Welcome to the World, Madam CEO

The subject is GM CEO Mary Barra and the public bullying she endured in the Senate committee hearing at the hands of Claire McCaskill and Kelly Ayotte.  Am I the only one to find this a festival of grandstanding cheap shots, right out of the gospel according to Darrell Issa?  I mean--actually for all I know she is guilty as hell, her fingerprints all over those dodgy ignition switches.  But I  can't say for sure and neither can the ladies from the world's most august debating club.  Anything else is just playing for the peanut gallery,  one thing--perhaps the only thing--our Congress does really well.

I wonder, does this prove

--Women can be just as nasty perhaps nastier, to (other) women than men can.

Or perhaps:

--When you want to beat up on a woman, send women.  Otherwise you just look idiotic, like Arlen Specter when he tried to shake down Anita Hill.

This way, I guess it just looks like a lesbian prison flic.

--

But Can She Do it with Her Teeth?

The staff and management here at Underbelly Central take pride in their conviction that theirs is the only first-class weblog to measure performance in the United States Senate as a function of skill at the castration of defenseless animals.  Up to now, we could discuss only one instance.  Now there are two.

HT JKP.  Alternate headline "A nation of sheep" are rejected because in this case it's pigs.

Nostalgia Isn't What it Used to Be (Senate Division)

Reading Robert Kaiser's nostalgia spasm about the good old days when there were nice people in Congress, I think it is time for the political equivalent of a bitch slap.  Okay, maybe Everett Dirksen was a warm-hearted boodler; he was still a boodler.  And if he is the best you can offer ...

But does Kaiser remember-- no, actually, I guess he doesn't remember--the 80th Congress, the Do-Nothing Congress, the Congress that made it their business that Harry S Truman accomplished nothing, nothing, in what they confidently assumed would be the sunset of his incumbency?

Wiki has the list.  If I count right, only four of the top 25 (in seniority) were Republicans but that's a distraction: most of the Democrats in the top 25 were the guys who would have been Republicans today: gentleman racists like Walter F. George and Richard Russell of Georgia, self-promoting lightweights like Tom Connally of Texas and genuinely rotten human beings like Pat McCarren of Nevada (said to be the last person in the senate who could castrate a sheep with his teeth--top that, Ted Cruz) (It's always seemed to me that McCarren did more long-term damage than his colleague Joe McCarthy because McCarren was more disciplined and purposeful, not to say more often sober).  Or Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, perhaps the most grotesquely racist of them all, against  tough competition.  And speaking of McCarthy, at seniority #25 we get New Hampshire's Styles Bridges, a McCarthy defender-apologist who presided over the Party of Chiang Kai-Shek.  It was Bridges (along with Idaho's Herman Welker) who blackmailed a colleague to suicide by threatening to expose gay son (yes, Welker didn't show up until 1951, but close enough).  Further down the list we get Owen Brewster, who mastered the stupid politician trick of building a Maine political career on support from the Ku Klux Klan.  Press on down and you come to Homer Capehart, the father of the juke box industry, along with his benchmate, William Jenner, who gave isolationism a new meaning.

Oh, I could go on.  Captious readers will say I've  stacked the deck.  Probably so.  I skipped over Ralph Flanders, Wayne Morse, John Sherman Cooper.  I also skipped over others whose record is more equivocal: people like Robert A. Taft who gained a reputation as the thinking man's conservative, giving cover and support to the worst lizards on the rock.   Still, I think there is plenty enough evidence to remind us that this is another one of those cases where you want to be careful what you wish for.  And evidence for the glum truth that maybe we aren't "in decline" after all--rather, we always were this way. 

Yurii's Realm

I have long embraced the Heisenberg principle of nationalism: the closer you look at a  nation-state, the more likely it isn’t there any more.  Today’s case in point, Ukraine.  Yurii Andrukhovych seems to recognize this perspective in his 1993 novel Moskovodiada, where he itemizes the titles of Olelko II, king of Ukraine, descendant (so he says) of he Riurykovychs and Dolgorukiis:

Sovereign and Ruler of Rus-Ukraine, Great Prince of Kiev and Chernihiv, King of Galicia and Volhynia, Master of Pskov, Peremyshl and Koziatyn, Duke [Hertzog] of Dniproderzhynsk, First of May and Illich, Great Khan of Crimea and Izmail, Baron of Berdychiv, of both Bukovyna and Bessarabia, and also New Askan and Outer Kakhovka, rhe Wild Field and the Black Forest of Arkhysenior, Hetman and Protector of the Cossacks of the Don, Berdiansk and Kryvyi Rih, Tireless Shepherd of the Hutsuls and Boikos, Lord of All the People of the Ukraine, including Tatars and Pechenegs, peasant farmers [malokhokhlamy] and salo-eaters, with every Moldavian and Mankurt, on Our Pure Land, Patron and Pastor of Great and Little Slobidska Ukraine, and also Inner and Outer Timutorokan, the glorious descendant of all the ages, in a word, our proud and most eminent Monarch.

