Chris Christie kills in this moment from last night’s New Jersey gubernatorial debate. You forget that when he’s in the mood he can dance. David Freddoso posted it on Conservative Intelligence Briefing.
The Strange Shutdown
You know, on one level the government shutdown is the strangest story. Congressional Republicans didn’t want a shutdown—they wanted to ding ObamaCare without having one. Democrats did want a shutdown—they thought it would reveal the Republicans as crazy, irresponsible, at the mercy of their radical wing. That’s not what they said in public, but it’s how they thought things would play out.
The shutdown came. Republicans scrambled for a strategy: pass bill after bill to fund federal agencies and departments that have been closed. Keep those monuments open! They would get a shutdown without a shutdown, make their point while not causing the kind of pain that would come back on them.
The Democrats and the president responded by refusing to back the funding bills. Their strategy would be to keep everything closed, which would cause maximum pain for the citizenry, who would react by hating the GOP. And the people are blaming the Republicans, but the Democrats too. The Democrats have been reduced to trying to keep World War II vets out of their monument, and saying blithe things about children with cancer.
And what all this means is that Republicans, who hate big government, are fighting to keep it open, and Democrats, who love big government, are fighting to keep it closed. Strange.
Watching the president’s news conference today I continued to think he made a mistake in adopting the Pain Strategy, but I also thought he and his party missed a real opportunity. The president and the Democrats should not have spent the past 10 days insulting Republicans; they should have spent the past ten days laughing at them. After the shutdown Mr. Obama should have had his party rush to the floor of Congress with bill after bill refunding and opening whatever the Republicans had caused to be shut. The Democrats should not have branded the shutdown “the Republican shutdown”; they should have branded it, “The Failed, Desperate, Uncaring Republican Attempt to Close Down Our Government.” The president should have made himself the protector of the potentially abused. And when Republicans, as they would have, refused to fund some programs or agencies dear to his constituencies, the president should have fought to protect them, too. He should have made the Republicans look not dangerous but ditzy and ineffectual. “A bunch of armchair nihilists can’t stop the American government from doing the work of the people.” And he should have smiled throughout, from day one, knowing he was leaving his opponent in the looming debt ceiling fight starting out from a position of embarrassment.
* * *
If you watched the president’s press conference and walked in thinking he was more or less right about things you probably left feeling the same way, and if you walked in feeling he was wrong you walked out thinking that. Mr. Obama has a great talent for saying harsh things in a moderate way. He compared Republicans to arsonists, immature people, extortionists and I think zombies out for your blood. Normally when you insult someone your tone gets a little hot, but the president insults people in cool, mild tones, as if he’s only trying to describe them accurately.
I imagined him as a child:
Grandmother: “Do your homework now.”
Obama: “Well, I understand your position and I can’t say it’s fully without merit, but I don’t suppose it’s the worst thing that someone works hard in school all day and then attempts to take a short breather.”
Grandmother: “Barry, it’s 9 o’clock. Do your homework.”
Obama: “I’m sure I’ll get to that, and I understand your frustration at being the chief breadwinner in our family, and I’m sure you’re tired, as grandpa is from whatever he does. And believe me, I understand your need to establish some kind of authority and impose order in an atypical family containing a grandson approaching his teen years. And I don’t doubt you’re feeling some conscious or unconscious anxiety that you may have contributed in some degree to this situation, though I want you to understand I don’t blame you, or indeed anyone.”
Grandmother: “Barry, keep that up and I’ll come at you with the broom. Get that TV off, now!”
Obama: “I understand why someone might resort to such threats and feel the lure of violence, especially the powerless, who cling to their brooms.”
I imagine it ended with her grabbing the broom, his yelping “OK, OK!” and running, with his books, to his room.
The Wisdom of ‘Mr. Republican’
Are the Republicans in civil war or in the middle of an evolution? Sen. Robert A Taft (1889-1953) says it need not be the former and can be the latter. Taft, known in his day (the 1930s through ’50s) as “Mr. Republican,” possessed a personal background strikingly pertinent to the current moment. He was establishment with a capital E—not just Yale and Harvard Law but a father who’d been president. And yet he became the star legislator and leader of the party’s conservative coalition, which had a certain Main Street populist tinge. Taft contained peacefully within himself two cultural strains that now are seemingly at war.
In his personal style he was cerebral, courtly, and spoke easily, if with limited eloquence. The secret of his greatness was that everyone knew his project was not ” Robert Taft ” but something larger, the actual well-being and continuance of America. His peers chose him as one of the five best U.S. senators in history, up there with Daniel Webster and Henry Clay.What would he say about today?
Senator?
“Nice talking with you even though I’m no longer with you. Out golfing with Ike one day and felt a pain in my hip. Thought it was arthritis, turned out to be cancer. It had gone pretty far, and I was gone soon after.”
Why did they call you “Mr. Republican”?
“Well, I suppose in part because I never bolted the party, and, in spite of what were probably some provocations on my part, no one managed to throw me out either. But I felt loyalty to the GOP as a great institution, one that historically stood for the dignity of the individual versus the massed forces of other spheres, such as government. I stayed, worked, fought it out.”
What is the purpose of a party?
