The Republicans and Public Funding

Obama and Public Funding:
Barack Obama’s decision to forgo public makes perfectly good political sense and might be just the thing to force a change finally of the financing system for national and Congressional elections. Consider the facts of the situation:

1. Up until the Obama campaign, large scale campaigns have largely been primarily funded either by the candidate’s own money, "special interest" money, or the big hitters.
2. By margins of 12 to 18 to one, these special interest funds and those of the big hitters are given to incumbents running for reelection, or to candidates for the Presidency who demonstrate a very clear likelihood of success. Big money does not like to invest in likely losers or long shots, and they certainly did not invest in Obama – about the longest of long shots.
3. The incumbents of both parties who are the primary beneficiaries of this system combined to stymie any real reform of the system, which largely supported the incumbents in both parties.
4. Hillary Clinton was the “anointed” likely winner of the Democratic Nomination, and she got most of the special interest money and that from the big hitters, who contributed to a Democratic Presidential candidate.
5. Obama, by contrast, had to forge an entirely new source of funding, from the grass roots upward, using the combination of his personal charisma combined with the Internet to generate an army of “small” contributors.
6. It has finally dawned on the Republicans just how enormous a funding advantage he has created, not only for himself but for Democratic candidates for the House and Senate.
7. Now, when his fund raising ability has proven enormously successful on a scale unimagined by everyone just 18 months ago, the “interests” on the Republican side, and their spokespersons in the national media, demand that he give up that advantage because it is somehow “unfair.”

Excuse me, but this a one huge joke on the Republicans who are now whining, whimpering might more accurately, about how terrible Barack Obama is for supposedly going back on his word. If McCain and the Republicans, along with their right wing allies, had invented this new organizational advantage, does anyone believe that they would give it up? Please remember, these are the same people who brought John Kerry to his knees with outside the box advertising and funding about his war record just four years ago. Today, they and their media surrogates are crying “foul” because it serves their interests to do so. If the roles were reversed, they would be protesting the virtue of having grass roots voters, rather than special interest money, funding their candidates.

Obama’s huge financing advantage, built fairly, in the open, and with great skill, might just be the factor that changes the funding mechanisms for all political campaigns. It will terrify the special interests who will be the main losers in the funding wars between the two political parties. These Internet lists, build carefully over time, could offset completely the need for incumbents to build war chests out of special interest money. The Obama lists are already being used by other Democratic campaign groups to raise money for Senate candidates. In truth, this process of raising money directly from individual citizens has been going on for years with the growing use of direct mail, but the use of email, Web sites. Credit cards, and on line giving has improved the efficiency tenfold over direct mail.

The Incumbency Protection Racket – the Real Evil:
This special interest money, raised well before the next election cycle, is the guarantee to the incumbents of their own invulnerability to defeat under normal circumstances. This money is a factor in the 95 to 99 percent re-election rates that exist for legislative incumbents at the state and national levels of government. By piling up huge reserves of special interest money, well before the election, incumbents can discourage the potential nominees of the opposing political party, who do not have access to similar sources of early funding because the special interests do not fund challengers in general.

The early funding for legislative races is one of the key factors that eliminates competition for office, reduces voter choice, reduces voter turnout, and renders the treasuries of the state and federal governments subject to raids by the special interests that funded the campaigns of the incumbents of both parties.

However, given a strong candidate and an early start, challengers for the Senate and House potentially can build slowly their own local or statewide email based funding mechanism that is tied to the personal appeal of the candidate. They can start doing just what Barak Obama has done at the Presidential level.

This” wonderful” system of “incumbency protection” has been built as the costs of running a campaign for office have escalated since the 1960’s. The growth of the use of television, and other media, combined with larger districts, has sky rocked the costs of electoral campaigns for office in the larger states and in races for the House and Senate. My son, Ben, and I wrote our book about this problem, The Politics of American Discontent, and it is filled with statistical evidence of this process.

Today, something has changed, and the Obama campaign has changed it. The prevalence of access to the Internet, coupled with the nearly universal use of email, has made it possible for Obama to finance an entire Presidential race without taking any special interest money. On a smaller scale, Howard Dean preceded him, and Ron Paul in 2008 was able to keep a very distinctive, niche campaign going with the same mechanism. However, the Obama campaign will be viewed historically as the starting point for a new way of organizing the fund-raising for campaigns for office.

