John McQuaid

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Over the past couple of months I’ve had a series of email exchanges over health care reform with a friend with a libertarian orientation. He is not a tea partier by any means. But he doesn’t trust the government to do anything right. This point of view certainly has some validity – the federal government screws a lot up. But it makes having a discussion hard. Argue that government actually can do something and you’ll face incredulity and contempt. End of discussion.

On the right there are Tea Partiers who think Stalinism and/or National Socialism are imminent. And there are conservatives with a firmer grounding in reality who think Barack Obama’s policies will lead us all to fiscal ruination – or simply that fiscal ruination is inevitable no matter who is running things.

This is cynicism. And maybe this is an obvious point. But cynicism is an essential and perhaps under-appreciated element in why so many who consider themselves conservative openly profess contempt or hatred for the government, and in the Republican Party’s disengagement from policy and governing.

You know the backstory here. (more…)

So the American Enterprise Institute has parted ways with David Frum, one of a vanishingly small number of prominent conservatives willing to openly criticize the conservative movement. A few days back he stated the obvious: the Republican obstructionist strategy on health care reform was a disaster on both substance and on the politics. Today, he’s out at AEI, a key locus of movement conservatism.

This is a short-sighted move. George W. Bush left the conservative movement and Republican Party in an awful mess. The main things that have altered their fortunes of late have been the terrible economic conditions and the historic political cycle, both of which point to significant GOP gains in the 2010 elections.

But those things have masked and even exacerbated the ongoing intellectual disarray on the Right. Frum is one of the few conservatives who sees rather clearly that the Right’s current agenda is outmoded and self-destructive, and he wasn’t shy about saying so. (I should say, the Right’s domestic economic agenda. Frum remains an unreconstructed neoconservative on foreign affairs, which I don’t think is a good approach to domestic politics or an effective geopolitical strategy.)

I’d call your attention not just to the fact of his departure, but the way it was handled and explained. (more…)

Health care reform is now law. And the fickle public now likes it! Maybe we’re in a new era after all.

But still, the intensity of the anti-health care reform efforts was remarkable, and the new law is likely to make a lot of people even madder. And on that point, I have a simple question: why, exactly, do so many people hate the federal government so much?

Set aside the hyperbole – the claims about imminent tyranny, freedom dying, et al (many of them uttered by sitting members of Congress). Never mind the ugly epithets that protestors hurled at members of the House over the weekend in the runup to voting on the bill. I’d like to better understand the underlying anger. What did the federal government do, exactly, to piss all these people off so much?

The answer is: very little. (more…)

It’s been a scant few weeks since the story about unintended acceleration in various Toyota models reached its apogee. Already it’s gone through a furious, though predictable, media arc – shocking revelations, public fear, congressional hearings, expressions of outrage, abject apologies from the company CEO, debates about damage to the Toyota brand, and even an alarming – though unresolved and possibly faked – acceleration incident while all this was happening.

My question is, WTF just happened? Because the statistics tell us that, essentially, nothing did.

Six million cars have been recalled, and the reports of Toyotas experiencing sudden, uncontrolled acceleration number in the dozens. Robert Wright, who drives a Toyota Highlander, did the math and concluded that there isn’t that much to worry about. You’re much more likely to die in a car accident than have an acceleration incident:

My back-of-the-envelope calculations (explained in a footnote below) suggest that if you drive one of the Toyotas recalled for acceleration problems and don’t bother to comply with the recall, your chances of being involved in a fatal accident over the next two years because of the unfixed problem are a bit worse than one in a million — 2.8 in a million, to be more exact. Meanwhile, your chances of being killed in a car accident during the next two years just by virtue of being an American are one in 5,244.

This doesn’t mean nothing is wrong. (more…)

Washington has been consumed for months not just by the endless health care sausage-making process, but also by the tedious meta-debate about the process itself. And the process is indeed, debatable. Nancy Pelosi’s latest wrinkle, called “deem and pass” is a faintly ridiculous maneuver in which House members could avoid actually voting for the Senate health care reform bill that so many of them fear and despise, yet pass it anyway.

