L. Morris, head of Genentech's Washington office: "There was no connection between the contributions and the statements." If you believe that, there's a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to talk with you about. Worse, another lobbyist said: "This happens all the time. There is nothing nefarious about it." The fact that, indeed, it does happen all the time is precisely what is nefarious about it. That someone can say such a thing with a straight face, and maybe even believe it, is the truest measure of what a state of decay this democracy is in.

It's get more and more frustrating to see the New York Times on Sundays. The Magazine might as well be named The National Homosexual Advancement Journal. The Book Review has turned into a journalists' delight: almost no standards, no rules of evidence, few serious books reviewed, and only journalists who know less than the authors seem to be able to review them. What is Sam Tanenhaus doing?

Case in point from a month or so ago -- Tony Horwitz reviewing Rich Cohen's book Israel is Real. It was hard to tell from the review essay which made the largest number of factual mistakes, the book or the review. Certainly the book, now that I've seen it. I even saw the author at a Bookfest at the JCC in San Francisco, but I couldn't bring myself to go over and introduce myself. What would I say? "Gee, Rich, you sure write well; too bad you don't have a clue what you're talking about"? There was a intro to the Horwitz review, in the form of a brief interview, on the inside cover of the Book Review that week, in which Horwitz let his discomfort with synagogues and rabbis and Judaism hang out for all to see. Cohen, apparently, too. So one semi-alienated Jew who feels heroic about it reviews a book by another semi-alienated Jew who feels heroic about it, and what do you think is going to happen? Well, it happened.

And then there's this week--nothing (thank G-d) to do with Judaism, only with a few Jews. We have in the November 9, 2009 issue Hanna Rosin reviewing a book by Barbara Ehrenreich -- her book entitled Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Ehrenreich lampoons positive thinking, which is right but she goes a little overboard. Rosin somehow managed to love the book even while dissenting from Ehrenrich's thesis--which is that corporate greed and connivance is behind the positive thinking plague. Of course Ehrenreich and Rosin appreciate the uses of sadness and angst--they're both reasonably well educated and well accultured Jews, after all; how could they not? But, that said, it is usually hard to like a book so well but at the same time disagree with its core argument. Do you think? But no, not in the NYTimes Book Review, where you get maximum points for striking the right mood and disliking the right things. Logic? Argument? Please don't bother me with that stuff.

And then there's Nicholas Thompson's review of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's The Preditioneer's Game. Bueno de Mesquita is a political scientist (I've even published him myself once, or half of once -- he was a co-author...) who seems to have been bitten by the rational choice bug. He argues that people act in their own self-interest, and that most collective behavior can be predicted from this insight. The reviewer wonders at one point if Bueno de Mesquita is full of baloney, so the reviewer is clearly not a complete idiot. Of course, Bueno de Mesquita is at least half full of baloney. Sure, one has to start with self-interest, but one cannot possibly stop there. Self-interest can be interpreted in all sorts of ways by individuals, rationally and not so rationally. After all, all of us are emotional creatures, and some of us are stupid, too. Moreover, collective behavior -- of governments, corporations, large organizations of all kinds, not to mention societies -- is not a simple aggregation of individual behaviors. Anyone who hasn't appreciated that little fact yet needs remedial training in the act of having an adult consciousness. Rational choice modeling is a a step backwards, and it is only as popular as it is because it seems you can load a lot of data into a computer and watch it gurgle and purr. Oh what fun. Oh what alchemistic baloney. Oh what "stuff" to ignore in a New York Times Book Review essay.

Thank heaven, at least, for TLS.

I Have No Idea

I give up trying to be a regular blogger. Too lazy; too little time. So once in a while, when the spirit moves me, I will post. No promises beyond that.

The spirit moves me. The spirit of bureaucracy moves me.

