Report From A Recent Trip to DC

Recently I spent a couple of days in Washington, DC talking with some very connected people from both sides of the aisle.  Some observations.

The center of the world is most definitely DC.  All the money is there and everyone who wants some of it is as well.  More so than any other time I’ve been there (I went to school there and have spent a fair amount of time there). Those of us not there simply have no concept of how the center of power in the US has shifted even more profoundly to the federal government.

Team Obama is biting off more than it can chew by a lot. Like many people, I was stirred and thrilled by Obama’s run for the roses and continue to find him a compelling and interesting leader and politician (I use that latter word in a good way).  But, and it’s a big but, he and his team are displaying their egg-headed tendencies.  Politics is the art of the possible.  Without commenting on the quality of the ideas, the whole lot of them display an astonishing disregard for what it takes to make change happen.  Leaving aside the difficulty of getting the big egos to play nice, there simply aren’t enough staff people in DC to do all the analysis by a factor of two or three.  The machine is able to handle maybe one big piece of legislation a session, the rest of the time being spent on piddling around, doing earmarks, and the non-stop game of running for office.  It’s just too much.

All the real work in town is done by super smart, super committed 25 to 38 year olds who are working 18 hour days, 6 days a week.  Have you ever done that?  For longer than a couple of months?  Does it make you feel good knowing that’s the backbone of our government? Surrounding those eager beavers are the layers and layers of old guard.  Some of these people are truly salt of the earth.  The serve because they believe.  The work hard.  Some of them even have some life balance.  Others are deeply cynical and do all they can to gum up the works.  In all ways, it’s not unlike the private sector, except turnover is driven by a different dynamic and the stakes are so much higher.

I am sad to say this, but a lot of what’s getting jammed through Congress is bad policy and will surely be bad law.  This is a function of the previous points.  It’s also a function of the design of our government which is built to guard against too much movement in any one direction too quickly.  The ills that beset us have come as the result of an accumulation of bad policies, bad laws, and bad governance.  Or maybe it was all well intentioned but times changed.  Pick your poison, but the point is it didn’t all happen at once and it won’t unhappen at once.

Good, bad, or indifferent, the GOP is not interested in making good laws.  They are running for election.  The whole purpose of the party in opposition anymore is simply to oppose, not to help govern.

The lawmakers at the focal point of all these big laws are simply not up to the task.  Probably nobody is. Chris Dodd, just to pick one, a man deeply unpopular in his home state at this point, is at the center of the Financial Regulation and Health Care reform.  It’s just too much by half. And he’s not the only one.  The private sector is a bone yard littered with companies that augered in because of managerial hubris. Why do we think Washington is immune to the same thing?

Obama has now spent a grand total of 5.5 months in office. My good friends on the left point to that as a sort of blanket defense.  While it’s just a smidgen of time, particularly in comparison to what many hope will be an eight year run, it’s enough time to take the measure of the man.  He’s a very cool and inspiring leader with undeniable charisma and class. He clearly loves smart people and big ideas. He is operating with a mandate based on both a sense of crisis and a significant electoral win. He said he was going to take on pretty much everythign and he has. He runs a tighter operation than a lot of CEOs I can think of. He and his team seem to have done a good job of reaching out in many directions and listening to divergent points of view during the strategy forumulation phase.  None of these things will change.

On many issues, Obama is also far more conservative in many ways than the left thought he would be: Gay marraige and national security are just two places where he has dissappointed many and where conservatives with a mind to juge fairly would find much to like. He and his team are finding it difficult to pay off the promises without a lot of backroom deals and budget mangling numbers.  Those who thought it would work differently, perhaps including Obama, were high.  All of this to say that it seems certain that his wings will get clipped along the way, and he will either have to make some deeper accomodations to govern effectively.  Maybe that’s why he’s shot so high, so that when he is forced to aim lower, he’ll still have hit something.

Conservatives love to harp on Obama’s choreography. Like Bush wasn’t. Of course team Obama is choreographing everything. Other than Mark Sanford, who isn’t?   Where’s the news?  I remember after the GOP stole the 2000 election, and let’s just not even debate that one, those in the know said basically, “Grow up, so what, get over it.”  So my conservative friends, on this and all the other nanny nanny billy goat “if George Bush did this . . .” bones you want to pick, “Grow up, so what, get over it.”  The whole Claude Raines, “I’m shocked there’s gambling going on here” wasn’t becoming when the Dems did it and it’s not when the GOP does it.

The Sanford debacle hit while I was in DC.  The smart one in that family is his wife.  That was true before Sanford’s “Don’t Cry for me Argentina” aria, and it’s even more true not.  It’s not that the Dems don’t have their share of dopes and scandals, but the GOP leadership, and I use that term really loosely, appears to compromised beyond hope.  The right wing blogs are all excited thinking that Obama will be a one term President.  I keep wondering who they have in mind because the whole lot of them seem to self-destruct in the light of day.

Tags: Obama, Governor Sanford, GOP, George Bush, Democrats, Republicans, Decision Making