The ‘Establishment’ Fights Back

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Washington

It is a month since the government shutdown and a day after the election. The minority leader of the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell, longest-serving senator in Kentucky history (1985 to the present, up for a sixth term in 2014), is seated in his office talking about the stresses, strains and estrangements that mark the relationship between what is called the tea party and what is called the GOP establishment, which at the moment seems to consist of everyone who isn’t in the tea party. Mr. McConnell is soft-spoken, contained, a person of habitual discretion. What seemed to be on his mind was something like “Star Wars: The Establishment Fights Back.” What he expressed was more like “The Establishment Voices Some Aggravation.”But it’s a start.

“The most important election yesterday wasn’t the governor of New Jersey and it wasn’t the governor of Virginia, it was the special election for Congress in South Alabama, where a candidate who said the shutdown was a great idea, the president was born in Kenya, and that he opposed Speaker Boehner came in second.” The victory of a more electable Republican, is significant, Mr. McConnell says. To govern, parties must win. To win, parties must “run candidates that don’t scare the general public, [and] convey the impression that we could actually be responsible for governing, you can trust us—we’re adults here, we’re grown-ups.”

Republicans must enter the 2014 election cycle remembering the advice of William F. Buckley : “He always said he was for the most conservative candidate who could win.”

Is the GOP in civil war? “No, I don’t think so.” Everyone agrees on the central issue: “We would all love to get rid of ObamaCare. If we had the votes to do it we’d do it in a heartbeat. It’s the single worst piece of legislation that’s been passed in modern times.”

But “we have a disability right now—it’s called in the Senate ’55 of them and 45 of us.’ I’m not great at math, but 55 is more than 45. . . . I think it’s irresponsible for some people to characterize themselves as sort of true conservatives, to mislead their followers into believing you can get an outcome that you can’t possibly get.”

Senator Mitch McConnellThe tea party, he says, consists of “people who are angry and upset at government—and I agree with them.” But “I think, honestly, many of them have been misled. . . . They’ve been told the reason we can’t get to better outcomes than we’ve gotten is not because the Democrats control the Senate and the White House but because Republicans have been insufficiently feisty. Well, that’s just not true, and I think that the folks that I have difficulty with are the leaders of some of these groups who basically mislead them for profit. . . . They raise money . . . take their cut and spend it” on political action that hurts Republicans.He refers to the Senate Conservatives Fund. “That’s the one I’m prepared to be specific about.” The fund “has elected more Democrats than the Democratic Senatorial Committee over the last three cycles.” The group is targeting Mr. McConnell with ads slamming his leadership during the shutdown. “Right now they’re on the air in obvious coordination with Harry Reid’s super PAC—Harry Reid’s!—in the same markets, at roughly the same amount, at the same time.”

But he says he isn’t worried about his own race: “I don’t wanna be overly cocky, but I’m gonna be the Republican nominee next year.”

Are members of the tea party on the ground being fooled by operators, profit makers and cynics? “Yes,” he said, followed by a brief silence. He declined to say more, but emphasized again that “I make a distinction between the leaders and the followers. I mean, I think a lot of well-meaning people are sending money to organizations having no idea they’re gonna spend all that money against Republicans. Because they’re being misled.”

During the government shutdown there was significant tension and discord among various Republicans on the Hill. Where does that fit in this story?

“It was a strategy that I said both publicly and privately could not work, and did not work.” The idea that a Democratic president and Senate might abandon their signature legislation was “a fantasy—in other words, it was not the truth.”

“All it succeeded in doing was taking attention off of ObamaCare for 16 days. And scaring the public and tanking our brand—our party brand. One of my favorite old Kentucky sayings is that there’s no education in the second kick of a mule. It ain’t gonna happen again.”

The lesson? “Learn from your mistakes, and realize that had we been talking ObamaCare during that 16 days, instead of people being consumed with the shutdown, we’d probably have a generic party ballot lead right now.”

