Recovering From Thanksgiving

On Black Friday (so named because retailers are supposed to break into the black that day), a door guard at a Wal-Mart on Long Island was trampled to death by 2000 anxious customers. They broke the door down just before opening time and went right over top of him. Anyone who tried to help was also trampled—and hospitalized.
After all, only 50 of this or that item on sale—only for as long as they last. There’s something about a limited sale that seems to bring out a truly savage lust in us. We’ll get one of those fifty if we have to sit out all night, and we’re perfectly happy to kill doing it.
What an exquisite commentary on the modern American Thanksgiving. Forget the Pilgrims—fifty percent of whom had died of hunger and disease the winter before—who were just grateful to be alive. Forget the Indians who brought five deer for the feast and stayed for days.
We pack it all into one day now. We have to: tomorrow has the best sales of the year and we have to be up by three or four. Stuff the turkey, stuff ourselves, watch the hapless Detroit Lions play middle school football against pros, and stampede for the gold. Whatever is fifty or more percent off.
I’ve talked to people who managed to hit four or five stores on Black Friday morning. I’m sure that’s nowhere near a record. (If you need to grocery shop that day, go about five o’clock in the evening. Most shoppers have collapsed in exhaustion by then and the store is reasonably empty.)
Is there any correlation between this lust for a bargain—at any human cost—and what’s going on over at the stock exchange these days? Do Wall Street and Wal-Mart have anything in common? Are the people who shop for that 50% off TV anything like the people who madly bought leveraged bundles of highly questionable mortgage papers?
As I’ve said in previous blogs, the problem scarcely began on Wall Street. Those are our kids down there. We taught them how to fudge, how to grasp and how to be completely ruthless in getting what they want. They just took the lessons they learned at home—and Wal-Mart—and applied them to those good jobs they got just out of B-school.
You can be appalled at what went on in the financial markets, but just remember where they first learned greed—at the Mall. In company with mommy and daddy and, later, in company only with mom and dad’s credit card. They didn’t come by it, as if newly sprung from Minerva’s brow, once they hit the Street.
Is there ever a day of actual thanksgiving for them? Do they know the meaning? (I admit, my son complains bitterly because he “hates” turkey.) Do any of us know the meaning? When was the last time most of us were hungry like the Pilgrims?
When was the last time we lay, staring death in the face, surrounded by those who had already died? The Pilgrims, scratching out a living on a strange new continent, months from the closest help, felt they had something to be truly thankful for.
They had plenty to be scared of, but they didn’t concentrate on it. They were thankful for survival. We’re scared because we might lose a bonus, a job, or a vastly overpriced house (remember when what sells for about $250-300 thousand today sold for $35 to $50 thousand? I remember when an $80K house was one whale of a house!). That’s all we can think about.
Take a moment to feel sorry for the door guard on Long Island. He died to make retail profitable—in some executives’ minds that’s as worthy a cause as dying to keep democracy safe. (After all, it was our own president who told us the best and most patriotic response to the 911 assault would be to go out and shop!) So feel as sorry for his family as you might for any dead soldier’s.
Then wonder—just as you wonder what kind of person flies a plane into the World Trade Center—what kind of shopper tramples a man to death and then rushes on to keep shopping.
God help us, they’re not all that different.

Other Problems, Other Places

Would that all we had to worry about were trivial matters like the financial meltdown, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran—or Detroit and a nearly bankrupt California. Alas, President-elect Obama is going to have more on his plate than that. He is probably going to wind up feeling like a clipped Boxer trying to chase its own tail.
India just had what some there are calling “our 911”. Survivors kept pointing out on the news that the perpetrators went to great lengths to identify Americans. Also, it is noted, that the shootings took place in bars and hotels that catered to Westerners, especially Americans.
Among the groups intelligence folk feel are well enough funded and staffed to pull something this well organized off are Al Quida and a Muslim group peevish over the fact that Kashmir isn’t part of Pakistan yet. (And, of course, both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons.)
Here’s a major center, where a lot of American business gets done, prone to violent attack. One commentator suggested that outside of Afghanistan and Iraq, India may suffer the most terrorist attacks in the world. Whether we like it or not, this involves significant American interests.
Then there was the picture on the front page of Investor’s Business Daily this week that showed a Russian warship receiving a 21 gun salute from Venezuela as it entered a harbor there. The Russian Navy is holding its first war games off South American shores since the Cold War.
Venezuela’s Chavez assures us this is not in any way meant as a provocation. (No more than I intended a provocation when I punched a kid in the mouth back in the Eighth Grade.) No immediate threat here; just a reminder that lots of places aren’t friendly toward us—right at our back door.
You really cannot blame these two things on George Bush. Kashmir has been a simmering problem since I was in Third Grade. I remember my Sixth Grade history book talking about it. Latin America has a long list of perceived or real grievances against us.
Mexico lost half of its territory to us in 1948 and has never entirely forgotten that California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and so forth are really part of Mexico. (They have a mantra in Mexico: “Poor Mexico, so far from God; so close to the United States.” Poland may have something like that about Russia and Germany. Who knows?)
I suspect a lot of Columbians are fully aware that it was an American gunboat that forced Columbia to give up Panama and its canal rights to effective American control in 1903. Argentina has to feel a bit of resentment over the fact that we ignored the Monroe Doctrine in 1982 and backed Britain over the Falklands.
Speaking of the Monroe Doctrine—how many of you have ever studied what Secretary of State John Q. Adams actually said in that communication? Back in those days the only way to transport cargo from the Midwest to the East Coast was by ship through the Florida straits.
In 1803 we bought Louisiana over top of Spain’s “first right of refusal.” In 1810 we grabbed Mobile from Spain. In 1819 we invaded Florida and took it from Spain. Britain knew that the two remaining threats to our Florida straits sea route were Cuba and Texas—and that it was only a matter of time before we moved on them.
So Britain—the planet’s mightiest super power-- sent us (with all the military muscle of Lichtenstein today) a communiqué offering to go halvsies on those two territories. With all the nerve in the world, Adam’s wrote back that we would take either or both territories as soon as we could, unilaterally.
We have Texas today and we still have a naval base in Cuba, protecting the Florida straits. Mr. Adam’s “Monroe Doctrine” still follows the rubric laid out by Franklin in 1755, “We shall be an empire of liberty from pole to pole and sea to sea”. Latin America is very aware of this imperial attitude.
They haven’t called us the “Colossus of the North” over the past century for nothing. Back in the 1890s, Cuban poet and revolutionary (against Spain that time) Jose Marti put it more starkly. Someone asked him if he’d been in the US. “I have lived in the belly of the Beast,” he replied. It took Castro (who repealed the American imposed Platt Amendment) finally to free Cuba from American control. He has his disciples—like Chavez.
In 1945, the Soviets demanded three votes in the United Nations. Why? “To make up for the twenty you control in Latin America.” (True at the time.) But now, Latin America is our powder keg. We haven’t even talked about narcotics!
Then there are pirates off the east coast of Africa –taking down whole oil tankers. (If that continues, do you have any idea what piracy will do to the price of your gas!?! It will drive insurance rates out of sight.) There are Chinese and Russian hackers draining space and military secrets out of NASA like water out of leaky tub. (Business Week, Dec.1)
The French have listening posts all over the world tapping into our industrial and military computers. The Chinese aren’t upgrading their military out of fear they will be attacked by any of their Asian neighbors! They see the Western Pacific as validly a Chinese sphere of influence as we see the Caribbean. They plan to have the muscle to make it so.
What would we do if Israel really did launch a strike at Iran? What if the corrupt Saudi government (where so much of our oil comes from) collapsed and a completely unfriendly regime took over? What if terrorist attacks in Europe made several governments there feel that it was unsafe to allow American bases to remain? (As improbable, no doubt, as someone daring to blow up the World Trade Center.)
What if—what if—what if? The world felt a lot more predictable and reliable when I was growing up. All we had to worry about was Russian bombs, and that was essentially a stalemate. The “What ifs” of today have so many uncontrollable variables.
Good on you,Mr. Obama, good on you.