--Reprinted in Andrew Wilson, The Ukranians:  Unexpected Nation (2000; new material 2002—and I gather there is a new edition from 2009).

Ernest Renan says that history is as much about forgetting as remembering. 

What I've Learned about Italian Nationalism from David Gilmour

Before this weekend, I knew enough about European history to know that Italy was/is "a geographical expression,"--a cut-and-paste smoke-and-mirrors nation-state, held together by the delusions and fantasies of its sponsors more than any durable threads in the fabric.  I more or less knew that  the fantasy was largely the fault responsibility of Giuseppe Mazzini and his ilk--19th Century dreamers/intriguers who imagined the Italian community:

[T]he goal that he and his democratic followers aimed for was simply an Italy that would be both independent and undivided. Only a unitary state, they believed, would liberate Italy from its age-old rivalries.

Gilmour, David (2011-10-25). The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (Kindle Locations 2698-2700). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

What I didn't know is that there were others on the left--not just the old fogeys of authoritarianism and empire--who did not see it that way.  These "others" believed

that only regard for [Italy's endemic internecine]  rivalries would allow Italians to respect each other’s differences and live together in harmony: a unitary state could never conceivably work in so diverse a country. The foremost federalist was the brilliant Milanese intellectual Carlo Cattaneo, who considered ‘the ancient love of liberty in Italy’ to be more important than ‘the cult of unity’. Like Guicciardini 300 years earlier, he believed that Italy had prospered from competition between the cities and argued that a political system that failed to take the communal spirit into account would not succeed. In his eyes this spirit was far from being a medieval irrelevance: it was alive – as it still is, 

remaining a vital component of the national identity even today. Cattaneo did not greatly exaggerate when he claimed, ‘The communes are the nation: they are the nation in the most innermost sanctuary of its liberty.’  Cattaneo was no romantic nationalist. Indeed he believed that nationalism was essentially illiberal – an unusual credence in those days – and he suspected with some reason that this would be the case with Piedmont. As a Milanese historian, he was aware of the old Piedmontese custom of grabbing and annexing bits of Lombardy, and he was rightly apprehensive about the ambitions of the Savoia monarchs in his own time. As a Lombard, he was also aware of his region’s ancient trading relationships beyond the Alps and recognized that there could be advantages, administrative and economic, in becoming a self-governing part of the Habsburg Empire. Such advantages would obviously disappear if Lombardy were to be annexed by Piedmont. 

 Gilmour, David (2011-10-25). The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (Kindle Locations 2699-2705). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.


I've spent a bit of time in and around Italy and I have to admit I don't remember ever hearing  of Carlo Cattanio before.


 

Lying: It's a Tough Racket any More.

Justly or not, we take it for granted that politicians lie, and we tend to believe that they lie more now than they used to.  On that last point, I wonder. I suspect maybe the real truth is that pre-Twitter, pre-blogosphere, pre 24-hour yap yap channels, lying was so much easier.  Case in point, Napoleon the liberator on the occasion of his invasion of Italy:

‘Peoples of Italy!’ the young General Bonaparte proclaimed in April 1796, ‘the French army is coming to break your chains … We shall respect your property, your religion and your customs.’ 

With which compare:

His words doubtless sounded encouraging to people in Italy who had not heard another speech made by the same officer a month earlier. ‘Soldiers!’ he had told his army, ‘you are hungry and naked; the government [the Directory in Paris] owes you much but can give you nothing … I will lead you into the most fertile plains on earth. Rich provinces, opulent towns, all shall be at your disposal; there you will find honour, glory and riches.’

Gilmour, David (2011-10-25). The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (Kindle Locations 2252-2256). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 

Abraham, Brigham and AJ

I've been spending some time with John G. Turner's absorbing biography of Brigham Young and I find my mind seeking him to fit him into a larger culture that includes Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson. 

Sure, the comparison is a stretch, but bear with me here.  It seems to me that the period beginning with Jackson and pretty much ending with Lincoln was the one time in American history when raw, unvarnished country boys--nobodies from nowhere--could rise to positions of real leadership,  Rise, moreover, on their own talents and energy, if not always their virtue. 

I'm not quite sure how far I can go with this without torturing the evidence beyond all recognition.   Jackson, surely is he most dramatic example of the three, not least because of his untrammeled and, yes, undisciplined energy: the man who won his great battle after the war was over, the scourge of the Indians, the man who destroyed an economy largely because he didn't understand it and was blissfully untroubled by his own incomprehension.*   Jackson's real contribution, I suspect, was not so much himself but the revolution he crystallized: the explosion of energy from a whole multitude of hitherto nameless and faceless Americans: the "ordinary sort: who proved themselves capable of extraordinary achievement.

Young's beginnings may have been quite as humble as Jackson's but they were close and he was, in any event, the sort who likely wouldn't have been able to make a place for himself in any earlier time.  His achievement may at first blush seem more modest: governor of a :"state" (broadly defined) and not president of an emerging nation.  But reading Turner builds the conviction that it may be easier to underestimate Young precisely because he was more successful: he made it look easy.