ObamaCare itself is “a catastrophic failure. It’s a lot bigger than the website—sooner or later they’re gonna get the website fixed—but from a strictly political point of view,” the fallout for Democrats will be serious and long-lasting. “Not a single Republican voted for it, not one in the House or Senate. Every single Republican voted to defund it, to delay it, to get rid of it in any way.”

But is that enough? I suggested there is a void in the GOP reaction to ObamaCare. Wave one of the story was debut, website, failure. Wave two was “Oh my God, I just got my cancellation.” Wave three: “Oh my God, I wasn’t cancelled but they hiked my premiums.” All this is making millions of Americans anxious and resentful—they have a sense the president lied to them. How does the Republican Party right now step in to help? What can it offer people who are suffering from the dislocations?

“Yeah, well, I hate to keep repeating myself, but to have the kind of relief the country needs, I think we change the government. Change the Senate, change the presidency. To get relief between now and then will require wholesale [Senate] Democratic defections. And it’s going to be interesting to watch them running away from this. Just three weeks ago they were all in lockstep, voting against any effort to delay it or defund it or anything else. Now a number of them, particularly who happen to be running in red states in 2014, are saying ‘Whoops, maybe we ought to do this or do that.’ So if there’s a jailbreak on the other side, so that the president is put in an awkward position with his own members demanding adjustments, it could happen.”

But “a lot of Democrats would have to start to defect, in a big way, to force onto a reluctant president massive changes.” And “I wouldn’t hold my breath on that. I think what [Democrats] will do is sort of pick around the edges and try to put some distance between themselves and the implementation.”

Is Mr. MConnell going to them and saying, “Guys, it would be very helpful to the country if you would begin to defect”?

No. “I’m waiting for them to come to us, because that’s when you know you’ll have real leverage.”

Obama’s Catastrophic Victory

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Years ago John McPhee wrote a great book about Bill Bradley called “A Sense of Where You Are.” I keep thinking about that title. You have to know where you are in time and space, you have to know who you are and what you’re doing, you have to be able to locate the moment and reorient yourself within it.

Politically where are we right now, at this moment?

We have a huge piece of U.S. economic and social change that debuted a month ago as a program. The program dealt with something personal, even intimate: your health, the care of your body, the medicines you choose to take or procedures you get. It was hugely controversial from day one. It took all the political oxygen from the room. It failed to garner even one vote from the opposition when it was passed. It gave rise to a significant opposition movement, the town hall uprisings, which later produced the tea party. It caused unrest. In fact, it seemed not to answer a problem but cause it. I called ObamaCare, at the time of its passage, a catastrophic victory—one won at too great cost, with too much political bloodshed, and at the end what would you get? Barren terrain. A thing not worth fighting for.

So the program debuts and it’s a resounding, famous, fantastical flop. The first weeks of the news coverage are about how the websites don’t work, can you believe we paid for this, do you believe they had more than three years and produced this public joke of a program, this embarrassment?

But now it’s much more serious. No one’s thinking about the websites. They wish you were thinking about the websites! I bet America hopes the websites never work so they never have to enroll.

The problem now is not the delivery system of the program, it’s the program itself. Not the computer screen but what’s inside the program. This is something you can’t get the IT guy in to fix.

They said if you liked your insurance you could keep your insurance—but that’s not true. It was never true! They said if you liked your doctor you could keep your doctor—but that’s not true. It was never true! They said they would cover everyone who needed it, and instead people who had coverage are losing it—millions of them! They said they would make insurance less expensive—but it’s more expensive! Premium shock, deductible shock. They said don’t worry, your health information will be secure, but instead the whole setup looks like a hacker’s holiday. Bad guys are apparently already going for your private information.

Look at the simple, factual eloquence of Edie Littlefield Sundby, from Monday’s Journal. It is a story that tells you everything you need to know about ObamaCare. It is the single most persuasive and informative piece written since the whole program began.

