State Dinner Attendees

I don't know about you, but I'm a sucker for White House guest lists. Politico has published the list of VIPs who attended last night's state dinner in honor of India on the occasion of the visit by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his wife, Gursharan Kaur. Close scrutiny of the list reveals at least one couple that deserve to be singled out by the Washington Buckeye: Jay Goyal and Kiran Goyal of Mansfield. Mr. Goyal (D-73rd District) is majority whip of the Ohio House of Representatives.

The adjacent photo is by Charles Dharapak of the Associated Press.

Not so Fast...

One of the most entertaining aspects of life in Washington, D.C., is the way that events refuse to unfold in exactly the way we expect them to. The already contentious issue of healthcare reform, for example, has been complicated by the report of a U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that no one had every heard of before this week. It seems that mammography and self-examination, along with prostate cancer screening, may not be as good an idea as we'd all thought. This is the kind of material that Post columnist Dana Milbank knows how to milk for all it's worth. So to speak. Read all about it here.

The cartoon is the work of the Post's Tom Toles.

The Allure and Folly of Projecting Current Trends

While the Glenn Fellows are busy producing drafts of their policy papers, the Washington Buckeye is catching up on his reading in the International Economic Bulletin, a publication of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The current issue features a story, “The G20 in 2050” by Uri Dadush and Bennett Stancil, that projects current trends into the middle of the twenty-first century. These trends show India overtaking China as the world’s most populous nation by 2031, and China passing the United States as the world’s largest economy by 2032. Click here to read the story and to play with the dynamic graph, “Projected G20 Economic Growth 2009-2050,” that shows these trends unfolding over the next forty years. Click on the “play” arrow to watch the universe as it unfurls. The balloons representing particular nations even expand or contract depending on population trends. Very cool!

And yet, and yet. . . . The problem with this kind of analysis is that we know even before we begin that the underlying ceteris paribus clause—all other things being held constant—is, simply, false. All other things will NOT be constant over the next forty years. We know that, and yet how else are we going to generate information that will help us plan for the future? We have to do it, even though all of us, and particularly those of us who pumped their IRAs full of stocks during the pre-2007 bubble, recognize the folly of projecting current trends.

There is some good news here: in 2050 the United States will still have—by far—the world’s highest per capita GDP. That is, if current trends continue. . . .

It Takes a Village and a Kind-Hearted Bartender

Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) made a lively presentation at a WAIP-WISH policy salon last night. In addition to the autumn 2009 class of Glenn Fellows, three of whom happen to reside in Rep. Fudge's 11th Congressional district, the audience of approximately 30 included a number of participants in the Congressional Black Caucus's fellows program. Lynn Jennings and Ervin Johnson of the CBCF and Dan Lewis of WISH also were in the audience.

Rep. Fudge talked movingly about her youth on Cleveland's east side, where she was raised by a single mother with significant assistance from church members--and later, while she was attending Shaker Heights schools--from a kindly restauranteur who provided lunch every day because her mother was at work and the school she attended had no cafeteria.

In her remarks about public policy, Rep. Fudge made an eloquent case for taking care not to strive for perfection in legislation. As she put it, we mustn't "let the perfect be the enemy of the good."

The Congresswoman is pictured above with members of the audience and with her three Glenn Fellow constituents--from left to right, Josh Kramer, Liz Hagan, and Jessica Meeker.

WAIP Policy Salon with Rep. Marcia Fudge

In the fall of 2008, the Glenn School’s Washington Academic Internship Program (WAIP) moved to new offices on Capitol Hill and contracted with Washington Intern Student Housing (WISH) to provide living accommodations for our students. This was more than a mere move across town. It was a relocation to the epicenter of lawmaking and adjudication, and to the part of town that is home to countless university-administered internship programs that have in the past been so many ships passing in the night.

More or less immediately, the WAIP-WISH coalition set out to build bridges to the many universities that call Capitol Hill home. We began by sponsoring a “policy salon” that meets on weekday evenings, usually in the WISH-owned classroom at 239 Massachusetts Avenue. WISH general manager Dan Lewis donates the classroom space, while WAIP has taken the lead in finding speakers. Prominent among those who have lent their time and expertise to the joint venture are Glenn School faculty members Jason Seligman, Trevor Brown, and Andy Keeler.

