Friday, April 8, 2011
Was President Obama's Role in Budget Negotiations Undercutting his Role in Presiding?
0 comments Posted by Find Insurance Online at 10:51 AM
However, even as the president was referring to the two sides sorting the budget out as “they,” he himself was on one of the sides. That is, even though he “sought to position himself above the nitty-gritty haggling going on in Congress, which . . . limited his influence on the process” yet distanced him from any blame, his taking a side in the dispute subtly worked against his attempt to preside to hold the process as a whole together. (3)
Michael Shear of The New York Times claims that Obama had "assumed the role of mediator in chief" in part to avoid a government shutdown. (4) Attempting to distance himself from both sides, the president told reporters after a negotiation session on April 7th, “What I’ve said to the speaker and what I’ve said to Harry Reid is, because the machinery of the shutdown is necessarily starting to move, I expect an answer in the morning.” (5) Shear maintains that Obama's language here "suggests that he sees himself more as a bridge between the warring political parties than an active participant in the high-stakes discussions." (6) Crucially, the president's motivation may have enabled him to unwittingly compromise his own credibility, and therefore his situs from which to preside.
Shear suggests that Obama was taking on the mediator-in-chief role not only as a means to avoid a shutdown, but also, and perhaps more saliently, "to try to show that a government shutdown, if it happens, would be the result of a disagreement between the two sets of lawmakers — not a failure of his own. But there is a long-term goal as well: to convey to a restless public, and especially to moderate voters, that Mr. Obama is above the petty Washington bickering that many Americans say turns them off. That will be especially important for Mr. Obama as his re-election campaign tries to woo back independents who had become disillusioned with him." (7) Jeff Zeleny reports that at times the president even referred "to Democrats in the third person, as though he is not the leader of the party. . . . 'Republicans and Democrats both start making a lot of speeches,' Mr. Obama said. 'Usually the Democrats blame the Republicans, the Republicans blame the Democrats.'" (8) "It remains an open question," Zeleny observes, "whether the distance he seeks to place between himself and Democrats on Capitol Hill — his own version of triangulation — will attract independent voters or antagonize members of his party." (9) Were the president's motivation more oriented all along to presiding so negotiations would have a buffer or safeguard of last resort, Obama would not have staked out a position in line with Harry Reid.
Aside from trying to distance himself from blame, a president alone can hold “the process” itself from falling off the ship of state by speaking to the encompassing interests of the country, thereby having credibility to both sides in holding them to the table. I contend that being a party to a dispute works against this presiding role that only a president can fulfill. In other words, a partisan president is an oxymoron even if the forced combination has become the bromidic default in practice. All too often, presidents have tried to have it both ways. In so doing, they have undercut their own presidencies and deprived the country of the function that only the president is in a position to accomplish. President Obama was not immune from the temptation.
Even though The New York Times reports that "Obama sought to present himself . . . as the man of reason and compromise, a disappointed father figure having to mediate a dispute between two squabbling siblings,"
The presider having become the one of the combatants, he could not exactly turn around and save the process. To accomplish that, he would have needed to have been in a position of credibility to both sides. When the partisans get to "what do we do now?" partisanship trumps the public good. Lest the partisans be left to stare at each other, twiddle their thumbs, and finally leave the room, this is precisely the point at which the presider is of such value--meaning that role alone. Wading into a pool only to step out should the water get too hot in order to rescue both sides simply doesn't work; the combatants whom the "presider" had confronted will be hesitant to take the outstreached hand even as the water begins to burn. Neutrality and the resultant credibility is absolutely essential to presiding at times when the partisans have reached a dead end and the greater good is threatened because of the paralysis. A partisan president trying to have it both ways doesn't cut it.
At one point during the days of negotiations on the stop-gap budget during the second week of April, the president took sides even as he was trying to come off as presiding in the interest of the union itself. While evincing political skill, the feat tacitly undercut his presiding credibility. Specifically, the president took a swipe at the Tea Party influence on the House Speaker keeping him from compromising. “The only question is whether politics or ideology are going to get in the way of preventing a government shutdown.” (12) Of course, this line could be interpreted as presidential, or presiding, because politics or ideology could apply to either party. However, given Reid’s charges two days later in the U.S. Senate chamber that the Tea Party’s ideology was keeping Speaker Boehner from compromising, the president had probably been maintaining a partisan script. That is, he had most likely been trying to have it both ways: seeming to preside while actually trying to further one of the sides.