“A theater critic once said a critic is someone who knows where we want to go but can’t drive the car. That can apply here. It is the conservatives of the party, in my view, who’ve known where we want to go, and often given the best directions. The party is the car. Its institutions, including its most experienced legislators and accomplished political figures, with the support of the people, are the driver. You want to keep the car looking good. It zooms by on a country road, you want people seeing a clean, powerful object. You want to go fast, but you don’t want it crashing. You drive safely and try to get to your destination in one piece.”
The establishment? “My goodness—lobbyists, consultants. I gather there’s now something called hedge-fund billionaires.” The establishment has a lot to answer for. “What they gave the people the past 10 years was two wars and a depression. That loosened faith in institutions and left people feeling had. They think, ‘What will you give us next, cholera?’ ”
The tea party, in contrast, seems to him to be “trying to stand for a free citizenry in the age of Lois Lerner. They’re against this professional class in government that thinks we’re a nation of donkeys pulling their wingèd chariot.
“Their impatience with the status quo is right. Their sense of urgency is right. Their insight that the party in power has gone to the left of where America really is—right on that, too.”
But the tea party has a lot to learn, and quickly. “It’s not enough to feel, you need strategy. They need better leadership, not people interested in money, power and fame. Public service requires sacrifice. I see too many self-seekers there.
“The tea party should stop the insults—’RINO,’ ‘sellout,’ ‘surrender caucus.’ It’s undignified, and it’s not worthy of a serious movement. When you claim to be the policy adults you also have to be the characterological adults. Resentment alienates. An inability to work well with others does not inspire voters.”
They should remove the chip from their shoulder. “Stop acting like Little Suzie with her nose pressed against the window watching the fancy people at the party. You’ve arrived and you know it. Forget the obsession with Georgetown cocktail parties. There hasn’t been a good one since Allen Drury’s wake.” Taft paused: “You can Google him. He wrote a book.”
Most important? “I don’t like saying this but be less gullible. Many of your instincts are right but politics is drowning in money. A lot of it is spent trying to manipulate you, by people who claim to be sincere, who say they’re the only honest guy in the room. Don’t be the fool of radio stars who rev you up for a living. They’re doing it for ratings. Stop being taken in by senators who fund-raise off your anger. It’s good you’re indignant, but they use consultants to keep picking at the scab, not to move the ball forward, sorry to mix metaphors. And know your neighbors: Are they going to elect a woman who has to explain she isn’t a witch, or a guy who talks about ‘legitimate rape’? You’ll forgive politicians who are right in other areas, but your neighbors and the media will not. Get smart about this. Don’t let the media keep killing your guys in the field. Make it hard for them. Enter primaries soberly. When you have to take out an establishment man, do. But if you don’t, stick with him but stiffen his spine.”
What should the establishment do?
“Wake up and smell the Sanka! Listen, reason, talk. Advise in friendship. Be open to debate and get broader, ask yourself questions. Deep down, do you patronize those innocents on the farms, in the hinterlands? Or perhaps you understand yourself to be a fat, happy mosquito on the pond scum that is them? You had better get a mind adjustment on that, and soon. You’re better than nobody. You had a good ride for 30 years. Now you’re going to have to work for it.”
How will a big merge happen?
“Day by day, policy by policy, vote by vote, race by race. On both sides they’ll have to keep two things in mind. A little grace goes a long way, and ‘A kind word turneth away wrath.’ ”
Ted Cruz ? Here Taft paused. “That fellow is a little self-propelled.” Another pause. “We had a saying, ‘Give him time and space to fall on his face.’ ” Others with him on the Hill, however, are “good, smart, intend to make America better, and will be a big part of the future.”
And don’t forget, Taft says, “the first Mr. Republican. Abe Lincoln. First inaugural: ‘We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies.’ Members of the party should wake up every day saying those words.”
Now Obama Rescues the GOP
We’re all limited in our judgments by what we’re capable of seeing. Our political perceptions are skewed by our passions—we can’t help think everyone else cares about or responds to what we care about and respond to. We’re limited by what we’ve experienced. The last government shutdown took place within a certain context and ended a certain way, so this one probably will too. We’re limited by the realities in which we individually rose, by the facts that reigned in that world. Someone once said: “Show me the headlines a man saw in his 20s and I’ll tell you what he thinks.”
So everyone is seeing the shutdown through a certain prism, and the best you can do is know the prism is there, allow for it and do your best to keep it from distorting your vision.
This is what I think I’m seeing. Both sides made big mistake the past 10 days. The Republicans mistake was to force a shutdown over the defunding of ObamaCare. “Defunding” isn’t even a word they can win on, never mind a concept. The dark side of their brand is that they’re always “defunding,” they’re always trying to take away and not adding, they’re all about cutting and never expanding. You should never play to the dark side of your brand. “Delay” would have been better—better as sheer policy, more in line with the anxieties of the public, and more in line with the needs of the administration. We saw what happened this week when they didn’t delay: the embarrassing, nonstop glitch that is ruining ObamaCare’s brand.