Vignette 1. Some weeks ago I became the president of my family's real estate holding corporation. I will spare you the bizarre details of this matter, but suffice it to say that when the corporation's officers changed, we had to get a new bank account to service our needs. That meant we had to get new cheques. We used the same bank as the previous officers, Chevy Chase Bank, transferred the money and all seemed well. But the bank sent the new cheques to the treasurer, my cousin Debbie, via UPS, and left them on her front porch during the middle of a Wednesday, while she was at work. The cheques disappeared, probably into the arms of opportunistic thieves trawling after the UPS truck. This is common. So I went into the bank and told them of the problem. The bank manager, Marsha Brogdon, put a restriction on the account until we could find out what happened. This was on August 11. The cheques never showed up, and meanwhile we needed to use the account to pay some federal and local taxes. So the bank put a hold on those cheques that were lost and ordered new ones printed. In the meantime, four temporary cheques were given to us to use for urgent purposes. I assumed, and was told, that the account would work, except for the cancelled range of cheques that had gone missing. We used the temporary cheques, three of them, one to pay our accountant for services rendered, one to pay the IRS and one to pay the District of Columbia government.

A little while later, the accountant called me to say his cheque had bounced, and he got tagged for a $35 fee. So I went to the bank to find out what the hell was going on. The assistant manager, Barry Robinson, looked at the account on-line and said nothing was wrong. He showed me that all three cheques had been paid and the money removed from the account. This was on August 31. So I told the accountant that something must be wrong on his end. That was not so. Then the IRS cheque came back, having bounced. I asked my cousin to call the bank, and she was told the cheques bounced because there was a restriction on the account. Incredulous, I called the bank. Neither Ms. Brogdon nor Mr. Robinson was there. I left a message to have someone call back before 5 pm (this was around 12:30). I got no call. The next morning I went into the bank; again, neither Ms. Brogdon nor Mr. Robinson was there. I left a message to call. Mr. Robinson finally did, and when he did I let him know in no uncertain terms how irritated and disappointed I was. It seemed not to occur to him that if a hold was put on a missing range of cheques, there was no longer a need for a restriction on the whole account. We needed for the account to work; why else would we request and the bank give those temporary cheques? I also explained that the bank's stupidity had and would cost us money: the accountant's bounce charge, probably the IRS and the DC government's bounce charges, and probably late fees from them as well. I told him the corporation would not be responsible for those fees because it was Chevy Chase's stupidity that caused them. I explained that if he did not see things my way, I would close the account and take it elsewhere. He saw things my way.

This whole stupid thing took up hours of my time, however. I hate clerical incompetence. The routine mismanagement of ordinary tasks is a mark of the Third World (along with massive deferred maintenance and the systematic evasion of personal responsibility for anything), not this world. What does that really mean? Is America becoming more like the Third World, while the Third World itself is becoming something else? I have no idea.

Vignette 2. In mid-August we refinanced our mortgage to take out money to pay off a dangerous and unstable mountain of college loan debt. I wrote a cheque for $68K and change, and send it to a Plus-Loan DoED address in Atlanta with a plain-as-day note saying, in effect, "Hey, look, I paid this off in full before the deadline for this payout amount to expire, August 31, so do not--repeat, do NOT--take $939 and change from my account electronically as of Sept. 7."

They took it out anyway. I called to scream at them, of course. A guy named Leroy looked it all up, admitted I was paid off, and said the money would be returned to me. Then the conversation went like this.

Me: "When and how?"

Leroy in Atlanta: "Well, takes about 60-80 days."

Me: "What? !?! An electronic credit takes 60-80 days? Why?"

Leroy: "It's not done that way. DoED does not return your money, the Treasury does, and they do it by cutting a cheque."

Me: "Why? Why does DoED involve another Executive Branch department in a simple transaction?"

Leroy: "I have no idea."

Me: "Seems sort of crazy, doesn't it?"

Leroy: "Well......I suppose...er"

Me: "Leroy, why is it that with all the fancy computers and telecommunications technology we have, it now takes much, much longer to complete a simple clerical operation than it did even before the invention of an IBM Selectric typewriter?"

Leroy: "I have no idea."

Me:"Say Leroy, how much interest is the Treasury going to pay me for the privilege of holding my money for so long?"

Leroy: "They won't pay you any interest."

Me: "Leroy, if I have to pay interest when I hold the government's money in loan, why doesn't the government pay me interest when they hold my money?"

