Upgrading GPRA

Today's Post has a story by Paul Light, who applauds Congress for upgrading the 1993 act that required government agencies to focus on the results of federal policy, rather than on government activities. A worthy cause, no doubt, though I am not as sanguine as Professor Light about the likelihood of real change.

A Reading List for New Members of Congress

In a column that appeared the day after the midterm elections, The Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein offered his congratulations to the Representatives- and Senators-elect, while issuing a “reading list for the incoming Congressional class of 2010.” His “list” consisted of exactly one book: the recently published collection of the letters of Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003), well described by Pearlstein as a testament to the late New York Senator’s intellectual integrity, his seriousness of purpose, and his love of the English language. Pearlstein concluded by posing this unnerving question to the newly elected members of the 112th Congress: “Are you going to accept the low bar now set for political leadership, or will you commit yourself to bringing some Moynihan-like style, intelligence, candor and independence to an ailing institution? It’s your choice.”

I do not expect the new Members to agonize over Pearlstein’s challenge. Rather than opting for 720 pages of epistolary grace and erudition, I think it far more likely that they will turn instead to more prosaic studies of the national legislature. Among these one of the most distinguished is The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get it Back on Track, by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein.

The co-authors of The Broken Branch, respected Congress watchers of long standing, see the institution as a perfect storm of dysfunction. Particularly in their chapter reviewing the history of “The First Branch of Government,” Mann and Ornstein make it clear that while Congressional decline has been caused by external challenges of long standing, many of its wounds are relatively recent (they trace the “seeds of the contemporary problem” to 1969) and essentially self-inflicted. In the case of the House of Representatives, frequently adopted closed rules have severely restricted debate, standard rules of procedure have too often been honored in the breach, the role of the Speaker has been grotesquely inflated, strident partisanship has replaced the bipartisan camaraderie of the committee system, and deliberation has been eclipsed by the “permanent campaign” that necessitates non-stop fund-raising. Finally, the chamber has ceased to be interested in exercising oversight of the executive branch. Over on the Senate side, there has been an increased reliance on the filibuster, or filibuster threats; heavy reliance on anonymous “holds” that sidetrack bills and nominations; more aggressive use of the budget reconciliation process; and a decline of debate on the floor that makes a mockery of the Senate’s traditional claim to be “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” In both chambers, ideological purity trumps bipartisan comity.

The good news is that to the extent that Congress has broken itself, it should have the capacity to reform itself back to good health. Mann and Ornstein recommend—among many other things—turning redistricting over to the professionals, restoring the power of committee chairmen, rewriting the campaign finance laws, beefing up ethics guidelines, reinstituting legislative oversight of the executive branch, taming the filibuster, reining in reconciliation, bringing Congressional families to town, and reintroducing bipartisan lunches.

There are, however, those who believe that Congressional decline is much more the result of the exertion of executive and/or judicial muscle. If Congress has been “broken” from without, inward-looking reform strategies such as those advocated by Mann and Ornstein begin to look much less compelling. Our newly elected Representatives and Senators should perhaps be dipping into this literature as well.

Consider, for example, the argument of Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg in Presidential Power: Unchecked and Unbalanced (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007). The authors contend that while Abraham Lincoln did much to aggrandize the presidency (and, by extension, the national government) during the Civil War, it wasn’t until the twentieth century that unfettered “presidentialism” really took off (at the expense of Congress). Crenson and Ginsberg pay particular attention to three more or less concurrent developments having to do with control of the federal budget, war powers, and what the authors call “executive unilateralism.”

At a time when even the presumptive Republican Speaker of the House believes that it’s the Democratic president “who sets the agenda for our government,” it is amazing to think that prior to World War I everyone agreed that budget planning was a Congressional responsibility. In fact, Crenson and Ginsberg contend that the national legislature “maintained near-absolute control of the federal bureaucracy” and was understood to be the formulator of national fiscal policy. In the course of the twentieth century, Congress was gradually eclipsed. In 1921, the legislation authorizing the Bureau of the Budget (BoB) was passed. Later, during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s long watch, BoB was assigned to the executive office of the president. In 1974, it was upgraded to the Office of Management and Budget, at which time Congress thought to create the Congressional Budget Office as a kind of “counter-weight.” Could it be that the diminished role of Congress in the budget planning process has something to do with its inability to pass appropriations bills? Now some Republicans are talking about restoring a prominent role for Congress in budget planning, though perhaps one may be forgiven for wondering whether their motivations are more partisan than constitutional.

On the war-making front, Crenson and Ginsberg note that during the 70 years that have elapsed since the last time Congress exercised its exclusive power to declare war, the United States has been almost continuously engaged in hot or cold warfare. The expansion of the Commander-in-Chief clause has rendered declarations of war superfluous. And while the War Powers Act of 1973 often is celebrated as a post-Vietnam reassertion of Congressional initiative, it actually conceded powers to the President that go far beyond Constitutional provisions.

In a revealing anecdote, Crenson and Ginsberg ask their readers to keep in mind the kinds of powers relied upon by the Bush Administration in Iraq and Afghanistan while relating the story of James K. Polk’s attempt to prosecute the Mexican War. Polk, a Democrat, was able to persuade Congress to declare war on Mexico, but a freshman Congressman named Abraham Lincoln gave him a serious case of heartburn in the process. It didn’t help that both of Polk’s top generals, Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor, were leading Whigs who harbored presidential aspirations. Cresson and Ginsberg emphasize that Polk was unable even to control the State Department functionary, Nicholas Trist, who was dispatched to negotiate a peace settlement with the Mexicans. When Trist encountered difficulty, Polk ordered him home. But Trist elected to stay in Mexico and negotiate a deal, the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, instead. Polk, who disapproved of the treaty, then ordered that Trist be put under military arrest and put on a boat bound for Washington. Subsequently, the Senate ratified Trist’s treaty, celebrated Taylor’s military exploits, and censured Polk for “a war unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.” The contrast with the Bush Administration’s twenty-first-century experience could hardly be more stark: with the conspicuous exception of Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV)—though others took up the cause later—Congress put up little or no initial resistance to the wars against terrorism, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Regulatory review, too, once resided with Congress, but gradually it has migrated to the executive branch. The authors of Presidential Power: Unchecked and Unbalanced document the increased reliance on executive action, particularly as it has been promulgated through executive orders. Congress fought back with the Congressional Review Act of 2001, which seemed to give the legislature oversight over the independent regulatory agencies. “The problem,” however, as Crenson and Ginsberg explain, “is that a congressional decision to invalidate a regulation could be vetoed by the president.”

It is worth mentioning, too, that the judiciary—famously characterized by Alexander Hamilton as the “least dangerous” branch, also has had a hand in the emasculation of Congress. Since Louis Brandeis introduced “sociological jurisprudence” to the federal judiciary in the 1908 case of Muller v. Oregon, judges have gradually become used to legislating from the bench, an activity that liberals now take for granted and do not regard as particularly controversial—witness Justice Sotomayor’s casual acknowledgement that “the court of appeals is where policy is made.” What’s surprising is that even conservative judges seem to have lost their inhibitions about judicial activism. Congress’s instinct seems to be to roll over and play dead. Given the balance of partisan power in Washington at the moment, it seems highly unlikely, for example, that Congress will act to undo the electoral consequences of the Court’s controversial decision in the Citizens United case any time soon.