The Gentle Ones

This is a postscript to yesterday’s blog. I spoke of the rudeness and shamelessness I have come to expect from today’s high school kids. Today I had a reverse experience while substitute teaching. It’s worth commenting on.
I took the place of the regular teacher in a room full of courteous, gentle, kindly high school kids that remembered me from my past visits. They went out of their way to let me know they were happy to see me again (that’s odd in the life of a substitute!). They obeyed almost instantly when asked to do something.
They were so unbelievably polite. A quick, smiling thank you or thanks for anything I did for them—including passing out work they had to do. That’s what really stood out. I turned to the teacher’s aide for the room and noted how strange I found it that these special kids could be so much more polite and nice to me than so-called “normal” kids.
I spent the day with a room full of intellectually challenged high schoolers. One was in a wheel chair, barely able to sit upright; he also had difficulty speaking clearly. Another one would only answer in mono-syllables. There was at least one Down’s syndrome child. There was a young lady whose arms didn’t quite move synchronomously with her legs, but she had the most dazzling smile.
Everyone present had a real problem. But that didn’t keep them from having a wonderful time today. It was the last school day before Thanksgiving. For years and years this particular suburban district has had a tradition among its special students.
All the high school students and their high school teachers get on the bus and ride over to the middle school where they have a party with their old teachers. Suddenly it’s a group of twenty or special needs kids – delighted to be with each other. They watched a movie (Wall-E) with slapstick comedy that had them howling with laughter.
They ate a hot lunch specially prepared for them by their teachers. (My room brought over the pumpkin and apple pies with whipped cream.) They played in the gym together—grades six through twelve—and they played board games together. I was amazed: there was no quarreling.
Oh, I’ve had these kids on other days when there were lessons to go through. They can squabble with each other like any other roomful of kids, but it doesn’t last or ever get really nasty.
I admit; I sit here puzzled. The “normal” kids who are going on to colleges or other careers so often seem to hate being in school. They seem so much less happy. They are much cruder and nastier to each other. I rarely if ever enjoy a room with “normal” kids the way I enjoy days with these kids.
Or is it something Christ said two thousand years ago. “Unless you become like a little child you shall in no way enter in.” Are these special needs kids more like little children in ways “normal” people have forgotten to be?
Are they too limited to fully understand that life is meant to be crude and miserable? Are the ones some people call “dummies” too dumb to know that the proper response to adults is either to ignore them or to be as insulting and arch as you possibly dare?
They certainly aren’t perfect, but there is a way the kids I was with today are more alive than many groups I’ve subbed for other days. They haven’t yet shut something down deep in their souls. Their minds may be limited, even very limited, but their spirits are still alive.
That sets them apart from so many “normals”. Sometimes you have to be where I was today to realize how sad the lives of so many “normal” kids are.
In some real way, the horrific diagnoses of these kids was a blessing.

Whatever Happened to Shame?

“Hey, look,” the kid said to me. He was grinning as he pulled up his pant leg, “I got fleas. This,” he pointed to the band around his shin, “kills fleas.” He was utterly unembarrassed, unchagrinned.
I didn’t bother to ask why he had the tether. That would, to his mind, have been completely irrelevant. It would have been. I’ve seen so many tethers on high school kids, called so many names for attendance, only to have somebody call out, “He’s in court.” Or “he’s in jail.”
No shame attaches to it. Occasionally I will overhear older boys impressing younger students with descriptions of what it is like “inside”—or how to survive it. Very often a prison record is a badge of honor. I hear the pride in a younger brother’s voice as he explains that his older sibling is doing time.
Pregnant girls feel no disgrace either. Nor does the boy or girl who explains why the assignment isn’t done or the test cannot be taken. “I was kicked out last week.” Or there’s the student I find casually rifling through a teacher’s desk. He or she is merely annoyed at being asked to stop.
There’s the thirteen year old girl whose mother tells her to go out and get pregnant—“We need the welfare cheque.” After you’ve been subbing in a dozen districts in over fifty schools—suburban and inner city—these things no longer faze you.
It’s like living in New York and learning to step over the drunk lying prostrate on the sidewalk without looking down. (If you try to help or question him, he will merely curse you.) So you let these comments and discussions go right on past you.
Occasionally a student will leer at you and ask, “Did you hear what he [or she] said?” I plead deafness or pretend not to have heard the question. Just the way I recently ignored the dope deal going down in a suburban high school, right out in the parking lot—next to my car.
But I can’t help overhearing some of it. The things young men and young women freely say to each other—and the vocabulary they use to say it—stun me. (I’ve known what most four-letter words mean since I was in middle school—but we didn’t suggest that someone actually do it, right in class.)
Then there’s the way they dress. Sagging pants, with the belt line barely above mid thigh is no longer limited to inner city schools. I’ve seen all the underpants (or buttock cleavage above low cut jeans) I ever want to, male and female.
When a young lady in a middle class school comes up to my desk and leans over to ask a question, it can be distracting to look at her. Very little more is hidden than was in a 1950s Playboy. It was been suggested to me that middle class mothers are proud that their daughters make such appealing bait.
We have become a society completely devoid of shame or embarrassment. That may explain why some of the same people that made millions fraudulently selling overleveraged mortgages have changed company names and gone right back into business pressing the FHA to take on equally fraudulent government guaranteed mortgages.
(Businessweek reports that the Federal Housing Authority has only three people who check up on the backgrounds of these reincarnated mortgage brokers—with the same previously indicted officers. Nobody’s taking it too seriously, but BW suggests that the FHA may become your next Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac. Nobody’s embarrassed.)
If they were never taught that there are actions to be ashamed of as kids, why would we ever expect them to know it as adults?
Shame is like the burn mechanism in our skins. It teaches us that certain things should be left alone—that some things should not be touched. Medical research will tell you what kinds of horrible things can happen to someone who has lost his or her sense of pain. He literally doesn’t realize when he’s burning up.
Horrible things can happen to a society in which the shame mechanism has been lost, too. We’ve been seeing that on Wall Street lately. They hurt because they’ve lost money (or a job), but they’re not embarrassed or ashamed.
That makes the rest of us hurt.

Have All The Bells Tolled Yet?

As a magazine, I have often heard BusinessWeek Magazine called “too bullish”, a “Chamber of Commerce” booster and a few other things that suggested it was not reliable on the downside. Well, you can take that all back this week. (Dec. 1, 2008)
Headlines ran from “Toxic Assets: Still No Takers” (housing securities) and “Cruel Christmas: How Many [retailers] Will Fall?” to “A [government] `Guarantee’ May Not Be Worth Much” and “America’s Lifeline – Exports—Is Fraying Fast”. On the cover is the caption to a picture of a wolf: “The Subprime Wolves Are Back and they’re feeding off the bailout.”
Jack and Suzy Welch spend their back of book column suggesting that the best thing General Motors and Chrysler can do is go bankrupt and combine. That’s definitely not too bullish, and none of it sounds like a Chamber of Commerce puff piece.
I caught a blurb on National Public Radio Friday morning when they were interviewing Senator Dodd about the bailout—specifically the $300,000 that’s already been handed out to various financial institutions. The idea was—and Congresses’—mandate to the Treasury was to kick start the lending process. Get banks to start putting out more loans.
Dodd said Congress (on both sides of the aisle) is very frustrated. Loans are not being made. Credit is as dead as it was last month before the bailout. What Dodd said he believes is happening is that instead of using the cash they’ve received from Uncle Sam to make loans, banks are sitting on to tide themselves over the rough patches they see ahead.
He strongly hinted that some banks have not yet been altogether candid in reporting how badly they’ve been stung by huge investments in subprime loans. These banks are using bailout cash to postpone the evil day when they have to give a full report and take their lumps.
They are doing this in the desperate hope that before the dies irae comes, things will return to “normal” and they will be able to unload their subprime holding to some other investor, bank, governmental entity somewhere and never have to take a loss on it.
That is, in all likelihood, absurdly wishful thinking—but it is doing two bad things. One, it is tying up the bailout money that was meant to give the economy a nice start. Two, it is just putting off a major day of reckoning that will have to hit with all of its negative force sometime. A good argument could be made, “Better sooner than later”, but these institutions intend to hold out as long as possible.
You could argue that Paulson and his bailout, however unwittingly, have just been enablers for a bunch of fiscal drunks who don’t want to sober up. That’s going to be bad for us. It looks like we’re going to take a major double whammy early in the New Year as it is.
Several retail chains look like they will be holding their final “After Christmas Sale” in January, and it looks like very nasty things are going to happen in the automotive sector at about the same time. The way the banks are playing it, we could get hit hard in the financial sector soon after.
Supposedly Paulson’s bailout package was going to get the credit/financial mess cleared up before the end of this year. Not if Dodd’s right. And from everything I’m reading, no one has any clear idea how much anybody owes to anyone else right now. That, as much as any Soviet threat in the 1960s is a genuine cause for concern!
(Oh well, maybe George Bush can do what he did after 911. He can go on the air and urge all Americans to support their economy by going out and spending. It seemed to work then. Or, is that partly why we are in such a pickle now?)
The poet John Donne wrote: “…never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." By coincidence he wrote that in 1624 just as the first English colony in America was finding its way out of a very nearly lethal depression (they had resorted to cannibalism to survive).
If he wrote today, Mr. Donne might better put it: Never send to know for whom the bell tolls, just find out if it’s the LAST bell.