Leroy: "I have no idea."

Me: "Do you think that's fair?"

Leroy: "I have no idea."

Me: "Leroy, do you have any ideas?"

Leroy: "Not between 9 and 5 I don't, no sir."

Me: "Have a nice life, Leroy."

Leroy: " You betcha."

Vignette 3. I take the 37 Ride-On rush-hour bus to the Metro in the cold, dark weather and when it rains. Yesterday morning the bus was 15-20 minutes late in a light rain, way off schedule. This morning, something much stranger happened. Instead of moving in a little clockwise loop in our part of the route, as the bus has done every weekday morning for the past ten years, not one but two busses came round in a counterclockwise direction. A woman who got off the bus on the other side of the road mumbled something about locos driving d'buuus, and said she thought the schedule had changed. Well, we knew vaguely that the schedule would change September 6, not so much the times as where the bus would go after the Grosvenor Metro, for the 37 route had been partly merged with another (this is amazingly complicated for a simple thing). Finally a bus came headed in the right direction. I asked the driver if the schedule had changed.

He said, "I have no idea. I'm not the regular driver on this route."

I said: "Well, OK, what's your schedule today. When are you, were you, supposed to be at this stop?

He said: "I have no idea. You need to ask the county about that."

I said: "You mean you're just driving the route and have no idea when you're supposed to be where?"

He said: "Please just have a seat, sir."

When I got to work I called Ride-On. They knew nothing about any of this. The schedule had not changed. So why has the bus been way off the last two days, and why are buses headed in the wrong direction around the loop, and why don't your drivers even pretend to care about their passengers?"

And she said: "I have no idea."

Two speeches

Alas, another long hiatus between posts. Why? Well, again, I've either been "busy" or "lazy", two of the most fungible words in the English language (perhaps, probably, mutatis mutandis with the vocabulary, in every language). But I just had to comment on the Obama Administration's speechmaking of late in foreign policy. Had to.

The President gave a major, architectural speech in Moscow on July 7 at the New Economics School graduation. At least it was supposed to be an architectural speech. It had five major elements, pillars or points, and it was very far-reaching in its language (wait just a minute and I'll come back to that). So this, I and others thought, was THE speech, the one given near the beginning of an administration that tells the world what the purposes of American power are. Usually THE speech, the architectural blueprint, is given by the Secretary of State, but since, by nearly all accounts, this President is acting as his own Secretary of State with the help of the Vice-President, this did not come as such a surprise.

But then, just eight days later, the Secretary of State gave a speech at the Washington offices of CFR that--you could have knocked me over with a feather--looked, smelled, quacked and read like THE speech, an architectural blueprint for U.S. foreign policy. This was a surprise. At the beginning of the Bush Administration, for various reasons I know but don't want to spend time explaining here, we got no such speech. This time we got two.

It would not have been so surprising if Secretary Clinton's speech had tracked along with the President's. It too featured five elements or pillars or main points, after all. And as these things are properly done, for a Secretary of State to echo and elaborate on the President's policy would have been a good idea, and it would have been proper and standard practice. But it didn't track with the President's speech.

Here are President Obama's five pillars from July 7: anti-WMD proliferation; isolating and defeating violent extremism; global prosperity; democracy; and international system that advances cooperation while respecting sovereignty. Here are Secretary Clinton's five pillars from July 15: build stronger mechanisms for cooperation; lead with diplomacy; make development as a core priority; coordinate civil-military efforts in conflict zones; and shore up the traditional sources of American influence, notably the international economy.

There is some overlap here. Obama's #3 matches, sort of, Clinton's #5. Obama's #5 could be read as akin to Clinton's #3. Clinton mentions democracy and human rights, Obama's #4, but does not call them a pillar. Basically, however, these are two separate speeches saying different things in different tones and with different emphases. Obama's five pillars are goals or aspirations, living at a high level of abstraction, if one had to describe them; Clinton's are less goals than operational principles, living at a high--but not as high--level of abstraction. I can see some clever White House type, if asked, claiming that the speeches are complementary on this basis--the President lays out what we want to do and the Secretary lays out how we're going to do it. But no one has done so because the press, so far anyway, has been too stupid, or too fawning, to notice the disconnect and ask any questions about it. And it would be cleverness without substance, because in fact these are what they appear to be: two uncoordinated speeches.

