Sucker-Punching

Maybe Republicans grew tired of being outclassed by Obama. So, they decided to make him look foolish. Judd Gregg basically sucker-punched the President. He may protest, “No, I just changed my mind.” Yeah, right. And maybe he was confused, thinking that perhaps Obama was really John McCain in black-face.

For Gregg to approach Obama with an offer to join the team, allow that concept to percolate for a couple of weeks in the press, with all that feel-good stuff about a bipartisan team, and then abruptly withdraw, refusing to sign onto the stimulus package, is just too calculated.

So, maybe it really is time to stop making nice to republicans. They seem too much like Hamas—you know that bunch in the Middle East that keeps lobbing rockets at Israel every time Israel tries to make nice? Yeah, that’s the Republicans. Make nice to them, turn around to smile, and they’ll sucker-punch you every time. Nice guys that bunch.

Bipartisan Chimera

So, is he giving away the store in fond hope of gaining bipartisan cooperation in the future? Dems increased the amount set aside for tax cuts, and decreased the amount for state aid and for school construction, a form of local aid.  All this, apparently, in an attempt to bring on board at least a few Republicans. The hard core, of course, will never follow. They are now slavishly following their new leader, the dopehead bigot Rush.  They are lost for all time. I wonder how Michael Steele, the Neo-Con nominal Black, feels now, having been crowned and then deposed virtually all within the week. And now A-Rod confesses to using illicit substances in his pursuit of athletic perfection. Perhaps he’s running for an important Republican leadership post, just behind Rush. I mean, why not?

But I digress.

I’m beginning to feel that Obama is being misled down some side alley to oblivion in his quest for bipartisanship. And I’m not really sure why he wants it so bad. He won one of the nastier elections on record, defeating this crowd that is now mocking him, the crowd lest we forget, that unleashed this hellish financial storm on the Nation. And now he wants their support? Why?

Does he think he will need it to gain approval in his other great quest, to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? I’m guessing they will stiff him there also.  Our President needs to listen carefully to the new leader of the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh. Rush said it succinctly. “I want him to fail.” That is the new Republican mantra. “Fail, baby, fail.” How would one expect to gain their cooperation? If he succeeds, they fail. They’re playing a zero-sum game.

So, dear President, pay attention. We elected you to recreate our Nation, to return it to that wonderful place we used to have before the Republicans ascended to the throne. Do not, please, be led down some blind alley in this fruitless quest. The Republicans can either cooperate, get out of the way, or get run over. Their choice.

So, come back to the people, and dance with the folks whut brung you. Let’s treat this foolishness as a minor hiccup and begin again pursuing the mission for which we elected you. 

Reinventing Government Redux

President Obama promises to change the effectiveness of government. Al Gore promised to "reinvent" government. I offer below a letter I sent to VP Gore in 1993.  Maybe President Obama will take it more seriously than VP Gore did. As you read. kindly remember this letter was sent in 1993.

June 20, 1993 

Vice President Albert Gore

The White House

Washington DC 20006

 Dear Vice President Gore:

             I would like to thank you for giving an hour of your time to the Council for Excellence in Government last week. I assist the Council periodically and was privileged to be present during your hour with them. While such exchanges are not normally heavy on substance, your discussion was impressive, your responses thoughtful and your knowledge of the issues substantial.  

          Much of your talk seemed right on target, including especially your discussion about decentralizing authority and accountability for performance.  My fears, having worked in government for eight years, is that they will take the delegated authority without accepting the responsibility.  I noted, for example, the current debacle pending in HUD, in which we the taxpayers will be stuck for a multibillion dollar bill.  My question is, will the group in HUD responsible be held accountable??  Will people be fired for misfeasance?  Will SESers (Senior Executive Service)still get performance bonuses??  I expect fully that the blame will be placed on former political executives who are now safely out of reach. 

             I have never been a great fan of SES performance bonuses.  I managed a three-year evaluation of the Civil Service Reform Act and saw no evidence that the bonuses could affect performance, even in theory.  I argued that group performance payments at least offered some prospect of affecting performance.  I could not get a reasonable hearing, because the people to whom I made the arguments benefited from the current arrangement.  My own outrage at huge payments made to private sector executives in the face of unprofitable performances by their companies continues. At least in the private sector, though, there is some risk that bankruptcy looms if performance falls too far.  In government, there should be some equivalent to bankruptcy.  HUD, the Department of Education and perhaps others would be bankrupt now were there such a status.  Then, executives could be moved out and the departments reorganized under some Chapter 11 system--perhaps under a special unit of OMB (at last, something for the "M" side to do!). 