Congress, alas, cannot be portrayed simply as the hapless victim of an imperial presidency or activist judiciary. All too often, the House and Senate have acquiesced as aggressive presidents or appellate courts have assumed legislative prerogatives. Mann and Ornstein are particularly eloquent on this point, bemoaning how a supine Congress has too often shrunk from contesting and overseeing the executive, especially when partisan and ideological interests prevail over institutional responsibilities. But again, this is nothing new. The agenda for the New Deal was set by a hyper-partisan FDR White House, not by Congress. Likewise, the Civil Rights movement proceeded mainly in the judiciary, with courageous support provided at critical moments by the executive branch—Little Rock being the classic instance, with Congress managing to keep a discreet distance.

Similarly, it looks as if the contentious “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy will be resolved by an odd coalition of Pentagon bureaucrats and appellate court judges, rather than Congress. And after the failure of H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, it appears that U.S. policy on global climate change will be forged, for better or worse, through executive orders drafted by functionaries in the Environmental Protection Agency or the Energy Department. In sum, members of the freshman class of the 112th Congress could do far worse, by way of orientation, than to study both The Broken Branch and Presidential Power to consider both internal and external challenges to Congressional authority.

And they’d better be prepared for partisan in-fighting that has become nasty and ingrained. Like most observers of Congress, Mann and Ornstein seem to assume that the unleashing of partisan and ideological passions is the cause of Congressional irresponsibility. I would argue that it is more effect than cause. It’s a disturbing thought, but it could be that Congressional politics is vicious for the same reason that university faculty politics is vicious: because “the stakes are so low.”

Pearlstein is probably right that the only cure for the disease from which Congress suffers would require “bringing some Moynihan-like style, intelligence, candor and independence to an ailing institution.” And so we have come full circle.

National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform

Over the next few weeks, it will be extremely interesting to follow reactions to the recent report of Erskine Bowles and Alan K. Simpson, co-chairmen of this bipartisan panel, which is looking into ways of making America solvent again. One thing is certain: there are profound implications for federal employees and prospective federal employees. Joe Davidson explores some of them in his Washington Post column, "The Federal Diary," of November 12. Meanwhile, Dana Milbank offers his views on how the No Regrets Democrats and the No Compromise Republicans are likely to view the unsettling prospect of fiscal responsibility.

It seems that the Glenn School's policy forum, "Avoiding Catastrophic Budget Failure," will be very timely, especially since the Commission is scheduled to release a report the next day. We're hoping for a big crowd of Washington-based Buckeyes on November 30.

November 17 update: Norman Ornstein weighs in on the Deficit Commission in today's Roll Call.

November 18 update: Roll Call's Morton Kondracke reviews three tax reform plans and urges President Obama to seize this opportunity to do something that would win popular approval because it would create jobs.

November 24 update: Today's Post has a terrific chart that compares the recommendations of the three panels (Simpson-Bowles, Rivlin-Domenici, and Galston-MacGuineas) that are looking for ways to reduce the deficit. Accompanying the summary table is a column by Ezra Klein.

November 29 update: The Brookings Institution's William Gale reviews five myths about cutting the deficit in the Outlook section of Sunday's Post.

December 2 update: Here, finally, is "The Moment of Truth: Report of the President's Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform." And here is a persuasive argument by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities that the Rivlin-Domenici plan is better.

An Intellectual's Guide to Public Service

On the morning after the 2010 midterm elections, The Washington Post published a column by Steven Pearlstein that congratulated the winners while offering a "reading list" to those who will be new members of the 112th Congress that convenes in January, 2011. The "reading list," it turns out, consisted of a single book: a collection of the letters of the late New York Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, edited by Steven R. Weisman.

The 720-page volume of letters has been getting rave reviews. One of the most entertaining of which is Hendrik Hertzberg's "Politics and Prose," in the October 25, 2010, issue of The New Yorker. Moynihan was a larger than life character, to be sure. George F. Will couldn't resist pointing out that Moynihan had written wrote more books than most Senators had read. On the other hand, the droll Eric Severaid once complained that the trouble with Senator Moynihan was that he threatened to make it respectable to be a sociologist.

Once, long ago in a galaxy far away, I wrote a review of Moynihan's book about the United Nations, where he had served as U.S. Ambassador. His book was called A Dangerous Place. I thought it would be clever to submit a review entitled "A Dangerous Man," the point of which was that Ambassador Moynihan might have enough rhetorical power all by himself to pose a threat to the mendacity from which the U.N., and particularly the General Assembly, suffered in those days.

My editor had different ideas. He replaced my title with one of his own, which made my reference in the body of the review to Moynihan as "a dangerous man" seem very odd indeed. I was not happy when the review appeared in print, but I didn't expect any real fallout from it.

But I was wrong. Late in the summer of 1979, I received the following letter on the stationery of the United States Senate:

Pindars Corners, N.Y.
August 31, 1979

Dear Dr. Kolson,

Help me. My friends say yours was the most hostile review A Dangerous Place has received. I thought it friendly. Am I bonkers? Please write, as I need to know!

Best,

DPM

Not being all that accustomed to receiving letters from United States Senators asking me whether I considered them "bonkers," I sat down at once to compose something reassuring. I think I managed to explain the confusion over the title convincingly enough, but in the process I'm sure I demonstrated that as a correspondent I had very little entertainment value. Senator Moynihan's framed letter occupies a prominent place on the wall of my den at home. But he never wrote back.

A Diplomat's Progress--Book Review (reprise)

This week the Fall 2010 class of Glenn Fellows is reading Samuel Huntington's famous Foreign Affairs article on "The Clash of Civilizations." As an introduction to the not-always-glamorous world of professional diplomacy, I have also assigned a book called A Diplomat's Progress, written by Henry Precht, a retired foreign service officer. Mr. Precht was born in Savannah, Georgia, and educated at Emory University. He joined the foreign service in 1961 and served in U.S. embassies in Italy, Mauritius, Iran, and Egypt. He was the Department of State’s Desk Officer for Iran during the revolution and hostage crisis when the Shah was overthrown, and he was deputy ambassador in Cairo when Anwar Sadat was assassinated. His nomination by President Jimmy Carter to the post of U.S. ambassador to Mauritania was blocked by Senator Jesse Helms.

After leaving the foreign service, Mr. Precht served as president of the World Affairs Council in Cleveland, Ohio, where he also taught at Case Western Reserve University. A few years ago, he published A Diplomat’s Progress, a work of fiction consisting of a series of vignettes about a State Department official named Harry Prentice. It is an engaging work that reveals, as one reviewer has put it, the “grittier side of embassy life with a wry sense of humor and a bit of an edge.” To the extent that the work is autobiographical, A Diplomat’s Progress is rather remarkable.

For one thing, the “grittier” aspects of diplomacy are portrayed warts and all. In one of the vignettes, the young Harry Prentice and his wife attend a dinner party at the home of the foreign minister of Mauritius, during which the lecherous host assaults the drunken daughter of the Japanese ambassador. In a vignette set in Egypt, the protagonist must tend to a dead body and a suitcase full of drug money. In “Caviar and Kurds,” Prentice unwittingly leads the Shah’s secret police to an underground freedom fighter named Hassan, whom Prentice finds hanging from a lamppost the next day. In this account of embassy life, no good deed goes unpunished.