Or better: look easy from a distance.  Closer up, you can see what an extraordinary accident he was.  Poorly educated and the possessor of no noteworthy skills--except, perhaps, extraordinary energy--he found himself in a position top put a claim on leadership by the sheer fortuity of Joseph Smith's untimely death.  What he did show from that moment on through the rest of his life was a singular capacity to lead, coupled with (they do not always go together) a remarkable knack for administration.    Taken together, these qualities allowed him to dominate his movement from then on until his death some 30 years later.  It's hard to imagine Mormonism without him: indeed it's an entertaining thought experiment to wonder what might have become of these peculiar people had it been Young and not Smith who had been murdered by the mob in Illinois.

Which brings us to Lincoln who, in comparison with the other two, emerges as even more extraordinary than he does on his own.  Starting with at least as fragmentary an education as the other two, he equipped himself in a skilled trade and a learned profession--and as perhaps the best writer/speaker of ll our 44 Presidents.    And the elemental energy y that seems to define the other two--at least on the outside, Lincoln showed none of that.  .   What he did show was that still center in the eye of the storm that made him so hard to overestimate, so easy to undervalue.

I don't mean to belittle Young here.  Rather, my point is that each of the three personifies and even articulates a culture that no one before it could have anticipated and that we in our own time find difficult even to comprehend.


*I confess I didn't always feel this way: I grew up on Arthur Schlesinger's Age of Jackson which now seems to me to be to be a bit of starry-eyed hero worship: Schlesinger in training for the courtier role he played so comfortably for Jack Kennedy.

Oh and another footnote.  It fell to me in my delusion to suggest to his mother that we name our son "Andrew Jackson;" we could call him "AJ."  I am eternally in her debt that she would have none of it.

The Affirmative Action Baby: A Different Take

I've been chatting with my friend the Wichita bureau over the puzzle of why Barak Obama has turned out to be such a mediocre President.  This blog post is the result although I should make clear that I haven't shown it to my colleague, and the opinions expressed herein are my own.

Be clear this is not a post about "born in Kenya" or "hates America" or "coming for your guns."  I'll certify that I think Obama is a decent man, even a smart man.  I hear that he masters his brief and that is comfortable making decisions (an underappreciated skill, I think, ironically rare in executive ranks).  I voted for him twice and  I'm pretty sure (particularly giving the indescribably awful competition) do the same thing over if I had to do it again.   It isn't even disappointment at Obama's centrism.    I know that everybody is a secondary source to himself after a while but I like to think that I knew he wasn't nearly the liberal that his enthusiasts took him to be.  I guess I am a bit surprised at his authoritarianism on the matter of spying and the phenomenon of demonizing journalists but for the moment, I think that's neither here nor there.

No: the question now is the matter of competence and in particular, how come Obama is so awful at the task of "leadership," understood here to mean the task of defining the issues and cajoling the troops to follow him--the characteristic, in other words, that made both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan so remarkable.  

Again, I like to think I saw this coming, though I can't honestly say I foresaw anything like its current dimensions.   Still, I had heard in particular about his career as president of the Harvard Law Review--the most important post, as his critics acidly recall--that he had ever held before.  I wasn't there but the story has been told.  Way I understand it, the board was riven between conservative and liberal factions who distrusted--all right, cordially hated--one another.  Obama presented himself as--well, no as the "compromise" candidate, but as a good presentable face forward, who could maintain an image of solidarity at the review while perhaps holding the contending factions somewhat at bay.

That can be an important role and if I am reading the scene right, then I'd have to say he played it well. But for his future career, it's a role that doesn't require him actually to do much of anything, except to stay cool and work to keep the temperature down.

All this may be old stuff. But now I'd like to expand the horizon.   Looking at Obama's pre-Harvard life here, isn't it possible to speculate that there might be a pattern here?  Don't we have a guy who is, first, pretty bright; second, likable (at least on the surface); and third, cool to the point of remote?  The kind of guy who, in short, is likely to get helped on his way up the ladder, even though he isn't really required to do anything?

I admit, in an effort to preempt criticism, that what I'm talking about here is a kind of affirmative action. But not what you might think.  I'm not thinking "stupid kid gets a break that should have gone to a smart white guy." I guess  I am thinking "smart, likable kid gets a helping hand without ever having to do very much."   And note that  don't mean to complain about any "unfairness" in the process--except possibly the unfairness to him insofar as it brings him up the escalator without ever realizing that hasn't really been seasoned.

One way to see this process at work is to consider the way Obama has presented himself persistently in times of crisis.  He certainly doesn't put your package in the top drawer, like Lyndon Johnson.  He doesn't try to mock or deride even to undercut his adversaries.   What he does do is to remind us that he's serious about good government, that he's thought hard about the issue, that he isn't influenced by base or unworthy pressures, and he more or less assumes (ha!) that his adversaries are doing the same thing.