Now that the funding mechanism has been built, with the innovation done, the Republicans (who do not have any similar capability in 2008) are “demanding” that Obama give up this unique political advantage. That is a little like other software companies getting together to demand that Microsoft give up the unique operating system on which its success depends.

Moreover, the Republicans have already recognized the unusual danger this represents to them in 2008 and beyond. Obama can and will turn his fund raising ability loose to aid Senate campaigns in races that might have been thought to be solidly Republican. Like most “new” competitive advantages, this one will be copied by the Republicans in the next election cycle.

applaud this development, and we are already witnessing its affect in a House and Senate that are more ideologically divided, and less able to reach accommodations, than they were in the period prior to 1960. This in turn produces the general intransigence and deadlock that has existed on deficit spending and the debt (with single exception during the Administration of Bill Clinton) since way back in the late 1960’s when the problem first started to get out of hand.

The Mutual Blame Game:
In the end, in 2008, you can be absolutely sure that the Democrats will blame the Bush Administration for the growing problem of deficits, citing his combination of war spending and the tax reductions. Likewise, the Republicans with justification will blame the Democrats because of their support of higher and higher spending on entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and the like. They are both half right, but being half right never strains the credulity of anyone in politics. Half a loaf is supposedly better than total dishonesty.

Politics, unfortunately, makes liars out of the most honorable of men and women, and the intelligent and thoughtful citizens know it all too well. Why else the growing disillusionment in all of the democracies as governments fail to figure out how to control the worse impulses of those in office, especially the impulse to allow all kinds of special interests – oil interests, bankers, car manufacturers, large farmers, teachers, public employee unions, and the like – to raid the public treasury on behalf of their “interests”. Now, with special interest funding unnecessary for Barack Obama, the hypocrits are out in full force, making claims about what Obama should do when they would never dream themselves of giving up such an advantage.

Just my opinion,
Gordon Black

Ross Perot: "He's back!"

Ross Perot Has Struck Again: http://perotcharts.com/

I received an email from my former colleague, David Clemm, who ran Harris Interactive with me for many years. The title of his email was: “He’s back,” and he included an article by David Broder of the Washington Post about Ross Perot and the new Web Site – shown above – created by Perot about the spending trends in America. As he did in 1992, Perot has created a world of charts that portray an America headed toward a complete fiscal disaster. No one can do this better than Ross Perot, although the charts do not include the remarkable humor and intelligence with which he presented them to America in 1992.

Like most charts, these do not entirely speak for themselves, except in so far as the display a country whose own leaders are taking it down the road to fiscal oblivion. The trends in these charts are not alone the product of George Bush and his Administration, as convenient as it would be to blame it all on them. Most of them, indeed, are the product of the office holders in both of the parties making decisions that put their own personal short term political gains ahead of the welfare of our children and grandchildren – over and over again.

The real question, of course, is why? Why would men and women who proclaim the virtue of their superior morality and their supposed love of country create trends like those displayed in Perot’s charts? That is the question that I have struggled with for more than two decades – as has Ross Perot and many, many other good citizens. The charts demonstrate things that are fundamentally disturbing about our democratic political system. They make us question the viability of our future as a rich and prosperous country, and certainly the future we hope to preserve for our children.

David Clemm and I spent a substantial amount of time and money together in the 1990’s, along with many other people, attempting to force changes that would alter the destiny forecasted in these charts. With Perot leading the way, those efforts persuaded a very, very reluctant Congress and the Clinton Administration to reach an accord that balanced the budget for the first time in decades. They did not do this out of the goodness of their heart on the rightness of our cause. They did it only because they feared Perot. They feared that he would create a new force in American politics that would undermine their control over the offices they so cherished. They did it to take him out of the picture – for their own political security.

However, as David Clemm said in his email, he’s back. He is back because the problem that motivated him, and so many other people, is back. We are engaged in a dramatic Presidential contest where the issues contained in Perot’s charts are once again being conveniently ignored by both Presidential candidates and by everyone else in Washington, D.C. Perot has given us, as before, the “facts.” Both of the Presidential candidates are repeatedly telling the American people once again "all of the wonderful things they plan to spend our tax money to do for us," without confronting the reality that we are rapidly running out of money to do anything more than simply pay for entitlements.

