Obama, Oil and The Deep Blue Sea

You have to feel sorry for anybody who sits in the White House. It’s a trap. You can’t go out for pizza; you can’t take a walk; you can’t put the place up for sale and move. Bush found that out when Katrina landed on him five years ago.
The City of New Orleans had spread out into lowlands that no one in his right mind would have built a house on during its first couple of centuries. But it had gotten crowded and poorer people had moved out where land was cheaper—and far less safe.
Whooooosh. Everything was gone. Somehow it became Washington’s job to move tens of thousands of people out of the way of a massive (and entirely predictable) natural disaster overnight—in moments. This while New Orleans police and rescue personnel were going AWOL in great numbers to rescue their own families, and mayor was holed up in the upper stories of a hotel.
Everybody hates Washington—until the floods come. Reminds one of Kipling’s poem dedicated to “Tommy” the soldier. Despise him, keep him away—“until the guns begin to shoot. Then it’s Tommy, savior of your country!” In this country, it’s why can’t Washington do the impossible—yesterday or even the day before.
Now it’s Obama’s turn. I watched on ABC News as Obama knelt down on a Louisiana beach and vowed to do something, to stay with you. And do what—send several million gallons of gushing oil into outer space?
Then the cameras switched to some civilians in diners and on the street. Did they believe him? The headshakes were eloquent. Of course they didn’t and, unless Obama is far less sane than I think he is, he didn’t believe himself.
What are you going to DO about millions of gallons of oil pouring out into water one mile straight down? Realistically? Kneel down and the beach, get some squishy, oily mud on your fingers and vow to hang in. No other real options.
Churchill made one of his heroic World War II speeches, knowing that the British Army basically didn’t have enough rifles for each soldier to have one. He had to kneel down on the beach and sound brave. “We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them in the hills” and so forth.
Then he put his hand over the mike and muttered, “We will hit them over the head with beer bottles as they crawl ashore. That’s all we have left to work with”.
He didn’t have to reach a mile down to the ocean bottom in order to do it. (Roosevelt found a couple of million World War I rifles and rushed them to England.) Obama’s got a tougher problem to deal with. No one’s got a beer bottle with a long enough neck for an undersea oil spill.
As I say, everybody should pause a moment to feel sorry for a president, Democrat or Republican. You come to Washington trailing clouds of campaign glory. You are going to reform education, reform health care, end war, put the economy back on track—and the war goes on; people too selfish to join a pool to pay for universal health care prove intractable, and the economic problems are absolutely terrifying in their complexity.
Maybe he made the right calls, maybe he didn’t—but the fact is they are still shooting in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the consequences to us of a European collapse are unthinkable. Nothing is truly cured. Our biggest curse—total dependence on Arab enemies for our fuel—seems unsolvable. So he tries to drill for more (just like Bush) … .
Pop goes the whole rig, pipe and oil deposit. A whole mile down. One more disaster to solve—with beer bottles; it’s all he’s got to work with.

Is Washington Reading The RIGHT Books?