I think you'd have to concede by now that this posture hasn't proven very effective.  More remarkable, in a world where appearances count for so much, it doesn't even seem very effective: think of how often Obama has taken a position which when you stop to think about it is perfectly reasonable but which, as presented, comes across as earnest, ineffectual, just naive.

Only one other point: I guess I'm also surprised that he doesn't seem to have learned from the experience. Some people grow into the job; some shrink.  Obama seems to have stayed pretty much the same. They say the Presidency is, or becomes, a prison. I certainly don't envy him the next three years (I didn't envy him the past five either, but let that be).   He's going to be miserable a lot and certainly won't all be his fault.  I do wish he could develop a bit of the grit and guile I suggest here, and which has been so lacking in his performance up to now.

What it Was About Herblock

I watched last night a few minutes of the HBO soaper on Herblock, the legendary Washington Post cartoonist.  But then I flipped it off so I wouldn't wake up and find the set still yammering at me at 3 am.  On my brief exposure, I'd say the director was hustling for the Academy Award in "bland," and Hank Steuver's excellent WaPo review (which I just now saw) confirms all my suspicions.

Or at least, I must like being the lonely dissenter on this sort of thing.   Because so far as I can tell, I am the only person who always thought Herblock vastly overrated as a cartoonist, as a humorist, as a Washington mover and shaker.  Well: only mus be too strong a word.  I'm sure that there are cadres of truculent nay-sayers out there in the boonies who, if they ever heard of Herblock at all, would or did consign him to the hellfires appropriate for the chardonnay-sipping Bilderberg cabal.   What I meant, of course, was the only nice person (or nice-person wannabee) among those who wore their invisible Herblock medallion as a badge of honor.

Honor, yes, but more: the point is that for a couple of generations of Washington elites Herblock was a badge of identity a not-so-secret handshake, a sign that you were one of the club.  For them, "did you see Herblock?"  was like ee cummings yelling to his neighbor Djuna Barnes across Patchin Place in the morning to make sure she was really still there.  Yes, I am still there, slugging it out, we can continue to fight the good fight..

You can get the point when you reflect on the fact--I suspect nobody mentioned this in the documentary--that Herblock was no more than moderately talented.  He could do deft and economical sketches, especially of children: I sure wish I could do that.  But his villains were dreary, unimaginative and lead-footed.  Some of his cartoons were genuinely funny but many--most?--were predictable.  Almost never did he surprise.  And to suggest that he  had a "signature style" was another way of saying he pretty much got stuck in a 30-year rut.

What he did have--I gather Lewis Black made the point--was concision.  It's hard to think of anybody who could soundbyte an opinion with more celerity-anybody more successful in defining a political figure the way Herblock did to McCarthy, Johnson, Nixon, even Clinton  And this may be the clue to his peculiar kind of popularity: Herblock was the busy man's guide to Right Thinking.  You really never have time enough for this sort of thing: you have places to go, people to see.  You need someone to give you the memo on the Topic of the Day, and to keep you on board with Received Opinion.  

Stuever remarks on the air of nostalgia that hangs over the whole project, as if for a more civilized, more gentlemanly time.  Could be that.  Could be that what we miss is the  very idea of Received Opinion:  that set of beliefs and commitments generated by the  old invisible choir--the choir itself that  network of deep thinkers and glitterati who drank and rutted and chatted together and told us all where we stood.  If ever there was a central node on this transmission line, it was Herblock.  Well, we could have done a lot worse.

Stuff I Did Not Know about the Brothers D

I lived through the Eisenhower/Dulles years--some of the time, in Washington itself.  But here are some things I never grasped until today:

• John Foster Dulles was the savage foe of everything he was a savage foe of, yet he exposed his neck to the thuggish Joe McCarthy, and why?   Apparently because he remembered how Woodrow Wilson rebuffed Congress and paid for it with the loss of his entire program, perhaps even his life.  John Foster was determined not to make the Wilsonian blunder. He knunckled under to McCarthy because he remembered Wilson.

• Allen Dulles as head of the  CIA may have made more mischief than John Foster as Secretary of State.  Foster bloviated; Allen sent in spies.  Yet Allen was not a clever man; he had no aptitude for analysis and no fully-developed world-picture.  He just loved gossip and intrigue.

• Henry Luce the publisher-potentate  and Allen operated on a common premise: if the guy in the field reported something contrary to what you believe at your desk at home, fire the guy in the field. 

• True that Dwight Eisenhower as President sent no American forces into battle.  But he thought coups against foreign governments were okay, presumably because the ones who got hurt were the other guys'.

Such is what I glean from The Brothers Dulles by Stephen Kinzer.  More anon.

It's Not Even Past

Remember the old old South with brave hearts and fair ladies, with grateful, dutiful slaves and Jeanie with the Light, Brown Hair?  No, neither do I. Well then, remember the old South, with sharecropping and lynching where pellagra makes you scrawny? 