             During your visit to the Council, you mentioned the unanimous opinion among government workers and managers that the system needed to be changed regarding their ability to fire people for cause.  As someone who supervised an office in which we fired someone for cause, I can tell you that the problem is real, but irrelevant.  We succeeded in getting rid of a problem employee, but such people are not the cause of government performance problems.  If you could fire at will for the next ten years, government would perform no better.  One of the reasons it is so difficult to fire non-performers is that the system by which normal performance is judged is grossly inadequate.  As an exercise you should personally read  a set of merit pay and SES performance plans--perhaps 100 plans selected at random.  I know it would be burdensome, but it would also be revealing to you.  Then, read the plans of at least 50 SESers who received performance bonuses--not the distinguished and meritorious awards, but the regular bonus awards.  You will learn why it is hard to distinguish good from mediocre performance and why many people object to SES bonuses.  With so many national problems so clearly in front of us, we award bonuses for coordination of budget and legislative plans.  We reward people for giving out grants.  Most of our executives would shy away from accepting responsibility for solving a national problem.  If the President will be held to a standard of performance dealing with the deficit and resolution of the health insurance crisis, why should we not hold our senior career executives accountable for reducing infant mortality, solving the homeless problem, getting health care professionals to locate where they are needed . . .?  If bonuses were paid for solving such national problems, I would applaud the bonus payments--in fact I would argue that even higher bonuses would be due.  Until that time, bonuses will always look like payments for at best ordinary performance.  We need organizational performance plans with important achievable objectives, not just individual plans.  I am not arguing that we try to force achievement goals where they are not possible--we do not know how to reduce breast cancer, or cure AIDS.  But we surely do know how to reduce infant mortality and we surely do know how to keep people from having to sleep on the streets, and we surely do know how to get health care workers to redistribute themselves.  We lack the will, and, thanks to Reagan the wallet.  But we need to at least get these issues into our accountability systems.

              I hope you look seriously at this issue of real accountability for performance.  The rhetoric of "reinventing government" will be absorbed slickly by our government execs, who are quite good at such absorption tricks.  Every where I go now in government I hear about how "we are into reinventing government", as though that statement explained something.  We need to go way beyond such rhetorical tricks.  Good luck in you review.  we need your intelligence desperately.

 Sincerely, 

Richard E. Schmidt

Wondering

Wondering

A recent commentator wonders why President Obama seems to be pursuing a war strategy, given that he strongly opposed the war during his campaign. A fascinating question, that.

Choices:

·         President Johnson initiates and vastly expands the war in Vietnam, on the advice of his brilliant strategists.

·         Nixon chooses to extend the war for another five years, after promising to end it through his “Plan to end the war.” After that five years, the war ends the same way it might have, had Johnson never begun, or Nixon never continued the war, except . . . 50,000 Americans and a million Vietnamese lost their lives.

·         Carter, when faced with a hostile takeover of Americans in Iran, negotiates for their release, instead of directing bombers to begin bombing Iran.

·         Reagan observes the release of the hostages, remarkably quickly after his inauguration. Result: no war, no one is killed.

·         Bush ignores warnings of an imminent attack, observes an attack resulting in the deaths of 3,000 Americans. Bush directs the start of a war against the wrong country. Eight years later, thousands of Americans and probably hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead, with an uncertain end in sight. The initial culprits remain in hiding in the country that harbored them initially.

·         Obama wins an election based partly on his promise to end the war in Iraq. Obama now looks to continue and perhaps expand the forgotten war in Afghanistan. The “war” in Afghanistan looks like Vietnam. Will Obama follow Johnson and Nixon down a similar rathole? Stay tuned.

In the meantime, ex-Veep Cheney is out there snarling, promising really, that an attack of great magnitude will occur. He is desperate to prove that he was right and Obama and the triumphant Democrats are wrong. He wants us to continue torturing and continue bombing.

Meanwhile, Hamas continues lobbing rockets at Israel, and Israel continues dropping bombs on Gaza. 