Well, it’s official. What we are blowing off in the Gulf is now the biggest oil spill in American history. We see it beginning to clog up the fisheries and wild life preserves along the Louisiana coast, it is threatening to take a ride on the Gulf Stream and wreck a few beaches on the Atlantic side. Nobody seems to have a handle on how to stop it.
Obama has just ordered a halt to all deep sea drilling—and without it our dependence on our Arab friends (in places terrorists come from) is increasingly total. It would be like finding, in the throes of World War II, that we were dependent on the Axis for our ammunition.
Oh, goodness gracious, would we work to find a substitute! (We got caught in such a bind during the Civil War when none-too-friendly England was in a position to cut off our munitions and threatened to do so. The South would have won instantly.)
You would think being at the mercy of a few mercurial Arab states would inspire us to start serious work at finding a substitute for petroleum. (No! I don’t necessarily think building more windmills or growing more corn is going to do it. Got a windmill that will propel your car?)
I mean finding a substitute for petroleum itself. Something that burns in an eight cylinder engine just as effectively as gasoline. After all, the Germans came up with a recipe for synthetic oil during the Second World War. They had very little fuel.
So they came up with something that would fly an airplane engine that burned 100 octane gas with great efficiency. Where is that recipe? As I’ve written before, it was brought to Washington after the war—but never translated. I don’t think anyone in Washington even remembers that such a thing exists. Or perhaps “existED is the more apt word.
It seems our schools aren’t the only place where no one reads. They don’t seem to do a whole lot of it at the Pentagon, the White House or Congress. I’ve written before how, during Vietnam, no one in charge seemed to have ever read the official evaluation of strategic bombing during WWII. (If they had, they never would have imagined they could lick North Vietnam with bombs.)
They bombed—more tons that we dropped on Europe or Japan throughout the big war. They accomplished nothing beyond killing a few people. Nobody read the report on what bombing could actually accomplish—and what it could not do.
No one in the State Department ever read DeGaulle’s “Memoirs” after they were translated. If they had, they never would have been surprised—shocked, I mean, SHOCKED—when De Gaulle threw us and NATO out of Paris in the 1960s.
I hear about each president that he busies himself reading about what past presidents wrote and thought about life. Interesting and sometimes useful. But how much time do you think either Bush or Obama spent poring over intelligence reports on the backgrounds of people running the training camps in Yemen or Pakistan?
Has anybody got any kind of a fix on the nuclear armed, saber rattling North Koreans? I’d be reading intensely on what it would take for us to stop them if they pulled another 1950 on us. That time they pinned us into a tiny little corner of southeastern Korea.
Who’s reading up on the Chinese military? What are its real capabilities. What kind of weapon systems are they building? Stuff aimed at Tibet and the western wastes—or stuff that could carry them all the way to Hawaii. In how many years?
What’s our backup plan if we ever lost our bases in Britain? What do we plan to do if Canada splits into warring factions? Does it spill over into Vermont and New York? Do we live without the St. Lawrence Seaway? Whom do we back? What’s the price of neutrality?
Again, what can we use as an alternative to petroleum that can actually run my Buick or my wife’s Dodge Caravan? Those are the matters we should be reading about—and trying to figure out.
It’s not just Johnny who doesn’t read.

Obama and NASA

Obama has slashed the space program budget. This will offend people of my age who remember the Glory Days when we beat the Russians to the moon (“Rah, rah, rah—go team”) as well as those who profess a love of knowledge for its own sake.
Neither are adequate reasons for maintaining the space program in its present form. Were I in Obama’s place, I would probably have cut NASA way back too. Years ago I began looking at the space program through the eyes of historical precedent. I didn’t like what I saw.
Compare NASA today to the court of Henry the Navigator in the 1400s. Henry knew there was land (planets) out there; he knew there was MONEY to be made from those lands. He invested on a century long program of exploration that eventually paid off in billions if not trillions.
We can’t say that about NASA or any aspect of the space program today. (Yes, to paraphrase “Cabaret”, “Money, money, money is what makes exploration go around”.) Columbus was sent to make money. When he didn’t find it, they tossed him in jail.
Cortes found it—and began a long chain of successful exploration that brought back vast fortunes in gold, silver, spices, tobacco, sugar, furs, cotton, coffee, bananas, diamonds, rare metals and oil. To merit serious funding, the space program has to pay for itself the same way.
NASA has to begin working on four things, right here on earth, before we buy it any new, big toys. ONE) Ships with bigger payloads. Right now over 90% of the space on our space rockets is wasted on fuel. The payload (cargo) is limited to a few hundred pounds.
It’s going to be hard to build mining and living stations on other planets transporting materials in such tiny increments. We won’t be able to bring the goodies back in large enough amounts to pay for the huge number of flights needed.
We’ve got to get past gravity. Fantastic? No more so than taking building blocks of the universe that we cannot even see and creating atomic energy. We don’t even understand electricity, but it seems to make my computer and my refrigerator work just fine. In the 1940s, we had to build an atomic bomb; today we have to get past gravity. Improbable—but we did it then.
TWO) We have to start working on locating stuff we need. We have to make plans (and equipment) for how exploratory teams are going to look for it once we get to this stuff on other planets. How are we going to get it on the ships? How are we going to get it onto the planet?
If our spectrometers locate an unknown substance on Mars even now (like sugar, oil or potatoes in the new world), we have to be figuring out possible uses of it even at this stage. No one in Henry’s court could have told you what they were going to find in Montezuma’s back yard.
THREE) We’ve got to work on speed. Admittedly, the entire “age of exploration” took place in times when it took weeks and months to cross from one land mass to another. But the industrial age, which eventually produced a slave-free modern society, didn’t really get rolling until we could cross oceans in a few days.
Just like atomic energy and gravity, we have to get past the speed of light. Trickier, no doubt. Not an immediate need—but our imaginations are already nibbling at it. We’ll certainly never get to the age of Kirk and Spock without doing so. We should work on it, beginning now.
FOUR) We have to come up with “shields” of some sort to protect our ships and space stations. Space is full of nasty little projectiles that hurtle about at dangerous speeds and smash into things. Our atmosphere mostly protects us from them. Ships in space don’t have protective atmosphere.
Scientists tell us that our current space station has just been lucky so far. A fleet of ships that travel regularly from one planet to another will probably need more than luck. When we put people and equipment up there we will need to protect them from meteorites, asteroids and who knows what all else may be whizzing about.
Tell NASA, stay home and worry about basic things like these. When you’re on your way to solving them, we can talk about big budgets and voyages of exploration. We should still dream of “boldly going where no one has gone before”, we just aren’t ready yet.