Remember how hard it was to throw that all away:

[S]elf-satisfied, complacent. They will not be diverted from their smugness, their unwillingness to look critically at what they are, with the result that throughout their history anyone who has attempted to point out to them the extent to which they are being used and manipulated for the benefit of those in power has been unable to get anywhere. Conversely, those who have flattered their self-esteem and confirmed them in their prejudices have been able to manipulate them to vote and act contrary to their own economic and political interests. ... [T]he average Southern white refused to recognize the divergence between his interests and those of the very wealthy, complacently preferring things as they were to a fairer share of the benefits of government, and allowing himself to be easily beguiled into voting his prejudices instead of his economic welfare.

 No?  Well then, remember the new South that put all the old stuff behind us?  Where blacks would gain from the new industry and industry would gain from desegregation and new-age carpetbaggers like Newt Gingrich didn't care about the burden of history because they weren't there and didn't want to look back?

Remember--Oh hell. Check:  Poverty.  Obesity.  Divorce. Disconnected youth.  Death of the American Dream.

Remember what Faulkner said about the past in the South: It's not even past.

BenWhiteGhaziWaterGate

Listening to the incessant drumbeat of right-wing chatter over Ben Ghazi--and observing how little it seems to have done so far to discredit Hillary--I came to wonder how this current episode might compare with the (equally ineffectual?)  obsession over Whitewater back in the Bubba administration: are talk shows comparing Ben Ghazi to Whitewater?  

Answer: apparently not.  Sporadic Googling over the past few days show only a few--and these mostly random and haphazard--references drawing the parallel in cable-land.  I did, however, learn that in high school basketball, Whitewater swamped Clinton 44-28.

Little Propane Tank in the Big Woods

The Wichita Bureau transmits an update from the local stringer up in Eau Claire, Wisconsin:

Well, the Governor declared a state of emergency in WI on Saturday night:  All of the counties and townships are setting up warming places for those who are running out of Propane and/or money.  In September the cost was $1.40/unit, by last Thursday it had risen to $3.50/ unit in EC, on Friday it went to $4.50/unit, and today it went up over five dollars.  We have a real bad week coming and it is going to be interesting.

Wichita grumbles in response: "My suggestion was to burn Republicans – they’re in oversupply"  But to be fair, he has to spend his days in the free state of Sam Brownback.

 

Update:  Wichita adds:

Trans-Canada pipeline blew up last night near Winnipeg. Going to be mighty cold. Gas company calling people in EC to turn down temps in house one at a time. 

Nostalgia Note:  Mrs. Buce began her professional career in Eau Claire.  She likes to tell stories about driving to work on tires that had frozen to the pavement. Ka THUMP ka THUMP.

 

 

The Two Minds of Robert Gates

At the end of his remarkable memoir on his time as Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates poses a question for himself:

Treated better for longer than almost anyone in a senior position I could remember during the eight presidencies in which I served, why did I feel I was constantly at war with everybody, as I have detailed in these pages? Why was I so often so angry? Why did I so dislike being back in government and in Washington?

--Gates, Robert M (2014-01-14). Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (Kindle Locations 10314-10317). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Gates offers his own answer: "It was because, despite everyone being 'nice,' getting anything of consequence done was so damnably difficult even in the midst of two wars."  Fair enough, although I can offer him a consolation: however "damnably difficult" these encounters may have been to live through, still the recounting of them is precisely what makes his memoir so fascinating.  Yet, while I don't reject his own analysis, I think I can offer a further explanation: I think one reason he found it all so "damnably difficult" is that he was constantly at war with himself.

Review the evidence.  On any soundbyte divide between hawks and doves, Gates counts as a hawk.   He thought it important to "stay the course" (ugh) in both Afghanistan and Iraq: he felt certain that we had a constructive role to play in rebuilding each country (which we, one might add, had played so great a role in destroying in the first place).  He admires and largely trusts the military leadership.  And presses more than once his view that both  that both Bush and Obama got the big decisions right.

Yet he is the most cautious of hawks.  He's concerned almost to the point of obsession with the well-being of the troops: he takes almost every casualty as his personal responsibility.  Repeatedly he raises the question of what will happen next?  Can we do this?  Can afford not to do it?  Are we doing it in the right way?

After a while, you begin to see a larger theme.  Gates does say he feels that Obama didn't have his heart in the Afghan War (indeed, this is about the only thing that most reviewers want to quote).  Yet in time, you can see that Gates is at best ambivalent about it himself.   He doesn't want us to leave Afghanistan until he has done what we can to establish a secure an orderly nation.  Yet here is Gates himself, writing on what he saw in 2010 in the runup to the Afghan elections: 

