The Life of Biden

Political reporters say that this White House manages the media as tightly as any of its predecessors.
Somehow though the occasional leak is coming from the Oval Office that paints view-president Joe Biden as the administration’s Cassandra. Okay, so not the occasional leak, but in fact major magazine profiles, such as the one that appeared in this week’s Newsweek.
The piece begins with a scene where Biden interrupts a Oval Office to ask hard questions about why the U.S. is devoting so many resources to Afghanistan and so few to Pakistan

The White House Situation Room fell silent. But the questions had their desired effect: those gathered began putting more thought into Pakistan as the key theater in the region.

They give Rahm the chance to make the case:

“He says the things that others at the table don’t want to talk about, or which they find uncomfortable,” says White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

He also brought a dose of reality to the internal discussions over how far the administration could go. “He’s been asking, ‘What are the trade-offs here?’” says Emanuel.

This story has been so relentlessly flogged in the past few weeks that it points to a concerted effort on the part of the White House to paint the innver circle as one riven by debate and dissension, and more interestingly, to put Biden in the role of truthteller.
It is hard to know what the strategy here. Obama is already under fire for being indecisive. Adding a loud voice to create interference does not seem likely to help convince the public that the president is resolute.

A couple of guesses: 1. Painting Biden as the resident dissenter further distances the Obama administration from its predecessor and shows American that a diversity of viewpoints is tolerated. Ergo, you too, American, who disagrees with the President, are being represented in his White House and your voice is heard too.

Two: The Biden truth-teller meme is specific to this set of circumstances in Central Asia. Throwing Biden out as a dissenting voice gives Obama cover if he chooses to reject the recommendations of Gen. McChrystal. The White House can say, “Well, sure we ignored the military brass, but we listened to the former chair of Senate Foreign Relations Committee. If something goes wrong, just check with him. Likewise, if Obama does follow the General’s advice, his people can say that he did so only after having welcomed the loudest voices against the plan.

Ensign on Incentives

Did I hear this right on NPR this am?

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers seem eager to encourage employers to create and expand programs that tie a portion of workers’ health insurance premiums to their willingness to change unhealthy behaviors. But there’s growing concern that some of those programs represent a new way to discriminate against those in less than perfect health.

By a vote of 18-4, the Senate Finance Committee added to its health overhaul bill an amendment offered by Sens. John Ensign (R-NV) and Tom Carper (D-DE) that would expand existing rules that let workplace “wellness” programs pay bonuses in the way of reduced premiums to workers to lose weight, quit smoking, control their blood pressure or practice other healthy behaviors.

Current rules allow premiums to vary by up to 20 percent of a worker’s total health insurance premium. Under the amendment adopted by the committee, that could rise to as much as 50 percent.

“We know that the more we pay for things the more we’re going to get. And so we need basically to pay for healthy behaviors,” Ensign said.

Eventually, satire will catch up to politics.

Conservative Governance

What does it say ability the ability of Republicans to actually govern that none of the presumed front runners for 2012–Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, and Newt Gingrich–actually hold office at the moment?

I’d venture that it shows that it is impossible to actually be a true blue conservative and an effective executive. Just witness the five Republican governors who attempted to turn down federal stimulus funds, and who by doing so in essence said it would be better to let people starve than betray their ideological principles.

Be Cool

There is a growing sense that Barack Obama needs to show righteous indignation of the kind that Jim Cramer, or for that matter, Jon Stewart evince.
Even the normally sober-minded Frank Rich is on board:

The question is not just why the White House was the last to learn about bonuses that Democratic congressmen had sought hearings about back in December, but why it was so slow to realize that the public’s anger couldn’t be sated by Summers’s legalese or by constant reiteration of the word outrage. By the time Obama acted, even the G.O.P. leader Mitch McConnell was ahead of him in full (if hypocritical) fulmination.

It’s odd how much this lien of reasoning mirrors talk during the campaign: From Michelle Cottle:

All of which strikes me as a bit of a problem at this point. While the cool, composed, no-drama demeanor helps Obama appear presidential–and no doubt allays some subliminal white racial anxieties–it also threatens to make him look a bit detached from the many and multiplying crises around him. These are not, to put it mildly, the most soothing of times for Americans. The economy is shaky. Unemployment is up. Growth is down. Oil prices have hit the roof just as home prices have crashed through the floor. Detroit is facing a full-fledged meltdown. We are still embroiled in two wars, neither of which offers much hope for a happy ending. Al Qaeda is running wild in western Pakistan. And now, like some bad acid flashback, Russia is acting like it wants to restart the Cold War.

Confronted by these dramas, Obama offers thoughtful, balanced, pragmatic responses.

It was wrong then and it’s wrong now. Keeping up with the bloviatiors though is actually the worst thing that Obama could do now, even as populism is supposedly on the rise.

The angry mobs have outlets enough. What Obama needs to do is calmly and patiently explain what is happening, why it is happening, and what the administration is doing to right ship.

From the address to Congress:

But I also know that in a time of crisis, we cannot afford to govern out of anger, or yield to the politics of the moment. My job – our job – is to solve the problem. Our job is to govern with a sense of responsibility. I will not spend a single penny for the purpose of rewarding a single Wall Street executive, but I will do whatever it takes to help the small business that can’t pay its workers or the family that has saved and still can’t get a mortgage.