Most remarkable as an autobiography—and surely it must be regarded as partly that, in spite of the veneer of fiction—is the book’s unflattering portrait of its protagonist. Throughout A Diplomat’s Progress, Harry Prentice’s diplomatic efforts are undone by either his naivete or his cynicism. Typically, the reader is given a glimpse of a career diplomat preoccupied, not with the national interest, as one might suppose, but rather, with his own career advancement. At one point, for instance, Prentice seems to have been the unwitting accomplice of a Palestinian terrorist. What does he do about it? He gets up in the middle of the night to compose a somewhat Bardachian “balance sheet of possible courses of action.” There appear to be two:

First, the natural inclination of every Foreign Service Officer: Do nothing. Wait on events and react as necessary and as seems prudent at the time. . . . Alternatively, I could report my suspicions to the police. Playing it straight and admitting wrong might be partially redeeming. The key word was “partially.” The embassy surely would be informed and handle my future as if it had no value. The same with the Israeli authorities. I had to face it: Only I really cared about my future, not any American or Israeli career-building bureaucrat.

During his posting to Cairo, Prentice is asked to interview a Sheikh who might have been in a position to influence the extremists holding a number of American hostages in Beirut. Prentice’s efforts fail. “But never mind,” seems to sum up his reaction. “I could only hope that someone—the ambassador or an unknown friend in the department—would make an excellent report of my performance for my file.” The adventure, he concludes, “just might be a turning point—upward—in my career.” On the basis of the evidence provided by the author, the judgment handed down by Prentice’s first wife seems just: He has “a pretty good soul, even though sometime it seems quite lost in the bureaucratic maze.”

Mr. Precht is a charming gentleman who has visited our seminar in the past. Unfortunately for us, he is spending this fall in Paris.

The Brief against Brandeis (reprise)

There is no denying that the long-lived Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) was an American treasure. The son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, he graduated at age 20 with the highest GPA in the history of Harvard Law School. He made his reputation as a Progressive lawyer and as a leader of the worldwide Zionist movement. In 1916, he was nominated for a seat on the United States Supreme Court by President Woodrow Wilson.

The definitive biography of Justice Brandeis was published by Pantheon in 2008. The work of Melvin I. Urofsky of Virginia Commonwealth University, the 955-page tome is getting rave reviews. One, written by Anthony Lewis, appeared in The New York Review of Books. Brandeis, according to Lewis,

was intensely interested in facts. His law clerks did research on facts as much as law. When the Court considered a case on presidential appointment power that involved the 1867 Tenure of Office Act, Brandeis had his law clerk, James M. Landis (who became the dean of Harvard Law School), go over the Senate journals of 1867 to see what the views of the times were. Landis spent months in the Library of Congress reading the journals page by page.

Brandeis even tried to get Justice Holmes, who read philosophy in the original Greek, to take more interest in facts. He urged Holmes to spend the summer break reading up on working conditions and visiting the textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts. A year later Holmes wrote Harold Laski that “in consideration of my age and moral infirmities, [Brandeis] absolved me from facts for the vacation and allowed me my customary sport with ideas.”

Brandeis’s obsession with facts continues to reverberate through American law and politics. Consider, for example, what Wikipedia has to say about the term “Brandeis brief,” which refers to

a pioneering legal brief that was the first in United States legal history to rely not on pure legal theory, but also on analysis of factual data. It is named after the litigator Louis Brandeis, who collected empirical data from hundreds of sources in the 1908 case Muller v. Oregon. The Brandeis Brief changed the direction of the Supreme Court and of U.S. law. The Brandeis Brief became the model for future Supreme Court presentations in cases affecting the health or welfare of classes of individuals. This model was later successfully used in Brown v. Board of Education to demonstrate the harmful psychological effects of segregated education on African-American children.

This week members of the Fall 2010 class of Glenn Fellows are reading essays and court cases organized around the theme of fact-finding and its jurisprudential consequences. As they read these materials, my hope is that they will perform a little thought experiment by asking themselves about the facts that the Court recognized in Muller, Brown, and Roe v. Wade, and whether it would have been wiser for the Court to base its rulings on strictly legal grounds, rather than conducting fact-finding expeditions.

In Brown, for example, the Supreme Court had the option of resurrecting Justice Harlan’s stirring dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, which would have meant striking down school segregation on the grounds that “our constitution is color-blind,” rather than on the less substantial grounds that segregated schools inflict psychological damage upon African-American children. Likewise, in Roe v. Wade, there were a number of precedents that the Court, rather than wrestling with the question of fetal viability and formulating a national “right of privacy,” might have used to finesse the issue of abortion by declaring that public health is a matter that the Constitution, through the Tenth Amendment, reserves to the states. I hope the Fellows will ask themselves, in short, whether the Brandeis brief, so well intentioned, has inflicted a great deal of legal and political harm in the century since Muller v. Oregon.

October 25, 2010, update: As if on cue, The New York Review of Books has published an insightful review by Jonathan Zimmerman of Martha Minow's new book, In Brown's Wake: Legacies of America's Educational Landmark (Oxford University Press). Toward the end, Zimmerman observes, "Live by the social science, die by the social science." It could be Justice Brandeis's epitaph.

Is the British Parliament Broken?

This week the Glenn Fellows are reading Mann and Ornstein's The Broken Branch, an indictment of both houses of Congress on a number of different grounds, among which are excess deference to and minimal oversight of the executive branch.

The U.S. Constitution separates the legislative and executive branches of government. The British Constitution, in contrast, fuses them together. I think it was shrewd Walter Bagehot who referred to the cabinet as the buckle that fastens, the hyphen that joins, the executive and legislative powers in Great Britain. One of the consequences of that is that it is fairly easy for new governments to implement new policies, citing their electoral mandate and exploiting the advantage of a parliamentary majority.

The freshly minted coalition of Conservatives and New Democrats that recently threw out Gordon Brown and New Labour has now announced its program to attack deficit spending in Great Britain. (That's British Chancellor George Osborne, above, unveiling the government's plan. He is flanked by Prime Minister David Cameron, in the purple Tory tie, and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, with his yellow New Dem tie.) Here is a story in The Economist. And here is Andrew Sullivan's typically idiosyncratic take in the Daily Dish.

Implementation of the program will put Keynesian propositions to a systematic test and will likely usher in a new age of austerity, at least over the short run. Most assuredly, other countries, especially those, like the United States, where deficits are staggeringly high in relation to Gross Domestic Product, will be watching closely. Pull yourself a pint and pass the Spam.

Richard Holbrooke and the Clash of Civilizations

Talks are being held in Rome to chart a common strategy for mapping the future of Afghanistan. In addition to the United States and NATO, participants have included delegations from Afghanistan's neighbors. According to Karen DeYoung in today's Post , participants in these talks now include diplomats from Iran. Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration's special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, asserts that the participation of diplomats from a number of Muslim countries constitutes "a living refutation of the clash of civilizations" thesis advanced by the Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington and warmly endorsed by many Muslim extremists. We'll be reading an excerpt in the Shafritz reader later this quarter. That's Professor Huntington with the glasses and natty tweed jacket. He died in 2008 at age 81. And that's Ambassador Holbrooke in the gray flannel State Department suit.

