Politics With Charles P. Pierce
Things In Politico That Make Me Want To Guzzle Antifreeze, Part The Infnity
By Charles P. Pierce Published: Dec 31, 2013
It's the holiday season, and that means pickings are slim for the gumshoes at Tiger Beat On The Potomac. It's a tough time of year for payola, and most of the tinpot political celebrities on which they usually dine -- "Sitting in for Joe and Mika today will be a pair of genuine antique cigar store Indians. Sitting in for Mike Barnicle will be Zombie Mike Royko." -- are scattered around the country, leaving the kidz to cobble together "think" pieces in which you can hear all the gears grinding, grinding slowly. Today, for example, they rounded up some "management" expertsto explain why the president has failed to make the Republican party less insane. After all, who better to explain the president's failures in "leadership" than the people educating the next generation of outsourcers, union busters, cubicle wranglers, and hedge-fund burglars?
A glitchy website and a wave of canceled plans gave Obama the worst headlines of his presidency in 2013, but at year's end a range of management experts interviewed by POLITICO said a central question tended to get lost in the partisan firefight: To what extent do Obamacare's early problems reflect the limitations, in experience and intellectual interest, of its namesake?
Lazy or stupid. You decide. Hey, kidz, we went through eight years of a limited, intellectually disinterested president. We know what one of those looks like. And so do many people in New Orleans.
The heart of the issue, many of these people say, is that Obama and his inner circle had scant executive experience prior to arriving in the West Wing, and dim appreciation of the myriad ways the federal bureaucracy can frustrate an ambitious president. And above all, they had little apparent interest in the kind of organizational and motivational concepts that typically are the preoccupation of the most celebrated modern managers.
Point The First: the problem the president has had is not with the "federal bureaucracy." The problem he has had is with a fanatic political opposition that has no interest in helping to govern the country, or even doing the rudimentary tasks of the jobs its members were elected to do. And while I have no doubt that things would be easier if the "organizational and motivational concepts" available to CEO's would have been helpful, certain constitutional limitations prevented the president from firing Eric Cantor, or transferring John Boehner to the office of the Hamilton County Register of Probate, or outsourcing Ted Cruz's Senate seat to Bangladesh.
For nearly five years, this dearth didn't seem to matter much. He responded with cool self-confidence during his first weeks in office, in the midst of a financial meltdown, continuing George W. Bush's bank bailout and then passing his own $787 billion stimulus package. The raid that killed Osama bin Laden may not have been, as Vice President Joe Biden said, the most "audacious plan" in 500 years. But it certainly did not suggest, as the Obamacare rollout did, a president squinting Elmer Fudd-like to understand what was happening - and not happening - in the bowels of his own government about his most important domestic initiative.
Elmer Fudd? Fk you. Maureen Dowd called. She wants her shtick back.
The website has undoubtedly improved since its troubled launch on Oct. 1, and the White House has been working hard on a campaign to promote success stories pegged to the Wednesday kickoff of many Americans' new insurance plans - a sign of optimism about the project and its management in the new year. And the reporting on the run-up to implementation doesn't suggest that the root cause was West Wing indifference or laziness. "The way I am attacking this is the way I attacked a lot of problems at the national security staff," chief of staff Denis McDonough told The New York Times last summer about preparation for the rollout. He was said to be running war rooms filled with two dozen squad members and zealously distributing countdown calendars for the project.
OK, so the basic premise of your story is probably wrong, or at least outdated. Can I go now?
But there is a difference between having meetings and knowing which questions to ask. There's also a difference between inviting concerns to be raised and creating a climate where people involved in the project actually feel they can raise those concerns.
You have examples of the latter? I'd love to hear them.
"Have you created an environment where it is not only OK, but it is rewarded to raise your hand early and say, 'This worries me'?" one longtime management consultant said. "The worst technique that happens in a lot of organizations is it's simply macho pressure. 'Well, you gotta get it done.' That feels good for about 30 seconds, then you're back in deep sh-."
So, that'd be a no. Why is this guy granted anonymity for this kind of Kiwanis banality? Did you meet him in a parking garage, late at night?
"I don't need people in the executive branch who are project managers in tech ... but I want them to know that we need to hire those people before we release the project," said Craig Garthwaite, an assistant professor of management and strategy at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. "You're building the ark after it started flooding."
Assistant professors of management and strategy move the world. I read that on a placemat somewhere.
Working on a great campaign or two does not necessarily substitute for that kind of experience, either. "There's enormous value placed, within the White House, upon winning and then getting legislation passed, and there's less and less value placed upon executing the law itself," said former presidential adviser David Gergen, now director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's Kennedy School. "This is not their asset. They are much, much better at campaigning and at the public microphones than they are in governing and in management."
Eek! The Undead! Run!
The debate about Obama's management performance with the ACA rollout has become a refrain in the continual, low-level rivalry between Democratic camps close to Obama and to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Several sources with high-level Clinton administration experience drew pointed comparisons between Obamacare implementation and a Clinton-era success story: The government-wide response to make sure there were no widespread technological failures at the time of the once-feared Y2K computer rollover.
And the nickel drops. Dawn breaks over Marblehead. All these earnest conversations with assistant professors of management and strategy and with the ambulatory corpse of David Gergen's career was extended camouflage of the story's real point -- Obama v. The Clintons: This Time, It's Personal. And I don't know what Clinton sources they talked to but, whoever they are, they're idiots out there comparing apples to andirons. Let's compare the Obama record on reforming the health-care system with the Clinton record on reforming the health-care system, the chewiest cluster of fk in the early years of the Golden Age of the Pericles Of The Ozarks. Better yet, take the rest of the year off, kidz.
Bartender, a double Prestone and see what the pundits in the back room will have.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
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