Symbols.

Two quick thoughts  — and a quick question — on the President’s announcement yesterday of his support for gay marriage (which, by the way, I’m fine with):

First, it’s striking how little long-term effort and thought went into developing more of a national consensus on the issue.  If the White House brings any one singular power, it’s the bully pulpit — the ability to convey views directly (the press conference, the speech, the Rose Garden announcement) as well as informally.  Practically no one believed that President Obama ever had any reservations about gay marriage; the reservations have always been political.  And it’s hard to believe that he would have been able to skate through an election year without finally coming clean on his views.

So the White House has basically had three years to prepare the country for yesterday’s inevitable announcement.  It could have thoughtfully and carefully used the more-than-you-can-count levers at its disposal to nudge the country in that direction — if not toward wholehearted acceptance, greater tolerance and empathy.  Yet little appeared to have been done along these lines.  Joe Biden put the press staff in an intolerable position which the North Carolina vote — banning same-sex unions under the state constitution — intensified, and they finally realized that the “President’s views are evolving” line wasn’t going to cut it any more.  Then came the call to a friendly reporter, and then the announcement.  Nobody’s mind will have been changed, and if anything the climate will be more polarized.   He’s gotten through the week (which included a fundraiser at George Clooney’s house), and that’s about it.

Second, I think we’re seeing yet another manifestation of the rising politics of symbolism — and considering that defining marriage is almost completely a state issue, this is pure symbolism.  Traditionally, national politics have represented a mix of symbolism and what I’ll call deliverables — a better economy, lower tax rates, new programs, infrastructure spending, or anything that can be expressed as a concrete benefit.  But budget realities make deliverables hard to come by, particularly when combined with how little people trust the federal government; even the massive surplus program of 2009 made few friends because of the presumption that the money was being spent wastefully.  That leaves symbolism, which emphasizes cultural issues and tends to drive the voting public further apart and makes the middle feel even more left out and jaded.  Sometimes it’s unifying, but usually because some external event gives the President an opportunity to speak to common national values — think George W. Bush with a megaphone in his hand at ground zero, or Bill Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing.  When politicians have to create the symbolic moment, it’s usually divisive and pitched to their base.  The big question here, and it bears watching, is whether Presidential action will lean more and more toward symbolic action as the budget and world economy make deliverables less… well, deliverable.

Which leads to the short question:  will the President put his money where his mouth is?  More specifically, will he direct the federal government to recognize gay marriages in determining eligibility for federal benefits?  This could be very, very expensive, and you’d like to think that the White House thought about this before yesterday’s announcement.  Yet again, thinking ahead has never been this Administration’s strong suit.

Lessons Learned? Not Here. (This is you, Senator Lugar).

It’s easy and perhaps trendy to write off Senator Richard Lugar’s loss yesterday in the Indiana Primary as (sigh) yet another example of the Tea Party’s dominance of the Republican Party.  It would also be lazy and wrong.  The better explanation is also the most mundane and, alas, familiar one for why politicians lose seats they’ve held, relatively easily, for a long time: Lugar ignored perils that should have been all too evident, failed to accommodate for changing circumstances, and failed to maintain a viable political identity.  Tea Party activists were incidental to this, not central.

The warnings should have been as evident as the portraits in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing room.  William Fulbright, Chairman from 1959 through 1975: beaten (no, crushed) in a primary.  Frank Church, Chairman from 1979 through 1981:  beaten in a general election.  Charles Percy, chairman from 1981 through 1985:  beaten in a general election.  Chairing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is heady stuff, acting at times as a shadow Secretary of State, able to whisk off on a whim on military jet to nearly anywhere in the world, and free to engage in issues which are both deeply engaging and, for the most part, without budgetary contraints and (let’s be honest about it) any real accountability.  But it’s dangerous territory for a politician.  Every time you’re on national television, every time you can’t meet with constituents because you’re traveling, every time you pontificate among your closest supporters about Big Global Issues, you’re essentially reminding your constituents that they’re not your real priority — that the Veterans’ Day barbecue is great, but all in all, you’d rather be in Paris.

