Kausfiles: A mostly political weblog.

How to Write A Piece On How to Save the President

GM workers assembling battery packs for the new "green" Chevy Volt will not be members of the UAW or any other union, according to TTAC. ... This is in Michigan, not Mexico. . ... Does the czar know? ... 1:31 A.M.

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Steve Clemons praises a What's-Wrong-With-the White-House diagnosis by Edward Luce in the FT:

 "[M]any of the nation's top news anchors and editors are sending emails back and forth (I have been sent three such emails in confidence) on what a spot-on piece Luce wrought ..."

Luce's piece seems incompletely convincing to me, as it follows a template familiar to connoisseurs of Save-the-President analyses from earlier administrations (e.g., Carter, Clinton). The rules are:

1) Blame the campaigners. The problem is the President relies for close advise on his closest advisers-- those who saw him through the campaign. For Carter it was the boys from Georgia--e.g. Hamilton Jordan. For Obama it's the Chicago interlopers: Axelrod, Gibbs, Jarrett, plus Rahm Emanuel. If only the circle were broadened! This reflexive Washington kvetch allows DC experts to think that the decisions would be better if only experts like them were consulted. Time to bring in a "Team B" consisting of [insert list of your friends here]. As if Chuck Hagel is going to save Obama.

2) Blame campaigning: "The Obama White House is geared for campaigning rather than governing," says Luce. This implies that the serious business of policy and governance is qualitatively different--and superior to--the grimy business of getting elected. ("To be successful, presidents need to separate the stream of advice they get on policy from the stream of advice they get on politics. That still isn't happening," says one of Obama's "close allies.") All the more reason for getting those campaign hacks out of there! And very flattering for DC policy types who would in theory take their places.

3) Blame process: If only the process were changed--the circle of advisers broadened, the "stream" of advice augmented, with cabinet officers and State department officials consulted--better results would pop out (no matter what the elected official in question actually believes in). This avoids messy arguments about substance and offers the prized Neutral Story Line--an MSM-safe narrative that seems to explain everything without taking ideological sides.

4) Never Blame the President. Goes without saying. What good would that do? ....

And of course,

5) Call David Gergen. ("[T]he lightbulb must want to change," he says of Obama.)

It can't be that the President made a mistake of substance precisely when he reached outside his inner circle to policy types, buying his OMB chief Peter Orszag's circle-squaring argument the health care reform was deficit reduction. As Ryan Lizza noted at the time, Obama was "in effect betting his Presidency on Orszag’s thesis." It was a bad bet** and he seems to be losing it.

It can't be that this was a mistake Obama would have made if Kathleen Sebelius and Ken Salazar had been consulted--a mistake he would have made if Jim Fallows and Fareed Zakaria were installed in the West Wing, supervising a "stream of advice"designed by Peter Drucker and Norman Ornstein, with Emanuel and Axelrod exiled to 40 cars back in the motorcade. It can't be that Obama would have made this mistake because it's what he really thinks, which is why he kept on talking about it even as his health plan sank lower and lower in the polls. (Some good campaign-oriented advisers might actually have helped at that point--they would have noticed that the President's vaunted salesmanship wasn't working. But probably not even that would have helped, since the problem was something they couldn't change: Obama.)

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**--Luce's piece is eye-opening in its description of what was sacrificed in the push for health care reform:

Insiders attribute Mr Obama’s waning enthusiasm for the Arab-Israeli peace initiative to a desire to avoid antagonising sceptical lawmakers whose support was needed on healthcare. The steam went out of his Arab-Israeli push in mid-summer, just when the healthcare bill was running into serious difficulties.

So Orszag's thesis didn't just sink health care. It also destroyed hopes for peace in the Middle East. ... Only half joking.

Update: At least according to The Hill, Obama believed the Orszagist alchemy wouldn't just reduce the deficit in the long-term, but also revive the economy in the shorter term:

One senior Democratic senator said Emanuel was initially reluctant to push healthcare reform so early in Obama’s first term, counseling instead for the president to focus on jobs and the economy

But the president decided healthcare had to pass when he had a strong political mandate and the party controlled large majorities in both chambers.

Obama was convinced overhauling the nation’s healthcare system would boost the struggling economy by curbing costs and reducing the long-term federal deficit, say Democratic sources. 
 