Philip Kennicott on Andrea Palladio

At the beginning of the quarter I posted a piece on the Palladio exhibit at the National Building Museum.

In today's Post, Philip Kennicott weighs in with his views on Palladio, which are charateristically subversive of conventional wisdom, verging on mean-spirited, and yet eloquently expressed and not unpersuasive.

Climate Change and EPA

The Fall 2010 class of John Glenn Fellows recently read Andrew E. Dessler and Edward A. Parson's The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), a book that I have been assigning since last year, when Congress appeared on the verge of adopting some version of the Waxman-Markey bill. That proved a chimera, of course, and now, as Robin Bravender explains in Politico, it devolves to the Environmental Protection Agency to do what it can to slow down the pace of global climate change by regulating greenhouse gases.

Bravender's is a pretty good account of the "iron triangle" of Congressional committees, bureaucrats, and industry lobbyists that sees to it that change occurs incrementally in our pluralistic system.

Why There is No Socialism in America (a reposting from January 24, 2010

In a lecture recently reprinted by The New York Review of Books, Tony Judt of New York University tells us that this query—why is there no socialism in America?—was posed a century ago by a German sociologist, Werner Sombart. The question remains pertinent, for reasons that I try to explain below, despite the enactment of a great deal of “social democratic” legislation in the course of the twentieth century.

Judt’s lecture explores some of the many answers that have been formulated in response to Sombart’s question. I was surprised, however, that Judt never mentions Louis Hartz, a political philosopher with an original take on American political history that he published during the McCarthy Era as The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, 1955).

Somewhat surprisingly, Hartz’s answer boils down to this: there can be no genuine socialism in America because there was never any genuine conservatism here. And we have no conservatives because in the New World there was no Old Order to conserve. Early settlers came to the British colonies in North America in an effort to get away from vestiges of feudalism (primogeniture, for example) that retained their oppressive potency in Europe. We Americans are the descendents of religious dissenters and others who voted with their feet against the Old Order. The deal was sealed when our few remaining Tories, aristocrats, and monarchists escaped, or were chased, to Canada after the American Revolution.

Canada, in fact, proves Hartz’s point. Even today there are a few honest-to-God Tories, and roughly the same number of authentic socialists in Canada, and neither feels obliged to offer apologies for itself. The result, to take just one example, is that the Canadians were able to create something akin to socialized medicine; it couldn’t be rejected, as it has been in the U.S., as part of a wholly alien tradition.

In the United States, by contrast, liberalism (think John Locke, for whom society is “atomistic,” i.e., the sum of its individual parts) is the only tradition we have. Some American liberals may be inclined to promote equality, even at the expense of personal liberty; Hartz calls them “liberal democrats.” Others may favor liberty over equality; Hartz calls them “liberal whigs.” We have neither a Far Right reminiscing about an organic, corporate order dominated by a benign and paternalistic gentry, nor a Far Left intent on overthrowing bourgeois capitalism and replacing it with a collectivist Social Welfare state (i.e., a Workers’ Paradise). The good news is that, there is nothing in our tradition for fascism to feed on. Never mind all the dire warnings about indigenous fascism that have been issued by the Far Left; the closest we’ve ever come was Father Coughlin in the 1930s, and that wasn’t very close. BTW, that's Ben Shahn's image of Father Coughlin with his Hitlerian fist pump up top.

The result, according to Hartz, is that American politics oscillates between the two “extremes” of liberal democracy and liberal whiggery, which aren’t extreme at all, but variations on the same theme. Thus, it is very much in the Hartzian tradition for Judt to pose the following musical question about American politics: “Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?” It’s because our liberal tradition is so capacious it makes everything else seem beyond the pale.

In the United States, the liberal democrats (i.e., people like Judt) have traditionally had the stronger hand. This is because they (unlike, say, the author of Federalist No. 10) have no real reservations about majority rule, and they know how to appeal to majoritarian instincts, some of which are not very honorable (e.g., the abolition of debts). Liberal whigs (e.g., today’s Republicans) have a harder time of it, because if they articulate their principles clearly they run the risk of offending the many who stand to profit from “majority tyranny.” Still, the liberal whigs are able to compete by planting seeds of fear and doubt in the American democrat. Conjuring up the “rags to riches” fantasy (e.g., Andrew Carnegie’s “gospel of wealth”) allows the American right, such as it is, to enjoy what Hartz called the Great Law of Whig Compensation, by which he meant that for the death of Hamilton (and genuine Toryism) they get the perpetual triumph of McKinley (an Ohioan, of course). You take what you can get. Come to think of it, Hartz himself was born in Youngstown, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants.

Still with me? Hang on, there’s just a bit more. Implicit in Hartz’s description of a consensual and monotonous liberal order is the idea that the parameters of American political discourse are unusually narrow. Tony Judt is on exactly the same page when he says, apologizing for the academic jargon, that the great shortcoming of American politics is discursive. One of the effects of that is that the stakes of American politics are fairly low, though politicians do everything they can to try to make them seem much higher.

Some will note that the U.S. has had its collectivist moments: the Progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century; the New Deal during the Great Depression; Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. And that is true, though each was more of an improvisation than part of a Grand Design, which explains why American institutions differ so markedly from their European counterparts. During our spasms of Social Democracy (to use Judt’s term) in the 1900s, the ‘30s, and the ‘60s, we were trying to solve practical problems. We were “muddling through”; we had no wish to create a Brave New World. From the days of Benjamin Franklin at least Americans have been practical-minded empiricists (the Branch method, rather than the Root), not theoreticians.

What Judt has to say at the very end of his lecture is extremely interesting. He is clearly disgusted with the American left for not recognizing that it “has something to conserve,” i.e., the collectivist, social democratic heritage of the twentieth century. He notes that the left often seems intent on apologizing for its own legacy. Judt also criticizes the left for not recognizing that the right (thanks largely to George W. Bush, though he doesn’t say that in so many words) has put itself in the awkward position of advocating utopian ideas such as not worrying about budget deficits (“Deficits don’t matter,” according to Dick Cheney) and “making the world safe for democracy.” The right, according to Judt, “has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project.” They ought to feel more uncomfortable in that position than they seem to be.

This, in my view, is astounding, especially when one considers that (quoting Judt again, but now with a bow in the direction of Charles Lindblom) “If we learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences.” (Consider, for example, Hitler’s answer to “the Jewish question,” or Stalin’s answer to the challenge posed by kulaks, whose very existence refuted Marxist ideology.) Yes, what we have here is another argument for muddling through.

Oops. $1 Billion SNAFU in Alexandria

This office building, not far from where I live, is supposed to accommodate 6,400 Defense Department employees, though it seems no one gave serious thought to the impact it would have on the local transportation network. The building is a creature of the 2005 Base Realignment and Close Commission. Read Andy Medici's story in the Federal Times.

Rationality and Public Policy Making: A Reposting

What follows is a slightly updated version of a post originally published on September 29, 2009.