This institutionalizes what you might call the John Kerry approach to legislation – you can be for something before you’re against it, and then be sort-of for it anyway! As Kevin Drum notes:

Any Democrat who thinks that Republican attacks this fall are going to be blunted even a smidge because, technically, they voted for the package of fixes, not the main bill, is living in fantasy land.

In fact, it will probably just make things worse. They still will have voted for the Senate bill, but it’ll look like they’re trying to hide the fact. That’s the worst possible tack they can take. For the fence sitters, their best hope is to pass the bill — through gritted teeth if they must — and then come out of the House chamber smiling broadly and proclaiming it a historic advance for ordinary Americans of all incomes etc. etc.

But does any of this matter (except in some marginal congressional races where it might become an campaign issue)? Put another way: does anybody outside of Washington care about congressional process? Most of the nation’s frustration and anger over Congress and health care is not due to arcane procedural maneuvering, but to the fact that, after more than year, the maneuvering has accomplished nothing. What matters is results. Once health care reform passes – or fails – Americans (with the exception of the parliamentarians) will instantly forget about reconciliation.

There’s only one thing more craven than tricky insidery rules, and that’s yammering about their alleged outrageousness. Is there any more vacuous debate? It’s not even a debate but a debate about the terms of the real debate, and its content is almost all opportunistic and hypocritical. Sarah Palin can fulminate about the alleged extra-constitutionality of Democratic tactics, but who doesn’t think she and her followers wouldn’t applaud such maneuvering if it were used to pass something they liked?

Moreover, it’s mostly just cable chat show noise. There’s nothing politically at stake. There’s no downside to attacking congressional process, because nobody outside of Washington understands or cares about it. There’s also very little upside (aside from firing up your own followers) because the politicians using those rules know that.

Here’s David Brooks attacking reconciliation:

Once partisan reconciliation is used for this bill, it will be used for everything, now and forever. The Senate will be the House. The remnants of person-to-person relationships, with their sympathy and sentiment, will be snuffed out. We will live amid the relationships of group versus group, party versus party, inhumanity versus inhumanity.

We have a political culture in which the word “reconciliation” has come to mean “bitter division.” With increasing effectiveness, the system bleaches out normal behavior and the normal instincts of human sympathy.

Brooks, it turns out, gets his reconciliation facts wrong. And this in the service of his own twisty maneuver, this time in the rules of rhetoric, couching a blunt partisan argument into a supposedly high-minded elegy for a non-existent time when comity trumped politics.

I have forced myself to read the late flood of profiles, stories and columns about Rahm Emanuel and I can confidently pronounce: they are all deadly dull. Do not read them! While they offer some insight into the workings of the Obama presidency, they’re simply not interesting. They reveal more about the media than our current political predicament.

It apparently started in February when Dana Milbank penned a Rahm-boosting column.  Then over the past week we got another pro-Rahm piece from the Washington Post, which self-consciously regurgitated the opinions of Emanuel defenders into an “emerging narrative” that we shouldn’t blame him for the White House’s political problems. And in recent days we got longer, more ambitious profiles from Noam Scheiber of The New Republic and Peter Baker of The New York Times. (If there are others, I don’t want to hear about them.)

Having read all of this, here’s the takeaway: Rahm Emanuel is loyal to Obama and a team player. He takes direction from the president and doesn’t freelance. He sometimes argues for more “pragmatic” positioning on issues, going for incremental wins at the expense of the dicier long ball. Sometimes Obama follows this advice, sometimes he doesn’t. (And on health care reform, Obama appears to have done both.) He swears a lot. He is all business. He is also 50 years old. And thin.

“At 50, Emanuel has the lean, taut look of a lifelong swimmer, with broad shoulders and distractingly prominent quadriceps.” – Scheiber

“At 50, he has the coiled energy of aides half his age, still as wiry thin as he was during his improbable days as a ballet dancer.” – Baker

Why is all of this so formulaic and un-illuminating? (more…)

Apologies to Harold Ford and Mort Zuckerman.

When it was reported last month that I was thinking of running for the United States Senate from the State of New York, major political figures in both parties lined up to try to force me out of the race. They denounced and insulted me.  My Aston Martin was keyed. My condo lobby was TPed. My children were shunned for a purported surplus of “cooties.” I received calls in the early morning hours asking if I had “Prince Albert in a Can.”