12:47 P.M.

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Don't Start the Orgy of Recrimination Without Me!

Give Us 'Fat Product,' Please: The real long-term damage to Toyota from the unintended acceleration mess? Now the public will learn about the company's decades-long "decontenting" binge (designed to eliminate "fat products" that were 'overbuilt' in terms of quality). As Truth About Cars notes,

Toyota’s reputation was built on those “fat” products of the mid-80s to early-90s ...

They aren't coming back, even after Toyota weathers the current crisis. ... P.S.: Has Honda avoided decontenting, or has it just wisely not written so much about it? ...  P.P.S.: Toyota customers should demand the Denso pedal! (via Ellisblog). ... Was the superior Denso device deemed too "fat"? ....1:49 P.M.

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All of a Sudden They Had an Election in Massachusetts! Who Knew? President Obama in Nashua, New Hampshire on Tuesday:

What I have said is that both the House bill and the Senate bill were 90 percent there. Ten percent of each bill, people had some problems with, and legitimately so. So we were just about to clean those up, and then Massachusetts' election happened. Suddenly everybody says, oh, oh, it's over.

Some would call this a stunning admission of incompetence. They couldn't have cleaned up the bill before the Massachuetts election? They didn't know there was an election coming up? ... I'm not saying Obama's screw-up was of that order of simplicity (i.e., forgetting to look at the calendar). I'm saying he's making it look like a screw-up of that order of simplicity. ...P.S.: The more complicated and, I assume, accurate explanation is that Congress moved too slowly to pass the bill because in their now-conscious subconscious lawmakers didn't want to pass the bill, because it wasn't popular enough. That's Obama's fault too--but it's a less simple failing. ...

P.P.S.: You can never start the orgy of recrimination too early! Sometimes it avoids the need for a later orgy--as with the tax reform of 1986, when anticipatory condemnation of Senator Packwood spurred him to change course and save the bill. ... 11:56 A.M.

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Name First, Shame Later ...

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Cherchez La Fern: Why did Bunny Mellon decide to give millions to help John Edwards?  Turns out it's all about ... gardening. From Lloyd Grove's Daily Beast report: 

One reason Bunny Mellon was supporting John Edwards, she told friends, was that somebody had to stop Hillary Clinton from becoming president. Shortly after Bill Clinton was inaugurated, Mrs. Mellon heard to her dismay that Hillary was planning to display modern sculpture in the First Lady’s Garden at the White House. Mrs. Mellon—a self-taught horticulturalist and landscape designer who had created a special First Lady’s garden for her friend Jacqueline Kennedy (as well as helping Jackie redecorate the White House and refurbish the White House Rose Garden)—lobbied Hillary to leave things as they were. After all, Bunny Mellon argued, it was a matter of respecting history: Ladybird Johnson, no less, had formally named the area the “Jacqueline Kennedy Garden.”

“It’s my garden now,” Hillary allegedly replied—thus earning the lasting enmity of the offended heiress. [E.A.]
 

P.S.: Marc Ambinder asks "Should Edwards aides be shamed and blamed?" Nut graf:

But there were a handful of staff members who knew that Edwards had at least one affair, who knew that he continued to have extramarital sexual liaisons during the campaign, who knew that the portrait of the Edwardses marriage was fictitious, who aided and abetted the perpetuation of an image they knew to be false; who arranged for the cover-up; who lied, directly, to reporters and to other staff members; who were veterans of the campaign game; whose loyalty to the Edwards family, such was it was, trumped whatever residual responsibility they felt to the democratic process.  These men and women did the country a disservice.   Not that they should have gone public and accused their guy of being a demon: several folks who learned about the affair decided that they would leave the campaign and pursue other opportunities. [E.A.]

I think that's a 'yes' to "shamed and blamed." How about named? ...  11:36  P.M.

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Mark Greenberg was one of the smartest opponents of the 1996 welfare reform--a brilliant guy, just on the wrong side. Because he's extremely smart, he's exactly not the sort of person those who backed the bill would want administering the program, Yet Obama has given him a high position at HHS's Administration for Children and Families. ... Someone needs to watch Greenberg (and his HHS colleagues) like a hawk. Luckily, Heather Mac Donald is on the job. .... 11:30  P.M.

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