But the White House this week has made an equally dramatic and consequential mistake, and it is balancing out the Republicans’ mistake. The Democratic mistake is the punitive, crude, pain-bringing shutting down of things that everyone knows don’t have to be shut down—the World War II memorial, the Iwo Jima memorial, parks, landmarks, etc. All this is part of a strategic decision to cause and ratchet up pain for normal citizens. That pain, the White House thinks, will make people hate the shutdown and therefore make them hate the Republicans who summoned it.
It is a mistake.
First, everyone knows it is the federal government that’s doing it, and the chief executive officer of that government is the president. If he didn’t want it to happen he could make it not happen. Every informed voter knows why the White House is doing it. Which means every informed voter knows they are being abused by the administration in order to make them hate that administration’s political foes.
If there’s anything this White House knows it’s modern media. But in this case there are signs they have insufficiently absorbed the fact that the old media landscape that prevailed during the last shutdowns, in 1995 and 1996, is gone. Now, as we all know and somehow have to repeatedly relearn, there is a whole new media world that is in effect a counter to the old media landscape—all the news sites and news aggregators, Twitter, etc., not to mention a broader, more culturally significant talk-radio presence, and a major, still-rising cable news network that is not of the liberal-left. The end result of this technology is not necessarily compliant toward or supportive of the Democratic Party. We all know this and have known it for 15 years, and yet it looks to me as if the administration isn’t acting as if it knows it.
Go Google the stories about the World War II Honor Flights and the old men ignoring the shutdown signs and going into the memorial. Google “barrycades,” “Iwo Jima memorial,” “national parks,” “historic site.” Google “Why would we want to do that?” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s answer when asked about restoring funds for children with cancer.
Americans are seeing this stuff, and they know who’s causing it.
The White House thought they’d cause pain with their strategy and the pain would redound on the Republicans. They have caused pain, but it looks to me very likely it will redound on themselves.
Add to this the seemingly incoherent but probably clever Republican move to force a shutdown and then pass bill after bill restoring funding to various government agencies and departments—which allows them to argue they’re trying to keep from hurting the people. They’re trying to lighten any pain.
They’re trying to get a shutdown with nothing shut. That way they rouse their base without riling all the American people.
This story has shifted, in just a matter of days.
Both sides have been hurt: The American people don’t want a government that’s shut down, they want a government that works. But between now and Oct. 17, it looks to me likely the White House will be hurt worse. As James Baker told me last week, the president has repeated over and over, in different venues and to different audiences, including on the phone with the speaker, that he will not negotiate. At first it looked as if he was saying he wouldn’t negotiate on ObamaCare. But he has allowed it to morph into a blanket statement that he won’t negotiate on the debt limit.
But presidents do negotiate on the debt limit. They have to. They can’t not negotiate it. And if the president keeps not negotiating, he is going to look like the man who caused a U.S. government default—an outcome of a whole other order of magnitude. He’s going to look that way because he allowed himself to look that way. And the reasons for his stand look exactly like this: miscalculation, stubbornness and pride.
People keep saying the Republicans don’t seem to have a clear endgame, and that’s true. But at this point I don’t see a clear, clean endgame for the White House.
It is a funny thing but the Republicans rescued Mr Obama from his troubles the past 10 days by going at him over defunding. Now Mr. Obama is rescuing them from their mistake. And once again there’s every sign No Drama Obama will add to the sense that he is really Endless Drama Obama—bringer of nonstop face-offs, constant brinksmanship, nerve-jangling cliffs.
That’s how it looks, today, to me.
History Visits Manhattan
You’re on a busy city street in the morning when everyone’s going to work. The sidewalks are filled, people are rushing by. You don’t know what’s in their heads or hearts. You don’t even know what’s in their briefcases. Probably the usual—memos, papers, smartphone, business cards.
Yesterday just after 9 a.m. a young man in his 20s—blue suit, red tie, thick black hair—rushed up the steps of a club on the west side of Manhattan. He looked like any young businessman. His briefcase was slightly larger than most, and made of light aluminum. Inside it was the personal crucifix of St. Thomas More, which he kept beside him on his desk as he wrote, and which is believed to have been with him in the Tower of London while he was imprisoned. The gold crucifix opens up, or rather is split in two, top to bottom, and on the inside of the top part is an authentic relic of St Thomas the Apostle—Doubting Thomas.
So at one point yesterday morning as people rushed by on West 51st Street, carrying their Starbucks and talking on the phone, they were within a few feet of a piece of physical matter that had been part of the body of the Apostle who put his hand in the wounds of Christ.
You never know what’s passing you by.
Also in the briefcase: a relic of Edmund Campion, the brilliant renegade Jesuit who had, during the reign of Elizabeth I, been the pride of the Anglican Church, and who shocked everyone by converting to Catholicism at the least opportune moment, the Reformation. He broke the law to say mass and distribute the sacraments for England’s Catholics. In 1581 he was hunted down, arrested, tried, and, having been found guilty of treason dragged through the streets, hanged, let down alive, disemboweled, drawn and quartered. The crown wanted to scare everyone out of being Catholic, or at least publicly so, and pretty much succeeded for a good long time. But they created a lot of martyrs and some saints, Edmund being one of them. The Campion relic: a small, almost minute piece of cloth from the cloak he wore when, in hiding and on the run, he could no longer dress as a Jesuit.