And now there are reports the insurance companies are taking advantage of the chaos of the program, and its many dislocations, to hike premiums. Meaning the law was written in such a way that insurance companies profit on it.

And—I am limiting things to just today’s news – the New York Times reports that while millions may qualify for enough federal subsidies to pay the entire monthly cost of some health-insurance plans, the zero premiums come with some “serious trade-offs.” What serious trade-offs? Most of these plans, called the bronze policies, “require people to pay the most in out-of-pocket costs, for doctor visit and other benefits like hospital stays.” Huh? I thought the purpose of the law was to help with the cost of doctor visits and hospital stays!

*   *   *

Back to a sense of where we are. You know where we are? It’s as if it’s 1964 and the administration has just passed landmark civil rights legislation and the bill goes into effect, and everyone looks—only immediately it is apparent that it makes everyone’s life worse! It doesn’t help minority groups – it makes their lives harder and less free! And it does real, present and intimate damage to the majority.

It’s as if it’s 1937 and they launched Social Security, only rich coupon-clippers on Park Avenue immediately started getting small monthly checks, and 67-year-old dust bowlers in tarpaper shacks started getting monthly bills.

It’s the biggest governmental enterprise that hasn’t worked since the earliest beginnings of the U.S. rocket program, when they kept trying to send rockets into space and they kept falling, defeated and groaning, into the ground. Only the rockets were still unmanned, so those failures never hurt anybody!

*   *   *

ObamaCare is a practical, policy and political disaster, a parlay of poisonous P’s.

And it is unbelievable – simply unbelievable – that the administration is so proud, so childish, so ideological, so ignorant and so uncaring about the bill’s victims that they refuse to stop, delay, go back, redraw and ease the trauma.

Two closing notes. In my lifetime the good word liberal was discarded by the Democratic Party. Over the decades they’d run it into the ground and changed it from a plus to a minus. Liberal came to suggest a whole world of bad ideas—soft on crime, eager for gun confiscation, big taxing. So the past 20 years Democrats tried to change their label, and in the Obama era it was finally definitively changed. They were now progressives.

Well, the biggest piece of progressive legislation in our lifetimes—not just costly but intrusive, abusive, and marked by a command-and-control mentality—is ObamaCare.

Remember, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat”? They’re gonna need another name.

Second point: I don’t know, maybe the Republican Party could focus on where we are and help those Americans who are beside themselves with anxiety? A friend had a suggestion today. Maybe instead of having oversight hearings on the stupid website, they could be hauling in some insurance executives to see if they’re capitalizing on this bad law and trying to profit on its dislocations? You know, like they’re listening not to K Street lobbyists but the people?

Maybe they could even call in some people from the White House and Congress, the ones who helped write and interpret this famous law that you had to pass before you could know what was in it, and ask: “Did you ever meet a normal human? Did you understand what you were doing when you produced this thing?”

Maybe they could even ask the president: “In your entire life, from community organizer to lawyer to politician, did you ever buy an insurance policy? Were you always on your wife’s plan, or immediately put on a plush government plan? Did you ever have to do anything like what you’re telling the people of your country to do?”

Questions for Secretary Sebelius

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Former White House press secretary Dana Perino has good, commonsensical advice for Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee who’ll be questioning Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on ObamaCare tomorrow.

Boiled down: Can the theatrics, know your stuff, we don’t need re-enactments of constituent rage, be serious and sober. If members take this advice—Speaker John Boehner and Chairman Frd Upton should be sending it out—they’ll better their chances of meeting the moment and providing a service to their country.

Dana’s advice made me think of what I’d add.

1. Members should communicate beforehand and not go forward, as they usually do, like colliding atoms. They should logically coordinate their inquiry. There’s a lot of ground to cover and they don’t need repetitions, redundancies and free-associative journeys down tributaries that lead nowhere.