As the "what do we do now?" question proffered after the president had said "nope, zero" to the speaker demonstrates, a great opportunity cost is entailed in a presider taking sides on every quotidian matter that crosses his or her desk. A president doesn't have to take this bait. Many players are available to dive into a dispute, but only the presider stands for the whole and is therefore in a position to hold the ship itself together when the partisans lose control of the process. Neither fusing partisanship and presiding nor playing mediator-in-chief simply to distance oneself from blame generates credibility sufficient to meet what is necessary for presiding in a crisis. Without a presider credible to both sides, the ship of state in such a case is bound to hit the rocks. Therefore, a truly great presidency resists the temptation to win the day; instead, a true president speaks to the nation as a nation so as to be able to keep it from the abyss when the partisans have tied each other in knots. Lest a president throw an arm or leg into the knot, who is left to untie the self-inflicted ropes? I’m afraid we all have forgotten what a presidential role was designed to do, and this has put the United States at great risk. Sadly, we don't even see it.
Click to listen to the author's podcast commentary on this essay.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Limits Inherent in a Two Party System: The Case of BP and MMS
0 comments Posted by Find Insurance Online at 2:23 AMIn the U.S. Constitutional Convention, James Madison in particular stressed the nepharious quality of faction in relation to the public good. He argued that if a republic is extended in scope sufficently that there are more factions, none of them would be able to dominate and the public good would emerge. In a republic in which there are only a few major parties, the people's perspectives can become delimited by the parties' paradigms in an either-or dual macro-framework. That is to say, societal blind-spots can exist. To the extent that both BP and the relevant U.S. Government regulatory agency, MMS, were both culpable in the Deep Water Horizon rig explosion in 2010, both the Republican defense of business and the Democratic defense of government fall short. Even so, these respective defenses went on undaunted in the wake of the disaster and in the next year. To be sure, old paradigms die hard.
Albeit an oversimplification, it can be said that the Democratic party in the United States stresses the power of business as the problem, whereas the Republican party there views the problem as being government. In campaigning for President in 1980, Ronald Reagan bluntly said that government was indeed the problem. Deregulation ensued and industry self-regulation was like a fad. The idea was that the checks and balances in goverment that protect the liberties of the citizens could be applied at the industry level such firms would provide a check on eachother automatically. Lost in the buzz was the extent to which an industry would be willing to sacrifice its own long-term viability in order to protect even the bad among its own.
In 2010, the Republican paradigm whereas business is good and government is bad resulted in some Republican office holders defending a piriah (BP) and continuing to urge deregulation in order to excoreate against the US Government and frustrate the Obama Administration. The ranking Republican on the US House Energy and Commerce committee apologized to BP’s CEO for the “shakedown” by Obama in extracting a $20 billion fund for the claims in the Gulf region. Meanwhile, Democrats were hard-pressed to admit that a goverment regulatory agency, namely MMS, could be so inept and corrupt. It was not so much a matter of more regulations being needed; rather, the problem was government regulation itself.
Democrats could point to the encroaching nature of big business over the regulators, but absent a shakedown in the size of the biggest companies, the wherewithal of the regulators not to “partner up” with the regulatees may be an intractable problem in government regulation. The traditional argument in capture theory that regulators depend on their respective industries for information doesn’t even break a sweat in what is needed to explain the extent of the power of big business over government regulatory agencies. The imbalance of power is systemic: government officials being too feckless and corrupt. and big business being too powerful for the good of the republic. In their letters, Jefferson and Adams agree on the need for a natural aristocracy of virtue and talent, rather than the artifical sort of wealth and birth. Absent a natural aristocracy, systems whether business or government, cannot but be ineffective and corrupt.
In 2010, BP’s sordid safety record and its explosion in the Gulf of Mexico challenged the paradigms of both parties. In actuality, business and goverment, as well as business and government, contain problems that exceed and transcend a particular paradigm. In treating the two party paradigms as a dichotomy, we miss the interaction effect that exists among the respective sectors’ problems. It might be that the founders were correct in their suspicion of factionalism, as it does indeed detract from the common good. Where a paradigm keeps one from acknowledging problems that are in the radar of an “opposing” paradigm, a person is not apt to serve the public interest. In other words, both paradigms are limited. The BP-MMS interaction and the subsequent explosion and responses exposed the delimited nature of the partisan paradigms.
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