Embassy polling showed that in 2005 about 80 percent of Afghans saw us as allies and partners; by summer 2009, after nearly eight years of war, that was down to 60 percent. As I thought about the tipping point, it seemed to me we had several vulnerabilities with the Afghan population. One was civilian casualties; every incident was a strategic defeat, often caused and always manipulated by the Taliban and then magnified by Karzai. Another was our thoughtless treatment of the Afghans in routine encounters, including U.S. and coalition military vehicles barreling down the roads scattering animals and scaring people. We often disrespected their culture or Islam and failed to cultivate their elders. We collaborated with Afghan officials who were ripping off ordinary citizens. In Kabul and all over the country, we and our coalition partners, as well as nongovernmental organizations, far too routinely decided what development projects to undertake without consulting the Afghans, much less working with or through them on what they wanted and needed. Was it any wonder that Karzai and others complained they had no authority in their own country? Or that even reasonably honest and competent Afghan officials got no respect from their fellow citizens? For all our hand-wringing and hectoring about corruption, we seemed oblivious to how much we were contributing to it, and on a scale that dwarfed the drug trade. Tens of billions of dollars were flooding into Afghanistan from the United States and our partners, and we turned a blind eye or simply were ignorant of how regularly some portion was going to payoffs, bribes, and bank accounts in Dubai. Our own inspectors identified how lousy— or nonexistent— U.S. government controls were. From Karzai on down, Afghans had to shake their heads at our complaints about their corruption when elements of the American government (and almost certainly a number of our closest allies) were paying off them and their relatives as agents and to secure their cooperation. Hillary Clinton and I repeatedly objected to this contradictory behavior by the United States, but to no avail.

Gates, Robert M (2014-01-14). Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (Kindle Locations 6513-6522). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

This is a damning indictment, not so?  And it is really nothing new, yes?  Gates (channeling Fred Kagan)  makes a point of insisting that "We're Not the Soviets in Afghanistan."  That is probably true; it is equally true that we aren't the Japanese Imperial Army in Nanking.  We're full of good intentions.  Yet at least since Vietnam and certainly since Iraq, we've piled up an abundance of evidence to tell us that we really don't know how to play this game--that, despite the best efforts of the best military leadership, we wind up wreaking the same kind of havoc and generating the same kinds of resentments that we tell ourselves we want to avoid.

Update:  moments after hitting "post," I ran across this.

Slow Boring of Hard Boards: Gates, Shultz, Acheson And the Art of the Political Memoir

I'm barreling through Robert Gates' much-hyped memoir of his tour as secretary of defense under two Presidents and they are right, it is a delight--one of the very best memoirs of actual governing that I've ever read (although maybe I need to read more such).    It is also, be it said, not remotely that farrago of political gamesmanship that the prince of courtiers, Bob Woodward, described in his first-out-of-the-box Washington Post review a couple of weeks back--why anybody still takes that guy seriously is beyond me.

It is, as many have noted, a remarkably unbuttoned affair, with a lot more blunt judgments than you usually get in this king of book.   I'd guess, following  Fred Kaplan, that it sounds a lot like an insurance policy by a guy who wants to guarantee that no one will ever invite him back into pubic office again.  Yet cherry-picking can give a sadly distorted impression.  Really, the thrust, the heft of the book lie not so much in the sharp judgments but in the rich and densely textured account of what it is to be a cabinet secretary, juggling a trunk full of hot knives every day for something like four years.  And even as he pitches his barbs, he restrains himself from adding any that aren't necessary to his story.    He makes it clear, for example, that he felt the "occupation phase" of the Iraq war was a major policy error, and that he has little or no use for the Obama domestic agenda. But neither is central to his story here so he doesn't waste any ink on them.   It is, in any event, the kind of book you would want every one to read before they took up a position of such trust and responsibility--except that if you did, the chances are that all the people you really want on the job would run yelping for the door.  As homework for the beginning office holder, I'd rank it pretty close to  what I suspect is the most instructive  book I read in the last year--James Q. Wilson's Bureaucracy.  Taken together, they provide a chastening lesson in what you are up against when you try to accomplish anything in public administration.   Or perhaps it is the a bare third behind The Power Broker, Robert    massive (perhaps overlong) biography of Robert Moses.  Either way, that's tough company.

Reading Gates' book did set me to thinking: exactly how many public-service memoirs actually teach you anything, as distinct from just presenting a facade of self-justification, together with the settling of old scores?  My search set may be small, but I can think of only two others: one, George Shultz' Turmoil and Triumph about his years in the Reagan administration. There is a slight air of special pleading in the Shultz book.  Which is no wonder: after the train wreck that was Iran contra, there was enough finger-pointing and blame shifting to fill a fairly large battleship.  Shultz wants us to know it wasn't his idea and I am pretty sure he wins that argument. But win or lose, there is so much more of "what we did and how we did it" that it belongs on anyone's list.  Side note: Gates plays a walk-on role in Shultz's memoir, in his avatar as presenter of the CIA view on the Soviet Union; Shultz wasn't impressed.  I suppose there is more on this in an earlier Gates book about the CIA, which I haven't read.

The other belongs almost on a  list by itself: Dean Acheson's Present at the Creation. To call it a memoir almost obscures  its real virtue: as the title suggests, Acheson really was present at the creation of the post-World-War-II world: it is no exaggeration to say he wrote the first great history of the Cold War.   It's also a joy as a piece of prose exposition in a way that Shultz and Gates really are not. Both Shultz and Gates are clear, concise and carefully argued. Acheson is all of these but he is also saturnine, elegant and funny.  Seems we don't get that any more.