How did this happen? I don't know the lead time on the President's speech, but I do know, or can surmise, that the lead time on Clinton's was more than eight days. That means that the speech was being prepared before Obama spoke in Moscow. I don't know how these folks operate, but I do know that when I was writing Colin Powell's major speeches, and the first two that Condoleezza Rice gave before I left her service, it would not have occurred to us to keep the White House uninformed as to what we were doing; in short, we would have cleared a mature draft at some point. Even more important, it would never have occurred to Powell, and certainly not to Rice, to essentially ignore what the President had said or was about to say on the same subject. They would have made it their business to know and align their language. They would have told me or the chief-of-staff or somebody to call over to the White House and talk to the speechwriters and find out what was going down. Powell used to insist that there never be any publicly perceivable "blue sky" between himself and President Bush, because that would just reduce his leverage, such as it was, on the President in private. What was Clinton thinking when she stood up there at the CFR podium, just days after the President's Moscow speech, knowing she was about to give a speech of parallel purpose to the President's but not of parallel content? Beats me.

Now, as to the speeches themselves, both are pretty bad as expressions of the "black arts" of speechwriting, to invoke Peggy Noonan's wonderful old phrase. Neither one is memorable, and neither sticks conceptually to the wall, as it were. But Obama's is worse. Good thing, I suppose, that no one noticed it since Michael Jackson died..... Clinton's at least has a theme that transcends pure banality, something the Building can understand and be lifted by, and the pieces fit together logically, sort of. Obama's, meanwhile, is all over the place; there is no logical thread connecting the parts, no theme one can remember as a take-away, no deliverables, no proposals or plans revealed. And there is way too much sentimental eyewash toward the end, and this in front of an extremely cynical Russian audience. Bad audience read.

But again, the real problem is that the President and the Secretary of State don't seem to be in the same huddle. I don't know this crowd--don't know the staffers who know the principals. But from the looks of this spate of speechmaking, I'd have to suppose that these teams are simply not speaking to one another on any level that matters. Maybe there's another explanation, but if so I can't see what it might be. So I'd have to conclude that this episode confirms my original view that Obama was on balance wrong to offer Hillary Clinton this job, and she was wrong to have accepted it.

It has been a long time since I wrote here.  Been busy, I guess.  But I just had to make a small remark for posterity's sake:  I heard Robert McNamara is finally dead. I know it is considered in poor taste to express happiness over the death of a fellow human being, but the only thing that would have made me happier is if the son-of-a-bitch had died a long time ago.  I hope he suffered.  What a horrible man, not just as Secretary of Defense, but also as World Bank president and then as semi-retired moron for many, many years.  Oh, I am so glad he's finally dead.  I want to know where his grave is.  I won't go out of my way to visit, but if I find myself nearby I hope to have my dancing shoes handy.

I needed this, too.  It has not been a great morning.  Squirrels in the plum trees this morning, and I missed, as usual, the one shot I managed to squeeze off. Just got back from attending a wedding in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin; cost me $1,700 and I can't honestly say I had any fun doing it. Gained a few pounds, too. Was late to work despite being awake early; more slowness on the Red Line....  Great weather for July, nice and cool. Otherwise, have not played my instruments for weeks, longest break I can ever remember, and don't have much taste even for listening to music.  Don't know what's the matter with me. So thanks, McNamara, for cheering me up at least a little.

I finally read it, the June 4 Cairo speech, and read it carefully. I’ve also seen lots of comments on it.

I could either have a lot, a whole lot, or a lot less to say about it, depending on how much time you have, oh dear reader. But basically, I think the speech was pretty good, and may well have accomplished what the President wanted to accomplish by it. That’s the right measure, not whether he said some things that were not strictly true. Which he did. 

That said, I have lots of criticisms, many of them small, some of them a little larger.