2. “It will be good for you to remember it’s not about you.” A health-care disaster has been visited on a significant number of Americans, who have been left understandably anxious, resentful and confused. If you use your time to pound the podium and get in the clips of the local news station back home, many of your constituents, seeing your theatrics, will recognize you to be an unhelpful blowhard out to gain from their pain. The national press will recognize you to be a grandstanding fool. Do you want that?

3. Do not take the bait when Democrats on the panel, who know they have been forced into defending the indefensible or joining a pile-on, try to change the subject. They’ll offer long, meandering (or accusatory and sarcastic) speeches on how Republicans have never wanted to help anyone in trouble and that’s why they’ve always opposed ObamaCare. Don’t engage, don’t start wrestling around with how many supported Social Security and who didn’t. Smile and let it go. You have limited time. Use it to find out what happened, what’s true and where we are.

4. Do not be defeated by Sebelius’s media coaches. Do not let the secretary’s slightly dazed unflappability get under your skin. All representatives of government are surrounded by communications advisers. Sebelius’s are no doubt advising her right now to do what they always tell officials in trouble to do: Come forth with long, meaningless yet on some level data-filled sentences that will steer clear of speaking plain truth and yet on some level imply the effort to be candid. (Yes, the irony: it is the taxpayers who pay for the media advisers who help the agency head mislead the taxpayers.) Sebelius will attempt to talk in a way that is arguably responsive and deliberately incomprehensible. She will not be trying to produce a colorful soundbite but to avoid one. She does not want to be on the evening news, she wants to get out of the hearing room with her career intact.

When government officials have been trained in this strategy, there is a tell. The tell is that they begin many of their sentences with the word, “So.”

As in:

Q: Madame Secretary, did you know or have reason to know the ObamaCare website would crash on opening day? If you did, did you tell the White House? Who in the White House? If you did not know, how did it happen that you, the person in charge of the program, did not understand the depth of its problems?

A: So, we know through historical experience that a vast, multitiered, horizontally integrated program will always yield or produce certain unanticipated challenges of a technological or other nature, which is inevitably and also predictably the pattern, and it’s increased by the scale and size of the endeavor . . .

Q: Let me ask: Did you know that as soon as the program debuted, millions of Americans would see their own health insurance policies canceled or terminated? And that they would often find that newer policies would be more expensive with less coverage? When did you come to understand this—during the writing of the law, after its passage, in the ensuing years? If you did not know that millions would lose their coverage, how did it happen that you did not know?

A: So, in the intervening days and months following the passage of the ACA, a focused task force composed of peer-reviewed stakeholders throughout the government and the private sector, in addition to appropriate designated agency officials, along with contractors and subcontractors . . .

This is what media advisers have gotten us to. If they had been advising clients in 1945-46 at the Nuremberg Trials the court transcripts would have looked like this: “So, part of the context within which directives were perceived is that there is a task announced and enforced by the government and its appropriate directors and agencies, and our topographical and rail line information, as provided on numerous occasions by the interior ministry, but also a number of people in the department had their own copies, suggested the most reliable train lines did in fact go through a town called Auschwitz. So considering that, and our responsibility to afford maximum efficiencies in accordance with the needs and directives, it was decided to . . .”

How to get around the obfuscation, indirection, passive voice, deliberately fractured grammar, and refusal to speak directly, clearly and pertinently?

Be courteous, cool, stay focused and press. “Madam Secretary, I know it’s hard under the lights, but I am going to ask for simple, direct answers. Please, at what point did you see a catastrophe coming? Who did you tell? And what did they say?”

“I must ask again, and I ask you to be clear and direct: Did you know, in the years that you and the president were saying ‘If you want to keep your current coverage you can keep it’—did you know that was not true?”

“You have heard the charge that that promise was a lie meant to aid in the selling of the Affordable Care Act to the American people. Was it a lie?”