Meanwhile, however, some of the wiser Empire State solons were quietly urging me to run, though discretion demands they remain anonymous. And as I traveled around the great state of New York, my beloved home for these past three and a half weeks, I swiftly came to understand why I places like Schenectady, Utica and Manhattan’s financial district were the likely venues for an appointment between myself and political destiny.

New York’s people are its greatest strength. Without them, according to the book “The World Without Us,” New York State would be just a bunch of buildings, roads and bus terminals that would quickly become overgrown with vegetation. New Yorkers devote their lives to keep that from happening. They are hardworking, industrious, reliable, kind, sensible, patriotic, brave, just and punctual. They love America, their families, their homes, their sprinkler systems and gas grills and smartphones. And they love their state, which has had a lot of songs written about it.

Yet our political leaders remain ensconced in their ivory towers, sipping chablis and eating brie while the rest of us labor long hours in the financial services industry for bonuses a fraction of what they were only a few years ago.

Our political system is broken. Gridlock, partisanship, earmarks, filibusters, Obamacare, Rahm Emanuel, Max Baucus, reconciliation and fake global warming have combined into a perfect storm of political dysfunction that has settled over Washington. New Yorkers have made it abundantly clear they do not want Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, yet the Obama administration has remained deaf to their concerns.

Senator Gillibrand, who I am told is descended from prominent New Yorkers including Boss Tweed and Bill “the Butcher” Poole, is according to some an adequate public servant and an above-average bridge partner. But to re-elect her now, at our moment of greatest peril, would be a grave error from which New York would, perhaps, never recover. Let there be no mistake: This is our moment for change.

I believe raising these issues over the last 56 hours has forced Democrats and Republicans alike to do better. And I will continue holding their feet to the fire. But I will not do so as a candidate for senator from New York.

I’ve examined this race in every possible way, and have with great hesitancy come to one fundamental conclusion: were I to run the result would be a brutal and divisive primary election followed by an apocalyptic general election campaign. The vested interests that control our state from their smoke-filled and brandy-soaked back rooms will not relinquish their death-grip on the reins of power without a fight. Such a fight would have significant fallout: weeks of enormous tabloid headlines that would hurt my constituents’ eyes and delicate literary sensibilities.

I realize this announcement will surprise many people who assumed I was running. I reached this decision only in the last few hours, as I considered what a a campaign – even with victory within my grasp and and all its various world-historical implications – would have done to my fellow New Yorkers. Even if I were to prevail upon them to make the necessary sacrifices (and I am certain they would) it would be hard to see how I could devote the necessary time to working in Washington, given my own work and the demands of my young family.

I am not going to stop speaking out on behalf of policies that I think are right — regardless of ideology, party or political expediency. I plan to continue taking this message across our state and across our nation.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I am struggling to understand the rationale behind this long Washington Post story about Rahm Emanuel. Its basic thrust is: various people are saying Obama should have listened to Emanuel more closely and scaled back health care reform and the closing of Guantanamo. Now the president is paying the price for his arrogance and overreaching. Oh, woe unto he who fails to listen to Rahm!

If the Washington Post tells us so, I guess some people are indeed saying these things. And maybe, as the piece says, “there is a contrarian narrative emerging” that lets Emanuel off the hook for the Obama administration’s difficulties. After all, one reliable sign of an emerging narrative is its appearance in the pages of the Washington Post.

But really, what is this narrative? It’s a few members of Congress and administration officials, many of them unnamed, carping about political problems and trying to fix blame on some Obama appointees while exonerating others. The pretext of the article is that Obama is in grave political difficulty. And yes, the Democrats are likely to suffer major losses in elections this year. But it’s hard to believe that the nation’s political trajectory is due to, for example, this:

“Axelrod has a strong view of the historic character Obama is supposed to be,” said an early Obama supporter who is close to the president and spoke on the condition of anonymity to give a frank assessment of frustration with the White House. The source blamed Obama’s charmed political life for creating a self-confidence and trust in principle that led to an “indifference to doing the small, marginal things a White House could do to mitigate the problems on the Hill. Rahm knows the geography better.”