The relic of St. Thomas the Apostle within the crucifix of St. Thomas More is the property of Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, England. In 1593 the Jesuits of England started a school in France for English boys who could not receive such an education at home. While the purpose of the school was to form their minds and consciences, it increasingly found it had an important second purpose: to rescue and keep safe centuries of English Catholic art, literature and symbols of worship. In 1794, the college moved to Stonyhurst.
They have a lot there—manuscripts, artifacts, vestments. A Book of Hours used by Mary, Queen of Scots, and the chasuble Henry VIII wore to meet the king of France at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. As the years passed the collection became ecumenical: There’s a brass-and-silver globe signed and dated 1623, Quaim Muhammed, and the Shakespeare First Folio, 1623.
The students at Stonyhurst get to see these things all the time, and if you call and make an appointment you can see them too, but Stonyhurst is now trying to create a new, larger, more modern space to which they can invite more of the public, along with a retreat and study center. Members of the group trying to raise attention and support for the project have been on a swing through Washington, Baltimore, Princeton, Boston and New York, where I saw them and their treasures. There, in a club on West 51st Street, I touched something that Thomas More touched, that may have been on his desk as he wrote “Utopia”; and a relic of Campion, that daredevil; and a relic of Doubting Thomas, Apostle of Jesus. That’s not a bad day, when you can say that.
This is the website of the group: http://www.christianheritagecentre.com.
And here, to remind us that history is not static but changes and can be made better, are jolly pictures of Elizabeth II and Pope John Paul II. Nothing with Francis yet, but that will come.
Answering Paul Krugman
In a blog post this morning for the New York Times, Paul Krugman attempts, mischievously in my view, to score some ideological points.
Yesterday he and I were on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” and when the show had ended but the panelists were still seated together I said I’d just had one of those shows where you forget to make the two points you were most eager to make. Everyone smiled—that can happen. Then someone asked what the points were.
We had talked on the show about the shutdown and debt ceiling crisis, and I’d stated that the Republicans who’d pushed the shutdown had made a mistake, going forward without a serious strategy, endgame or plan. But, I said, the larger point I’d meant to make is that what’s going on now in the GOP is not only a continuation of old fights but a big brawl between old-style, experienced or “establishment” Republicans, who put an emphasis on realistic strategy in order to win, and their rising challengers on websites, in talk radio and in some think tanks, who take a different approach, who are more slash-and-burn, or purist. And this fight, or split, while not new, is becoming more consequential to the party’s future.
The second point I’d wanted to make, I said, is that for all the Republican Party’s troubles, for all the fighting and fisticuffs, there is one great thing, and it is that the party is alive with idea and argument and debate. This is good, it speaks of a liveliness and vitality appropriate to a great party. And if I were a Democrat, I said, teasingly but also seriously, I would wish my party were engaged in such spirited debate, and be anxious that it is not.
Someone said there should be a new segment on the show called “What I Meant to Say,” and we laughed, talked a little more, went our ways.
When I referred to what is happening among Republicans in the area of ideas, I had in mind a number of things – disagreements about tax policy that include subarguments about questions like the treatment of carried interest. There are real disagreements about the impact of an immigration bill on unemployed and underemployed U.S. citizens. There is a continuing and rising Republican debate about foreign policy, about what America’s role in the world should be, of which the NSA spying debate is, in a way, a subset. There are both present and coming debates about spending. Must we be the party of cutting entitlements because they can bankrupt us, or are there other, more winning and in the end more constructive and realistic approaches that promote growth while taking into account the number of Americans who right now depend on government because of forces—globalization, for one—beyond their control? All these debates involve ideas about what is just, desirable, possible.
These are just a few issue areas. But there’s a lot going on! And these debates are playing out in a lot of places, if least satisfyingly on Capitol Hill.
While Paul, in his post this morning, concedes it’s possible to argue that “the GOP is full of ferment, with passionate arguments that are very different from the relative placidity of Democrats these days,” he reminds us the truly sophisticated would understand “the much-ballyhooed rift between Wall Street and the Tea Party is entirely about tactics, not policies.”
That is simply not true.
Some quick examples. Wall Street is pro-immigration and wants a bill; the tea party is not and does not. Wall Street would fight to the death for the favorable tax treatment of carried interest; the Tea Party would do away with it in a great populist roar. If there were another financial crisis and the banks wanted bailouts, Wall Street would argue passionately for it, and the tea party would fiercely oppose it. Even as we speak the tea party is calling repeal of the medical device tax in the Affordable Care Act another example of crony capitalism, while Wall Street, if you will, argues it’s a matter of higher costs and jobs.
These are not tactical issues, they are or bear on serious policy questions.
Paul, in his work, often seems so immersed in an ideological world—in who is right and must be momentarily held high (they’ll be wrong tomorrow) and, more frequently, who is wrong and must be denounced (Paul Ryan’s ideas are not just “terrible”, they’re old)—that he doesn’t even notice what is going on among those he disagrees with, or doesn’t find it worthy of inquiry because whatever they’re doing it couldn’t possibly be in good faith. (My friend James Taranto summed up Krugman’s blog post as, “Oh yeah? Well, the jerkstore called, and they’re running outta you!”)
