Noted "centrist" pundit, David Broder, describes an essay that came across his desk
"...that offers as good an insight into President Obama's approach to government as anything I have read -- and is particularly useful in understanding the struggle over health-care reform."
This essay, "Obama and the Policy Approach" written by William Schambra, comes to us from the well-known neo-conservative aligned Hudson Institute, which the Capital Research Center gave a 7 out of 8 score for being hard right in ideological leaning.
First off, we have to conclude that Mr. Broder is not a centrist, but rather by admission or not, an admirer of neoconservatism and hard right ideology. But more interesting than Broder's clunky approval, is the content of Schambra's smartly-written essay itself. Allow me to focus the rest of the diary on that. It's premise is well laid out and offers great insights into how Obama's policy orientation fits into a longer historical context. It's premise is that Obama is a master of the Policy Approach to governing: If you only fix one thing in isolation, you set off repercussions you don't control that may sabotage the fix in the first place. Therefore, you must understand and create (or "reform") entire systems. You must use professional expertise to craft policy that recreates entire systems of policy that takes everything into account. This is why we have to reform the health care system entirely, not just change a benefit here or there.
In fact, Obama does speak this language. He often refers to using science and accepted knowledge to craft comprehensive policy solutions to large-scale problems. The problem, says the essay, is that the legislative process, and in fact democracy itself abhors precise, coherent, exacting policy. Most elected officials are ignorant of such things, care only about their own political machinations, their constituents, and their money-base. It turns out, they and their parochial interests are the foil of the elite experts "who know better" and seek to impose their more-informed prescriptions upon the country. Once a policy gem goes through the legislative process and is reviewed by the policy non-experts in and out of government, it comes out a mangled mess, impotent, useless, defiled. And so it goes, it is impossible for our system to install coherent policy.
Enter health care. Yes, it's pretty easy to see a parallel there, what with all the demagoguery and petulance. In fact, our entire national debate seems to revolve around the Right shitting all over comprehensive policy proposals by any means necessary.
But what of this defeatist attitude that claims knowledge is not useful? That good policy is undemocratic. That ignorance is more important than knowledge, because most people are ignorant. They say it's why Carter failed and why Clintoncare failed. And Obama is a bigger Policy-ist than either of them, so hold on for the greatest Fail of all time.
Well, it's pretty funny for a neo-conservative think tank to be worried about an elite that knows more than everyone else and seeks to impose its will on the ignorant by any means necessary. Putting aside the psychiatrist's couch to unravel that one, the primary flaw I see in this essay is the claim that the Policy Approach has always failed. He conveniently ignores the New Deal, our comprehensive post-depression financial regulatory scheme, and how we even approach things like traffic flow and transit. All of these things required a big complicated idea dreamt up by experts to be imposed on the ignorant hordes. The implimentation of health care in any form requires complicated coherent policy to be forced upon a population. ("You should listen to what your Doctor said!") Hell, our entire military is a "big idea" forced onto people from onhigh--all done by the government!
But finally, the worst part of this essay is the assertion that crapping all over well-thought-out ideas is what is great about America. This is a celebration of ignorance, fear, demagoguery, and obstructionism, painting them all as the "real" America, "real" democracy.
In it's soaring conclusion, Schambra states gloriously why Obama will fail:
This is not because society is not in fact an intricate web as the early Progressives asserted, but precisely because it is — a web far too intricate to be reliably manipulated. We are not capable of weaving our society anew from fresh whole modern cloth — and so we should instead make the most of the great social garment we have inherited, in its rich if always unkempt splendor, mending what is torn and improving what we can.
Our constitutional system is constructed on this understanding of the limits of reason and of the goals of politics. Every effort to impose the policy approach upon it has so far ended in failure and disappointment, and done much lasting harm. President Obama is now attempting the most ambitious such effort in at least 40 years. He brings considerable talent and charm to the attempt — but the obstacles to its success remain as firm and deeply rooted as ever.
Other than the Iraq war, reinventing an entire country in our image, and redesigning an entire region that produces oil and has a 5000 year history that is theirs, not ours, we just don't have the ability to change our "intricate web." We have so little capacity to do anything really, all we really can manage is to mend the occasional tear in the fabric of our "unkempt splendor." That unkempt splendor being 40 million people without health care insurance, an economy doomed for another bubble/bust, a poisoned environment under duress, and an unsustainable debt structure. Nothing we can do. That's America, Jack.
I must vomit now.