It's week 3, which means it must be time to take another close look at Eugene Bardach's A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis, a book that has always struck me as a kind of Rorschach test. While Bardach recognizes that policy analysis is "more art than science," he is, ultimately, an optimist. He thinks that public policy is improved when it is informed by rigorous empirical research. As a dyed-in-the-wool futilitarian, the Washington Buckeye is less sanguine about the prospects of rationality in the policy-making process.

The October 8, 2009, issue of the New York Review of Books has a remarkable article that bears on the issue: "The Anarchy of Success," by William Easterly, an economics professor at NYU. The article is a review of two new books, Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, and Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. Unfortunately, the NYROB won't let me attach a link to Easterly's article because it is premium content.

So here's the nub of the argument. Easterly says that the phenomenal rates of economic growth enjoyed by Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore (see skyline photo above), and Taiwan in the period between 1960 and 2007 inspired a tsunami of research by economists eager "to find in the empirical data which factors reliably lead to growth. Yet hundreds of research articles later, we wound up at a surprising end point: we don't know."

Think of it. After the investment of billions and billions of dollars and Euros in the righteous cause of economic development, we actually don't know the causes of growth. According to Easterly, summarizing Mlodinow, economists have identified 145 factors associated with growth, but "most of the patterns were spurious, because they failed to hold up when other researchers tried to replicate them." As for Bad Samaritans, Easterly says that Chang criticizes "those who have made overly strong claims for free trade and orthodox capitalism, but then he turns around and makes equally strong claims for protectionism and what he calls 'heterodox' capitalism, which includes such features as government promotion of favored industries, state-owned enterprises, and heavy regulation of foreign direct investment."

Could it be that "the science of muddling through" is the best we can do?

The Gargoyle Shot

Fall 2010 Glenn Fellows at the Library of Congress. Left to right: Chandra Caldwell, Kevin Ruppert, Justin Canfil, Alex Petrucci, Sara Hinds, Christina Buckler, Claire Racine, Lindsey Wilson, Kyle Everett, Brock Hutchison, Theresa Brenner, Nichole Hill, Katie Heffernan.

Fall 2010 Glenn Fellows Arrive in D.C.

Left to right: Alexandra Petrucci, Chandra Caldwell, Nichole Hill, Justin Canfil, Sara Hinds, Kyle Everett, Kathryn Heffernan, Brock Hutchison, Theresa Brenner, Kevin Ruppert, Lindsey Wilson, Christina Buckler, Claire Racine.

Members of the fall 2010 class are living in The Congessional Apartments at 215 Constitution Avenue, N.E. We held our orientation session on Monday. Tuesday was the first day of their internships. Seminars and study tours will be held on Fridays this quarter.

"In private industry, if you screw things up, you get the boot; in the civil service, if you screw things up, I get the boot"

In the Washington Academic Internship Program, we talk a lot about how public policy is made, which usually leads to consideration of the tension, endemic to the nation's capital, between politicians and civil servants. Indeed, the Washington Buckeye is convinced that it is this tension--and not the more celebrated rivalry of Democrats with Republicans, or liberals with conservatives--that makes this city tick.

There is no better way of gaining insight into the contest between politicians and civil servants than through the 1980s BBC comedy series called Yes, Minister and its sequel, Yes, Prime Minister; they were Margaret Thatcher's favorite television shows. The main characters in the original series were Jim Hacker, a Member of Parliament of indeterminte party affiliation who serves as Minister of Administrative Affairs, and his Permanent Secretary (a senior career civil servant, in other words), Sir Humphrey Appleby. Wikipedia sums up their relationship as follows:

The different ideals and self-interested motives of the characters are frequently contrasted. Whilst Hacker occasionally approaches an issue from a sense of idealism and a desire to be seen to improve things, he ultimately sees his re-election and elevation to higher office as the only measures of his success. Accordingly, he must appear to the voters to be effective and responsive to the public will. To his party (and, in the first incarnation, the Prime Minister) he must act as a loyal and effective party member. Sir Humphrey, on the other hand, genuinely believes that it is the Civil Service that knows what is best for the country (a belief shared by his bureaucratic colleagues) which is usually what is best for the Civil Service. Most of Sir Humphrey's actions are motivated by his wish to maintain the prestige, power, and influence he enjoys inside a large, bureaucratic organisation and also to preserve the numerous perks of his position: automatic honours, a substantial income, a fixed retirement age, a large pension, and the practical impossibility of being made redundant or being sacked. In fact, a good deal of the tension in their relationship comes from Hacker's awareness that it is the politicians who are liable to lose their jobs if civil service ineptitude comes to public attention.

In the current issue of The New York Review of Books there is an article by Philippe Sands on the inquiry undertaken by a blue-ribbon commission chaired by a senior civil servant, Sir John Chilcot, on the origins of British involvement in the Iraq War. Although the inquiry has not yet been completed, it already has brought certain documents to light that point to the key role played by Prime Minister Tony Blair's Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, who firmly believed--right up until the last minute, when he was brow-beaten by advisors to President George W. Bush--that waging war in Iraq would be illegal without a clear mandate from the United Nations. In addition to the political pressures on cabinet ministers such as Lord Goldsmith, the documents reveal the civil service in all its glory, as if it were the reincarnation of Yes, Minister. Read it, weep.

Palladio Exhibit at National Building Museum

Often we start a new quarter with a quick trip to the National Building Museum, the main attraction being a more or less permanent exhibition on the history of the capital called Washington: Symbol and City. The building itself, also known as the Pension Building, and the other exhibits always reward a close look, also.

This fall, a particularly good case can be made for visiting the Pension Building, thanks to a special exhibition called Palladio and His Legacy: A Transatlantic Journey, featuring drawings and models of buildings designed by the great Renaissance scholar and architect, Andrea Palladio (1508-1580). Palladio was revered by Jefferson, who, through works such as the Virginia State House, did much to popularize Palladio's distinctive version of classical design.

A nice write-up of the exhibition appeared in today's Roll Call under the by-line of Kaitlin Kovach. We'll be visiting the exhibition next Monday afternoon with the Autumn 2010 class of Glenn Fellows.

Michael Tomasky's Critique of the U.S. Senate

The current issue of The New York Review of Books contains a piece by Michael Tomasky, "The Specter Haunting the Senate," that praises two recent books on the filibuster and cloture as they have been employed by that institution. The "specter" that haunts the Senate is, of course, the unlikely prospect of reform.

Mr. Tomasky clearly is one of those, like last quarter's WAIP guest speaker Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution, who thinks of Congress as a "broken branch." The Washington Buckeye commented on Mann's presentation on August 18, 2010, and published an earlier post on the Mann-Ornstein book, on January 31, 2010. Just last month, we noted George Packer's lively critique of the Senate in a recent New Yorker, and all of these accounts of the lamentable condition of the national legislature need to be read against the urgent need of incumbents to keep the campaign contributions rolling in. On January 4, 2010, we wrote about Robert G. Kaiser's book, So Damn Much Money, about fund-raising, lobbying, and Congressional earmarks. It all makes for fascinating reading, parental guidance advised.