A small point connected to this. Paul writes that he “really wanted to ask” me about what I meant, but “time was up.” Actually time wasn’t up. The show wasn’t ending, it had ended. He could have asked me my thoughts right there, or afterwards, as we strolled, the two of us, from the studio to the street. There was plenty of time, if he was really interested.
Now Is the Time to Delay ObamaCare
The Obama administration has an implementation problem. More than any administration of the modern era they know how to talk but have trouble doing. They give speeches about ObamaCare but when it’s unveiled what the public sees is a Potemkin village designed by the noted architect Rube Goldberg. They speak ringingly about the case for action in Syria but can’t build support in the U.S. foreign-policy community, in Congress, among the public. Recovery summer is always next summer. They have trouble implementing. Which, of course, is the most boring but crucial part of governing. It’s not enough to talk, you must perform.
There is an odd sense with members of this administration that they think words are actions. Maybe that’s why they tweet so much. Maybe they imagine Bashar Assad seeing their tweets and musing: “Ah, Samantha is upset—then I shall change my entire policy, in respect for her emotions!”
That gets us to the real story of last week, this week and the future, the one beyond the shutdown, the one that normal people are both fully aware of and fully understand, and that is the utter and catastrophic debut of ObamaCare. Even for those who expected problems, and that would be everyone who follows government, it has been a shock.
They had 3½ years to set it up! They knew exactly when it would be unveiled, on Oct. 1, 2013. On that date, they knew, millions could be expected to go online to see if they benefit.
What they got was the administration’s version of Project ORCA, the Romney campaign’s computerized voter-turnout system that crashed with such flair on Election Day.
Here is why the rollout is so damaging to ObamaCare: because everyone in America knows we spent four years arguing about the law, that it sucked all the oxygen from the room, that it commanded all focus, that it blocked out other opportunities and initiatives, and that it caused so many searing arguments—mandatory contraceptive and abortifacient coverage for religious organizations that oppose those things, fears about the sharing of private medical information, fears of rising costs and lost coverage. Throughout the struggle the American people must have thought: “OK, at the end it’s gotta be worth it, it’s got to give me at least some benefits to justify all this drama.” And at the end they tried to log in, register and see their options, and found one big, frustrating, chaotic mess. As if for four years we all just wasted our time.
A quick summary of what didn’t work. Those who went on federal and state exchanges reported malfunctions during login, constant error messages, inability to create new accounts, frozen screens, confusing instructions, endless wait times, help lines that put people on hold and then cut them off, lost passwords and user names.
After the administration floated the fiction that the problems were due to heavy usage, the Journal tracked down insurance and technology experts who said the real problems were inadequate coding and flaws in the architecture of the system.
There were no enrollments in Delaware in three days. North Carolina got one enrollee. In Kansas ObamaCare was unable to report a single enrollment. A senior Louisiana state official told me zero people enrolled the first day, eight the second. The founder of McAfee slammed the system’s lack of security on Fox Business Network, calling it a hacker’s happiest nocturnal fantasy. He predicted millions of identity thefts. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius—grilled, surprisingly, on “The Daily Show”—sounded like a blithering idiot as she failed to justify why, in the middle of the chaos, individuals cannot be granted a one-year delay, just as businesses have been.
More ominously, many of those who got into the system complained of sticker shock—high premiums, high deductibles.
Where does this leave us? Congressional Republicans and the White House may soon begin a series of conversations centering on the debt-ceiling fight. Good: May they turn into negotiations. Republicans are now talking about a grand bargain involving entitlement spending, perhaps tax issues. But they would make a mistake in dropping ObamaCare as an issue. A few weeks ago they mistakenly demanded defunding—a move to please their base. They will be tempted to abandon even the word ObamaCare now, but this is exactly when they should keep, as the center of their message and their intent, not defunding ObamaCare but delaying it. Do they really want to turn abrupt focus to elusive Medicare cuts just when it has become obvious to the American people that parts of ObamaCare (like the ability to enroll!) are unworkable?
The Republicans should press harder than ever to delay ObamaCare—to kick it back, allow the administration at least to create functioning websites, and improve what can be improved.
In the past the president has vowed he’d never delay. But that was before the system so famously flopped when people tried to enroll. A delay would be an opportunity for the president to show he knows what’s happening on the ground, a chance for him to be responsive. It would allow him to say the program itself is good but the technological infrastructure, frankly, has not yet succeeded. This would allow him to look like one thing no one thinks he is, which is modest.
A closing thought on the oft-repeated liberal argument that ObamaCare must stay untouched and go forward as written. They say it was passed by Congress, adjudicated by the courts and implicitly endorsed in the 2012 election; its opponents are dead-enders who refuse to accept settled outcomes.
There was always something wrong at the heart of this argument, and it’s connected, believe it or not, to a story involving Johnny Carson. His show was a great American institution. When Carson retired in 1992, David Letterman was assumed to be his heir. Instead, NBC chose Jay Leno. In time Mr,. Leno faltered, and NBC came back to Mr. Letterman, who now was receiving more lucrative offers from the other networks. Everybody wanted him. But it was his long-held dream to host “The Tonight Show,” and he anguished. Then, as Bill Carter reported in “The Late Shift,” his advisers came to him. “The Tonight Show” starring Johnny Carson doesn’t exist anymore, they said. It’s gone. It’s Jay Leno’s show now. If you want to take a lesser deal to be his successor, go ahead. But the old “Tonight Show” is gone.
