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

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.