Whatever Happened to Idle Curosity?

I’m not going to challenge anyone on the question of whether or not kids today are as bright as or brighter than previous generations. They can make computers, IPods, and online game platforms stand on their heads; they can go on and on about the latest rapper; and, boy, can they tell you who’s on which drugs or where to get them.
This is suburbia I’m talking about. Middle class, some with six figure household incomes. A goodly number college bound. Some diversity—but mostly middle class diversity. As I subbed for high school English today, I sat and watched. Five groups, two tenth grade, three eleventh grade.
As I watched, I wondered, “What happened to curiosity?” Their teachers sometimes wonder the same thing in my hearing. Want to bore these kids fast—to the point of disorderly conduct? Try telling them something about the subject that isn’t cemented into the text as a requirement.
Five years ago, I could get a class to listen. There were attentive looks, sounds of interested surprise, a few questions. Today, if it isn’t absolutely required by the text book, they really, really don’t want to know. I’ve stopped all attempts at adding anything to their handout sheets.
I just sit and watch them after giving the assignment. I try to keep most of them working instead of chatting about the only things that seem to interest them: sex, getting stoned, and their own music. The conversations that break out are both enlightening and appalling.
Present one of these kids with a word he’s never heard before—or an author or a line of a poem—and he will react with disdain. YOU are the “stupid” one for knowing something he doesn’t and sees no value in. How dumb of you to bring up something outside of my (very limited) experience or interest.
When I was a junior high or high school student and we had a short assignment, I recall an entire room full of us getting volumes of an encyclopedia and reading it. We were curious. Many of my classmates (from about the same economic strata as the kids I watched today) actually paid attention to the news and knew what was going on.
I still remember how furious my six grade class was when Truman fired MacArthur in 1951. We were interested and we were curious. Often it was an idle curiosity—and that’s not bad. More than one scientific breakthrough has come when a scientist at home or on coffee break had an idle thought—and then followed it out the window.
Can it be that with band practice, sports practice, work to support an automobile, kids are too busy to allow for curiosity? Anything that makes the lesson a line longer is extremely unwelcome. “I’ve got a life, dude, and I’ve no time to learn anything I don’t have to.” Pretty accurate summation.
Now, if as part of a class project for a grade, a DVD of someone like Al Gore says, “About face and say, `Green’”, they will wheel about. They won’t think much about it—after all thought cuts into work time, too. But they’ll march in a kind of lock step. After all, he’s a celebrity now. This generation seems willing to follow any celebrity anywhere, anytime, anyhow.
Many of them supported Obama. Okay, why?
“Because Bush is stupid.”
A righteous case can be made for that. “How was he stupid? What did he do?”
An annoyed look, “Because he’ stupid.” (How could I be so dumb?)
Some thought Obama would bring “change”. What kind of change? After all, tripping on a crack in the sidewalk brings change. One minute you’re up and walking, next you’re flat on your face. That assuredly is change. But specifically what sort of change will Obama bring? Once again, the questioner is the stupid one.
It takes curiosity to find answers to questions like that. Even idle curiosity can begin the job. But that requires time. It requires an interest in something outside of your own blinkered little world. That’s a trip few of these kids are willing to take. Neither on nor off narcotics.
Possibly if the national economic disaster we seem poised to experience comes upon us, it will force kids who no longer have jobs, no longer can afford to drive cars anywhere and anytime to slow down. Forget smelling the roses, just encourage that unfamiliar sensation called curiosity.

What 'Goes Up

In its October 27th issue, Business Week ran an article called, “It’s not a crisis of confidence”. In it, the writer raised the question, “What if the financial meltdown is a symptom, not a cause? What if we face a wrenching readjustment of the worldwide economy?” That’s a wrenching thought.
It’s one worth considering. For most of my lifetime, since World War II, we’ve basically run world finances our way. It was almost as if whenever there was a pie to be split, we cut it in pieces, ate the one of our choice, tucked most of the rest away for later, and let the rest of the world sniff the platter.
We helped ourselves to 50% or more of the world’s energy in 1950; we had just about the only unbombed factories on the planet. We fed the planet—at a price. We rebuilt Japan and Europe—using our money to buy materials from our companies.
Did you want to buy oil or machine parts? You used American dollars (the “gold” of the Twentieth Century) that you got from us. Our companies built (and sold) the most TVs, autos, machines, shoes and clothing. We controlled the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
We got so used to this life style that, as the older generation that had known a different era died off, we assumed it was God-ordained to go on forever. We never seemed to notice that as the rest of the world rebuilt its ruined factories (or built totally new ones) we were losing, inch by inch, our supremacy. First one business, then another went overseas—almost under the radar.
The world went on pegging everything to dollars. It loaned us the money to buy goods we used to make. The national leaders of what we called the Big Eight got together to discuss world finance, it seemed to us like the Big One and the seven dwarves.
Like a species of animal growing in an environment with no predators or natural enemies, we forgot all about the fact that such things might somewhere, sometime exist.
But somebody did finally offload a boatload of predators on our island. At first they were small and we hardly paid attention. Oh, when Japanese auto companies began to bite into Detroit’s market share, a few rowdies might chase an oriental looking guy down the street in Detroit.
Some Detroit suppliers wouldn’t allow Toyotas and Nissans to park in the lots outside their factories. But basically as our TVs came from Asia, our cars from abroad and our shoes and clothes from outside the country, we began to feel a bit of a chill. Nothing major, nothing to change our world view.
Then the tech support guys from Oregon and Upper Michigan went away. We found ourselves talking to people who hardly spoke English. We griped, we complained, and we muttered. But our basic perception of the world that had existed since the 1940s remained unchanged.
You still bought oil in dollars. The shrinking auto giants of Detroit went on being called, “The Big Three”. (We somehow ignored the fact that Chrysler was “big” only by comparison to a couple of car companies in Eastern Europe. And Ford was no longer second in the world. GM’s market share was halved.)
What Business Week is suggesting is that we may have reached a tipping point. Is the teeter totter really changing from up to down? Do the other guys finally really weigh more than we do?
Did the collapse of the overleveraged housing market merely expose a deeper—more frightening—reality? Are we going to have to start sharing that cake?
Do we have to deal instead of dictate? The gubernatorial race in Michigan two years ago brought something out that I found fascinating. The Republican challenger was the son of one of the founders of Amway, a mult-billion manufacturing and marketing firm.
Michigan was already in recession. DeVos’s campaign was premised on the fact that he had built a huge company in Michigan and he knew how such things were done. The Democrats gleefully pounced on the fact that he had built a factory in China that employs thousands there.
“He stole jobs from Michigan” was the cry. (It killed him at the polls.) No one seemed able to hear what he had to say. By making a DEAL with China in which he built a factory there, he was able to get them to agree to buy product from his plant in Michigan—thus saving four thousand US jobs.
No one heard. That got lost. His foes wanted the old system back. We cut up and keep the pie—you get to lick the crumbs. They couldn’t hear DeVos saying, “The world has changed”.
Business Week is essentially asking, “Is DeVos right?” Has the world really changed that much? Has the rest of the planet caught up with us? Does it have the power to demand and take a bigger piece of that pie?
It will be a wrenching change of we have to start sharing—if we can no longer dictate. Most of us aren’t going to enjoy it (even those of us who keep jobs) any more than a laid off Detroit auto worker does. It’s never fun to go from number one to one among many. It’s downright wrenching. That, more than greed on Wall Street, may be the cause of the loud ouches we hear from all over America.