Simple Arithmatic That Tea Partys Miss

Last time I talked about what I consider to be the absurdity of the Tea Party position—however mainstream American it may be. Now let’s talk about some valid concerns Americans do have about our present governmental activities.
Last evening I stopped to chat with a neighbor who has run his own construction business for several decades, does good enough work to be prospering in recession, and is much too busy to take time off for tea parties of any kind.
He just evaluates the fiscal policies in Washington from the standpoint of the simple arithmetic that has to govern his own business decisions. If you earn $1,000 a week and you continually spend twelve or thirteen hundred, at some point something bad is going to happen.
Very basic—a well educated third grader could probably walk you through it. Neither he nor I are refuting Keynes—but Keynes in his wildest imagination probably didn’t contemplate a level of governmental spending in GOOD TIMES and BAD that led to consistent and often huge deficits on a regular basis.
We haven’t just spent our way out of recessions and depressions. If bad years were the only time we had run deficits, our national debt would be infinitely smaller. Keynes’s idea was to ramp up government spending when everybody else was flat—and, hopefully, to PAY IT OFF IN GOOD YEARS. Like a nearby power plant works in Michigan.
At night when demand for electricity is low, it expends energy pumping Lake Michigan water into a huge reservoir. When day comes and homes and factories turn on the juice, the water flows back out, turns the turbines and generates power.
This is the backup plant that is used to restart electrical plants all over Michigan in cases of major power failure. It’s precisely the sort of thing Keynes had in mind in government finances. Unfortunately the United States has been running the water out without pumping much in for decades.
My neighbor’s concern is that at some point the fiscal reservoir is likely to run dry—even if he doesn’t say it in those terms.
He’s right. The American lust for a free lunch—first noted when we refused to pay our fair share of defense taxes during and after the wars with France—is eventually going to catch up with us. Since the 1960s (the game began long before Reagan) we’ve been cutting taxes (water being pumped into the reservoir) and piling on new programs, Medicaid, college aid and grants, Medicare, Social Security entitlements, enhanced welfare and fighting wars (water flowing out), without paying for it.
Had we been regularly replenishing the reservoir, we might well have afforded a few trillion here, a few trillion there to bail out our economy in 2008. (Then again, if we had always been the kind of people willing to PAY for government services, we might never have gotten into the mess we were in a year ago.)
At some point, as Greece found out, the reservoir really will run dry. Then there will be no more juice generated—and nothing with which to restart the plant. But the problem isn’t a “socialist Obama” who is the first president ever to run us into debt.
The problem is us. WE stood at Bunker Hill or at Boston Harbor and shouted that we wouldn’t pay for the services we demanded from government. WE voted for what George H.W. Bush called “voodoo economics” back in 1980 when we elected Reagan.
WE cheered as Lyndon Johnson slashed taxes, created vast new programs and launched a very expensive war all at once. WE loved George W. Bush as he cut taxes and launched his world wide war on terror.
Someday we definitely are going to get a notice: “Your credit limit has been exceeded”. That’s when the tea party people will really have something to be mad about.

Obama--Cutting Back The Nukes: Good Idea?