“How did you expect the American people to react when they found out it wasn’t true?”

Keep to the question. Don’t make speeches. Find out the answer.

Update: Early reports say Sebelius will be apologetic in her testimony regarding the failed rollout. Meaning she does want a soundbite after all, and that’s it. An apology is fine, it’s appreciated, but an apology is not accountability. When a guy causes a fatal car crash it’s good if he says he’s sorry, but it doesn’t exonerate him. Was he driving under the influence? Was he texting? Was he asleep? Who’s going to pay for the damage, what will ease the suffering of the victims?

There are reports she will blame one or more of the outside contractors. This is weak—the government oversees and directs the contractors. It’s like the captain of the Titanic saying the problem is the company that made the rivets in the water tight compartments. Maybe, but it was his ship and he let it sail full steam into an icefield.

The Deep State

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

President Obama says he didn’t know the U.S. government was tapping Angela Merkel, and you know, maybe he didn’t. I have come to wonder if we don’t have what amounts to a deep state within the outer state in the U.S.—a deep state consisting of our intelligence and security agencies, which are so vast and far-flung in their efforts that they themselves don’t fully know who’s in charge and what everyone else is doing. Maybe they’re bugging so many people it’s hardly news to them when they bug the chancellor of Germany. Maybe they mentioned it to the president, maybe not. Maybe they don’t know.

Mr Obama has gone from seeming like someone who doesn’t quite know what’s going on in his government to someone who doesn’t really want to. He has perfected a sense of surprise. He’s always finding out at just the moment you are, and feeling your indignation.

So maybe he didn’t know. Maybe our intelligence and security apparatus—so huge and full of money since 9/11, so self-encased and self-perpetuating—didn’t tell him.

Before we think about that, should we be tapping Merkel’s phone?

No, for a simple reason: Because it is wrong. She is our friend. She is our ally. She leads a great nation. As such—friend, ally, greatness—she deserves respect. It is not respectful or friendly to invade her privacy and spy on her in this way.

It also seems sort of nuts. Does the National Security Agency think Angela Merkel is planning to blow up Times Square? That would be just like her, wouldn’t it? Does the NSA want to get the mood of her government before the trade talks commence? Then they can do it the old-fashioned way, through old-fashioned human measures: “Hey, source in the foreign ministry, what are you hearing?”

America has been embarrassed by this. A president with more than adequate political smarts would never OK it. But our intelligence and security agencies? That vast edifice that always wants whatever new technologies are available and whatever new targets are around? Sure, they would do it. After all, it’s not their job to look after America’s reputation in the world, it’s just their job to get the goods and say they got them. Maybe they don’t get into sources and methods even with presidents.

Particularly obnoxious on this question are the American policy thinkers and journalists who, when asked about the Merkel taps, put on their world-weary professional wise-guy face, looking like tragic suburbanites who once read a John le Carré novel and can’t forget the shiver of existential dread, and say that everyone does it, governments spy, get with the program, this is the way the world works.

*   *   *

Sorry, but tapping the private telephone line of one of your most important friends in the West is not how the world works, it’s how, once she finds out and the world finds out, it falls apart.

A president would, naturally and out of sheer diplomatic courtesy, tell his intelligence community to cut it out. What I’m wondering is: Do they cut it out? Who would know if they didn’t? Maybe they will choose to be courteous to the president, stop the tap and present Germany with evidence the tap has stopped. But maybe the deep state will think it doesn’t have to be pushed around by some joker who’ll be gone in a few years, to be replaced by another joker.

Yesterday on “Face the Nation,” I was on a panel that included Tom Johnson, Philip Shenon and Bob Woodward. We talked about the tendency of government agencies to cover up their mistakes, hide their internal agendas and lie. We’d been discussing Shenon’s impressive book on the JFK assassination and the making of the Warren Report. He documents the extent to which agencies and actors in those days withheld and even destroyed information that should have gone to the Warren Commission.