This helped clarify Mr. Letterman’s mind. He went with CBS.
OK, the Affordable Care Act doesn’t exist anymore. It was passed and adjudicated, but since then it has changed, and something new taken its place. Hundreds of waivers and exceptions have been granted. The president decided he had the power to delay the participation of businesses, while insisting on the continued participation of individuals. The program debuted and the debut was a disaster and Americans who want to be part of it haven’t been able to join.
The ACA doesn’t exist anymore. It isn’t the poor piece of legislation it was, it’s a new and different poor piece of legislation.
All of this is highly unusual. A continuation of unusual would therefore not be out of order. Delay the program. It’s a mess and an oppression. Improve it.
To Lead Is to Negotiate
Acrimony, insults, the government shut down. Time to talk to a wise man, someone from the days when government worked. I turned to the famous Mr. Baker—James A. Baker III, U.S secretary of state (1989-92), secretary of the Treasury (1985-88) and White House chief of staff under Ronald Reagan (1981-85) and George H.W. Bush (1992-93). He spoke, by phone, from his Houston office at the law firm Baker Botts.
Looking at Washington, “I’m seeing, frankly, a sad situation.” A brief shutdown won’t be terrible—there had already been 17, he notes, since 1976, eight when he was at the White House or Treasury. But the longer this one lasts the more dangerous it will become.
The political problem: The president is failing to lead. His refusal to negotiate with Republicans over spending and the debt limit is “an obstinate position, it’s not a leadership position.” The Republicans made a mistake early on with a “maximalist” position on ObamaCare—they could not realistically achieve their aim of defunding when the Democrats hold the White House and Senate. But the president’s position is a “pretty damn maximalist position itself, and people will say that.”
Presidents, he notes, always negotiate in order to get an increase in the debt limit—it’s their job. “It’s a failure of leadership to say, ‘I’m just gonna sit here while the government remains closed,’ or, with respect to the debt limit, ‘I’ll sit here and not negotiate and the catastrophic consequences I warned you of will just have to happen.’ . . . He has the burden of moving forward. He’s the leader of the country. He has to get the debt limit raised to avoid default.”
Yet the GOP too bears responsibility for the impasse. “I don’t think it was a very wise strategy for we Republicans to say we would not fund the government unless we defunded ObamaCare. I don’t think that’s a smart political strategy, and I think we’ll pay a price for it. . . . If you’re gonna make your stand, make your stand on something you can accomplish.” When he worked for Reagan, he’d come back from a negotiation saying, “I think we can get this,” and it was never all the president wanted. “Reagan would say, ‘I’d rather get 80% of what I want than go over the cliff with my flag flying.'”
Mr. Baker says two GOP-backed changes to ObamaCare hold promise. “House Republicans are not wrong when they say we ought to eliminate the special privileges that members of Congress and their staffs have. . . . That would be tremendously popular in the country.” The public also would support, and Democrats would likely back, eliminating the ObamaCare tax on medical devices.
He returns to the leadership problem: “When a president doesn’t control both sides of Congress he has to deal with the other party. Ronald Reagan did it almost every day with Tip O’Neill.” Nonnegotiation is bad politics. “Suppose we get past this budget debate and Oct. 17 get into a fight on the debt limit. I’m not certain the American people would not penalize the administration.”
What should President Obama do? Own it. Lead. “Leading would be to call [Speaker John] Boehner in: ‘All right, this is a sorry situation for our country. Come on here and let’s talk about resolving it.'” In this negotiation they should first explore an agreement on getting rid of the special provisions for Congress. Second, they could move to come to agreement on eliminating the medical device tax.
“Resolve this thing by getting into a room and making the government work. The leader of our government should be willing to get into a room and sit down with the opposition.”
Why doesn’t Mr. Obama do this? Baker spoke of “obstinacy” and political calculation. “This White House thinks it’s got a bird’s nest on the ground because we Republicans overreached when we said defund ObamaCare.” The president thinks this works for him. “He could turn out to be right, and he could turn out to be wrong.” Democrats “think this is a great political strategy. I’m not sure it is if it continues too long, particularly if it segues into the debt limit and he doesn’t negotiate.” The White House meeting of the president and congressional leaders Wednesday night does not qualify as a negotiation. “They didn’t do anything but parrot their respective positions.”
Ronald Reagan faced a fiercely Democratic house throughout both terms of his presidency. “Those days were bitter, but we got into a room and we thrashed it out. The ‘Gang of Five,’ the ‘Gang of 17’—we worked it out, each side gave a little, and we got the government working. Reagan—as you know, he had the reputation of being a conservative ideologue. But he wasn’t, he was pragmatic.” He worked with the other side and “won them over.” How? “Horse trading, compromise and negotiation made the government work.” Bill Clinton too “was willing to negotiate when he had a body controlled by the opposite party.”