The Obama Administration just announced that it is going to change certain aspects of American nuclear war policy. Specifically it is going to list situations in which it would NOT resort to nuclear weaponry. That reverses policy that has been in place most of my life.
The idea makes me nervous. I understand that there has always been pressure to take nukes out of the military equation because they scare the liver out of everybody. But, I remind you, that’s the whole point of nuclear deterrence.
Let’s not forget that it has worked. It’s been sixty-five years since the last major war. There were only twenty-one years between World War I and World War II. There were 99 years between World War I and the previous world war (the Napoleonic wars). That century without major war lasted only so long as one nation maintained an absolute preponderance of naval power.
So long as no would could sneeze or speak without British concurrence you had peace. When Germany built a fleet to rival England’s, war became as inevitable as a fallen soufflé in a fireworks display. The atomic/hydrogen bomb eliminated the need for any one nation to have absolute military superiority. You didn’t mess with anybody who had nukes and a credible willingness to use them.
When I was in graduate school, former President Eisenhower’s foreign policy was a thing of contempt and distain among modern young (and liberal) professors. Eisenhower was a major architect of the policy of massive nuclear retaliation.
Kennedy won the election of 1960 in part because he demanded that we limit our dependence on nukes and come up with more conventional options. Like Obama, he worked to limit situations under which we would use nuclear or hydrogen weapons.
In a seminar course, a professor of mine sneeringly asked if anyone wanted to try to defend Eisenhower/Dulles foreign policy. (It was also an article of faith among liberal scholars that Ike was merely a puppet for John Foster Dulles.) I agreed to try.
I did lots of reading. I soon could demonstrate that, if anyone was the puppet, it was Dulles. I came up with a lot of other facts that definitely indicated Eisenhower’s methods of preserving the stalemate peace between the Soviets and the US had a lot to be said for it.
I summed up what I had learned in a simple allegory with which I began my presentation. I created the verbal image of an old western bar room (pre-atomic Europe, if you will). Every Saturday night there was a shooting (The Napoleonic Wars, World War I, The Seven Years War, etc.). and every Sunday bodies were buried.
A new sheriff was elected—who had seen enough gun fights and didn’t like them (Ike). The first Saturday night he was on duty, he carried a beaker of liquid into the bar. “This,” he announced, ” is a jar full of nitro-glycerin.” He sat down, set the jar on the edge of his table and ordered his dinner. “Golly,” he said, “I hope no one knocks this glass over.”
No shooting that night, or the next or the next. Things went on for a few years until a young fellow (named Kennedy) ran for sheriff. “How awful,” he proclaimed, “to have such dangerous stuff as nitro in a bar full of people!!! Let’s get rid of it!”
He got elected. He removed the jar of liquid that scared people so much and came into the bar with the latest model Colt pistols on his hips (remember McNamara and the Whiz Kids at the Pentagon?). A couple of Saturday nights later there was a shooting, and then another. The undertaker was back in business.
My instructor was enraged. He ranted at me for a full hour after class was supposed to end. He walked out muttering, “I didn’t think it could be done” and gave me an “A”. Today, of course, most historians think better of Eisenhower than they did in 1966.
Let’s not forget WHY he had that bottle of nitro sitting on the table.