Meanwhile, the Taliban continue to blow up villages, roads, trucks and people, anything and anyone that gets in their way of becoming the world’s first drug superpower.  Afghan warlord-drug mobsters are living the good life.

So, what is our president to do?

It occurs to me that we (the US of A) has not won a war since WW II.  All other “wars” declared and undeclared have either continued without abating, or we have simply, flat out lost.  We cut a deal in Korea, lost in Vietnam, and are somewhere in between in Iraq. Afghanistan looks unpromising. Also, I am reminded, the “war” on cancer, and the “war” on poverty were either lost somewhere in the dim past or wrestled to a draw—you choose.

So, maybe, I am thinking, “war” is a bad choice of terms to describe what we are doing in the Middle East. First, it forces you to adopt a military approach—bombing, tanks, shooting people wholesale. Second, it reduces the options you are allowed to consider.

Maybe in this ninth year of the 21^st millennium, we need to do something completely different. Maybe we need to call a halt, even a temporary one might be good, and we need to begin some conversations about what the various actors want. Since war clearly will not deliver any results worth having, maybe thinking and talking might produce a totally different strategy for the world.

Couldn’t hurt.

A little “out-of-the-box” thinking guys, please.

Please?

The Daschle Blessing

So maybe it’s a blessing in disguise, the Tom Daschle debacle. It may force some new thinking on who they want to run the Department of Health and Human Services, and why. Here’s my choice:

David Kessler. Dr. Kessler was born in New York in 1951. He graduated Amherst College in 1973, and then went on to earn a degree from Harvard Medical School (1973-1979). While at Harvard Dr. Kessler obtained a law degree from the University of Chicago (1977). From 1981 to 1984 he served as a consultant for the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, and from 1982 to 1984 he was special assistant to the president of Montefiore Medical Center in New York. Dr. Kessler then went on to serve as medical director of the Hospital of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine from 1984 until President Bush appointed him as FDA commissioner in December of 1990. It is important to note that Dr. Kessler continued to serve as FDA Commissioner under President Clinton.

Dr. Kessler was one of the best FDA Commissioners we have seen in that post. As such, he knows intimately the issues facing the Nation in the areas of both drugs and food safety. He would command respect from the health care and health research scientific communities, a necessary ingredient in success there. But, further, he would bring both intelligence and firm management to a Federal department sorely in need of both.

But, could he both manage this vast department and transform the US health care system? I would submit, not.

Under the Clintons, an opportunity to transform our health care system was lost, partly due to Clinton mismanagement, and partly due to Republican demagoguery. It has been clear for some time that Republicans do not wish to give the Democrats another Medicare, or Social Security system. Those two programs have rightly been regarded as triumphs. Republicans desperately do not wish to give Democrats another such triumph. Thus, under Clinton, Republicans argued that the proposal being developed by the Clintons was too costly, too complicated, and, this is important, unnecessary—they argued that there was no health care crisis, thus no reform was needed. The Clintons failed to respond to this challenge. They continued to develop their system and then aborted it before it came to full term. Republicans had their own triumph, of sorts, albeit one for which Americans are still paying the price.

Now, we have another opportunity. I would argue that a second person is needed to manage this vast enterprise—transforming the US health care system so that it is responsive to the needs of the people, cost-effective, and efficient.  We need a single payer system, but before we leap to such a conclusion, we need to know why. Thus, I believe an initial effort, probably requiring six to 12 months, is needed to examine in detail and bring into the light of day, both the benefits and the flaws of the current system of care.  There is no question we have a magnificent system of care, for those who can afford to participate. But the system by which we pay for care is broken, and getting more ineffective daily. An employment-based insurance system can no longer be afforded or tolerated.

So, we need to detail all the features of the current system, including:

·         The system by which we pay for care;

·         The systems by which we deliver care;

·         The systems by which we attract and train the best and the brightest people into health care, and the approaches we use to compensate those people—that system is also broken, as we pay too much to specialists and not enough to our primary care practitioners. We are losing people out of primary care at the point where we need more, not fewer practitioners.

·         The systems by which drugs are developed and the companies compensated.

