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.