Rufus Miles and Bob Gates: A Reposting with New Link

Rufus Miles (1910-1996) was born in Columbus and is remembered for having been a senior federal administrator for many years. Here is his New York Times obituary.

It was Miles who famously observed that "Where you stand depends upon where you sit," which is usually understood to mean that if you know what's in the best interest of a particular agency or department, you know the opinions of its senior staff. It has come to be known as Miles's Law, and it works almost every time.

As usual, it's the exception that proves the rule. And Exhibit A is Robert Gates, who recently announced that he would be stepping down as Secretary of Defense sometime in 2011. Fareed Zakaria profiled Gates in his August 16 column in the Washington Post. Here's a Secretary of Defense who has the temerity to suggest that there's something terribly wrong when the Pentagon has ten times as many accountants as the United States has foreign service officers. And now, in today's (August 17, 2010) Post, Walter Pincus talks about some of the radical changes Gates is willing to contemplate in his quest to "change the Pentagon culture and to cap spending."

Bob Gates will be sorely missed.

September 9, 2010 update: Gates is the subject of David Ignatius's column in today's Washington Post.

A Washington Buckeye Wannabe

President Barack Obama helps spell out "Ohio" with the Weithman family, Rachel, 9, Josh, 11, and mom Rhonda, in their home in Columbus, Ohio, Aug. 18, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Reprinted from yesterday's Columbus Dispatch.

Congress back on track? Not yet, says Congressional Scholar Thomas E. Mann

On Tuesday, August 17, the Glenn School's Washington Office hosted a reception at the Phoenix Park Hotel to honor the 15 participants in the Summer 2010 Washington Academic Internship Program. A number of internship supervisors, mentors, and local alumni were in attendance.

The program featured Thomas E. Mann, holder of the W. Averell Harriman Chair in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and co-author, with Norman Ornstein, of The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get it Back on Track, one of the textbooks in our public policy seminar.

Dr. Mann was educated at the University of Florida and the University of Michigan. He came to Washington forty years ago as a Congressional Fellow in the offices of Senator Philip A. Hart and Representative James G. O’Hara, and apparently he never looked back. He quickly became an expert on Congressional procedures and the history of the institution. He calls himself a “hardcore partisan” of Congress and of the legislative process generally, and he ranks among the wisest and most approachable of Washington's talking heads. Among the many accolades bestowed on Dr. Mann is the Glenn School’s Excellence in Public Service Award, which he won in 2006.

We asked him to share his thoughts about whether, a year and a half into the Obama Administration, Congress is getting “back on track.” Dr. Mann argued that while the branch is still "broken," the 111th Congress accomplished a great deal more than the public is inclined to give it credit for. The Washington Buckeye found that entirely persuasive, though one can imagine a legislature being so broken that a "Do Nothing" Congress might actually be preferable to a productive one.

Rufus Miles and Bob Gates

Rufus Miles (1910-1996) was born in Columbus and is remembered for having been a senior federal administrator for many years. Here is his New York Times obituary.

It was Miles who famously observed that "Where you stand depends upon where you sit," which is usually understood to mean that if you know what's in the best interest of a particular agency or department, you know the opinions of its senior staff. It has come to be known as Miles's Law, and it works almost every time.

As usual, it's the exception that proves the rule. And Exhibit A is Robert Gates, who recently announced that he would be stepping down as Secretary of Defense sometime in 2011. Fareed Zakaria profiled Gates in his August 16 column in the Washington Post. Here's a Secretary of Defense who has the temerity to suggest that there's something terribly wrong when the Pentagon has ten times as many accountants as the United States has foreign service officers. And now, in today's (August 17, 2010) Post, Walter Pincus talks about some of the radical changes Gates is willing to contemplate in his quest to "change the Pentagon culture and to cap spending."

Bob Gates will be sorely missed.

The Empty Chamber

I've always been a little ambivalent about the "broken branch" thesis. On the one hand, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein make a good case that things have gone downhill in both houses of Congress since the glory days of Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn. George Packer makes the same argument, specifically about the Senate,in the current issue of The New Yorker.

Actually, no one has issued this indictment more eloquently than Senator Glenn. Looking back on his long career, he writes:

In my twenty-two years in the Senate, I had watched the legislative process change. There was always partisanship--that was the nature of the system. Although it produced disagreement and debate, it ultimately forged budgets and laws on which reasonable people could differ but that worked for most. In general, lawmakers performed their duties in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

This was no longer the case. By the 1994 election, we had single-issue candidates, the demonization of government, the sneering dismissal of opposing points of view, a willingness to indulge the few at the expense of the many, and the smug rejection of the claims of entire segments of society to any portion of the government's resources. Respectful disagreement had vanished. Poisonous distrust, accusation, and attack had replaced it.

On the other hand, sometimes it seems to me that maybe the good old days weren't all they're cracked up to be--and, as a wag once suggested--never were! Certainly, the vicious caning of Senator Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, by South Carolina's Preston Brooks in 1856 (pictured above) hardly qualifies as "respectful disagreement."

On the third hand, you can make the case that what's wrong with Congress is that its powers have been usurped by an all-consuming executive branch whose mandate comes from what James Madison referred to as "the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority." Or you could argue that Congress has simply abdicated. Either way, the explanation for Congressional irresponsibility starts to sound like the old saw about academic politics: it's vicious precisely because "the stakes are so low."

No doubt these issues will be rehearsed at the Phoenix Park next Tuesday evening, when the Glenn Fellows will have a chance to talk to Thomas E. Mann, Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution.

The Billionaires and their Pledge

Last week one of our summer 2010 Glenn Fellows, Sean Fitzpatrick, commented on the recent agreement by 40 or so billionaires to give at least half their money to registered charities. Steven Pearlstein commented in his column in Saturday's Washington Post. Not exactly Sean's point, I don't think, but also worth pondering.

In explaining the high rates of charitable giving in the United States, it's hard to overstate the importance of generous tax deductions that encourage philanthropy. For me the interesting question becomes, is our high rate of charitable giving a reflection of the tax code, or is the code an expression of our distinctive culture? Or does the influence flow both ways?

A Diplomat's Progress--Book Review

This week the Summer 2010 class of Glenn Fellows is reading Samuel Huntington's famous Foreign Affairs article on "The Clash of Civilizations." As an introduction to the not-always-glamorous world of professional diplomacy, I have also assigned a book called A Diplomat's Progress, written by Henry Precht, a retired foreign service officer. Mr. Precht was born in Savannah, Georgia, and educated at Emory University. He joined the foreign service in 1961 and served in U.S. embassies in Italy, Mauritius, Iran, and Egypt. He was the Department of State’s Desk Officer for Iran during the revolution and hostage crisis when the Shah was overthrown, and he was deputy ambassador in Cairo when Anwar Sadat was assassinated. His nomination by President Jimmy Carter to the post of U.S. ambassador to Mauritania was vetoed by Senator Jesse Helms.

After leaving the foreign service, Mr. Precht served as president of the World Affairs Council in Cleveland, Ohio, where he also taught at Case Western Reserve University. A few years ago, he published A Diplomat’s Progress, a work of fiction consisting of a series of vignettes about a State Department official named Harry Prentice. It is an engaging work that reveals, as one reviewer has put it, the “grittier side of embassy life with a wry sense of humor and a bit of an edge.” To the extent that the work is autobiographical, A Diplomat’s Progress is rather remarkable.