Anchor Bob Schieffer noted that the first things agencies under duress tend to do is “try to make sure they can’t be blamed for something. And, clearly, that is why the FBI and the CIA did not come clean with the Warren Commission.”

Woodward referred briefly to Watergate, and added: “I think there’s a theme here in all of this . . . that connects somewhat to what’s going on now.” He spoke of “the power of this secret world—CIA, FBI,” in the past, to know of or be involved in activities such as assassination plots against Fidel Castro, and not divulge those activities to a commission that was ostensibly searching for potential motives behind the Kennedy assassination.

Woodward brought it to the present. “We look now at what’s going on with all the NSA wiretapping and people saying, ‘Well, they didn’t know, or they did know.’ It clearly is much more extensive than people expected. You connect this with the drone strikes in Pakistan, and Yemen, which is our government conducting regular assassinations by air. You know, what’s—what’s going on here? Who is in control of it? And who can find out? You know, I think—it’s in the New York Times this morning that there is a review that Susan Rice, the National Security Adviser for Obama, has done on Mideast policy. They need to review this secret world and its power in their government because you run into this rat’s nest of concealment and lies time and time again, then and now.”

I agreed with Woodward. His stated concerns are very much my growing ones. And the pertinent questions are, as he says, “What’s going on here?” and “Who’s in control?”

What Woodward calls “this secret world” I have come increasingly to think of as the deep state—again, the vast, unfathomable and not fully accountable innards of the permanent U.S. intelligence and national-security apparatus. I have been wondering if it isn’t true that presidents change and directors change—you can keep changing the showbiz side, the names on the marquee—but the ways, needs, demands, imperatives, secrets and strategies of The Agencies stay pretty much the same, except for one thing: They always want more. The dynamic is always toward growth, toward more reach and more power. (We see some of this too in the permanent regulatory and administrative class in all the domestic agencies, EPA, HHS and IRS. You know why Lois Lerner more or less operated as if she had impunity? Because she more or less had impunity.) And it’s all gotten too big, too dark, too impenetrable. I’m not talking about “Homeland”-type darkness and shadows. It is more bureaucratic than that, more banal, less colorful, less dramatic. It is more James Clapper than James Angleton, more Vienna, Va., than mildly sinister McLean dinner party.

But it is actually the big thing our country should be talking about now, needs to be talking about and would be talking about if only our president had not decided, a few years ago, to blow up the U.S. health-care system.

And so now we’ll have to deal with that. It will demand all focus as we try to turn it around. But the NSA, its size, power and way of operating—that will have to be reckoned with.

Bonus anecdote. Once about 10 years ago an official who worked with a famous European leader told me of a conversation that had just taken place in the office. The leader met with his staff, who had decided to warn him that every day he’s just one comment away from disaster. “Anyone can hear you now,” they told him, “not just when you’re in public but when you’re in the car or at home on the phone. Hidden mics, taps, devices of all sorts—you can’t say anything.” It’s not only the media and all sorts of freelancers, they said, it’s other governments, perhaps our government, unseen forces and powers.

The leader looked crestfallen. This couldn’t be, he thought—this will require a whole new way of being alive.

But he knew they were telling the truth. Later, to an aide, he said, “I guess the only way to guarantee my privacy now is to sit crouched in the bathtub, with a big blanket over my head, talking to myself.”

Yes, the aide said, that’s about it.

ObamaCare Is Taking On Water

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

We should not lose The Headline in the day-to-day headlines. This is big history, not small. The ObamaCare rollout is a disaster for the White House, not a problem or a challenge or an embarrassment, not a gaffe or a bad few weeks. It is a political disaster, and the only question is whether it is partially recoverable, meaning the system can be made to work in a generally satisfactory way in the next few weeks. But—it has to be repeated—they had 3½ years after passage of the Affordable Care Act to make the program into something the American people could register for and feel they were benefiting from. Three and a half years! They had a long-declared start date: It would all go live Oct. 1, 2013, and everyone in the government, every contractor and consultant, knew it.