Obama--A Salubrious Cynicism Indeed

A couple of days ago I wrote that Obama probably does not have “the kind of arrogance that will make him prey to [the] sort of hubris” that makes him forget power in Washington is not so much held as derived from others. I added that I sensed “a salubrious cynicism in him.”
He wrought brilliantly to resurrect health care reform from the dead and get it through the House. Even those who don’t like him or the bill have to hand him that! Getting the bill passed required a masterpiece of political statesmanship.
George Bush demonstrated it when he got his tax cuts through; Reagan displayed it when he pushed Reaganomics through a Democratic Senate; Clinton flaunted it time after time with both Democratic and Republican Congresses. LBJ and Nixon both had the knack.
Now, for the first time in his presidency, Obama shows us that he, too, can run something—specifically, he can push a program hugely unpopular with large segments of the American population and the opposing party right into law. Give him credit.
Then, as soon as Congress folds its tents and sneaks out of town for its own version of Spring Break, Obama displays a wonderful version of Chicago ward boss politics. (Run against the King of England; get them to vote early, vote often.)
He slipped fifteen major appointments—that require Senate approval—through as “Recess appointments”. The rules say that if you use a recess appointment, the guy (or gal) can serve a year or more without being confirmed by anybody.
Whooosh, they’re in. I know I should be properly peeved as my fellow Republicans all profess to be, but I can’t help but grin a bit. Apparently wandering around Chicago as a community organizer, watching how politics is played in that grand old town, taught Obama something.
The Republicans used to procedural grounds to hold up these appoints for nearly eight months; that does smack of pure politics. (Then again, if they really didn’t like some of the people—and they did not—what other choice did they have against an overwhelming Democratic majority?) So everybody was playing politics—and Obama end played them.
Republicans went through the motions—John McCain pleaded with Obama not to use Recess Appointments—and Obama paid as much attention to them as he did during the 2008 campaign. Obama has been a bit rough on McCain lately, true enough.
During the bi-partisan summit on health care reform, he tartly reminded a pontificating McCain that “the election is over”. He just gave him another reminder last weekend. “The election is over; I make the Recess Appointments; you don’t.”
Obama looked like a patsy last year. He allowed the international community and BOTH parties in Congress to walk all over him. Last weekend he showed, finally, that he can be a political “son-of-a-bitch”.
Democrats—who are sweating fall re-election—can maybe start to smile just a bit and repeat the rest of the old adage, “but he’s OUR son-of-a-bitch.”
As a Republican I’m not necessarily pleased. As a detached observer of the American political scene, I’m grinning a bit.

Obama and the Usages of Power IV

Obama has won the Battle of Health Care Reform. His perceived ability to have exercised effective political power will create an aura—an illusion, if you will--of a politically savvy and powerful president. The hardest thing for him to do now will be to remember—as he did NOT in 2008/9—that much of this aura is a normal Washington illusion.
He must now act in a way to conserve that illusion. Conserving AND using the illusion of power is a bit like having one’s cake and eating it, too, I admit. It is part of the necessary and health destroying tight rope act of exercising power in Washington.
The Illusion of Power, as long as he can maintain it, will be the most important weapon in his political arsenal for as long as he holds office. The instant he allows it to fall apart, he will cease to be effective and the nation will be fundamentally leaderless—as it was under Bush in 2008 or under Hoover in 1932.
Let’s look a bit more at political illusion as it applies to the presidency. Sometimes it’s easier to see in matters of foreign policy so I’ll mostly talk about that. Domestic maneuverings are usually done more quietly and don’t make major headlines.
Look at the difference between Eisenhower and Kennedy during the late fifties and early sixties. Ike could afford to let our national defense deteriorate to a degree that might have been criminal under any other president. Pilots lacked fuel to practice flying, GIs were still carrying World War II weapons and the navy was floating boats from the 1930s and 40s.
How could he get away with it. Illusion. Smoke and mirrors. The Russians knew him. They remembered that with a nod of his head he could unemotionally sentence half-a-million German civilians to death in a single day’s raid.
He embodied the horror and destruction of total war. They occupied the ruins our bombers had left of the neighborhoods of Berlin. He scared them. He didn’t need to spend billions on new toys. Just the myth of Eisenhower was sufficient. Smoke and mirrors.
From 1958 on the Russians had wanted to build a wall across Berlin like the Iron Curtain across the rest of Germany. They didn’t dare. Kennedy took office with his green berets, all the new ships and planes for the armed services—and they built the wall during his first year.
Khrushchev summoned Kennedy to Vienna in June, 1961, took his measure, saw no illusion of power, and built his wall a month later. He tried to put missiles in Cuba. Finally Kennedy stood up—and nearly extinguished all life on this planet. Creating no illusions can be dangerously costly.
LBJ was the “Master of the Senate” in the 1950s. He lost all real power when he became Veep in 1961; but he had left enough of an imprint on Congress and such an illusion of being dangerous that he passed more social legislation in two years than almost any four or five previous presidents had in their entire combined terms.
One last illusion that we are living with today. THE INVINCIBLE AMERICAN AIRCRAFT CARRIER. It was, in 1945. We could launch a thousand carrier planes in a single strike. We owned the skies over Japan and occupied China.
If an American carrier shows up today in foreign waters, it inspires great trepidation in those who live adjacent to those waters. (An Arab leader pointing out at the Persian Gulf and screaming, “Do you think those carriers are there on vacation?’)
One lucky missile hit—and that illusion will be forever gone. We won’t just lose a ship, its 5,000 men and its eighty or ninety planes—we will lose three-quarters of a century of myth that has served and protected us well. Be careful where you send them. Stay at red alert—the way we didn’t in December, 1941.
One missile—and the illusion goes the way of the B-29 bomber.
Illusion of Power. It is the indispensible ingredient for successful politics and diplomacy. It is so easily and quickly broken and lost. Obama—in Afghanistan and Washington—must now walk a very, very careful (without seeming to be cautious) tight rope.
Let’s all wish him Good Luck.