For one thing, the “grittier” aspects of diplomacy are portrayed warts and all. In one of the vignettes, the young Harry Prentice and his wife attend a dinner party at the home of the foreign minister of Mauritius, during which the lecherous host assaults the drunken daughter of the Japanese ambassador. In a vignette set in Egypt, the protagonist must tend to a dead body and a suitcase full of drug money. In “Caviar and Kurds,” Prentice unwittingly leads the Shah’s secret police to an underground freedom fighter named Hassan, whom Prentice finds hanging from a lamppost the next day. In this account of embassy life, no good deed goes unpunished.

Most remarkable as an autobiography—and surely it must be regarded as partly that, in spite of the veneer of fiction—is the book’s unflattering portrait of its protagonist. Throughout A Diplomat’s Progress, Harry Prentice’s diplomatic efforts are undone by either his naivete or his cynicism. Typically, the reader is given a glimpse of a career diplomat preoccupied, not with the national interest, as one might suppose, but rather, with his own career advancement. At one point, for instance, Prentice seems to have been the unwitting accomplice of a Palestinian terrorist. What does he do about it? He gets up in the middle of the night to compose a somewhat Bardachian “balance sheet of possible courses of action.” There appear to be two:

First, the natural inclination of every Foreign Service Officer: Do nothing. Wait on events and react as necessary and as seems prudent at the time. . . . Alternatively, I could report my suspicions to the police. Playing it straight and admitting wrong might be partially redeeming. The key word was “partially.” The embassy surely would be informed and handle my future as if it had no value. The same with the Israeli authorities. I had to face it: Only I really cared about my future, not any American or Israeli career-building bureaucrat.

During his posting to Cairo, Prentice is asked to interview a Sheikh who might have been in a position to influence the extremists holding a number of American hostages in Beirut. Prentice’s efforts fail. “But never mind,” seems to sum up his reaction. “I could only hope that someone—the ambassador or an unknown friend in the department—would make an excellent report of my performance for my file.” The adventure, he concludes, “just might be a turning point—upward—in my career.” On the basis of the evidence provided by the author, the judgment handed down by Prentice’s first wife seems just: He has “a pretty good soul, even though sometime it seems quite lost in the bureaucratic maze.”

Mr. Precht is a charming gentleman who has visited our seminar in the past. Unfortunately for us, he spends his summers in Maine.

Glenn Fellows visit SCOTUS

Yesterday the Glenn Fellows visited the Supreme Court of the United States. Afterwards, they had a conversation with a reporter who covers the Court, Lawrence Hurley of the Los Angeles Daily Journal. Here is a link to Lawrence's blog, Washington Briefs: http://washingtonbriefs.com/

During the seminar, we talked about Mann and Ornstein's indictment of Congress, The Broken Branch. And we welcomed Stacy Rastauskas, OSU's Assistant Vice President for Federal Relations, who aregued that lobbying is a noble profession. (Last quarter's speaker on this subject, Jane Hoover, formerly of Proctor & Gamble, said that she always thought of herself as being in the "education" business.) Coincidentally, Roll Call ran a piece today about lobbying that included a table listing the twenty biggest spenders during the first half of 2010. The listing reveals, not surprisingly, that intense lobbying activity, much as Madison anticipated, is a largely defensive maneuver on the part of threatened minority interests. The American Beverage Association, for example, is in ninth place on Roll Call's 2010 list. A year ago, before there was much talk about taxing sugary drinks, the American Beverage Association ranked 212th.

Escalator Outages

First-time visitors to our nation’s capital, including many Glenn Fellows, routinely fall in love with the Washington Metro. It happened to me when I first rode the embryonic subway system in 1976. In those days Metro consisted of just a handful of stops on the Red and Blue Lines. But it was clean and fast, and it seemed to bespeak confidence in the public sector. With its classical allusions, Metro seemed a natural extension of L’Enfant’s ambitious city plan.

I was an aficionado in the early days. No more. The quirks that once seemed so charming gradually became annoying—and, ultimately, infuriating. Every regular Metro rider has his or her pet peeve.

For me, it’s the chronic problem of out-of-service escalators. Escalators are absolutely essential to Metro’s basic design, and yet they have been unreliable from Day One. We know this thanks to Zachary M. Schrag, author of The Great Society Subway (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), the authoritative history of the Washington Metro. Let Schrag pick up the story here:

Harry Weese [Metro’s chief architect] and his team had originally planned all vertical movement by escalator. In the course of the 1970s cost-cutting, some escalators were replaced with granite stairs, but every station entrance and mezzanine had at least two escalators. . . .

The fundamental problem with the escalators is . . . that they are complicated machines with hundreds of moving parts, run for nineteen hours a day and stepped on by their users. Like helicopters and photocopiers, they are inherently maintenance-intensive. As the architects planned the stations, the nation’s leading escalator manufacturers warned them to expect each escalator to be out of service for a ten- to twelve-day stretch each year. Based on this advice, the architects made room for three escalators at most street entrances, so that two could provide down and up service while the third was repaired. But a spare escalator cannot guarantee adequate maintenance. WMATA has struggled to find enough skilled mechanics to work twenty-four-hour shifts, and it has lacked funds to overhaul aging escalators according to schedule. Unsurprisingly, deferred maintenance has resulted in breakdowns, with up to one out of every five escalators out of service on any given day (Schrag, pp. 246-247).

Your faithful blogger respectfully disputes Schrag’s one-in-five estimate. I have been silently documenting Metro’s escalator performance for 25 years and have found that roughly one in three escalators are out of service on any given day.

Schrag is right that repair of a Metro escalator is a major undertaking. At Braddock Road, the Metro station in Alexandria that I know best, there are two escalators, one elevator, and no staircases. A few years ago the escalators—first one, then the other—underwent a complete overhaul. The job was supposed to take six months for each escalator. It took seven months, in fact, which meant that for a total of fourteen months riders had to endure two-way foot traffic twice a day on the escalator not then undergoing repair. You can build a McMansion is less time. Hell, the Phoenix Project that rebuilt the Pentagon after the attack of September 11, 2001, was faster than that.

Rationality and Public Policy Making (encore, 09/29/2009)

It's week 4, which means it must be time to take another close look at Eugene Bardach's A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis, a book that has always struck me as a kind of Rorschach test. While Bardach recognizes that policy analysis is "more art than science," he is, ultimately, an optimist. He thinks that public policy is improved when it is informed by rigorous empirical research. As a dyed-in-the-wool futilitarian, the Washington Buckeye is less sanguine about the prospects of rationality in the policy-making process.

The October 8, 2009, issue of the New York Review of Books contains a remarkable article that bears on the issue: "The Anarchy of Success," by William Easterly, an economics professor at NYU. The article is a review of two new books, Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, and Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. Unfortunately, the NYROB won't let me attach a link to Easterly's article because it is premium content.

So here's the nub of the argument. Easterly says that the phenomenal rates of economic growth enjoyed by Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore (see skyline photo above), and Taiwan in the period between 1960 and 2007 inspired a tsunami of research by economists eager "to find in the empirical data which factors reliably lead to growth. Yet hundreds of research articles later, we wound up at a surprising end point: we don't know."