Keeping Hillary Close

There’s talk about making Hilary Clinton Secretary of State in an Obama cabinet. (I shall resist the temptation to ask if that position has become home to the resident token female. I merely note that the last two presidents have had a woman in the slot.)
We should keep in mind that secretaries of state in my lifetime have had a great deal of impact on American foreign policy (Acheson and Dulles), all but none (Hull), and been glorified messengers for several presidents (Powell and Rogers).
In terms of actual power, the position is questionable. How much authority a Secretary of State has is totally dependent on his or her relationship with the President. Does he trust him or her; would he dare send him or her around the world to speak authoritatively for him? Or does he trust that person to speak only the words he or she has been programmed to speak?
Worse yet, does he send someone from his personal staff inside the White House to do the real negotiating—like Kissinger with China? Going in, Hillary can have no idea which niche she will find herself in. (If I were she I would think long and hard.)
There are lots of potential positives for Obama. Hillary certainly has some skills as a diplomat. She proved to be a popular figure abroad as First Lady. She has a vast popular following here that might be at least partially propitiated by Hillary receiving a high sounding title. Having a leash on Hillary just possibly might also mean having some control over Bill.
As I write he’s off in the Arab world doing “something” that appears to involve this or that financial entanglement. (When it comes to personal finances Bill and Hillary have often seemed to be more concerned with Bill and Hillary’s well-being than the national good.
While none of their investments have been proven strictly illegal, some of them have unquestionably left applicable law stretched and gasping for breath. Then there are all those rumors about how she took gifts and furnishings with her from the White House in 2001.)
Could it be that having Hillary in his cabinet—and her thus needing a relatively clean image—will enable Obama to keep both Clintons under reasonable control? Would there be a further advantage in having her in his cabinet and comparatively under his thumb—rather than in the Senate where she could keep her eye on future elections and subtly sabotage crucial legislation?
There are also negatives for Obama to consider. Can he trust her? What about Bill? Can they have a meeting of minds that must be there to have an effective and useful Secretary of State (like Bush apparently had with Condoleezza Rice)?
He’s got some serious and tough negotiations coming up. Two wars, Arab oil states, Asian economic competitors who may or may not play fair. It will take a serious load off him if he can rely on his Secretary of State to do at least some of the heavy lifting. Is that Hillary?
If he’s going to pick someone inside the White House to do his serious negotiating, why not make that person his Secretary of State? (If I were Obama I would think long and hard.)
But, then again, there may one positive that outweighs all. Remember the old adage? Keep your friends close; keep your enemies closer. Right in the cabinet?

A Potpourri on Obama

Here are few thoughts on our president elect. Now that he’s won everybody’s saying what I was a few weeks ago. Even Obama is saying it now. He, his supporters and his detractors are all admitting there are no quick and easy answers to the present economic or military situation.
The media talk about the grimness or seriousness of his expression when he talks about the financial mess we are in. Actually that’s not all bad. At least he knows he was talking twaddle on the campaign trail. Some politicians never admit it; worse, some never even realize it. That’s terrible; that he knows and admits it gives us hope.
Obama knows he’s got a steep climb in front of him, and he’s trying to find workable ideas and places to put his feet as we make that climb. He’s talking to a lot of the right people, and he’s taking it all seriously. That encourages me.
I read something in Newsweek yesterday that also made me feel better about him. The writer strongly suggested that Obama is the same kind of liberal that Ronald Reagan was conservative—at bottom a pragmatist. In other words, Obama isn’t any more likely to shift far to the left than Reagan shifted to the right.
Reagan preached a lot, but he didn’t lead his congregation any farther off dead middle than they were willing to go. Obama, writes Newsweek, is no more likely to lead his congregation any farther off the political middle. Reagan annoyed conservatives for his waffling; Obama will annoy liberals the same way.
I can live with that the same way Tip O’Neill could live with Reagan. I’m not happy; I certainly could wish he held some other views, but the most conservative of us can survive him. We appear to have a man who may prove to be a nearly moderate pragmatist.
There is no question that the mere fact of Obama’s election sends a message to the world and to us that we are no longer paranoid about people who are not like us. From the founding of the Republic, Americans have been victims of that fear. Now we seem to have taken a step or two past it. That can be very good.
But the Secret Service is reporting very high levels of threats to the president-elect—unprecedentedly high threat levels. That brings us to another worrisome American reality. On several occasions in our history our dislike of “others” has reached homicidal levels.
Let’s just talk about one period eighty years ago. It was a time when Americans were bitterly disillusioned with a war (World War I), and were facing a speculator fed prosperity that was doomed to collapse. Whole sectors of the economy were left hurting badly and our economic relations with the rest of the world stunk.
History books don’t stress how strong the “crazies” were then. But Ku Klux Klan rallies could gather thousands all over the nation. (Here in West Michigan, a trove of KKK records were uncovered several years ago that showed how incredibly many sheriffs and officials in the state were KKK members in the 1920s. That’s not the South, that’s Michigan!)
Then the entire economy collapsed. The GNP went down 50%; world trade dried up, families of four—the lucky ones—lived on $15 a week. Nazism and Fascism were on the rise all over the planet. We had the KKK here—and Father Coughlan, Huey Long—as well as a whole lot of students who were turning to Communism.
We were an entire nation about to fly apart over our own radicalism. Just as in Weimar Germany, there were millions of disillusioned, unemployed and angry voters ready to follow the extremist positions of any demagogue who came along (remember how many did listen to Coughlan and follow the Longs).
We were blessed with a Roosevelt whose greatest contribution to the United States would be to defuse the forces that could have given the Axis an ally on the Potomac. That’s a problem that Obama faces now. He’s doing a beautiful job of defusing. Will it be enough?
What happens to us if some crazy gets through the Secret Service in the next few months? Will there be rage? Riots? An explosion of radicalism on both sides of the political spectrum? I for one cannot imagine a more terrible blow to the nation than having something happen to Barak Obama. It will make the entire election a lie. It will shatter hope irretrievably in many quarters.
I suggest that people of all parties unite to pray for the safety of the president elect. We don’t even want to think of the alternative right now.