I cannot personally do much, but I do know how to interpret the meaning of many of these numbers. I plan to use “Perot’s facts”, really the “facts” created by our “benevolent” political leaders, to ask the question “why” in the months ahead, and the answers are not likely to please Democrats who want to blame all of it on George Bush, or on Republicans who like to talk about “ the tax and spend Democrats.”

We all live in the world of the Internet today. We have a way – it’s called the forward button -- to get these “facts” to nearly every person in America – simply by pushing forward to your family, friends, colleagues and associates. Knowing the facts may not change them, but not knowing them will certainly make them prophecies of consequences we would not wish on our children and grand children. One hour with Perot's Charts is more enlightening than all of the speeches by all of the candidates to date in this Presidential election.

Just my opinion,

Gordon Black
June 15, 2008
Perot Returns, Charts and All
By David Broder
WASHINGTON -- Sixteen years after he shook up American politics by launching an impromptu campaign for president, Ross Perot is about to dip a toe back into the public debates. And, yes, he's bringing his charts with him to make his point.
Beginning Sunday, people who go to http://www.perotcharts.com/ will find the Dallas billionaire waiting to challenge them on one of his favorite subjects -- the "ruin" he says America is courting with its spendthrift ways.
"We are right at the edge of the cliff," the voice with the unmistakable Texas twang informed me, when I called him the other day to find out about this latest venture. "We can't go on spending money we don't have."
That is not a new theme for Perot. It was his core message when he did his on-again, off-again, then back-on-again race against George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in 1992. He led the field in the early months and, even after the confusing signals sent by his dropping out and coming back, won more than 19.7 million votes -- almost 20 percent of the total.
His real triumph, however, was a policy victory. With simple charts that he designed and displayed on prime-time television "infomercials," he managed to convey to millions of voters the stark reality of what the record deficits of the 1980s really meant.
It may well have been the first and only time that the abstraction of an out-of-kilter budget was communicated outside the boardroom or the economics classroom. People got it. A Washington Post poll taken in October 1992, at the height of Perot's public information campaign, found that 63 percent of those surveyed said they worried a great deal that the federal budget deficit would grow, and another 17 percent said it worried them a good amount.
The newly elected Clinton took note, and, prompted by Robert Rubin and other economists, abandoned his campaign promise of middle-class tax cuts and instead made his priority cutting the budget deficit. Within a few years, we had a brief and blessed run of balanced budgets.
But with the current president, deficits have returned with a vengeance -- and no one seems to care. Current polls show that less than 1 percent of the voters call the budget deficit one of the major problems facing the country.
Part of the reason is that politicians of both parties are laboring to disguise the reality from public view. Both President Bush and the Democratic Congress this year have issued budgets that claim to achieve balance in 2012 -- just four years from now.
But those budgets are based on blue-sky assumptions that have no grounding in the real world. When I asked Perot what he made of them, he replied, "It's an election year. What would you expect them to say?"
In recent weeks, when I have found myself in conversations with David Walker and other economists who know how grim the long-term budget picture really is, I have mused aloud, "We need Ross Perot back." Turns out, he was quietly preparing his return. He took some of the basic work done by Walker and others, and had professionals turn it into 35 very clear charts and link them on a Web site with an equally simple narration.
Sadly, Perot hired a professional announcer, rather than reading the text in his own distinctive Texas way, but he told me he's willing to substitute himself -- which would make it a lot less pedantic and a lot livelier. With a personal investment of some $300,000, Perot has built a real teaching tool.
Perot is not offering any solutions. But he is clearly pointing to what he says are the culprits, the big entitlements -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. As the narrator puts it with the first of the charts: "The United States faces large and growing budget deficits mostly due to an aging population and rising health care costs. Unless we solve the problems caused by entitlement spending, there will be little money left to do anything else in the future. Over time, our standard of living, our national security, our standing in the world and the value of our currency could all be threatened. The sooner we confront these issues, the better."
So far, John McCain and Barack Obama are not doing that. Perot, now almost 78, says he has no desire to get back into politics. But he's doing a service by unleashing his favorite weapon: those charts.
mailto:%20davidbroder@washpost.com

The VP Decision

The First Big Obama Decision:
Obama faces his first huge decision almost immediately, and it is obvious: how to deal with Hillary Clinton and whether to put her on the ticket as his Vice President candidate. The answer is not obvious at all, despite the strong feelings that will swirl around the decision. As we all know, politics makes strange bedfellows, but this would be among the strangest of all time.