Those who followed Fulbright learned their lessons, including Lugar, who chaired the Committee in the 1980s before his longer tenure there from 2001-2007.  Claiborne Pell (Chair from 1987-95) was from tiny, Atlantic-facing Rhode Island; his tremendous personal popularity, easily cultivated in such a small state, protected him.  Jesse Helms  (1995-2001) never lost a chance to remind his base that he changed the gavel a lot more than it changed him.  Joe Biden (2001-2003, then 2007-2009) maintained such a strong political organization in Delaware that when his son didn’t want to replace him in the Senate, he installed a former staffer instead.  And unlike Lugar, who moved to Washington, Biden made sure everybody — everybody – understood that  he spent every night in Delaware, from which he commuted via Amtrak.  Massachusetts might be the one state in the country which actually prefers to have a Senator pontificating on issues like transnational institution-building, so John Kerry is safe.  Even Lugar (1985-1987 before the 2001 ascension) learned a lesson: don’t be Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  When Republicans took the Senate in 1995, he took the chairmanship of the Agriculture Committee instead.

In fact, the better question might be why Lugar survived so long, and the answer might be timing.  Not only did Lugar never have a tough race, he rarely ran in tough years for Republicans nationally.  In 1976 he faced a hugely unpopular incumbent and Gerald Ford won Indiana comfortably; 1988, 1994, and 2000 were all strong years for Republicans across the country.  In 2006 Democrats failed even to put up a challenger, most likely because the money necessary to compete with Lugar would have been much better spent elsewhere (as it was).  Only 1982 was a truly bad year for Republicans nationally, but it wasn’t that bad for Indiana Republicans.  Congressional Republicans won over half the statewide vote, and though Lugar ran ahead of them, it wasn’t by much:  53.8 percent of the vote vs. 50.6.

The absence of hard races meant he could avoid the long checklist of retail politicians:  country fairs, parades, town halls.  As a senior Senator, Lugar could instead raise vast sums of money within the Beltway, and it’s pretty clear that his core political strategy had much more to do with using his campaign account to deter potential challengers than with continually making the case for why he should represent Indiana in the Senate.  That’s the importance of tea party (no, it’s just not organized enough to deserve capitalization) activists:  they provided enough of a platform for a potential primary challenge to see if an opposing candidate could get enough traction to be viable.  Because of them, Richard Mourdock didn’t need to start with millions of dollars in the bank, campaign offices in every county, a team of consultants, and expensive ads.  The vines were already planted; he just had to water them.

In the end, Lugar’s own case for Lugar came down to deliverables:  who would be better at diverting money from Washington to Indiana.  It’s tempting to talk about how unpopular pork has become, and Lugar was probably tone deaf to developments in his own state, particularly the immense popularity of Governor Mitch Daniels (his own former Chief of Staff), who is known much more for cutting spending than parcelling it out (his nickname in the Bush Administration, where he was the first OMB director, was Dr. No.).  But I suspect that Hoosiers are onto something else, too.  I suspect they understand — or enough of them do — that the days when money was always available to grease a bill’s passage are over, that we’re entering an era of truly scarce governmental resources, and that the bigger questions are going to be about where to cut, not where to spend.  On those questions, Senator Lugar never truly weighed in.  By not lending his deep appetite for work and considerable intellect to perhaps the biggest issue facing the country’s future, he made himself dispensable.  And so: farewell, Senator Lugar.

Yes, We Can. But It Helps to Know How.

The political he-said/ she said (or, in this case, he-said/ he said) political story of last summer was the failed effort of Speaker John Boehner (my old boss) and President Obama to reach a so-called Grand Bargain on the country’s long term fiscal policy.  Boehner claimed that Obama walked away from a deal he’d already agreed to; Obama has relentlessly tried to finger Boehner and House Republicans for rigidly refusing any deal which relied on more revenues.  Boehner’s case made much more sense at the time; now the Washington Post has confirmed it, with an impressively well-researched and exhaustive account of the entire episode.

What basically happened was this:  after weeks of extraordinarily delicate talks, Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and Obama reached broad agreement on a deal that could have cut $4 trillion in federal spending over the next 10 years and, at long last, put the federal budget on a sensible, sustainable path.  That deal included significant spending reforms, but it also included $800 billion in new revenues, largely generated by closing loopholes, broadening the tax base, and lowering top corporate rates, which would actually have resulted in higher revenues.  Boehner felt he could get this through the House without triggering a rebellion among his more doctrinaire Members; Obama would have been able to show he really could meet the promise of his campaign, making difficult but vital choices and putting partisanship behind him.

But then a bipartisan group of Senators (and it’s important here that the Senate is under Democratic control) came up with a budget plan that included $2 trillion in new revenues.  Obama — who had already shaken hands with Boehner on the earlier deal — then tried to reopen the negotiation to move toward this new number.  Boehner concluded that Obama could no longer be trusted to keep his word and broke off talks:  the end.