Which reminds me of one other item that might qualify for this list, although it isn't quite on topic. I mean the Autobiography of Abba Eban, in which he gives his unforgettable account of the founding of the State of Israel, which he saw from his peculiar vantage point as Israel's face in the United Nations.   Even more than Acheson, Eban is both writer and actor: I think it's fair to say that Eban's presentation determined for a generation the public view of Israel.   Gates can't claim that kind of distinction, partly because that was never his job.  He very likely was, however, for good or ill the most effective Secretary of Defense ever,  and he's written a book that proves it.

Followup:  For an interesting contrary view, go here.  For a full-scale bill of particulars, go here.  Both of these pieces aim their heaviest fire at Gates' earlier career and his misguided appraisal of the Soviet Union. I think Cole overdoes it

Corruption, Then and Now

Listened to an instructive faculty lunch talk yesterday about "corruption" in the law of insider trading. A core point that there are certain norms of behavior in  the exercise of office, the violation of which we regard as (not simply wrong but) "corrupt," some kind of fundamental deficiency.  En route, the speaker gave us a screen shot of text from the great George Washington Plunkett, once a wheel horse of Tammany Hall--actually, not all that important as a political leader, but memorable because he unburdened his mind to a willing listener, and so we have him to thank for the most vivid and (at least) entertaining defense of old-style ward politics.

Here's a sample of Plunkett (though to be honest, I'm not certain this is exactly what the speaker was showing us--I wasn't taking notes):

I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for before. 

Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. Well, that’s honest graft. Or supposin‘ it’s a new bridge they’re goin’ to build. I get tipped off and I buy as much property as I can that has to be taken for approaches. I sell at my own price later on and drop some more money in the bank. 

Wouldn’t you? It’s just like lookin‘ ahead in Wall Street or in the coffee or cotton market. It’s honest graft, and I’m lookin’ for it every day in the year. I will tell you frankly that I’ve got a good lot of it, too.

Link.  Well, yes.  Not precisely what we regard as the norm of good behavior today.  What intrigues me at the moment, though, is not the substance but the texture.  Plunkett  clearly wants to explain or justify himself.  Yet one can't escape the notion that he's not entirely happy with his own defense--that he knows he isn't likely to sell it to his audience and, more important, maybe not even to himself.

 Which me to thinking. There was a time (not so?) when a proto-Plunkett might have felt no need to justify himself--might have taken it for granted that the purpose of holding public office was to line his private pockets--that anyone who, given the chance, forbore to enrich himself at the public expense, was just a fool?   There was a time (yes?) when people actually bought and sold the office for the explicit purpose in trafficking in its opportunities for personal gain?

What I'd like to know is--when did that attitude change?   When and how did we develop a norm of public duty that enjoins the Punkettian protocol?  And don't tell me "we're not there yet." Of course we have "corrupt" (heh!) politicians (though I suspect it's  bit strong to ring in the number at 100 percent).  But they try to conceal it--and not just because they might go to jail.  They try to conceal i because they "know" it is wrong--that not even the Plunkett defense will pass the giggle test?

I'm sure "there's a literature" as they say down at the faculty club.  Just confessing my ignorance, that's all.

Consent of the Governed

My friend Ignoto has been hassling me a bit about my allegedly misty-eyed daffiness over the Somalis. Somalia is not a "failed state" I argued; it is not "ungoverned;" it is just governed by principles other than those we recognize.

Well, I'm sticking to my guns (ahem) here, though I will grant it would be useful to drill down a little further.  I think Ignoto's point is that it can't be a government worthy of the name unless in some sense it concerns itself with the welfare of its citizenry.  

That's a very seductive proposition.  Consent of the governed blah blah.  Social contract blah blah.   Hold these truths to be self evident, long train of abuses and usurpations, hoo boy where have I heard all that before.

Actually, you know the answer to that last question.  The snippets were, of course, from the Declaration Independence, the crowning achievement of a long struggle to establish a theory of government on the principle of the welfare (or at least the "consent") of the government.  It's the ornament of our history, our presiding narrative, but that's the trouble: it is so much a part of the fabric of our lives that we forget that it is a human creation, a cultural artifact that lives in time and space. We cannot conceive it otherwise.

Cannot conceive it otherwise; this doesn't mean it can't be otherwise, and that is where I give myself the prize.  I'd hate, hate, hate, to give up this presiding narrative; still my point is that societies can operate without it. Can?  Hell, most have, and still do.  We live now in a world where our presiding narrative is so deeply ingrained that virtually everybody has to pay obeisance to some version of it.  Some are sincere; some are sincerely deluded.  Some barely bother with the pretense.

Am I saying that "common weal" begins with, e.g., John Locke?  I wouldn't go quite that far.  I suppose going back to prehistory, contenders for elite status made a habit of appealing to some model of the common interest.  It is good that you delegate to me because I am stronger, tougher, wilier than the rest of you and thereby better than you at implementing your own interests.  I suppose  fair amount  of that goes on today.  I suppose also it was common enough that after a few years in office, he'd decide that God's real plan was to be implemented through his own (earthly) DNA, his own spawn.  And after a few more, the idea of general welfare probably fell under the bus* altogether.

