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