What’s most apparent about the whole episode is how the two principals view the nature of legislative negotiation.  For Obama, who seems enamored of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s depiction of Abraham Lincoln as a decision-maker who thoughtfully probed each option before making his choice, it’s some sort of dialogue among key parties:  let the key decisionmakers make the best choice possible, then take that to their respective camps.  And without being unfair, this is what you’d expect from a President with as little (as in, practically none) experience in legislation as Obama had in the Illinois state legislature and then the U.S. Senate.

Boehner’s is much more sophisticated, involving internal congressional politics, party politics, theatrics, and personal trust between the principals.  In this view, how a deal is set up is as important as the policy, because the political planning and preparation expands the potential scope of the final agreement.  A huge part of that is understanding your negotiating partner’s political exposure and political capital, because ultimately they circumscribe what the negotiation can actually accomplish more than anything and because triggering the risks or overestimating the capital can kill a negotiation before it even starts.  And this isn’t unique to Boehner, although Boehner’s experience as a legislator goes back decades.  Anyone, Member or staff, who tries to steer a big, complex bipartisan package to enactment will have to learn this or the project will fail.

In other words, the principals have to agree to watch each others’ backs.  Boehner’s big exposure is that any Speaker serves at the pleasure of a majority of his or her own party within the House;  if 130 of his House Republicans decide they want a new leader, he wouldn’t last the day.  And unlike House Democrats, most House Republicans have power bases which are district-based (local businesses, groups, donors) and/ or ideological (in contrast, Democrats are much more driven by national interest groups like labor unions or environmental groups, which makes them easier to pressure from a leadership position).  So if Boehner’s own Members lose trust in him, he’s at significant risk, but criticism from outside-the-Beltway constituencies could also undermine him.  Beyond his personal credibility with Members, his tools are substantial — he has a huge hand in determining critical committee assignments, for example.  But just for this reason, they’re rarely used.  The biggest arrow in his quiver might be his power to include or exclude very specific pieces of legislation — including someone’s amendment here, protecting somebody’s constituent there — but when fewer bills move and pork is off the table, even this power is limited.

The President’s major exposure, on the other hand, is a primary opponent.  Barring impeachment, he can’t be removed from office before his term expires, even if his own party loathes him.  He does have to maintain broad support within his own party, but he has so many ways of doing this, ranging from appearing at a fundraiser in a Member’s district to his ability to influence the regulatory process to the fact that he alone can reach into every single television set in America, that it boggles the mind.  Even Bill Clinton kept the grudging support of Congressional Democrats after he had signed welfare reform, agreed to a balanced budget with significant tax cuts, agreed to significant Medicare reforms, and championed free trade agreements.  And in any case, even this need is minimal; his own agenda ended with the health care bill, and if Republicans overreached Democrats would rally to him in any case (see, Bill Clinton, Impeachment of). 

Obama’s failure to make this basic calculation is what killed the talks.  He had little to risk but a short-term perception that Boehner had outmaneuvered him, but Boehner’s very job was at stake.  Reneging on the earlier agreement — itself a cardinal sin among serious legislators — showed Boehner Obama’s indifference to his political position, and just like that, the necessary critical mass of trust evaporated.

That lack of serious legislative experience runs throughout the piece.  An Obama aide says that Boehner “couldn’t even deliver a pizza.”  Is that serious, or faux-macho callowness?  Chief of Staff William Daley, no novice to politics but himself without significant experience dealing with Congress, begs off the deal because of possible Congressional Democratic frustration that the Administration was being outmaneuvered (any Congressional caucus or conference will always think a President of its own party is being outmaneuvered unless they fundamentally agree with what he’s doing).  And the lack of staff experience in the room — the absence of senior legislative liaison who understood Congress and its dynamics — was  a direct and disastrous consequence of Obama’s no-lobbyists mandate from 2008.  Like them or not, the people who best understand how to manage Congress, and how to manage a high-stakes legislative negotiation, are people who earned their stripes on the Hill and then developed their own personal relationships with Members of both parties in the private sector.  There were none here.  Instead, there were a lot of people who cared more about not looking bad than grasping an enormous opportunity to answer the single biggest threat facing the U.S. economy.

The ultimate point here is, again, that change is hard.  It’s tempting to think that the change agent is the charismatic leader who inspires the masses to give up their own selfish interests for the common good.  That’s clearly still what Obama thinks — note that the story starts with Obama’s return from a Sunday sermon.  More likely, it’s somebody who understands how the process works, has a deep commitment to change, and uses all his skills and expertise to point that process in a new direction.  Someone, in this case, more like Boehner than Obama.

Change is Hard, Part….