The president put the meaning of his presidency into the program—it informally carries his name, it is his brand. It was unveiled with great fanfare, and it didn’t work. For almost anybody. Crashed systems, frozen screens, phone registration that prompted you back to the site that sent you to the 800 number, like a high-tech Möbius strip.

All this from the world’s greatest, most technologically sophisticated nation, the one that invented the computer and the Internet. And from a government that is able to demand and channel a great deal of the people’s wealth.

So you’d think it would sort of work. And it didn’t. Which is a disaster.

Even though it’s huge, and those who are reporting the story every day are, by and large, seasoned and have seen a few things, no one seems to know how it will end. Because it’s new territory. Does anyone believe the whole technological side can be fixed quickly? No. The president may eventually accept a brief delay in implementation—it is almost unbelievable that he will not—but does anyone think that the economics of the ACA, the content as set out and expressed on the sites, will flow smoothly, coherently, and fully satisfy the objectives of expanding health-insurance coverage while lowering its cost? You might believe that, but early reports of sticker shock, high deductibles and canceled coverage are not promising. Does anyone think the president will back off and delay the program for enough time not only to get the technological side going but seriously improve the economics? No. So we’re not only in the middle of a political disaster, we’re in the middle of a mystery. What happens if this whole thing continues not to work? What do we do then?

It hardly matters if anyone is fired. That’s the fifth paragraph in the Wikipedia history, or the 10th. Yes, a firing would be good democratic form, and it would acknowledge the idea of accountability—someone or some persons failed on a historic level and were removed. It would take some heat off the White House—”Look, we’re doing something!”—so it’s surprising they haven’t done it and odd the Republicans are clamoring for it. But who would want to be the new HHS secretary? Who would take that job?

Titannic HealthcareIt was Bill Daley —accomplished political player, former commerce secretary and, most killingly, former chief of staff of President Obama —who Thursday, on “CBS This Morning,” admitted the scale of the problem. Asked whether Kathleen Sebelius should be fired, he said: “To me that’s kind of like firing Captain Smith on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg.”

The Titanic. Some will see his comments as disloyal. Actually they were candid and realistic. Although in fairness, the Titanic at least had three good days, and Edward Smith chose to go down with the ship.

He didn’t deny the waters were icy; he failed to slow his ship, failed to show heightened concern. Mrs. Sebelius did not show overwhelming confidence in the days before the debut—there was no “God himself couldn’t sink this program.” She repeated her lines in a way that seemed almost furtive, appearing not confident but confused, and almost guiltily stubborn. Her message was almost always the same: There are no icebergs ahead.

Norman Ornstein in National Journal this week reminds us of Democratic Sen. Max Baucus’s iceberg warning—actually “train wreck”—at a hearing six months ago, in April. He warned implementation of ObamaCare could be a disaster. He told Mrs. Sebelius: “I understand you’ve hired a contractor. I’m just worried that that’s going to be money down the drain because contractors like to make money more than they like to do anything else. That’s their job.” A lot of agencies are involved, he said, people are going to get confused, more simplicity is needed.

He was right. I happened to reread his warning while the House Energy and Commerce Committee questioned the four major contractors on the ObamaCare sites. The most pertinent query came from Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who asked the contractors to put on paper, and under oath, exactly how much money they had made from the federal government so far, and exactly how much they stand to make now, as they fix the sites, and in the future.

There are more questions on the failure to launch. Did Mrs. Sebelius and her top staffers know that the system was not ready and likely to fail? If they knew, did they not tell the White House? If they didn’t know, how did it happen that they didn’t? If the White House knew of the likelihood of a coming failure, why did they go full steam ahead? And if they didn’t know, why?