So far this year, we have enjoyed contributions from several Washington-based university programs, including Johns Hopkins University (David Bernstein Professor of Political Science Benjamin Ginsberg), the University of New Mexico (Professor Richard Schaefer), and the University of Missouri School of Journalism (Professor Charles N. Davis). This fall alone, we have had a number of lively presentations from OSU alumni and friends: Jerome Pierson of NIH spoke about the U.S. response to the Pandemic H1N1 virus; Christine Kontra, legislative assistant to Rep. Steve LaTourette, lectured on the pros and cons of earmarking; attorney Ted Van Der Meid spoke about Congressional ethics; retired AP foreign correspondent Myron Belkind provided advice to budding journalists; and Rep. Patrick J. Tiberi talked about how Ohio State was in many ways the crucible of his political career.

It would be stretching the truth to say that the WAIP-WISH partnership has been an overnight sensation, but now that we are well into Year 2, we can claim one triumph in institutional collaboration, and that is the loyal participation of a third partner, the Congressional Black Caucus Fellowship program. Thanks to CBC staffers Ervin Johnson and Lynn Jennings, CBC fellows have attended almost all policy salon events. Last year, the CBCF arranged a presentation by House Whip James E. Clyburn (D-SC). This evening, our speaker will be Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), who represents Ohio’s 11th House district, which covers downtown Cleveland and its eastern suburbs. Rep. Fudge, an OSU alumna, will be addressing a group that includes three Glenn Fellows who are residents of her district: Liz Hagan, Cleveland Heights; Joshua Kramer, Shaker Heights; and Jessica Meeker, Lyndhurst.

from today's Washington Post:

ROTC for civilian service
By E.J. Dionne Jr.Monday, November 16, 2009

Imagine a time when government work was exciting, widely admired and much sought-after.
It seems an outlandish thought at a moment when you cannot turn on your television without hearing government spoken of as almost an alien creature. It is cast as far removed from the lives of average Americans and more likely to destroy the achievements of private citizens than to accomplish anything worthwhile.

True, we don't apply our anti-government sentiments to at least one group of Americans who draw government paychecks: our men and women in uniform. All the polls show they are, deservedly, held in high esteem. But civilians who do the daily work of government are more likely to be referred to as "bureaucrats," "timeservers," and various unprintable names than as public servants.

This has not always been the American way. There were important eras in our history when citizens in large numbers were drawn to government service with a sense of mission and exhilaration. The New Deal was certainly such a time, as were the days of the New Frontier and (though it is unjustly derided now) the Great Society.

They came in part -- take note, President Obama -- because they were inspired by leaders who made it a point to call them into government. Caroline Kennedy has said that when she was growing up, "hardly a day went by when someone didn't come up to us and say: 'Your father changed my life. I went into public service because he asked me.' "

But inspiration is not enough. The military, after all, does not rely solely on patriotic feelings to build its force, and neither should the civilian parts of government. One of the most powerful incentives the military has is the Reserve Officers' Training Corps, which offers assistance to those seeking higher education. It's time for a civilian ROTC.

That's the idea of a bipartisan group of senators and House members, who are proposing to create a Roosevelt Scholars program, named after Teddy Roosevelt. Reps. David Price (D-N.C.) and Mike Castle (R-Del.) have introduced a bill in the House, and a similar measure is expected in the Senate this week from Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and George Voinovich (R-Ohio).
Although there is sentiment to include undergraduates in the program, the House bill is aimed at graduate students because the federal government has a special demand for highly qualified employees who are otherwise attracted (and heavily recruited) by the private sector. In exchange for generous scholarships in fields such as engineering, information technology, foreign languages and public health, the scholars would commit to three to five years of service in an agency of the federal government.

"With the aging of the boomers and those who responded to Kennedy's call to service, we need to replenish the government workforce," says Max Stier, president and chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service.

Stier, a one-man evangelizing squad on behalf of government service, notes that the government must fill 273,000 "mission-critical" positions in the next three years. This will require vast improvements in the way government recruits and a new willingness on its part to invest in its workforce.

The military, Stier says, gets roughly 40 percent of its officer corps through the ROTC. It makes sense to undertake a comparable investment in the civil service.
In the small and underappreciated world of those who care passionately about improving government's performance and prestige, there are competing visions of how to achieve this. One group of activists and legislators has been pushing to create a public service academy, modeled after the military academies, to prepare a new generation of leaders in government.
It's a good idea and would send another powerful signal that government work is and should be valued. But with the extraordinary constraints on the federal budget, the prospects of the large investment that would be required to build a new institution are not exactly rosy. A civilian ROTC would be a good first step. The Roosevelt program would have the benefit of drawing on the entire higher education system's capacity to produce specialists.