Think of it. After the investment of billions and billions of dollars and Euros in the righteous cause of economic development, we actually don't know the causes of growth. According to Easterly, summarizing Mlodinow, economists have identified 145 factors associated with growth, but "most of the patterns were spurious, because they failed to hold up when other researchers tried to replicate them." As for Bad Samaritans, Easterly says that Chang criticizes "those who have made overly strong claims for free trade and orthodox capitalism, but then he turns around and makes equally strong claims for protectionism and what he calls 'heterodox' capitalism, which includes such features as government promotion of favored industries, state-owned enterprises, and heavy regulation of foreign direct investment."

Could it be that "the science of muddling through" is the best we can do?

Ohio in the Pacific

I don't ordinarily pay any attention to Yahoo as a news source, but this morning the site is running an intriguing piece about Ohio-class submarines being dispatched to the Pacific, where one can imagine any number of ways that they might be deployed. One would love to know something about the decision-making process that led to this result.

KC-X Tanker Contract Inspires Intense Lobbying Effort

You've probably heard the old joke about university faculty politics. Question: "Why are academic politics so vicious? Answer: "Because the stakes are so low."

It's funny, to be sure, but anybody who really believes that the most vicious kind of politics is to be found in university faculty clubs should be following the story that will be unfolding this Friday at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

Here's a link to the story, "Defense Firms Strafe Each Other," by Bennett Roth in today's Roll Call.

Pictured above is the KC-135 refueling tanker, a vestige of the Eisenhower era that is due to be replaced by either Boeing or the European Aeronautic and Space Company, the owner of Airbus.

Historian W. Roger Louis to Lecture on European Colonial Empires in Asia and Africa

Glenn Fellows and others interested in international affairs might want to consider attending a lecture on Monday, July 12, by the eminent historian W. Roger Louis, the U.S. scholar who serves as editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire.

For details, see the Library of Congress's announcement here.

Pictured above is the Gandhi statue in front of the Embassy of India on Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.

"Midterms May Mean Roster Shake-ups"

Only in the pages of Roll Call would you ever see such a headline. What's it all about? It turns out that tonight is the 49th annual Roll Call Congressional Baseball Game, to be played at Nationals Park. The Democrats beat the Republicans in 2009, snapping an eight-game losing streak.

The story appearing under the above headline analyzes the November 2010 elections and their likely impact on Congressional baseball. According to Roll Call, the Democrats' long-term baseball fortunes may rest on the electoral fates of two Ohioans from highly competitive districts: John Boccieri of Ohio's 16th Congessional district and Steve Driehaus of Ohio's 1st.

Boccieri, who is listed as a catcher/pitcher, bats right, throws right, and, according to Roll Call, votes "switch," unlike most of his teammates, who are lefties. Driehaus, also a switch-voter, is that rare second baseman who bats right and throws left, which would seem to make for an awfully awkward pivot on the double-play.

The Republican team will be led by Joe Barton of Texas, recently famous for his apology to BP CEO Tony Hayward. In terms of voting behavior, the GOP lineup leans strongly to the right.

The bipartisan Washington Buckeye will maintain a scrupulous neutrality, of course, though he finds it hard not to root for the switch-voters on both teams.

June 30, 2010, Update: Democrats win, 13-5.

Universal Health Care Tends to Cut Abortion Rate

The Summer 2010 Glenn Fellows currently are Reading Eugene Bardach's A Practical Guide to Policy Analysis and working up proposals for their own foray into public policy research and analysis. I hope we'll have a chance this Wednesday to talk about the following article, which appeared in The Washington Post on March 14, 2010:

Universal Health Care Tends to Cut Abortion Rate

By T.R. Reid, Sunday

Countless arguments have been advanced for and against the pending bills to increase health-care coverage. Both sides have valid concerns, which makes the battle tight. But one prominent argument is illogical. The contention that opponents of abortion should oppose the current proposals to expand coverage simply doesn't make sense.

Increasing health-care coverage is one of the most powerful tools for reducing the number of abortions -- a fact proved by years of experience in other industrialized nations. All the other advanced, free-market democracies provide health-care coverage for everybody. And all of them have lower rates of abortion than does the United States.

This is not a coincidence. There's a direct connection between greater health coverage and lower abortion rates. To oppose expanded coverage in the name of restricting abortion gets things exactly backward. It's like saying you won't fix the broken furnace in a schoolhouse because you're against pneumonia. Nonsense! Fixing the furnace will reduce the rate of pneumonia. In the same way, expanding health-care coverage will reduce the rate of abortion.

At least, that's the lesson from every other rich democracy.

The latest United Nations comparative statistics, available at http://data.un.org, demonstrate the point clearly. The U.N. data measure the number of abortions for women ages 15 to 44. They show that Canada, for example, has 15.2 abortions per 1,000 women; Denmark, 14.3; Germany, 7.8; Japan, 12.3; Britain, 17.0; and the United States, 20.8. When it comes to abortion rates in the developed world, we're No. 1.

No one could argue that Germans, Japanese, Brits or Canadians have more respect for life or deeper religious convictions than Americans do. So why do they have fewer abortions?

One key reason seems to be that all those countries provide health care for everybody at a reasonable cost. That has a profound effect on women contemplating what to do about an unwanted pregnancy.

The connection was explained to me by a wise and holy man, Cardinal Basil Hume. He was the senior Roman Catholic prelate of England and Wales when I lived in London; as a reporter and a Catholic, I got to know him.

In Britain, only 8 percent of the population is Catholic (compared with 25 percent in the United States). Abortion there is legal. Abortion is free. And yet British women have fewer abortions than Americans do. I asked Cardinal Hume why that is.
The cardinal said that there were several reasons but that one important explanation was Britain's universal health-care system. "If that frightened, unemployed 19-year-old knows that she and her child will have access to medical care whenever it's needed," Hume explained, "she's more likely to carry the baby to term. Isn't it obvious?"

A young woman I knew in Britain added another explanation. "If you're [sexually] active," she said, "the way to avoid abortion is to avoid pregnancy. Most of us do that with an IUD or a diaphragm. It means going to the doctor. But that's easy here, because anybody can go to the doctor free."

For various reasons, then, expanding health-care coverage reduces the rate of abortion. All the other industrialized democracies figured that out years ago. The failure to recognize this plain statistical truth may explain why American churches have played such a small role in our national debate on health care. Searching for ways to limit abortions, our faith leaders have managed to overlook a proven approach that's on offer now: expanding health-care coverage.

When I studied health-care systems overseas in research for a book, I asked health ministers, doctors, economists and others in all the rich countries why their nations decided to provide health care for everybody. The answers were medical (universal care saves lives), economic (universal care is cheaper), political (the voters like it), religious (it's what Christ commanded) and moral (it's the right thing to do). And in every country, people told me that universal health-care coverage is desirable because it reduces the rate of abortion.

It's only in the United States that opponents of abortion are fighting against expanded health-care coverage -- a policy step that has been proved around the world to limit abortions.

T.R. Reid, a longtime correspondent for The Post, is the author of The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care.