Was there some degree of fabulism, or magical thinking, or reliance on blind luck within the White House and the greater administration? Many important people in the administration, and those contracting with it from the outside, would have had to ignore various signs of a coming failure. Did some of them know or have reason to know problems were both present and coming, and mislead or fail to inform their peers or superiors?

And there is the enduring mystery of why the president, who in his career has attempted to persuade the American people to have greater faith in and reliance on the federal government’s ability to help, continues to go forward with an astounding lack of interest in the reputation of government.

He talks but he doesn’t implement, never makes it work. He allows the IRS under his watch to be humiliated by scandal, waste, ill judgements prompted by ideological assumptions. He allows his signature program, the one that will make his name in the history books, to debut in failure. In response he says bland, rounded words that leave you wondering what just got said.

We’re all reading of Jack Kennedy. He stayed up nights with self-recrimination after failure. “How could I have been so stupid?” he asked about the Bay of Pigs. A foreseeable mistake and he’d blown it, listened to the wrong people, made the wrong judgments. That man suffered over his missteps. He worried about his reputation, and the reputation of his government, and of America.

It is disorienting to not see this in a president. It is another thing about this story that feels not only historic, but historically strange.

Scott Carpenter, RIP

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Oh what it was like. “Mission Control, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed.” “America on the moon.” “Godspeed, John Glenn.” “Come on and light this candle.” “A-OK.” “Four 3, 2, 1, and liftoff, we have liftoff.”

Oh, we did. Those are words and phrases of America’s space program, especially the Mercury program, one of whose astronauts died this week, 88-year-old Scott Carpenter. In 1962 he became the second American to orbit the Earth. He was the one they couldn’t find for a while, when he missed his splashdown point by about 250 miles. It’s tempting to write that all of America was on the edge of their seats while Navy planes searched for him and his capsule, but we weren’t. We knew it would be fine.

But what an era of dynamism, of breaking through, of pushing out, of daring. The space program gave us a forward-looking attitude, a sense we could do anything in any area. Especially if you were a kid, as I was, age 11, when Carpenter flew. What a gift it was to be young then—America blasting off, the Yankees or the Dodgers always winning. No one cared about government—what bliss—but to the extent we had one it seemed to work. Respectable people like Dwight Eisenhower were in charge, and then, in ’61, the glamour of the Kennedys. People were getting TVs. A whole new way to waste time! But also something else, our culture showing itself to itself, and it didn’t look so bad, especially, again, if you were young.

But the point is the era. It was big, expansive, it was pushing against limits, even against gravity. Now we have shutdowns, ceilings, chained CPIs—it’s all limits. The head of NASA talks about greenhouse gases.

Our children aren’t told by our culture that we can do anything, they’re taught to be afraid by people who are afraid—the future can harm you, hunker down, shelter in place. Really, that phrase captures the mood of our time: “Shelter in place.” Don’t go anywhere interesting, like a planet.

We don’t talk greatness now, we talk problems; and we don’t solve them, we set up processes to address them down the road.

I don’t know who the next American president is, but I know who the next great American president is—someone who remembers and can marshal and bring forth the mood of the old America: “Liftoff, we have liftoff.” “We will do it.” “Endless horizons.” “Home of the brave.” Great nations run on spirit. The next great one will know that. Scott Carpenter, steely-eyed rocket man, rest in peace.

Advantage Christie

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

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

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

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’

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

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.”

Ohio Sen. Robert Taft
Ohio Sen. Robert Taft during the Republican presidential primary in 1952.
In the current dispute, he says, “both sides have something to admit. The GOP will not be a victorious national party in the future without the tea party. The tea party needs the infrastructure, tradition, capabilities—the car—in order to function as a fully coherent and effective national entity.” He feels more sympathy toward the tea party than the establishment. “Their policy aims, while somewhat inchoate, seem on the right track. They need to be clearer about what they’re for—intellectually more ordered. They can’t lead with their hearts.”

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

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

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.