The Roosevelt program could also be an antidote to two debilitating trends in our politics. It would push back against the tendency of politicians to deride government (an odd habit, since politicians are themselves engaged in government service). And it might open the way for a bipartisan achievement at a time when such endeavors are in very short supply.

Dr. Gee Recognized by TIME Magazine

I'm still trying to figure out what it all means, and to decide whether our charismatic president should be flattered or revolted by the fawning attention of TIME magazine.

Maybe it's worth noting that TIME has chosen to honor the CEOs of institutions that are, for the most part, big, public, and relatively unglamorous. What are we to make of the fact that the Ivy League was shut out of TIME's exclusive society of college presidents? And what does it mean that New England scored only one hit--Middlebury College, which is far from being the most illustrious school in America's Brain Basket. Is there something about the Ivies that inhibits executive leadership? If so, how does that manifest itself? And why doesn't the failure of executive leadership in the Ivies--and at other prestigious institutions, such as Oberlin, Kenyon, and the University of Chicago--somehow make its way into the inscrutable annual rankings of U.S. News and World Reports?

What is TIME trying to say about the executive talent nurtured or recruited by institutions such as Ohio State (and also the University of Michigan, let us hasten to add)? And why do TIME's executive success stories emanate fom schools that have endured unique challenges, such as Tulane, and institutions with notably proletarian pedigrees, such as the University of Maryland Baltimore County, the University of Texas at Brownsville, and Miami-Dade College?

Inquiring minds want to know the answers to these questions about rankings and celebrity, about the rise of the masses and what the great sociologist, Vilfredo Pareto, called the circulation of the elites. In the meantime, let's extend hearty congratulations to Dr. Gee and prepare to enjoy the ride.

Today's Politico declares three Ohio Democrats--Mary Jo Kilroy, Steve Driehaus, and Zack Space--politically vulnerable due to their votes on healthcare reform. Read the story here.

A Bipartisan Moment on Capitol Hill

Last night, the Washington Academic Internship Program of the John Glenn School of Public Affairs made a modest contribution to the spirit of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill by hosting a reception in honor of the autumn 2009 class of Glenn Fellows:

• Liz Hagan, Cleveland Heights (Center for Budget and Policy Priorities)



• Joshua Kramer, Shaker Heights (OSU Office of Federal Relations)



• Jessica Meeker, Lyndhurst (Human Rights First)



• Amy Ovecka, Canton (Department of Justice, International Affairs Department, Criminal Division)



• Chelsea Rider, Marysville (Free the Slaves)



• Samuel Rose, Columbus (U.S. Business and Industry Council)



• Terry Traster, Amherst (Office of U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown)



• David Young, Columbus (Global Resources Center, Gelman Library)

Laura Allen, WAIP Administrative Associate, and I were pleased to convey greetings from Dr. Charles Wise, Director of the John Glenn School of Public Affairs. We also were delighted that other members of the Ohio State family were able to join us, including Dick Stoddard, Associate Vice President of Government Relations; Stacy Rastauskas, Assistant Vice President, Federal Relations; and Tammy Parker, Director of Development, School of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

As we had hoped, the reception proved to be a great opportunity for mixing with a number of former Glenn Fellows, as well as past and present internship supervisors and participants in the WAIP mentoring program.

Senator Glenn, who had just come from a reception honoring Vice President Joe Biden as this year’s recipient of the Annie Glenn Award, said that the Washington Academic Internship Program was central to the Glenn School’s mission and to the cultivation of public service as he and Mrs. Glenn conceive of it. Senator Glenn then introduced Representative Patrick J. Tiberi, a Republican who represents Ohio’s 12th district in the U.S. House of Representatives.

In his remarks, Congressman Tiberi emphasized the vital role that The Ohio State University—not only through formal coursework, but particularly through the marching band—played in his education and in the development of his nascent interest in public service. Rep. Tiberi is the son of Italian immigrants and the first person in his family to graduate from high school. He used his own biography (as well as that of President Barack Obama) as evidence that America continues to be a land of opportunity. He is Ohio’s only member of the powerful House Ways and Means committee, where he serves as the Ranking Member on the Select Revenue Subcommittee. In that capacity, Rep. Tiberi said that he makes a point of reaching across the aisle to work with Democratic colleagues in the House.

Hey, it's a start.