Obama and the Usages of Power III

We’re talking about how much Obama showed us he has learned about the usage of power last week—when he got at least part of his health care reform through Congress after a year of abject failures. In earlier blogs I talked about how Obama’s biggest problem last year was believing his own press.
It’s hard to stay balanced when everyone from Vienna to Honolulu is cheering madly for you, calling you the culmination of the entire civil rights movement and proclaiming that the new millennium begins now with you.
Perhaps today he senses that power—whether it arrives from office, public adulation or military force—is essentially an illusion. And that nothing is easier to lose than the illusion of power—because it never had any reality in the first place.
On the other hand, nothing is more powerful, more frightening than illusory power because, unlike actual power, it has no limits in other people’s mind. It assumes a life of its own and seems more dangerous than a hundred hydrogen bombs.
Used properly and sparingly, it can accomplish more, prevent more problems and win more bloodless victories than all the armies of World War II. But you must have a monumentally acute sense of just how far you dare push it, how unreal, how unstable it truly is.
Let’s give a couple of practical examples. One has come and gone—poofed away in the wind. THE AMERICAN STRATEGIC BOMBER. The B-17, B-24, B-29, B-47, B-52. The world literally trembled at the mere thought of having such horror unleashed on it.
Everyone “knew” that the American bomber had won World War II. Photographs of German and Japanese cities in flames or covered with the puffs of exploding bombs, all falling in a deadly row, were seared into world consciousness.
Except that they—and unfortunately we—knew wrong. Bombers were frightening; they killed an awful lot of civilians—but they had a very limited impact on German and Japanese war making potential. All those photo-news shots of falling bombs were militarily an illusion.
(Caveat—we did cut German oil production to the point that German troops jumped off in the Battle of the Bulge (December, 1944—five months before it was all over) with only five days of fuel. They were expected to capture allied fuel dumps to resupply. People like Patton prevented that.)
But as long as the world THOUGHT that the American bomber was invincible—it was. Every so often in the 1950s and 60s, Russia’s fractious ally, the Chinese Communists (who had fought us to a draw in Korea) got feisty and threatened to take on the US again.
They kept calling us the “paper tiger”. Russia’s Khrushchev would publicly remind the Chinese that the American Strategic Air Command (SAC) had “nuclear teeth”, and ask the Chinese to shut up. But China knew something.
In Korea her troops had taken the brunt of World War II style mass bombing raids by B-29s and B-50s. They had endured terrible casualties. Enough, however, had survived to force the war to a stalemate. But the myth went on.
What was worse, we believed the myth. In Vietnam we destroyed it forever, like a shattered glass vase. We bombed and bombed and bombed. Our generals assured the White House that, just as they had defeated Germany and Japan, they would destroy the Viet Cong.
They killed lots and lots of human beings, true. But they only thing they destroyed with their own myth of invincibility. That was possibly the biggest loss we endured in Vietnam. Never again would a Russian leader publicly credit American bombers with mythological powers.
It can be expensive to shatter one’s own myth. We did it—by not recognizing that, at bottom, an illusion is an illusion is an illusion. It can protect you while it endures; when it falls apart, it can leave you terribly naked.
A bit more next time.