Killing the Golden Goose

Remember the story about the chap who had a goose that laid golden eggs, and he got greedy and killed the goose to get more? Well, the State of Michigan has been taking a few good whacks at that goose over the past few years. I bring it up because I suspect it may not be the only state to do so
First item on the agenda might be cutting back funding for state universities—especially the crown jewel, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. When I was college age it ranked among the top five universities in the nation, including the Ivy League. That’s a serious school.
(I might add that when Michigan achieved that rank, the University of California at Berkeley tied with Harvard one year for first. City College of New York was considered a first rate school. You don’t hear that about either of them any more. It’s not just Michigan.)
People came from all over the world to be treated at its medical school. Its engineering school, law school, and general education schools were among the best. Today, after a little cost cutting here and there over the years, it ranks about twenty-fifth. That’s a noticeable demotion.
Of course, in their infinite wisdom, the state fathers in Lansing voted to proclaim any state school that gave out a baccalaureate or two to be a “university”. That cost nothing, sounded good (in the interest of fairness) and reduced the term university as it applies to Michigan schools to meaninglessness. But it was cheaper than funding them.
Then it was the state parks system. I defy you to find a better system of state parks than those that exist along the shoreline of Lake Michigan in this state. People flock in from Chicago, Missouri, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, the Detroit area, Canada—I’ve met people from England, Egypt, Scotland and Syria on these beaches.
They bring money. They spend it. The parks are an awesome draw. You would think that Michigan would value this source of revenue. Seemingly not. Each year there are fewer and fewer park rangers. On-site housing for staff stands empty and abandoned. Bath houses stand bleak and untended with no showers, no concessions, and only two dimly lit toilets.
Lansing acts as if it doesn’t know these parks exist. When money has to be cut from the budget, the parks seem to be first on the operating table. After all, the parks merely make money. It’s so easy to lop off another cleaning crew, eliminate all life guards, or cut back on cleanup.
The only position that you can be sure remains staffed is the little booth that collects the state park entrance fees. Thirty years ago they were about $7.50 a season (up until 1962 there were no fees for day trippers at all). As the service declined and all but collapsed, the fees climbed to $30 this year and we are told to expect further raises next year.
Trust me, that booth will still be manned. Hasn’t been a life guard on those beaches in decades—and, like the salt seas, sometimes the lake can be dangerous. People do drown. But no life guards, just fee collectors.
How long will the out-of-state campers come to spend a week or two in parks that steadily go downhill in maintenance? If we’re losing General Motors, can we afford to sink the state park system too? What will be left to make money in Michigan? Just orchards?
Then, yesterday, I picked up our daily paper. The state fathers have decided to cut snow plowing on the two most important highways in this area. One is only the highway that runs along the coast. If you’re coming in from Chicago, US 31 is the road you take.
If you work thirty miles away in a Hermann Miller plant or one of hundreds of metal work and plastic part suppliers along the shore, US 31 is your only road. They’re going to reduce a major divided highway to secondary status. Why should workers—in a state where jobs are drying up and blowing away—be able to get to work on time—or at all?
How long can the goose go on laying golden eggs if they keep clobbering it? Do they think that if they kill it, everything inside will turn to gold this time? It didn’t in the story; it won’t now.

Don't Tell Us How to Build Cars!

Today, Secretary of the Treasury Paulson indicated he was not in favor of bailing out General Motors with the $750 Congress gave him to play with. GM says it has enough cash to last into the new year and very little beyond. Are we playing “Chicken” here?
Whatever the game is, it is hard not to feel that General Motors has it coming. Even in the face of the reality that if GM goes down, it will take with it tens of thousands of high paying, tax paying jobs through out the nation. It would be a monumental economic disaster.
But it is so hard not to think that GM has brought this on itself—that all of the “Big Three’ have brought it on themselves. Each of the companies, especially General Motors, is a monument to corporate arrogance. You want to think of that sneering corporate face finally brought down—but then you realize they are likely to swamp the whole boat as they fall out.
My dad served in the tank corps during World War II. (He was lucky enough to go in at the end of the war and not to see combat.) I remember one story, especially, that he told me.
Most people who know anything about WWII know that our main battle tank, the Sherman, was a tinker toy up against a German Tiger or Panther. Only because we made so many of them and had total air domination did our tankers survive.
The archives are full of stories of German and American tanks meeting face to face, the Americans getting off the first shot, and watching it bounce off. Then the Germans took aim and blew the Sherman right out of its treads.
Or of the GIs who drove their Sherman over a hill, saw a Tiger, and bailed out for their lives before it could sight in on them . Or of the GIs who came upon a French cement factory and slathered wet cement and pieces of metal on the front of their Shermans to protect themselves.
The army was well aware of this situation. My dad told me that when they would go to Detroit to complain about it, the auto executives would retort: WE build vehicles; don’t tell us how to do it.” Shut up and go away. With Detroit the customer is always wrong. Even if he’s getting killed.
I remember a great little story about Charlie Wilson, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense and former CEO of General Motors. During World War II, Wilson headed the GM division that made tracer bullets. After he joined the cabinet, he took a trip to Korea to see the war.
They started out driving in a Chevy truck. They got to a hill and the driver told him they would take a jeep from here on. Offended, the GM partisan demanded to know why. Why not the Chevy? The driver, who didn’t know Wilson from Adam, replied, “This damn Chevy wouldn’t make it up these hills.” Wilson had no clue.
As they drove up the mountains near the front lines, the night sky was lit up with flying lights. “What are those?” asked the man who had headed the division that made them. “Tracers” replied the driver. Wilson had made millions of them; he had never bothered to see one.
That’s our General Motors. My family drove Buicks from the 1950s on. Ten years ago I finally bought one. Cute, red, lots of gadgets. I like driving it. But from day one it had so many nagging little glitches, it drives me nuts. The manager of the Buick dealership that sold it to me retired soon after. ( Believe it or not, my wife’s Dodge minivan is holding up better.)
I bumped into the former manager one day and told him about the little things that were constantly going wrong. He nodded and told me about the time he went to Detroit for a dealers’ meeting with the Vice President of the Buick division. He said, “I brought up the same kinds of problems. I asked him, `What do I tell my customers?’”
The Vice President all but sneered back, “You don’t tell them anything.”
At long last, General Motors is getting snake bit by the arrogance that sustained it for so long. Once again, it looks like the people who had nothing to do with making GM what it is—us—will get hurt the worst. After all, they make cars. What do we know?
Is that why so many of us buy Toyota’s now?

My ducats, my dresses, my ducats

Oh, come, come, come. The Republican National Committee, having no better way to assuage its wrath over a thoroughly lost election, is now going to avenge itself on Sarah Palin’s wardrobe. Here, surely in all the realm of the Silly is the silliest reaction of all.
Hey, come on. They were the ones who looked at the gowns and jewelry sported by McCain’s rich wife at the convention and decided they’d better dress up Palin to match. So, with Cindy McCain’s wife as her model, Sarah obliged them and dressed herself up. She didn’t shop at Goodwill. Neither does Cindy.
So Sarah spent the past weekend sorting through which bra and set of undies she bought, and which were bought by the Republican Party. The Republican Party is coming to reclaim whatever it bought. It’s also muttering about making Palin pay for whatever she wore.
Palin points out that she shopped a lot like my wife does (at different stores, no doubt!). She took home three or four items, picked the one or two she liked and returned the rest. A good bit of the $150,000 probably came right back. (My wife has occasionally terrified me by coming home with a credit card full of goodies—and then returned most of it next week.)
But the Republican National Committee is having none of any rational explanation. The election has been lost. It is obviously all the fault of Sarah Palin’s wardrobe. Think, if they had only had that $150K to work with, it would have made all the difference. McCain would be president-elect.
It was the outfit from Saks that turned the tide—not at all the fact that fellow Republican George W. Bush has the lowest approval rating since Jefferson Davis (who also fought an expensive losing war). The election wasn’t lost in Iraq; it was lost on Fifth Avenue!
The fact that the entire financial structure of the United States—run according to the best conservative Republican principles—collapsed a month before the election had nothing to do with it. It was all the fault of those shoes she bought. And don’t forget the other accessories.
The fact that his IRA just tanked, he was likely to be laid off—or his once huge company was about to go under, that gas hit $4.00 during tourist season, that grocery bills are climbing, medical co-pays are on a non-stop rise, and that he’s about to lose his house, made no difference to the American voter.
His attention was focused on Sarah’s new clothes. He was outraged that money that might have bought a few more TV spots went into her wardrobe. This, and this alone, sent him out in great numbers to vote for “change”. So feels the Republican National Committee.
I understand that there is an emotional response to a thrashing like the Republicans took last week. I can well understand that the desire to figure out what went wrong (some of it should be obvious) is almost a compulsion right now. But let’s stay rational.
Sarah Palin did not lose the election. (And, if she did, blame the guy who picked her—she didn’t force her way onto the ticket.) She didn’t hand the nation to Obama. Blunders on Wall Street, blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan, and just plain horrible timing in the financial crisis did the damage.
Making a big thing out of repossessing Palin’s new clothes really isn’t going to help in figuring out how to react to the Democrats next year or in how to win in 2012. If Republicans have found a technical reason why buying her clothes is illegal under campaign finance law, then let the Party reimburse the campaign funds.
She’s not a rich woman. Even thinking of charging her for what she wore—at their behest—is cruel to the point of insanity. If there is a legal error here, they are as much or more responsible than she is.
In the realm of not just the silly, but the picayune and petty, this action pretty much takes the cake. Okay, Republicans, get mad. Get mad that the Democrats were able to raise such unbelievable amounts of campaign funds. Be angry that Obama came up with a message that resonated with the electorate.
Come up with some new ideas, new programs, figure out better fund raising tactics. Getting mad at a vice-presidential candidate that you cheered in September—and who tried to do exactly what she was told to do until it became so obvious that it just wasn’t working—should be beneath you.
Enjoy the dresses, RNC, and may they bring you many new voters.