There will be a body of opinion inside the Obama campaign that argues simply for ignoring her and the unusual situation, but that will only push a final resolution off to the Convention with debilitating effects on the entire Democratic Party. That leaves very little time for reconciliation, for any merger of effort, for an elimination of uncertainly for people who continue to harbor hopes, and a complete focus on the Republicans and John McCain. There is apparently an additional body of opinion that views her behavior during the campaign rules her out as a partner.

Regardless of these feelings, the decision needs a clear look at some of the issues at stake, and emotions aside, there are serious risks either way.

The Central Problem:
Everyone knows instinctively what the largest risk is with this decision, and it has the name, William Jefferson Clinton. Bill Clinton may well be very popular with many Democrats, but he poses unknown and unknowable risks that no previous President has ever had to face.
He is, after all, the former President of the United States, and he is impossible to hide in any closet quietly, particularly if he does not want that. He is also virtually impossible to control for any length of time, and his presence poses a risk to a White House every step of the way. He is “news” where ever he goes, and he is almost always good copy for the news media. We all know that he has made many “promises” regarding his behavior in the past, and he has not kept them for very long when the impulse strikes him otherwise. Given his international popularity, he could be a substantial asset, but he has a predilection for unscripted, impromptu remarks and he could prove an equally large distraction and liability.

However, there is a huge risk with Clinton posed by his “consulting income” and “gifts” to his foundation over the past eight years. The Clintons have refused to disclose the sources of those payments, and that is not acceptable if she is to aspire to the Vice Presidency. Those payments represent potential conflicts of interest of the most serious sort, and no one can rely on the Clinton’s personal “opinion” about this issue without the public seeing the facts.

Therefore, any consideration of Hillary Clinton for the Vice Presidency should require a complete disclosure of all of the sources of funding for the foundation and for Bill Clinton. The disclosure must be public, immediate and not put off until the Convention, and the subject of public discussion before any decision about Hillary is announced or even considered. At some point, the Obama campaign should indicate that this is a prior condition that must be met for any consideration of Hillary on the ticket. This “leak” will put the ball back in the Clinton’s court, and any refusal or their part is a perfect and quite reasonable justification for not considering her for the ticket.

The second consideration is with Clinton’s “consulting” during an Obama Administration. This is a topic for negotiation. Bill Clinton, like Caesar’s Wife, must be above reproach. This will be an ongoing problem for an Obama Administration, and it would have to be dealt with upfront. It is one thing for Clinton to earn a large fee for speaking before a public convention or meeting, where the activity is public, the organizers are identified and the payment is clear. It is another thing all together to earn a large fee for introducing a client or “friend” to someone important in the new administration, or for undertaking activities between a client and an international corporation or foreign government, or for advising anyone in their dealings with the Federal Government.

Bill Clinton’s consulting activities, and his high flying lifestyle, are a minefield for an Obama Administration. Without full disclosure of all of the sources of his past income, and an active and publicly negotiated agreement on his future income sources, Obama would be walking through that minefield with a blindfold on. If the Clintons cannot agree to those terms, publicly and above board, then they have no right to wiggle the press for an invitation to the Vice Presidency.

The Secondary Problem:
There is a simple rule of American politics. Vice Presidents largely “serve” by waiting in the shadows. No President can afford a Vice President who seizes the public limelight on their own. I doubt that the Clinton’s have in mind such a diminished role – serving in total silence if the President requires that. They simply have never been people to “serve in silence,” as far as I can adjudge, and every public speech by Bill Clinton will be evaluated for any clues that might apply to an Obama Administration.

They know the rules of the White House and the Vice Presidency as well as anyone, and it is hard for me to believe that “silence” is what they have in mind when they started promoting Hillary as the Vice Presidential candidate – “the President-in-Waiting,” perhaps, but not a silent one, either for her or her husband.

Hillary Clinton as a Vice President poses significant risks on her own, but the relationship with her own husband poses even larger risks for damaging missteps and potentially difficult distractions. Giving her a policy “mandate” to capture her efforts, particularly with health care, poses other risks of division within the Administration. The one thing that a new Administration under Barack Obama does not need is a ready source of conflict and disruption within a new administration from the very first day.

The Political Issue:
The question of whether Hillary Clinton on the ticket helps or hurts Barack Obama’s chances is a relatively easy issue to resolve from the standpoint of the public. This is an empirical issue, resolvable quite readily with polling and analysis, and I assume that the Obama campaign has already begun that analysis.