Obama and the Usages of Power II

Yesterday I talked about what Obama has learned about the nature and usage of power. I also talked about my own experience in learning that all political power is in some sense derivative—derived from someone or something outside of one’s own self and office.
Learn that, live and succeed. Forget it and someone will cut you off from behind before you ever know you’ve been hit. I don’t think Obama has the kind of arrogance that will make him prey to that sort of hubris. I sense a salubrious cynicism in him. No one in Washington ever achieves much without it. I think he may have that.
I question whether he will demonstrate the appetite for health breaking kind of work it requires to continue to exercise real control in Washington. He is, after all, a man for whom family is very important. The pursuit of political power will permit you to have no other gods before it; it is more jealous than the proverbial “bitch goddess of success”.
But he did what needed to be done to get his health care plan through Congress last week. That shows tremendous growth in aptitude over last year. Now we shall see if he knows some other things about power that I learned while watching, doing and meditating in Washington decades ago.
Briefly, my own tale. I allowed overweening ambition to propel me into a job in the Office of the White House before I was ready or capable. I had reached my then limit by rising to a job in the Office of the US Surgeon General that allowed me pretty effective access and, to a slight degree, control over the vast (international in scope) US Public Health Service.
People answered my phone calls; they had a car waiting for me at the airport, I had friends and allies. Where I needed to be feared, I was feared. The intensity of working more immediately for the President (my boss’s boss’s boss was Lyndon Johnson) was something I wasn’t ready to handle.
They chewed me up and spat me out. When they laid off or reassigned over half the staff or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1968, I was one of those called in and told to go away. (The Democrats did not need the stigma of being too pro-Civil Rights in that year’s election.) Perhaps foolishly—I was offered a higher pay grade in another agency—I resigned and left Washington.
My success—and my failure—had cost me a marriage, a career and a mental breakdown. Playing with political power is a bit like holding a 400 amp electrical cable in each hand and trying to attach them while they are live. It can fry you.
From my standpoint of having experienced both success and failure in wielding the Washington game—and years of meditation—I pass along the following thoughts on the nature of power. Obama will learn these things if he succeeds.
One) Power is a matter of propinquity. You have to BE there. After five o’clock, when the bottles of scotch come out, the feet are up on the desk and you talk (and LEARN) about what’s going on. You have to get off your chair and walk around, all day, late into the evening.
Talk even to failures—some will know someone who can help you. (My best sources of power came from people who had failed themselves, but still could place a helpful phone call.) Forget family, forget other activities. Be there, be there, be there.
Two) Power is persistence far more than it is the exertion of brute force!!! (Any insurance agent can tell you this.) It is the gentle pressure of the star fish rather than the bite of the shark. The latter will scare others into retaliating against you. Eventually that will get you.
Be friendly, be understanding of the other fellow’s problems, keep yourself in his memory banks, hang onto ALL phone numbers you are given—and call them now and then. Somebody, somewhere, is going to need something that can benefit you—and you want them to remember your name. Favorably.
Three) Power is mostly ILLUSION. This is the biggie. We’ll talk more about it next time.

Obama and the Usages of Power

It’s still too early to say whether or not Obama will grow to be a successful president—but he took a significant step in that direction last week. He put his nose to the political grindstone and made some of his health care initiative finally happen.
Whether he can articulate it or not, he’s learned some important lessons about the nature, usages and limitations of Power. A year ago he made the mistakes most people make when they think about power—that if you have a title like “president” all you have to do is stand there and “be” powerful.
Nope. Do that and Congress, Wall Street and the folks who decide where the next Olympics will be held will walk all over you. Throughout Obama’s first year in office, they walked at will. He discovered that the presidential seal and fifty cents will get you a phone call every time.
This is not really Obama’s fault. He has had no experience wielding power. A Senator, a community activist and a recent Harvard Law School graduate have no power to wield. There was no way he could have learned before last year.
First of all, to be effectively powerful—to make things happen—requires a voracious appetite for an appalling amount of desperately hard work and a stomach for unimaginable stress. I believe it can be safely said that most men who have served as CEO of, say, General Motors (or Exxon, Nescafe, General Electric—it doesn’t really matter) have done so without ever seriously affecting how or what was done at General Motors.
In other words, they’ve never ran General Motors. The same thing can be said of most presidents. They have served their four or eight year terms without ever having run the United States government—or having gotten a real idea of what’s going on in Washington.
Obama’s misfortune—and possible future good luck—is that he landed in Washington during one of those rare occasions when it was necessary for a president to 1)know what was going on, 2)make things happen, and 3)exert real and effective power.
Roosevelt did. Lincoln did. George W. Bush did. It is instructive to look at photos of these men taken on the day they assumed office and taken during their last year in the office. The job aged the life right out of some of them. It killed Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. It left people like Bush and Buchanan covered with opprobrium.
Most presidents, more than we like to think, have glided through their terms without having to go much beyond Cal Coolidge’s famed question (when he woke up from a nap), “Is the country still there?” It usually was and it survived them.
I’ve done a lot of thinking about the nature of power ever since I was a twenty-five year old kid in Washington with the equivalent civilian rank of first lieutenant or captain in the army. I would periodically step back and observe myself and be fascinated by a couple of things I saw around me.
I could call a multi-billion dollar federal agency like the CDC in Atlanta and make it hop, skip and jump. The man next to me, with the equivalent rank of a colonel or general couldn’t make it budge. Why? What was the difference?
For one thing, I possessed something that is true of almost anyone in Washington who can exercise any real power—I had DERIVATIVE power. I spoke in the name of someone who had power, in this case the Surgeon General of the United States. The other man did not.
I quickly realized that much of the Surgeon General’s power was also derivative—as was the power of his boss, the Secretary of HEW. ALL of us were working on derived power—not anything that was actually real. (Forget that, even for an instant, and you suffer a nasty political death.) So all power is actually merely derived. It isn’t really yours. Push beyond the limits of that derivation, and you fail.
I learned a few more things about power during that time—I’ll continue next time.