Fuzzy Thinking on the Warfront

Before wishing Obama “Good Luck” extricating yourself from the twin tar babies, Afghanistan and Iraq, I want to caution against some of the same kind of sloppy thinking that got us into this mess in the first place. Obama, Bush, and several other highly placed personages have been making a point of late that we all—Christians and Muslims—“worship the same God”.
No. The Muslims don’t think that and neither does anyone who knows an ounce of theology. It’s not necessary to think that to negotiate with them, cut a deal, fight with them or make peace. You certainly don’t earn any respect from them if you do.
They will think they are dealing with fools and negotiate—or fight—accordingly. The Crusaders, for all their faults, understood this completely. Hugely outnumbered by their Muslim foes, they hung on to forts and land in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine for two centuries.
We could learn something from how they did it. Very, very quickly, they grasped the differences between Shiites, Sunnis and the more radical sects of Islam. Crusaders were constantly shifting allegiances between these groups—understanding that often Shiites hated Sunnis even more than they hated Christians. Or vice versa.
General Petraeus has finally begun to figure this out. His Crusader predecessors even allied themselves, from time to time, with the Eleventh Century equivalent of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Yes, they allied with people who had done them horrible—and sometimes humiliating—damage, keeping the higher goal in mind: survival.
Islam is a vast sea. It will drown you if you do not differentiate one droplet from another and conduct your negotiations accordingly. (Unless you really enjoy facing car bombs and suicide bombers forever.}
Further, we must understand, that while one sect of assassins (Eleventh Century) or Al-Qaeda today may momentarily ally with Christians to fight another group of Muslims, that alliance will not ever last. Eventually they will come together. After two centuries the last Christian knights were finally driven out.
Because ultimately Islam is an offshoot of a sect of Christianity deemed heretical since two centuries before Mohammad was born. It was a huge sect, probably over half the Christian world in the fourth century—the half that is now and has been for 1400 years, Muslim.
North Africa, the Near and Middle East (all Christian back then) fell on one side of a theological divide; most of Europe fell on the other. They were splitting the Roman Empire in pieces at precisely the point when Constantine was hoping to use Christianity to unite the empire.
The issue that divided them—and eventually has caused such bloodshed—was the question of the divinity of Christ. Most of Europe held that he was God, that the Godhead was triune—a trinity made up of Father, Son and Holy Ghost (think of a Notre Dame place kicker crossing himself before he kicks.)
The other half of Christianity held that he was something just less than God—the neo-Platonic Nous, for example. He was the creative urge, the creator of the universe—but he was not co-eternal with God, and not God himself: the highest of creation but not God. These were called Arians.
The partisans of these opposing views got very exercised over this. It was shattering the peace. Constantine called a huge Church Council in what is today Turkey. The Council voted that Christ was God—and you’d better believe it. The “or else” could get very unpleasant.
So for a couple of centuries the half that secretly thought Christ wasn’t God kept quiet and seethed.
Several years ago I asked a Muslim professor from Cairo why North Africa had fallen so quickly to the Muslim faith. He looked surprised. “They were Arians”, he said. “They believed in one, single God. When the Muslims invaded they said, `You believe what we believe; join us.’ And they did.”
The Muslims are not at all confused about the issue of a triune God as opposed to their belief in a single deity, who has neither “son” nor “father”. We should not act like fools and try to tell them we think it’s all the same.
That’s like saying whether you vote Republican or Democratic, it’s all the same. McCain and Obama are really the same person supporting the same positions. Both candidates would regard you as nuts. But that’s what we’re trying to say to Islam.
Why should they negotiate with complete fools? Fuzzy thinking didn’t keep the Crusaders in their fortresses for two centuries. It won’t help us either.

How a President Might Actually Govern

As I’ve said the last two days, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time the past 40 years thinking how a president could get a handle on the executive branch of the government. Technically, the Constitution says he’s in charge of that wing. Reality says he isn’t. So how can he gain control?
There are a couple of things that come to my mind. One—walk around. Have all of your cabinet officers, undersecretaries, assistant secretaries (all of the people who answer directly to the president get out of their secretary shielded offices and walk around.
Even the president himself—on a slow news day—get out and walk. I remember when I was at Health, Education and Welfare in the 1960s, people still remembered Nelson Rockefeller with a bit of awe. He was an assistant secretary under Eisenhower in 1953-4. He was also the only cabinet level officer any one could ever remember walking the halls.
The secretary at the door of every program knows an awful lot about what that program does and why. (Rarely does any executive, government or private industry, know as much as his secretary. They’re a lot like wives that way.) When a cabinet level officer shows up in front of her desk, with a big Rockefeller grin, and starts chatting and asking, she’s going start telling.
After all, her visitor represents real power—power that almost never shows up at the program level. She really has no choice but to answer the questions she’s asked. If she calls her boss, he has to answer too. And she knows he’d probably rather not be called. So she answers.
Mr. Secretary, Mr. President, you’ll learn a lot about your department that way. You’ll even remind its lowest level employees who the boss is—and that he’s alert, watching, aware. After you’ve chatted with several program chiefs and secretaries, your questions will be more knowledgeable and penetrating. You’ll sound like you actually know what’s going on. That will alarm them.
I have one more thought. Remember, I started this series by pointing out that unlike a CEO in private industry, a president cannot enforce his will be firing anybody. That badly cripples him. Realistically, you’re not going to overturn the Hatch Act. Better luck with Roe v Wade.
As it stands now, millions of federal employees are going to go on working to retirement, secure from being fired—at least for something as minor as allowing a President’s program to drop between the cracks. As long as he’s not guilty of overt defiance, he’s pretty much home free. (Besides there’s an excellent chance he’ll get all the way to retirement without ever meeting anyone who actually speaks for the administration.)
But there is something else Obama could try. He just might be able to make it happen because he has a large majority in both houses of Congress. Very early, preferably before January 20, he should sit down with the Democratic leadership in Congress.
He should make the point that he will take office with no real control over the executive branch—and yet he will be held responsible. American voters may even become unhappy if certain programs they were promised in the campaign do not come to pass. Congressmen understand this sort of reasoning.
Also, the normal fear that a Congress made up of one party might have at the thought of an effective president of the other party really running the executive offices will not be in play. They’re all in the same party now. So Obama might be able to talk them into it. Maybe.
I would ask for (no more than) one hundred chits. I would request legislation granting me the authority to discharge one hundred federal employees over the next four years. No pension, no appeal, no reinstatement. A prospect absolutely terrifying to a federal employee (with no social security).
Obviously—and Congress could see this—no president is going to use those chits promiscuously. He’s going to husband them. They will be like the atomic bomb—always there but rarely actually used. But any bureau chief or program director talking to the president or a cabinet officer will be very, very aware of them. It will make him far more tractable than he would otherwise be.
The president should use two or three of them early on—to show they really exist and he has the nerve actually to use them. Then just hold them in reserve until they really need to be used.
A president and cabinet who actually call in program chiefs and talk to them; officials who get up and walk the halls; and a president who has the power to fire—if only a few—that will result in an administration that has a reasonable handle on what’s going on and the ability to direct what is happening.
You will have the first president since, possibly, Andrew Jackson who makes a serious effort to take responsibility for what happens in the executive branch.