The proponents of Hillary Clinton to the Vice Presidency will not be empirical, except in the crudest fashion. They will assert that she can deliver blue collar and working class whites back to the Democratic Party. That may well be the case for some voters, but her success with these voters in the primaries is no indication that they will return with her on the ticket. Polling with sophisticated analysis can determine whether this will occur with ease, however.

The counter argument is that Hillary Clinton is a polarizing influence in American politics; that she will push Independents and Disaffected Republicans right back into the arms of the Republican, John McCain. Again, this is an easy argument to resolve using sophisticated polling and analysis. Like the situation with White working and lower class Democrats, the argument is empirical and capable of analysis and definition.

Fortunately for the Obama campaign, independent polling organizations, particularly those financed by the media, are not stupid and they can do this analysis as well as the campaigns themselves (although nothing has yet been published). Moreover, the findings of the independent polling organizations (not financed by Obama or Clinton) are far more likely to be accepted by the general public and the proponents and opponents of Senator Clinton. Let’s hope they do this quickly, now that the general primary campaign is over, and the Clintons are suggesting her new role.

The Intangible Issue:
Assume for a moment the following: the empirical analysis shows that the inclusion of Senator Clinton on the ticket neither hurts too much nor helps too much, that her presence is less influential either way, which is the general case for most Vice Presidential candidates.

Including Senator Clinton on the ticket has a number of obvious advantages to the organizational Democrats that supported her campaign. Clinton will bring with here both her organizational advantages and her organizational liabilities. If she is the Vice Presidential candidate, the people who supported her (inner staff, interest groups, funding sources, organizational Democrats, etc) get a consolation prize as it were, which is access to the new administration through her office. These people are much better off staying with her as the potential Vice President than they are sitting out the election or helping John McCain.

Senator Clinton as Vice President will have influence, whether the White House staffers like it or not. They can isolate her only at some real risk, but including her in any policy capacity has risks as well. They cannot stop her from making phone calls, introducing people to figures in the Administration, using her enormous range of contacts to facilitate access, etc. Neither she nor her husband is one who is likely to go quietly into that dark night of political oblivion. That is just not in their character.

The good news, therefore, and the bad news are exactly the same. Including Senator Clinton on the ticket brings along with her an entire entourage of very powerful and influential people whose interests are simply not necessarily the same as the Obama Administration. No new Administration, to my knowledge, has ever faced a situation quite like this one.

The Bottom Line on the Clintons:
This is simply not an issue to avoid, or to delay dealing with. The first step of dealing with it is to communicate two inviolate conditions to Senator Clinton as soon as possible, both of which should be leaked or given to the press. First, there will be no consideration of inclusion on the ticket without full disclosure of all of the fees taking in by Bill Clinton and his Foundation over the past eight years, and sooner rather than later. The issue here is the potential for damaging conflicts of interest which can only be assessed with full disclosure. There is no “wiggle room” on this condition. Barack Obama has a right to know.

The second condition is a public statement from the Clintons that Bill Clinton is willing to”limit” his sources of funding, making them public, for as long as she serves. This condition needs to be eventually in writing and hammered out with lawyers for both sides. That will take weeks, if not months, and there is not a lot of time, once the lawyers are involved.

The second step is obvious: empower the Obama search committee to include her as a possibility and give them the resources to evaluate the consequences of her inclusion on the ticket. That delays the issue and quiets the speculation for a number of weeks, thereby reducing the pressures on the Obama campaign and on Obama himself.

The statistical bottom line is pretty clearcut. If she adds three pointsor more on a combined ticket, i.e., a real statistical improvement in a very close race, she would have to be considered for the ticket, both for the improvement of Obama's likelihood of winning and for the impact her presence would have on other Democratic races. If her contribution is two points or less, that is not much of a contribution and the risks would certainly outweight the potential benefit of having her as Vice President.

Unless the empirical evaluation clearly shows that her inclusion on the ticket markedly improves Obama’s chances in November, she is simply not worth the risks she will bring as the Vice President. There are better and less risky choices, no matter how loud the howls of public outrage by some of her key supporters.

The third step is to work quietly with any media organizations to encourage them to explore the issue and release the findings to the public. Unfortunately, one cannot assume that this obvious issue is equally obvious to them.