First, addressing “the Muslim world” and equating it to America is unfortunate. That sets up the ummah as a political actor and diminishes the authority of the state. It speaks al-Qaeda language and cedes the vocabulary to the bad guys. This is not a very smart thing to do, and would worry me a lot more if I worried a lot more about the power of this enemy.

Second, some of what he said was culturally clueless. Like speaking out loud what you know to be so in private being a virtue. This is not how Middle Easterners see the world. They will see a statement like that not as noble but naïve.

Third, he was a little too much fawning. Using the word “revealed” for Islam and quoted Quran 4 times. That’s fawning.

Fourth, relatedly, he missed the subtle difference between being modest (which is good) and being humble (which isn’t good). You never apologize.

Fifth, related to the first comment, there is something a little awkward about conflating a sermonesque delivery to the Muslims with a point-by-point policy review (Afghanistan, Iraq, Arab-Israeli, etc) because you’re bound to leave something out, (Lebanon,eg) giving the impression that you don’t really care about it. That also accounts for the seemingly pathetic “deliverable” part, about the programs we’ll run and the money we’ll spend. It mixes tones, and it gives the whole a disrupted, rocky feel. The “deliverable” sounded like a box-checking exercise, but it need not have had the front of the speech not been so abstract.

Sixth, at one point early on he referred to the speech (anticipation of it) in the speech. You never do that. It’s not Presidential and it breaks frame.

Seventh, at one point he referred proudly to the democratically elected government of Iraq, but given his criticism of Iraq as a (wrong) war of choice, it was a little too obvious that had Sen. Obama’s views prevailed, there would be no democratically-elected government of Iraq.

All that said, it was a strong speech and in many ways brave. As I said, I think it did in the region what he meant it to do --- hit a kind of re-set button, not be preachy or threatening, and especially not be so self-referential and self-possessed. That’s not “manly” in Arab culture, and Bush did way too much of it — it was all about us. I think Obama was wise not to use the “T” word. He was explicit that we did not seek permanent bases in Iraq or a lock on Iraqi oil, something Bush could have said on umpteen occasions, should have, and foolishly never did. He mentioned justice twice and dignity four times, and those are the right vocab buttons to push. 

I also reject the accusations that he equated the Holocaust and Palestinian displacement; he did not.He merely pointed out that both peoples carry historical baggage that affects their perceptions. Anyone who denies that has to be some kind of imbecile. Really, too, from a Jewish point of view, anyone who had trouble with this speech was looking for ways to have trouble with it. I reject the accusation that POTUS made the U.S. “neutral” in the Arab-Israeli conflict; most of what he said on that score could have been cribbed from any number of speeches given by former Presidents and SectStates.

So what am I really saying? That it could have been a lot worse, and that I could have written it better.  Sure as hell I could have, too.  But not bad; pretty good; in some places brave; in a very few really masterful. 

Yesterday's New York Times Magazine carried David Leonhardt's interview of President Obama on the economy and, I am glad to say, in at least one respect (if not also others) it was very heartening. I refer specifically to the fact the POTUS clearly gets the analytical problems involved in the health care cost acceleration, especially the problem of spending on terminal care.  He exaggerated the estimated percentage this might come to -- as much as 80%, he said -- but that's not important. What's important is that he takes the subject seriously enough to have learned something about it.  And, of course, his understanding thus tracks perfectly with my own, as discussed in an earlier post on this blog. You could look it up. 

I was amused too by Obama's remarks about his economic advisers -- the ones in government service and a few not.  He mentioned by name Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Paul Volcker, Peter Orszag, Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, Joe Steiglitz and Christine Romer. He noted that Summers is now sounding more like Reich sounded inside the Clinton Administration ten years ago--i.e., more structural and radical in terms of analysis.  What he did not mention is that all of these advisors except, I think, Romer, are Jewish. Is Obama trying to get the economy moving or to make a minyan?

Of course there is an explanation for this.  It's not (just) funny. It's in my new book: Jewcentricity: Why the Jews Get Praised, Blamed and Used to Explain Nearly Everything.  Out in September. Buy it please, because I don't make a dime from this blog.

More, on Bulgaria and Savoie Libre, later.