How a President Can Find Out

Continued from last time – how does a president find out what’s going on in the executive branch of the United States Government? Before we figure out how he gains control, he has to know what is going on. This is not an easy trick.
One time, when I was working in the Surgeon General’s Office, I got curious as to how many grant making mechanisms, individual programs, existed in just the Public Health Service. I thought that should be easy to find out. How wrong I was.
There may be a census for the American people, but there is no census for the American government. No one could tell me how many programs that made grants there were in the Service. Certainly no one had a figure for the entire cabinet level department – Health, Education and Welfare as it was then called. I began to suspect no one wanted to know.
Just to be sure, I began calling other departments. Nobody at Agriculture or Labor or Commerce could give me a figure. There was certainly NO figure for the federal government as a whole. I realized that Congress didn’t know either. They were working out budgets for each department and agency, and they really, really didn’t know what these bodies did.
A couple of years later, when I was working in New York as a fund raiser, I made another attempt—this one from the outside—to find out. No luck whatsoever. The executive branch is a vast organization full of mid-level managers who know they will never get another promotion unless they create more programs and hire more people to run them and be managed. They constantly find ways. I did.
So what would I do if someone took me at gunpoint and stuck me in the Oval Office? First I would demand duplicate copies of the phone books for every single government department and agency in Washington.
Then I would call in all the cabinet members and agency heads under presidential control in the executive branch and hand them the phone book for their respective organization. Then I would tell them that what I was going to ask of them would be a top priority—and that they would report to me each week on their success carrying out this directive.
Once a week, I would be picking up a phone book at random and picking a program at random. I would then call the director of that program, his second and third in command, and demanding their presence in my office within one hour. Each cabinet officer and agency head would do the same thing with his or her own agency.
The program head would be directed to bring their budgets, their list of personnel, a list of all program activities and actual expenses to that meeting. Then I (or the agency head) and a good accountant would go through the figures, the charts and personnel records and ask a lot of questions. We might even send them home for more answers.
If things seemed too fuzzy, a White House audit team might be sent to visit program HQ and other offices throughout the country to get answers. In the end, we would know what that program did. The government grape vine would go into high gear and acts would be cleaned up all over Washington.
At the end of two or three years—having shared notes with the other agency heads—the administration would have a decent idea of what actually went on in the various departments and agencies. That’s time consuming, but if you want to get a handle on an organization as big and ungoverned as the federal executive branch, I cannot think of better way of doing it.
So many unauthorized programs would die unborn in the fear of a White House or cabinet level audit. You would find a line item for every activity that did occur. The bureaucracy would be compelled to realize that they really, really answered to the person with the title Chief Executive.
Because you see, Hatch Act or no, if these interviews actually turned up malfeasance (and misappropriation of funds qualifies), a bureaucrat can actually be fired. Or demoted. Or reassigned to a penguin counting mission in Antarctica for a couple of years.
I remember how much fear just the thought of a Congressional or White House inquiry could inspire among my fellow bureaucrats. Fear can have salutatory consequences when wisely wielded. It’s one tool a president can use. So I say to Senator Obama, Use it!

What Presidents Never Find Out

What if Jack Welch had begun his job as CEO at GE without the power to fire any employee at all? What if he had no idea—and no real way of finding out—what all the divisions of GE actually did? Would he be deemed a business Guru today? Would he have a column in Business Week?
That’s exactly the situation Barack Obama will walk into next January. It’s the situation Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Ike, Truman, FDR all walked into. A little known secret is that the president has no real control over the civilian side of government.
The one branch he does not run is the executive branch. A president can threaten, cajole and sometimes influence individual congressmen. He can appoint Supreme Court justices that agree with his policies. He can wage war. But he has had no effective way of influencing the executive wing—or even figuring out what it’s up to—since the Hatch Act was passed in 1939.
That’s the law that protects civil servants from politics. In other words, no Democratic president can make a civil servant follow his policies or program any more than George Bush could have made them follow his directives. They are insulated. They cannot be fired.
This gives them enormous power. When I worked in the bowels of the bureaucracy the saying was, “Presidents come and go, we stay.” Presidents—and cabinet officers—are never allowed to realize their impotence. Senior bureaucrats can be slavish in their expressions of deference and obedience.
The president hears them, becomes used to their obsequiousness, possibly even believes them and then goes back to his Oval Office. They go back to their offices and do exactly what they have planned all along to do, whichever president is in power.
I recall having a fairly high ranking bureaucrat open a drawer and show me plans for an expensive new project his program was planning to build. He freely admitted Congress had no idea, nor did the secretary of the department. “Don’t tell anyone,” he said—and put it back in its file.
This came as no shock to me. I was second in command of a small program that had no legal budget whatsoever. We had powerful backers. They bludgeoned and dragooned funds (that had been appropriated for something else) out of various bureaus and divisions until we had enough to fly around the country and run our program.
Go through the 1965-67 federal budget and you will find no trace of my program. We had no authorization whatsoever. Believe me, we were not alone. Had an auditor made any sort of fuss, the worst that would have happened to us is reassignment. The Hatch Act protected us.
I don’t think Clinton or Bush were aware of this reality—or that they are to this day. I am sure president-elect Obama hasn’t a clue. The civilian bureaucracy is huge; it is located in every city in the nation. It is essentially faceless.
(I do not in the least mean to put down the millions of civil servants who work long hours to protect our health, our safety and watch over the products we use. They keep our job sites safe, they fund vital medical research, they send me my social security cheque on precisely the same day of every month. They land our planes safely and they battle terrorists and crime. All I am saying, is that the president has very little to say about what they do. He doesn’t even fully realize the fact that he doesn’t. Bureaucrats are also very good at insulating presidents and cabinet officers.)
President-elect Obama has been a senator. I’ll bet he has never roamed the halls of an executive department asking what they do. Bush and Clinton have been governors. None of them ever had the eye view of the executive department I had—because I worked there. I was one of them.
I’ve spent a lot of time the last forty years figuring out what a president could do to get some handle on the departments he is constitutionally required to run. I’ll share some of my thoughts—for what they may be worth—over the next day or two.
It may sound arrogant to suggest I know something our government that presidents don’t. But I do.