When people speak of Reagan and O’Neill, I said, it always comes across as covered over by nostalgia, as if the two were magical. “Hell no, I’m talking about practicality. Reagan, believe it or not—one reason he was so successful was he was pragmatic. He did what he needed to do to get things done.”
Could Reagan have controlled today’s GOP? “I think yes, he could have. You bet. Yeah, he would have.” How? Baker’s answer seemed to be: Through a personal application of peace through strength. “Somebody asked me about the tea party, ‘Ya think Reagan would have [been at odds with] them or been in sync with them?’ I think, Reagan would have probably led the charge! But remember how it was when he first came in. He understood that we judge our presidents . . on the basis of what elements of their programs they get accomplished legislatively, how they make the government run, how they lead.”
A sound strategy for the Republicans going forward would involve a shift in public perception. People will see the issue one way when they believe House Republicans are unwilling to pass a budget because of ObamaCare. When people see the issue as the president refusing to negotiate with House Republicans on the issue of the debt limit, things will change. The president’s refusal to negotiate “could change the political calculus, the more so the longer it goes. . . . My political antennae tell me when the debate becomes the failure of our leader to negotiate . . . the mood of the country could flip.” That would look like a true “abdication of leadership.”
Does he worry about how all this is making America look in the world? “Yeah, sure, of course. It makes us look like we don’t have our act together. And I guess you could say we don’t.”
He notes that Mr. Obama used to speak of how he admired Reagan. But Reagan tackled big problems—fundamental tax reform, fixing Social Security. “Why doesn’t he do what Reagan did?”
Tom Clancy, RIP
Tom Clancy was a great gentleman, generous and kind. He gave a lot of money away to medical research, and if you wanted to hear him get excited you talked about what doctors were doing to make the world better. They were his heroes. He loved America and worried about her. Our friendship over the years became an email and instant-message one. I’d be working at my desk and suddenly on my screen his nom de net would pop up and he’d be full of life, immediately present. What’s cooking, how’s the weather, what do you think of this senator, that governor, who’s coming up, who can help the country? He was relaxed about his work, didn’t take it so seriously, or rather himself so seriously. He’d sold tens of millions of books and was a household name. That didn’t impress him much. At the same time he was aware of his name’s power and frequently deployed it to help others.
He was a professional who hit his marks and did his job. He had the confident sense his imagination would carry him through. He did a lot of research, which often involved finding ignored geniuses who loved telling him about the latest in military technology and spycraft and politics. He admired men and women in the armed forces as much as he admired doctors. When he judged a general to be a good man he’d tell you why, and a lot of the time it wasn’t what he’d done on the battlefield but something else. Of a Marine officer, from memory: “This guy was held up outside a Wal-Mart, pushed his wife to safety, clocked the bad guy and sat on him while he waited for the cops.” He admired manliness in all its manifestations. He was especially kind to young writers. In 1989 he heard of a manuscript I’d written, got his hands on it, and tracked me down to offer to write a big, over-the-top blurb. We had never met. I was impressed and heartened by his praise—he knew what young writers need most is to be heartened—and a friendship began. I notice that I begin this by calling Tom a gentleman, and going over old emails I found that that was his highest form of praise. Of an admired surgeon: “He’s a great gentleman and a pretty good chest cutter.” Of another: “A solid troop, Bill is.” He thought character was the most important thing, that it trumped brains and talent in the making of a life.
Tom Clancy loved Camden Yards, the Yeoman Warders of Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London, and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he was proud to tell me a few years ago he’d bought research chairs in ophthalmology and pediatric oncology, the latter a great passion. Tom’s father had been a mailman there; now Tom was sending notes to Stephen Hawking telling him of the Neurology Department’s latest clinical trials. He found this part of his life delicious—that he had risen so far, just like an American—and common, too. To him, his story was the classic one of his country and the essence of its dream: Here you can start from anywhere and go on to anything. He was proudly sentimental and loved the unheralded—regular, uncelebrated people who yet make everything run, who keep the whole thing going. He had a gift for praise and dwelled on the excellence of others. He noticed it. When someone—a clerk, a president—was a jerk, he summed the person up with an earthy epithet and moved on. Life is too short, let’s talk about the good guys.
But the essence of him was this: Tom Clancy, patriot. Oh how he loved the America he inherited and came from, wanted so badly to preserve and did help preserve, by creating, among others, the brave and good Jack Ryan, a late-20th-century icon of the USA. I called him Big Tom. Probably a number of people who knew him did. He had a big heart. He changed many lives. He worked hard. I hope tonight the Beefeaters of the Yeoman Warders are hoisting a few in his memory. Something tells me they are, right now. Tom Clancy, rest in peace.
A Small President on the World Stage
The world misses the old America, the one before the crash—the crashes—of the past dozen years.
That is the takeaway from conversations the past week in New York, where world leaders gathered for the annual U.N. General Assembly session. Our friends, and we have many, speak almost poignantly of the dynamism, excellence, exuberance and leadership of the nation they had, for so many years, judged themselves against, been inspired by, attempted to emulate, resented.
As for those who are not America’s friends, some seem still confused, even concussed, by the new power shift. What is their exact place in it? Will it last? Will America come roaring back? Can she? Does she have the political will, the human capital, the old capability?