Other times, other strategies.  The Classical Greeks are a fascinating example because they seem to be a rare outlier in which some combination of weak leadership and endemic paranoia seemed to provide for decentralized authority to exist for more than just a few weeks.  But that's the point: they are fascinating because so unusual.

I don't see much evidence that Roman emperors (say) took much thought of the common welfare, though they may from time to time have pretended to--out of grandiosity, out of fear, or both.  But in his heart of heart, each knew that he was the one who counted, and the rest of the multitudes could go fry or not, as they saw fit.

This is an artless adolescent-style lurch at an issue that deserves (and, let's admit it, often gets) more serious or sophisticated treatment.  My narrow point for the moment is that there is nothing inherent about "welfare of the people."  It's a feature. not a bug, but you can perfectly well organize a society without it, and usually do.

An Obama Twopher

Two notes about our President.  One, go and read the shrewd profile by Todd Purdum.    The Browser, endorsing Purdum, says "Nobody loves him; nobody fears him"--i.e., the President, not the profiler.  I think that is spot on and I wonder if the blurber understood that he was tracking a great predecessor:

Nasce da questo una disputa: s’elli è meglio essere amato che temuto, o e converso. Respondesi, che si vorrebbe essere l’uno e l’altro; ma, perché elli è difficile accozzarli insieme, è molto piú sicuro essere temuto che amato, quando si abbia a mancare dell’uno de’ dua.

And here comes in the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both; but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.

Machiavelli, of course, The Prince, Il Principe, Ch XVII, link, link.  So, we have a null set.

And two--I was idling through a back copy of Time Magazine the other day when I happened on the profile of another world luminary who put me in mind of our President.  The comparison is not exact, but what if I told you he is instinctively civil, well-intentioned by his own lights, seemingly eager to make the world a better place, yet emotionally paralytic.  Would you think our President?  Or would you think this guy?

Elizabeth

I dearly hope it is all media hype that Elizabeth Warren wants to run for the Presidency.  I've said before that I've known Elizabeth over the years (albeit not at all well) and I like her; I think she has the right enemies and mostly the right friends.  I thought (and still think) the Senate was/is the right place for her, much more suitable than that consumer agency she incubated.  That is: afflicting the comfortable is clearly part of her skill set, and senators have bully chance to do just that.  On the other hand  I see no reason to believe she has any chops as an administrator.  And we've had our experience with a one-term senator in the White House and does anybody want to remind me how that turned out?

I can believe she wants to lure Hillary to the left.  I suppose that might work,  if she plays her hand with great finesse.   But it might backfire, in either of two ways.  One, recall how opposition from the left (Henry Wallace) and the right (Strom Thurmond) lifted the incubus of extremism from the shoulders of Harry S Truman and allowed him to barrel home through the center.  And two, if she really thinks she can make a statement by energizing the left, she might want to consult the ghost of Ralph Nader (Oh, still alive.  Right).  

I guess she might just  be just positioning herself as the go-to second choice if by chance Hillary chooses to bail.  Gives me one more reason to hope Hillary goes all the way.

In any event, I'd hate to think it is really Potomac fever. 

Among the Missing in the Battle of Obamacare

Quick, no Googling--who is Barack Obama's chief of staff?

Ah, got you there, didn't I?  Unless you are Ezra Klein or one of the COS' many siblings, I'd say it is very unlikely you are able to conjure up the name of the person who ought. by all rights, to be the second most important person in any Presidential administration.

Which suggests all kinds of questions.  Like: where the hell has he been during the current uproar as the Obama administration seems to descend into a bad imitation of The Pink Panther.  Isn't it the job of the chief of staff precisely to see that things do not happen, i.e., to see that health care does not go off the rails, that surveillance does not turn into a game of catch-the-hot-knife, and that the administration not look like--well, not look like the second Reagan administration as it very nearly disintegrated under the weight of Iran contra?  In all the second-guessing and finger-pointing, if anyone has mentioned the name of the COS, I must have missed it.

Of course there is a perfectly respectable answer to me here.  That is: one of the main job requirements of a COS is not to be noticed: it is the President, not his supposedly faithful sidekick, who is the protagonist of the story.  

This is a beguiling proposition but I am not quite sure it holds up.  Grant that one of the reasons why Donald Regan was not right for the job is that he seemed to think it was about him and not the other guy.  On the other hand,  James Baker seems to have been effective even though people knew his  name.  And if Andrew Card was anonymous, it is because he wasn't much more than an errand boy for Dick Cheney anyway.

So I guess my question comes down to a relatively minor inquiry in the sturdy of administrative behavior.  Where was he, or where is he?   Is he the guy who has kept things from getting far, far worse?  Or is he just a spectator in somebody else's drama?

Still can't remember the name of the incumbent? Go here.