Imagine you are Roger Goodell, Commissioner of very likely the most successful sports league in world history, the National Football League.  By any measure, you should be happy — delighted, even ecstatic.  Money is literally pouring in from more sources than you can keep track of — TV, cable, radio, multimedia, direct corporate sponsorship, computer games.  While other sports talk about eliminating teams, you’re planning to extend to other continents.  You just had one of the most dramatic Super Bowls in memory, and like most Super Bowls it drew more interest and money from both advertisers and consumers than any other televised event of the year.  Television networks fawn over you, because your sport remains as the one piece of broadcasting which can reliably attract enough viewers at the same time to keep the entire network/ affiliate structure in place.  You survived a possible labor war to win a broadly accepted 10-year deal with your players, giving you long-term stability other sports leagues can only dream about.  And NFL owners — your bosses — have just rewarded you with a rich new contract that makes you the highest paid and most powerful single figure in all of American sports.

And yet you worry.  You know that the NFL’s fortunes depend on its acceptability to the American television audience, and in the eyes of advertisers, that increasingly means women.  Women, your research shows you, enjoy the speed, the athleticism, the strategy, the drama at the heart of the typical NFL game.  But they’re not so caught up on the extraordinary violence of the sport, particularly when that violence — as is being shown by medical studies — can lead to debilitating brain injury.  No viewer, male or female wants to be a part of this; no corporate sponsor wants to be seen as subsidizing the devastation of young men’s brains.  We’re already seeing evidence of this in the decline of tackle football among teenagers.  Even Troy Aikman, a Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback with the Dallas Cowboys (and whose own career was cut short by concussions), refuses to allow his own children to play organized tackle football.  If this trend continues, you fret, within a generation professional football could well become like professional boxing, a once-dominant sport now only seen on pay TV or cable.  Past success is no guarantee of the future.

So, Roger Goodell, you’re living well but on a knife’s edge.  On one hand, violence is so deeply ingrained in the sport’s culture and historic appeal it’s almost impossible even to moderate it.  You’ve tried this past year by taking on the most damaging head-to-head hits, particularly when the offensive player isn’t in position to avoid the contact.  You’ve fined dozens of players, some even beyond $100,000, and you’ve even suspended a few for particularly egregious hits.  You’ve made player safety your signature issue as Commissioner, funded serious medical research into the long-term effects of concussions, and pushed the adoption of safer helmets.

But, you’ve learned, change is hard.  Your players disdain you for forcing them to change a whole style and philosophy of play that in most cases goes back beyond high school, and for punishing them in a way they see as arbitrary and high-handed.  Many of your coaches see you as attacking the purity of their sport, like substituting pastels for bold colors.  And most likely, even an owner or two has had their doubts: We’re going great — could Rog be screwing it all up?  Change is hard enough when a clear crisis makes it unavoidable; when things on the surface are going well, it’s nearly impossible.

So when you hear a report from your top league investigator that a top defensive coordinator has organized and subsidized a bounty program that rewards his own players for actually injuring opposing players, you say:  This is terrible.  Is this who we’ve become?  Players being paid to cripple other players? 

And then, in the privacy of your office, you pump your fist in triumph.  YES!!      This is good news, and even better that the coaches involved have confessed and there’s no disagreement about the basic facts.

Because now, and only now, do you have a stick for driving change.  Morally, you’re on the right side; no one can defend paying players specifically to harm other players, even though it’s been going on in the league for decades.  And you have the authority to do something about it which will emphasize the importance to everyone of accepting your new vision of safety.  The players most deeply involved will almost certainly be suspended for several games, costing them a big part of their paychecks; the coaches and team executives will likely be suspended more, even as much as an entire year; the team will lose the draft picks that any NFL franchise depends on for new talent.  No team, no executive, no coach, no player will want to meet the same fate.

Just as important, you’ll have a win under your belt.  If the penalties are severe enough (and the reaction of the press after the investigators’ report was leaked has made it nearly impossible for them not to be severe enough — think that was an accident?) you’ll will be widely praised for aggressive, responsible decision, and the positive press will enhance your popularity with the owners; you’ll also be able to tell TV executives and nervous advertisers that you’re on top of the safety issue.  Players will draw some satisfaction that they’re not the only ones being punished.  Ultimately, your authority to go after other threats to player safety will be stronger, and your broader vision of physical but safe football will have some more body and some more teeth.