It is a world in a new kind of flux, one that doesn’t know what to make of America anymore. In part because of our president.
“We want American leadership,” said a member of a diplomatic delegation of a major U.S. ally. He said it softly, as if confiding he missed an old friend.
“In the past we have seen some America overreach,” said the prime minister of a Western democracy, in a conversation. “Now I think we are seeing America underreach.” He was referring not only to foreign policy but to economic policies, to the limits America has imposed on itself. He missed its old economic dynamism, its crazy, pioneering spirit toward wealth creation—the old belief that every American could invent something, get it to market, make a bundle, rise.
The prime minister spoke of a great anxiety and his particular hope. The anxiety: “The biggest risk is not political but social. Wealthy societies with people who think wealth is a given, a birthright—they do not understand that we are in the fight of our lives with countries and nations set on displacing us. Wealth is earned. It is far from being a given. It cannot be taken for granted. The recession reminded us how quickly circumstances can change.” His hope? That the things that made America a giant—”so much entrepreneurialism and vision”—will, in time, fully re-emerge and jolt the country from the doldrums.
The second takeaway of the week has to do with a continued decline in admiration for the American president. Barack Obama’s reputation among his fellow international players has deflated, his stature almost collapsed. In diplomatic circles, attitudes toward his leadership have been declining for some time, but this week you could hear the disappointment, and something more dangerous: the sense that he is no longer, perhaps, all that relevant. Part of this is due, obviously, to his handling of the Syria crisis. If you draw a line and it is crossed and then you dodge, deflect, disappear and call it diplomacy, the world will notice, and not think better of you. Some of it is connected to the historical moment America is in.
But some of it, surely, is just five years of Mr. Obama. World leaders do not understand what his higher strategic aims are, have doubts about his seriousness and judgment, and read him as unsure and covering up his unsureness with ringing words.
A scorching assessment of the president as foreign-policy actor came from a former senior U.S. diplomat, a low-key and sophisticated man who spent the week at many U.N.-related functions. “World leaders are very negative about Obama,” he said. They are “disappointed, feeling he’s not really in charge. . . . The Western Europeans don’t pay that much attention to him anymore.”
The diplomat was one of more than a dozen U.S. foreign-policy hands who met this week with the new president of Iran, Hasan Rouhani. What did he think of the American president? “He didn’t mention Obama, not once,” said the former envoy, who added: “We have to accept the fact that the president is rather insignificant at the moment, and rely on our diplomats.” John Kerry, he said, is doing a good job.
Had he ever seen an American president treated as if he were so insignificant? “I really never have. It’s unusual.” What does he make of the president’s strategy: “He doesn’t know what to do so he stays out of it [and] hopes for the best.” The diplomat added: “Slim hope.”
This reminded me of a talk a few weeks ago, with another veteran diplomat who often confers with leaders with whom Mr. Obama meets. I had asked: When Obama enters a room with other leaders, is there a sense that America has entered the room? I mentioned de Gaulle—when he was there, France was there. When Reagan came into a room, people stood: America just walked in. Does Mr. Obama bring that kind of mystique?
“No,” he said. “It’s not like that.”
When the president spoke to the General Assembly, his speech was dignified and had, at certain points, a certain sternness of tone. But after a while, as he spoke, it took on the flavor of re-enactment. He had impressed these men and women once. In the cutaways on C-Span, some delegates in attendance seemed distracted, not alert, not sitting as if they were witnessing something important. One delegate seemed to be scrolling down on a BlackBerry, one rifled through notes. Two officials seated behind the president as he spoke seemed engaged in humorous banter. At the end, the applause was polite, appropriate and brief.
The president spoke of Iran and nuclear weapons—”we should be able to achieve a resolution” of the question. “We are encouraged” by signs of a more moderate course. “I am directing John Kerry to pursue this effort.”
But his spokesmen had suggested the possibility of a brief meeting or handshake between Messrs. Obama and Rouhani. When that didn’t happen there was a sense the American president had been snubbed. For all the world to see.
Which, if you are an American, is embarrassing.
While Mr. Rouhani could not meet with the American president, he did make time for journalists, diplomats and businessmen brought together by the Asia Society and the Council on Foreign Relations. Early Thursday evening in a hotel ballroom, Mr. Rouhani spoke about U.S.-Iranian relations.
He appears to be intelligent, smooth, and he said all the right things—”moderation and wisdom” will guide his government, “global challenges require collective responses.” He will likely prove a tough negotiator, perhaps a particularly wily one. He is eloquent when speaking of the “haunted” nature of some of his countrymen’s memories when they consider the past 60 years of U.S.-Iranian relations.
Well, we have that in common.
He seemed to use his eloquence to bring a certain freshness, and therefore force, to perceived grievances. That’s one negotiating tactic. He added that we must “rise above petty politics,” and focus on our nations’ common interests and concerns. He called it “counterproductive” to view Iran as a threat; this charge is whipped up by “alarmists.” He vowed again that Iran will not develop a nuclear bomb, saying this would be “contrary to Islamic norms.”
I wondered, as he spoke, how he sized up our president. In roughly 90 minutes of a speech followed by questions, he didn’t say, and nobody thought to ask him.