Health Care--Alive Again

Let’s break into our discussion of American mythology with a comment on the passage of the Senate’s 2,000 page health care reform bill (which may contain a few myths itself). Pelosi got her five votes (possibly by denying the members any potty breaks).
That she got it at all is the real surprise. Back in December that looked about as likely as snow in July on the capital mall. I would have bet money that it was dead—and I am much too conservative a Hollander to be much of a betting man.
I prognosticated that it was dead. I was so sure. But Obama, Pelosi and the Democrats found as unlikely an ally as Churchill making a pact with the Bolsheviks—the American health insurance companies rode full tilt to the rescue of health care reform.
After spending millions of dollars and spreading amazing amounts of lies, half-truths and obfuscations to sink reform, in the end they pulled a bone headed stunt that brought it back to life. Who passed health care? The insurance companies!
Pelosi and Obama were given a gift that they could not have imagined. The health care industry decided to raise nearly everybody’s rates at the turn of the year. It happened all across America to millions of people—people with health insurance, people who vote.
I can’t speak for all of them—but I can tell you what happened to me. For years retired teachers in Michigan had had Blue Cross/Blue Shield as primary insurance, Medicare as secondary. Part D—pharmaceutical insurance was also covered by the Blues. They covered every drug I’ve ever been prescribed in whatever the form my physician wanted.
It was great insurance, and it wasn’t very expensive. In the fall, I began to read that the Blues were raising their rates. I didn’t think too much about it. On January 2nd, I went to my regular pharmacy to refill some of my normal prescriptions.
Holy Toledo!!! The co-pays had doubled, in some cases tripled. I left them at the counter and went home to make some calls. A couple of drugs were no longer available at any price. Who was this strange new company? (It has taken me weeks and hours to get it all figured out—not just money but time, hours of it!)
It seems that rates had gone so high that the teacher’s union felt the only thing it could do was switch us to another medical plan—Medicare primary; a different, inferior Blues plan secondary. Even though it’s inferior, the new plan still costs more than the old plan did last year.
This also meant I had to go to ALL of my physicians, blood labs, etc. etc. etc. and show them my new cards so they could get my new insurance right and not get rejected when they submitted a claim. I haven’t finished all of that yet.
I opted out of the union’s prescription drug provider and found one myself. The co-pays are less than that other plan but, unlike last year, I cannot get most of my drugs on a three-month, one co-pay basis, The same co-pay three times in a quarter is a significant increase over that co-pay once in a quarter.
All the way around, it costs me more. It costs millions of us more. I’ll lay you odds there are a whole lot of folks out there whose anti-health-care reform bill fervor cooled quite a bit this January. I can just see some of those tea party folks staring with dismay at their new rates and co-pays and suddenly losing steam in their opposition.
The Republicans in the House may call the Senate bill “Armageddon”, but the real Armageddon in health care reform was brought by some mind-bogglingly stupid insurance executives.
I’ll bet when they get alone by themselves even Obama and Pelosi can’t believe just how stupid those people were.
Of course, the additions to the bill still have to go back to the Senate where any Republican can add an amendment. Should Democrats be silly enough to let one pass, the whole business is back up in the air (and back to the House for another long weekend).
Let’s see if the Senate can avoid being as foolish as the health insurance industry. Well finish up War and Myth next time.