An Officer and a Gentleman

John McCain started adult life as an “officer and a gentleman”; he remains an officer and a gentleman. It was a most gracious concession speech, hopefully it will even be a healing speech. He remarked on the election of a black American to the Presidency, and he promised to do all he could to help the new President. He called upon his followers to do the same.
He said that losing was all his fault. Good officers do that. Eisenhower gave a victory speech when D Day succeeded—but he had another speech in his pocket in case the invasion failed. It said, “It is all my fault.”
To paraphrase Shakespeare, nothing became McCain’s campaign so much as his leaving it.
So it’s President Obama. He just never quit; he kept chugging along. There were times during the primary season when he reminded me of the Tortoise. Hilary, the speedy Hare, kept winning big states, but Obama slogged around picking up delegates in little bitty states. He proved Aesop right.
After the Republican convention his numbers dropped again. By mid-September it was a real horse race. There was no sure winner. And then came the collapse of the banks and the once great houses of finance. People were losing their retirement, their equities; even their savings seemed threatened.
When that happens you blame the party in the White House. That’s probably fair enough since the same President will take full credit while the markets go up and people make money. Poor John McCain –he had the Republican label printed all over him.
I won’t even try to speculate on whether Sarah Palin made a significant difference. But I honestly cannot see how Romney or “America’s Mayor” or anyone else on the ticket would have helped either –not with the entire American financial structure tottering toward bankruptcy.
After that the Democratic horse pulled into an insurmountable lead. It would have taken a “walk on water” or “raise the dead” miracle for any Republican to win the White House yesterday. They can try to blame Greenspan, or even Ayn Rand—they can point out that these policies were followed during Clinton’s administration (and that up to this summer, the Democrats were bragging on that fact), but the reality is that the roof fell in on a Republican watch.
The Republicans haven’t faced a massacre like this since LBJ crushed Goldwater in 1964—or Roosevelt buried Landon in 1936. As football coaches, facing a dismal season, like to say, “It’s rebuilding time.”
This week’s Newsweek has a long article pointing out that Obama faces massive troubles—for which there may be no easy cure or any cure at all. You can immediately point out that Roosevelt faced a similarly daunting task—and didn’t see victory over the Depression for ten years.
But I will point out some significant differences. In Roosevelt’s time we didn’t have trillions in debt piled on us—that has to be serviced at huge cost before we can do any rebuilding. Even if an Adolph Hitler is waiting in the wings for us to wage war upon, where is the huge pot of gold that we picked up when the shooting stopped in 1945?
But that lies in the future. Right now we can say to the entire world, no matter how much hostility may exist between individual blacks and whites, a black American CAN climb the highest mountain.
What Abraham Lincoln wrote to Frederick Douglas is now refuted. Even if I thought the races equal—which I do not—he wrote, the American public would not accept such an idea. Well, Obama just went equal big time: with the likes of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan, both Roosevelts, Jackson, Washington, Jefferson—and Lincoln, himself.
Now he’s got to deal with it. Whether he will be a “good” president or a “bad” one waits to be seen. But nobody can argue that he’s a racially inferior one. He settled that for all time.

How Christians Should Win

Yesterday I wrote on the demographic shift that has made many conservative Christian tenets—once adhered to nationally—minority positions today. Many Christians have not even admitted that this shift has occurred, let alone figured out how to deal with it.
I am going to address these comments primarily to conservative Christians—although others are certainly welcome to follow along. How should a Christian who finds his stands on abortion, homosexuality, etc., react when they no longer can command a majority of the votes?
One suggestion might be that we withdraw our unwinnable positions from the political arena. As a kid I heard a doggerel that went, “Old farmer Jones, sittin’ on a fence, tryin’ to make a dollar out of 65 cents … .” You can’t make one hundred votes out of sixty-five, either. That’s one of the nasty things about democracy.
And then, do what? Do what Christians have historically done to change societies around them. One, stop shouting political slogans and pray. Many Christians pay lip service to the power of prayer, but when it comes to political issues, they seem to believe only in the power of the ballot. So, pray.
Next, show love and compassion. For fagots and baby killers? Christ said he came to minister to precisely those kinds of people. “I come to judge no man.” (There will be a judgment, but that’s in a different time and place, and it’s none of our business.) We must stop judging and start caring.
Christ said that people would and should recognize Christians through the love they show. Angry demonstrations against abortion clinics and gay pride rallies, to name two, show very little love. The image left with non-Christians is of a hostile and potentially violent group.
Well, how would Christ handle abortion clinics and gay pride parades? Same way he handled gladiatorial combat, I suspect. There was a theatre for them just outside of Jerusalem. Did you ever hear a word about that holocaust from him—even though he must have walked past it many times?
No, he waited until love and prayer changed society. (It didn’t come with Constantine’s conversion, either. After that, Christians simply threw pagans to the lions for a few centuries.) The same way early Christians handled slavery. In silence. Praying and loving. Changing society as a whole first.
It wasn’t until the early 1700s that a sect of Christianity known as Quakers formed anti-slavery societies in America. For millennia before Christ and millennia after, slavery went right on—and Christians who could not make a dollar out 65 cents kept silence and prayed.
In Christ’s day, there were no abortions. There was infanticide. When faced with an unwelcome child, you put it out in the cold and let it freeze or let the dogs eat it. Just as much carnage as caused by abortion clinics. Do you hear a word about that from the early church? (They didn’t have the votes.) No. Just centuries of changing society through love and prayer.
In 1964 it was finally codified that women were the equal of men. That certainly wasn’t true in Christ’s day. Nor is it true in the non-Christian world today. So how did it come about? Quietly changing society with no angry demonstrations or condemnation. Until they finally had the votes.
If you believe in prayer, try it. Stop shouting and carrying on. Calm your E-mails and preachments down. If your prayers and kindness change society enough, you will someday have the votes. You just don’t have them now.
Does this mean don’t vote? Of course not. Pick candidates and nominees that are as close to your positions as you can find. Vote for them. Don’t ask them to be perfect or to adhere totally to your position on anything—they have to get elected, after all. Be realistic about the “sixty-five cents” you have got. Don’t try to make it something more.
Let’s be known for our love—not our spleen.

The Christian Right -- Betrayed by Democracy

American political demographics have changed dramatically within a human lifetime. The problem for conservative American Christians is that they haven’t figured it out yet—or what it means for them and for some of their most cherished positions. It happened too fast.
Like millions my age, I grew up listening to democracy glorified off the pulpit. Preacher after preacher would tell us how blessed we were to live in a democracy, what a wonderful thing it was to live in a democratically Christian nation.
They could view it as a blessing because, forty and fifty years ago, they had the votes. It was inconceivable to them that a day might come when democracy became a two edged sword, slashing at virtues, mores and morals no longer supported by a majority of the voters.
The term “moral majority” in the early 1980s was really a plaintive question – aren’t we? It hasn’t really changed, has it? The majority of Americans still support the same positions that we do – don’t they?
To prove that things had not changed, televangelist Pat Robertson declared himself a candidate for president in 1988. I remember the fervor with which many of my fellow Christians enlisted in his cause. Then came reality. Right here in Michigan. Robertson’s wing of the Republican Party was smashed beyond retrieval at the state party convention. George H.W.Bush hammered them into the ground.
Stunned, they fell back, licking their wounds—never to be the self-confident same again. But they still could not admit that the world had changed so drastically. After all, in the 1950s, a vast majority of the body politic – however hypocritically—claimed themselves adherents to and partisans of the conservative Christian point of view. Billy Graham was a national hero.
One small case in point—in 1952 and 1956, conservative Christians made a point of not voting for the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, because he had been divorced. This contributed in no small part to the Eisenhower landslides in those years.
Today, it is the Republican candidate who once upon a time walked away from “the wife of his youth” and married an attractive and rich younger woman. Not even a whisper of criticism on the point. Too many of the rest of us have been divorced and remarried.
In the 1950s if I knew any homosexuals they were well closeted. I never heard anyone speak of it. I think I reached twenty-one, the age of legal maturity, without every hearing the word “abortion”. I certainly never knew of anyone who had one. We drank enough beer to keep the Monitor afloat, but no one I knew ever used narcotics.
We had the votes. In Grand Rapids there was only one drugstore open on Sundays—and it rotated throughout the city. When we went to the movies, even married couples slept in double beds and kissed chastely. (Some foreign types were sneaking in movies with subtitles and naked women in them—but you had to hunt to find them.) We had the votes.
No department stores, hardware stores, supermarkets or clothing stores were open on Sunday. Professional football was a fairly minor sport – possibly because it was played on Sunday when many of us were forbidden to watch it. We had the votes.
“Suddenly” it’s changed. We don’t have the votes. We seem to be back in some kind of pre-Christian era where there is no accepted standard of (Christian) morality. Now democracy bites. We simply do not have the votes any more—and Christians don’t know how to adapt to this.
They deny it. They talk of majorities that simply do not exist any more. They demand of (largely Republican) candidates adherence to standards that cannot command a winning margin in general elections. They become furious when those candidates make the least concession to reality.
The political American world has changed. Democracy is no longer automatically our friend. So how do we function as a minority in a world that no longer espouses our most cherished beliefs? That is the great question facing conservation American Christendom.
I’ll write more on that tomorrow.