Of all of the things that the Obama campaign is faced with at the moment, this is by far the most consequential, now that both Hillary Clinton and her husband have publicly indicated willingness for her to go on the ticket for the “good of the party and the Country.”

No matter what Barack Obama decides, this is a decision that will be second guessed for years, whether he wins or loses in November. Second guessing is the inevitable consequences of excellent arguments on both sides of an issue, where hindsight finally emerges to determine which arguments were the most telling. Barack Obama has argued that judgment is the primary quality, and this is certainly a judgment call if there ever was one.

Just my opinion,

Gordon Black

Realism and Cautious Optimism

Don’t expect too much!
It is almost over. The compromise is made on the Florida and Michigan delegations, but not in a manner satisfactory to the campaign of Hillary Clinton and she threatens to take it to the Credentials Committee at the National Convention in Denver. Her claims are fueled by polls in both states which show her preferred over Barak Obama. She certainly has some merit to her position, which is probably worth remembering by everyone. Obama’s margin at the end of the long contest is razor thin, and he is at the moment not a better candidate in the polls against John McCain than Hillary Clinton.

Her supporters claim that the nomination is being “unfairly” denied to her, and many clearly will not support Barak Obama in the fall campaign, particularly among the White women, again confirming for many observers the continuing importance of “race” as one of the factors in this race. “Irrational enthusiasm” , to paraphrase Alan Greenspan, is the best description for the supporters of both candidates.

For everyone involved in this contest, it is perhaps the proper moment to gain a sense of realism about this election and lower our expectations about what is likely to take place – regardless of which of the Democrats prevail. Yes, the election is historic in that the contest is between a woman and a man of mixed racial parentage. And yes, symbols do matter and both candidacies mark a change with the past in American politics.

However, in the end, what really matters to Americans is what the candidates will actually do if they win and how well they will actually govern. In that, I would suggest to you that the forces of “continuity” are far and away more powerful than the forces of “change,” and the forces of continuity are deeply entrenched in Washington politics and they have many points of influence over the policies of the next Administration. For the new Administration, the primary power they have at the beginning is ability to replace a few thousand appointed leadership of the various Federal Agencies, and even in that they will suffer many disappointments.

The Limitations of an Obama Administration:
We should all face a singular fact. Barak Obama is absolutely a “newcomer” to national politics. His roots in the Democratic Establishment are very recent, tenuous, and based on relationships that are not tested by years of political contest and interaction. Unlike Hillary Clinton, he does not have nearly 20 years of immersion in national Democratic politics where both friends and enemies are well established. The people that he has relied to up to now, who have admittedly run a meticulously well organized and well thought out grassroots campaign, are themselves newcomers on the national stage of politics.

He has advisors, and there are certainly many, many people who would like to use his candidacy to propel their own careers in politics. But he lacks time tested and trusted friends and colleagues who know Washington politics to insert in many of the key positions. While he is probably less of an “outsider” than Jimmy Carter was when he was elected in 1976, he will have a difficult time identifying and installing people who will carry out his program as he wants it. Like Carter, many of his inner circles of advisors lack the breath of contacts in the national arena that make recruitment somewhat easier. And, we would do well to recall, that the Administration of the talented Mr. Carter was not what anyone calls a success.

In the absence of a readily available reservoir of advisors who can occupy key administrative roles, the new administration-in-waiting will face a virtual barrage of proposed candidates from every type of interest group with permanent residence inside the Washington beltway. Many, and perhaps most, of these candidates are proposed because the proposed candidate serves the “interests” of those who are proposing them. Sorting through the possible candidates is a forbidding task that mostly has to be accomplished on the higher level appointments in a period of less than three months.

Many of these appointees will simply fail. They will fail to have ideas for change that can actually work. They will fail as leaders. They will fail to recruit the most talented staff to support themselves. They will fail to understand the mission of the new President. The will fail because the bureaucracies are filled with life tenure personnel who control much of the information that rises to the top of the various agencies. They will fail because many ambitious figures are more “blue smoke and mirrors” rather than people of real substance, professional glad-hander’s with much more style than competence. And a few will fail for ethical reasons, where the contracting process is used to reward their old allies in the political process. Unfortunately for the new Administration, the time and systems for administrative oversight are limited and these failures are likely to become public before they are recognized within the Administration, and each failure inflicts a cut where some blood is lost in prestige and presidential popularity.