There are more issues than I can list here, but the point is that an analysis of the current system is complicated and must precede any design of a new system. The public must be brought to an understanding of why the current system is neither viable, nor especially effective (our current infant mortality rates are a disgrace). Once the public is made aware of the flaws in our system, they will be ready for a new system. It is also the case, that the new system can be shown more easily to fix those flaws, i.e., the design process can be made transparent to the public. This way, Republicans can argue their case, but they will be unable to demagogue the proposed approach.

I repeat, though, that this process is too complex and too time consuming for one person. The Department of Health and Human Services desperately needs competent leadership. It cannot await completion of the health care reform initiative.

Bombing Civilians

Watching the Bill Moyers Journal last evening was a scary proposition. The subject: bombing civilians, and why that never, ever works. The bombing campaign at issue is the Afghan-Pakistan border, where our President has apparently authorized continued bombing of “terrorist” hideouts in that wild region not governed by anyone, except maybe the Taliban. The point of the discussion was that, all the evidence we have, dating back at least to WW I, is that bombing of civilians never works to bring the civilian population to its knees. Specifically, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, when the Nazis were busily bombing London and other major population centers in England, that “we will fight them >>> everywhere” suggests that not every population could be cowed by heavy bombing. Churchill, in fact, failed to heed his own admonition, by ordering the same type of heavy bombardment of German cities.

President Johnson ordered continuous bombing of North Vietnam population centers, on McNamara’s recommendation. That resulted, eventually, in America being discharged from the Vietnamese peninsula, returning home with its tail between its legs, but not before we lost some 50,000 brave young men and women.

In the Middle East, our bombing campaigns seem to have actually expanded the roster of Islamic “terrorists” willing to blow themselves up in order to kill Americans and their allies. Whole organizations now exist that never existed before we intervened—Qaida in Iraq, Taliban in Pakistan are newbies, thanks to our campaigns.

But what gave me the greatest pause was the thought that President Obama is now committing himself, and us by the way, to an expansion of a war in Afghanistan and maybe Pakistan, that we cannot win-- Vietnam Redux. We are talking 60,000 more troops. The Soviets had three times that many and were summarily dismissed from Afghanistan. We seem to be embarking on a redo of Vietnam, only this time under Obama’s watch. I think he’s too smart for that, but he may be too smart by half. Sometimes, smart people cannot believe that they will fail to succeed where others have indeed failed.  We are being sucked into this spider web, and we may soon be unable to extricate ourselves. Given that we have a few other problems, like a collapsed global economy, it seems sensible to me that we might reconsider our course of action.

Maybe it is time for President Obama to call a halt to military actions in that region and call for some kind of global discussion on what it is we are trying to accomplish, and whether that goal is achievable. Maybe, we need to go beyond our current crop of military advisers to being in some fresh brains, i.e., brains not already corrupted by the Bush doctrines.

Couldn’t hurt.

Political Silliness

So it’s Ground Hog Day, and we await news from a rodent somewhere in the wilds of Pennsylvania as to our near-term weather forecast. Wonder what it’s like to be a weatherman and listen to people argue/debate about Phil’s relative accuracy in forecasting.  And he doesn’t even consult Doppler Radar.

And elsewhere, in our Nation’s Capitol, Republican Mitch McConnell utters pronouncements on the relative soundness of planned expenditures under Obama’s version of Bush’s version of a fiscal stimulus package. McConnell:”We need to lower taxes. That’s the way out of this mess (that we created). Oh, and let’s get rid of any spending on those nasty condoms. Eeeewwwwww. Nasty things.”

Republicans continue to demonstrate why they’re a party in decline. They are holding fast to their lifeline—right wing zealots, who want to return us to the 19^th century, those glorious days of the Robber Barons. They hate Gays, cling to 12^th century religious views, practice bigotry whenever they get the chance, and work hard to slow down public education. “Keep the people ignorant and us in power” is their mantra. What a group. Is this a great country or what?

And just when I thought the Dems had bought themselves some cleverness, with the planned appointment of Judd Gregg as Secretary of Commerce, giving the Democratic Governor of New Hampshire a shot at appointing a Democratic successor, thereby giving the Dems a 60 vote majority, we learn that he will appoint a Republican.  Just to be fair. Does anyone in the universe think that Republicans, given a similar chance, would appoint a Democrat, just to be fair?  Silly people.

Ahhh well, as the world turns, and it does continue to turn, whether we like it or not . . .

Stay tuned to the world of American Leadership.