I’m sure Obama is indeed indifferent to “small, marginal things” that might help moving legislation. If he paid more attention to such things, though, he’d be attacked for doing that. But does anyone believe that more aggressively stroking and accommodating certain members of Congress would have made a significant difference in health care or anything else? It’s silly – all the more so because nothing has been decided. Health care reform might yet pass. Guantanamo may yet be closed. And the fate of the fall elections and Obama’s presidency depend far more on the unemployment rate than on any piece of legislation or decision made in the past year. Obama faces serious structural obstacles, yes, and perhaps his strategy and decision-making process are totally out-of-whack. But that’s not really what this article is about.

What went wrong here? Well, the idea for the piece seems to have come from a Dana Milbank column – which the piece cites as an example to buttress its case – but I don’t think that’s the root of the problem. The Washington Post cannot straightforwardly document what’s really happening, which is: a pro-Rahm constituency is using Post news pages to take shots at the White House, laying the groundwork either for a more Emanuel-centric strategy, Emanuel’s exoneration from Obama’s failures, or both. This piece grants political constituencies access to the Post’s news pages to grind their axes with minimal skepticism about their motives or agenda. What does the Post get in return? It strokes its sources, and gets an opportunity to create a news cycle “narrative” that might last longer than a few hours.

Every natural disaster affects the human “footprint” on the planet differently. So it’s not exactly apples-to-apples to compare this past weekend’s Chile earthquake with the Haiti quake. The latter hit closer to a sprawling urban area, and so the death toll is naturally going to be much higher. But on the face of it, the numbers are striking: more than 200,000 Haitiians died, mostly due to collapsing buildings and infrastructure. The Chilean death toll is still below 1,000 and likely to remain much lower than Haiti’s.

Besides the relative luck of geography, there’s a manmade reason for that: Chileans realized they had built their cities on major earthquake faults and their government took steps to prepare for the worst.

Haiti’s earthquake was shallower and closer to a major city, Port-au-Prince, than was the Chilean quake, which accounted for much of the devastation in Haiti. Stricter building codes and better enforcement of them played a major role in reducing the loss of life in Chile, says Andres García, manager of AGR Analysis, a construction and building management company in Viña del Mar, Chile.

“Chile has been building according to the best standards in the world for at least 20 years,” García says. “As the technology and techniques have gotten better, the rules have gotten stricter. And that’s what has minimized the loss of life this time around.”

All this seems pretty obvious from a civics lesson standpoint. Yet if you look at the United States, we’re in considerably worse shape prepping for earthquakes and other disasters. Our infrastructure is falling apart, as the American Society of Civil Engineers has repeatedly noted, which of course means a lot of important stuff is more likely to collapse or implode in the event of disaster. The West Coast has earthquake-resistant building codes, this report from the Institute for Business and Home Safety notes, but not so the Midwest, which is overdue for a quake from the New Madrid fault.

Why such a patchwork? Because disaster planning is not a national priority. In some ways, this makes sense: the United States covers a vast and varied landscape. Conditions and risks vary widely. In Chile with earthquakes, or with the Netherlands and floods, there’s a clear top-down rationale. Not so here.

The problem is, though, that the footprint of potential natural disasters is getting larger, in the U.S. and abroad. And as that expands, so does the onus on the federal government. There’s more sprawl and development covering a wider area than before. Much of it is in disaster-prone areas, close to coastlines, fire-prone forests and fault lines. In America, people like to live close to nature, and nature isn’t shy about biting back. Around the world, the advent of the mega-city has put more people and buildings over fault lines than ever before in human history.

Add into this the potential effects of global warming on sea level, storms, and fire regimes, and the risks grow even more. That is, beyond capacity of U.S. states and localities, or developing world nations, to absorb.

In an age of austerity, a few more mega-disasters on the scale of Hurricane Katrina – which cost more than $100 billion in federal aid – will really put the hurt on the federal budget. Modest up-front improvements in building codes and other forms of “disaster mitigation” can save billions on the back-end.

But there are all kinds of obstacles. Our government and politics are famously dysfunctional, and there’s a powerful and renewed strain of sentiment that holds any government action in contempt. The Chile situation should be a reminder that governments are, occasionally, quite useful.