At the same time, as we learned to our bitter experience with the Bush Administration, the selection of more experienced insiders is certainly not any guarantee of success. Few could argue against the level of experience of Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Cheney, or Paul Wolfowitz, and the three of them may well be the most “failed” administrative leaders of all time as measured by the costs they have inflicted egregiously on the United States.

The Contrast with the Bush Administration:
The best thing that Barak Obama has going for him is that he is not George Bush. The longing to get rid of Bush and his cronies in the Administration is remarkable. The polls do not begin to capture the depth of this feeling among Americans. The most closely analogous situation that occurs to me is the transition from Herbert Hoover to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. Hoover never understood the degree to which Americans held him personally responsible, unfairly in historical insight, for the Great Depression. Likewise, Bush and his cronies have no conception of the degree of disgust in which his Administration is held by all but the “true believer” segment of the Republican Party. The polls, which deal with words like favorable and unfavorable in their languages, simply do not capture the intensity of the disdain and revulsion of ordinary Americans to this Administration.

Barak Obama wins from the first day onward in that he is not George Bush. Moreover, he sounds nothing like George Bush even with his speeches crafted by Republican wordsmiths. That contrast will stand him in good stead for a while, maybe even the first year or so, but it will not last much beyond that and he, like all Presidents, will be judged by what he does and by what happens to him during his Administration.

“Advocating Change” is easier than “Producing Change:”
Obama’s rhetoric is nice, and excellent rhetoric is a very valuable asset, as I have pointed out in an earlier blog dealing with leadership. However, real change is far harder to manufacturer, particularly real change that results in improvements to the current situation. When that change involves huge bureaucracies with massively entrenched external special interests and indifferent civil service employees, with both groups supported by their political and legislative allies whose campaigns they fund, new administrations are viewed more with amusement than fear.

Trust me, these people have heard it all before, many times, with no effect whatsoever to the direction of the bureaucracy, or, to quote Eisenhower, the “military-industrial” complex.
Barak Obama can have the best of intentions, but there is a huge gulf between his intentions and what will actually occur and all Presidents have at best been only partially successful in bridging this gulf. To the best of my knowledge, Obama has never really run anything in his life and neither has Hillary Clinton or John McCain, and ignorance does not bode well for their likely performance.

Contrast that with Ronald Reagan, who ran the State of California for eight years, which is one of the largest governments in the world, and who was also the President of the Screen Actors Guild, one of the larger and more active unions. by comparison, he had light years more experience than the three candidates put together.

Ironically, the Bush Administration has been remarkably successful in producing “change.” They have successfully religionized the management of much of the scientific establishment, subverted constitutional protections on civil liberties, embarked on a full scale war of their own choosing, pushed the courts toward the evangelical right wing, enriched the voters who supported them, and diminished the fiscal condition of the United States as much as any Administration in modern history.

Optimism or Realism:
Seen from Paris, where we are staying for a time, the election of Barak Obama will produce one of the largest and most heartfelt “sighs of relief” ever accorded an American Presidential transition. If you think George Bush is unpopular in the United States, he is one of the most universally despised Americans ever in Europe. One of the reasons for the remarkable popularity of Bill Clinton over here is simply that he is not George Bush, either in personality or substance, and the Europeans are far and away more forgiving of a politicians personal life than the right wing zealots in the Republican Party. In this instance, Bush and his cronies have earned the enmity of much of the free world with their version of misguided, right wing, reliously inspired nationalism.

For the most part, Europeans, particularly the French, simply have no patience for the right wing religious fanaticism of the main stream of the Republican Party. The French have had a long history of where the Catholic Church manipulated the government to enrich itself and protect its prerogatives, and they ended that hegemony with their own revolution in 1789. They are not sympathetic to the claims of moral superiority and superior wisdom that are shouted from the pulpits of those supporting candidates in American politics, left or right.

I like the term, “cautiously optimistic,” to describe the possibility of an Obama Administration, although I would put more emphasis on the “cautious” part. Personally, I think we are a very long ways from taming the dragons that have dragged America into two unwanted wars in less than sixty years and into an era of extraordinary fiscal irresponsibility, and I think President Eisenhower got it right when he warned against the unwanted influence of the military industrial complex. These people have ten thousand fingers in the pie of American spending, and they are not about to remove those fingers without a fight that I do not see Obama or anyone else waging with much success. They were in Washington long before Obama arrived and they will survive Obama and his appointees by many decades.

Just my opinion,

Gordon Black