That’s what this is about. It’s not about helping banks – it’s about helping people. Because when credit is available again, that young family can finally buy a new home. And then some company will hire workers to build it. And then those workers will have money to spend, and if they can get a loan too, maybe they’ll finally buy that car, or open their own business. Investors will return to the market, and American families will see their retirement secured once more. Slowly, but surely, confidence will return, and our economy will recover.

Indeed, if Obama can project calm and confidence, markets are likely to recover. If markets recover, those left holding the pitchforks will look kinda silly.

Is the urban president bad for cities?

Joel Kotkin, author of The City: A Global History seems to think so:

From New Geography:

More important, Obama’s urban policy also marks a critical shift from the traditional American preference for decentralization of power — including at the city level — to one that embraces ever greater concentration. It could also mark a public embrace of hierarchy every bit as serious — and perhaps less reversible — than has occurred in the relatively unregulated marketplace environment of the past quarter century.

Scary stuff, though what’s meant by “the public embrace of hierarchy” isn’t exactly made clear, or how this embrace would differ from the embrace of hierarchy that led to the current morass.

Kotkin then confuses urban life, with its tolerance of difference, ability to incubate of culture, and be a launching pad of ambition, with the messy morass of Chicago politics.

Chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is a tough-guy player from the variously effective and consistently corrupt Chicago city machine. The members of the Cabinet and top-tier apparatus are longtime residents of such large cities as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston and, of course, Chicago.

As the continuing Roland Burris saga reveals, the Chicago connection, in particular, seems likely to wreak continued damage. Chicago’s corruption could run like a sore through this administration, much like Arkansas with the Clintons. But rather than deal with almost laughable hillbillies, we may witness the exposure of some of the toughest, and brazen, baddies in American politics.

Eh, ok. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen dirty politics in rural counties, too—Kotkin does mention a certain couple from Arkansas, but considering that so far both Emanuel’s and Obama’s—and, for that matter, every once else in the administration—hands are clean from this kind of ward boss politics, it’s a little unfair to say that necessarily geography equals destiny.

Kotkin avoids the negative effects of our suburban century—the over-reliance on automobiles, the role the rush to home-ownership played in the our current economic debacle, the devastating effects white flight had on the urban underclass.

And the balance of power in terms of public policy has so far tilted in a rural/suburban direction over the decades, that any course correction by the Obama administration would likely do far too little to reverse the current imbalance.

Reagan Was Right

About the central question in voter’s minds when—whenever—they go to the polls.

“Are you better off than you were four years ago.”

Where Reagan was wrong, I think, was in framing the question as a purely economic one, as in, Do you have more money than you did four years ago, and its close corollary, Do you have more money than you did four years because the government has taken less of a share of it?

If you did give away more of your income to the taxman than you did four years ago, but you have health care, or you’re gay and can marry, or you’re less fearful of being unemployed or your kids go to better schools or the streets in your community are safer, than yes, you are better off than you were, and are likely to register that contentment at the polls.

It’s worth bringing up because it’s been lost in a lot of the debate around the stimulus plan and the bank bailout, but in two years or four years most Americans won’t care about the price tag, or the party line vote, or even, I’d say, its contribution to the federal deficit.

What will matter is if it works—puts Americans back to work, let’s them keep their homes, and mitigates the sense of doom everyone is feeling right now.

Speaking of The Cabinent

It’s odd that so many of them come from the ranks of the poltical class. By my count 8 out of 15 of the inner circle could plausibly list “politician” as thier current or most recent job.

It’s not that politician is necessarily a bad career choice, but I don’ see how it prepares someone for the task of managing a city agency and agency administration involves much different skill sets and personality types than running for elected office. The latter requires public speaking, gladhanding, shameless money raising, deal cutting, and not wincing at seeing your name on campaign posters everywhere; the latter requires organization, managing people and focusing like a laser on efficiency.

If in New York, Mayor Bloomberg has had any success, it has been that he has appointed good managers to run city agencies. As best I can tell, only (coincidentally) NY head of Housing Preservation and Development Shaun Donovan fits that description.

So it will be interesting to see how this crew works out. My suspicion is that in the Obama management structure, agency heads act more as cheerleaders, selling his plans to the public–a job otherwise known as politicking–than actually running the agency.

Either that, or the promise of a new era managerial competence is a false one.

In Transit

The odd thing, it seems to me, is not that Obama is stocking his Cabinet with so many old Clintonhands, but that Clinton was able to bring in such a new crew in 1992. There aren’t that many people who know how to the kind of things that Cabinet secretaries have to do.

Of course, we know how well having fresh legs in there worked out in the early days of the Clinton administration

Best Line of the Day

Today’s:

From far away, this is how it looks: There is a country out there where tens of millions of white Christians, voting freely, select as their leader a black man of modest origin, the son of a Muslim. There is a place on Earth — call it America — where such a thing happens.

From Ethan Bronner in today’s NYT

The best line of the day

Yesterday’s:

It has been a long and terrible time since tomorrow mattered as much as it does today.

From William Rivers Pitt, at Truthout