All of which makes you wonder to what extent Goodell (sorry, you’re not the commissioner anymore) actually wanted this story to come out.  It had its roots in an NFC Championship game two years ago between the New Orleans Saints (which operated under the bounty system) and the Minnesota Vikings, in which the Saints hammered Vikings quarterback Brett Favre on nearly every play.  The Vikings’ coach complained to the league that the Saints were handing out bounties to get Favre out of the game, which launched an investigation.  The investigation stalled when the Saints’ coaches issued blanket denials, and only revived when new information became available.  Ultimately thousands of documents and emails were reviewed; this was not an effort to sweep bad news under the carpet.  You have to wonder — did the information simply surface, or did the Commissioner’s office apply pressure to extract it?  How badly did they want it?  And who leaked the investigators’ report to the public?

Change is hard.  Sometimes it’s only possible when there’s bad news, even humiliating news, that shows that the status quo isn’t acceptable anymore.

Done with Newt

Much of what Newt Gingrich is having to deal with right now is still-raw scar tissue from his four years as Speaker of the House, a term that ended more than a dozen years ago — a lifetime in politics.  Gingrich was more responsible than anyone else in Congress for the Republican landslide of 1994, and he got most of the big, substantive stuff right.  He got Republicans off on the right footing in January 1995 by holding to the Contract with America’s pledge to bring up each of its proposals within the first 100 days of Republican House control; he was the most important driving force in Congress for balancing the budget while cutting capital gains taxes, and he played a critical role in the telecommunications, financial services, and liability reforms which Bill Clinton signed and which helped create the nearly transformational wave of growth of the late 1990s.  Many argued that on some things — Medicare reform, for example — he pushed too hard and imperiled the Republican majority, but I find it more likely that if he hadn’t pushed as hard in a forward direction, inertia and discord would likely have taken hold and Republicans would have been in even worse shape; if you’re not swimming, you’re sinking.

But the day-to-day stuff drove a lot of people crazy.  You could listen to him one day give an-off-the-cuff speech which beautifully synthesized hundreds of years of American history with current philosophical, economic, cultural, and technological trends in a way that made that year’s agenda the moral and political imperative of the age; the next day he’d say maybe the weirdest thing you’d heard in your entire career.  One day he’d walk House Republicans through an absolutely brilliant strategy for the coming year; the very next he’d undercut his own message, unnecessarily and in every media market in the country, with an idea he’d thought of while having breakfast.  (I worked closely with him on one issue, and I was incredibly impressed by his policy grasp and strategic focus, but I could also see what drove those closer to him nuts.)  What finally did him in — after he survived a coup attempt — was putting all his political eggs for the 1998 midterms in the Clinton impeachment basket.  But even if Republicans hadn’t come so close to losing their majority, he may well not have returned.  His colleagues were just that sick of him.

What’s impressive is that he hasn’t truly recovered in the eyes of many of his colleagues from that time.  Bill Clinton’s rehabilitation is complete, despite the fact that over the course of his Administration he arguably (1) sold out key Democratic constituencies on issues like NAFTA, welfare reform, and balancing the budget with capital gains tax cuts , (2) compromised the prestige of the White House (and possibly national security) by having a sleazy affair with a White House intern, and (3) proclaimed fundamental Democratic ideology since FDR obsolete (“the era of big government is over”).  Since leaving the House, Gingrich has been a solid Republican citizen, running his own think tank, being a leading thinker on health care reform, helping the party when asked, and — yes, it needs to be said — staying happily married.  Why can’t people who served with him — people like Joe Scarborough and Jim Talent, as different temperamentally as in political experience (Scarborough served three terms, Talent four, including a stint as a committee chair, and the another term in the Senate) — forgive and forget?

Mark Knopfler — formerly of the band Dire Straits but now on his own — put the reasons as well as anyone in a song called “Done with Bonaparte.”  Written in the person of one of Napoleon’s veterans after the disastrous invasion of Russia, the song recalls Napoleon’s vast promise:

“What dreams he made for us to dream

Spanish Skies, Egyptian sands.

The world was ours, we marched upon

Our little Corporal’s command.”

But then — reality:

“And I lost an eye at Austerlitz

The sabre slash yet gives me pain.

My one true love awaits me still

Flower of the Acquitaine.”

And finally, disillusion and anger:

“Save my soul from evil, Lord

and heal this soldier’s heart.

I’ll trust in thee to keep me, Lord

I’m done with Bonaparte.”

And that’s why, so many years after a Speakership in which, arguably, he did as well as anyone could reasonably be expected to do, Gingrich can’t find any of his colleagues to step forward for him.  They’re just done with him.  If he’s going to survive the scrutiny his record as Speaker is certain to get, he’s going to have to own up to those failings and convince people he’s changed.  Otherwise he’ll be done too.

Cameron’s Bet

We don’t hear that much in the mainstream press about the economist Paul Romer, mostly because he’s not interested in the kind of short-term macroeconomic analysis the the current policical environment is obsessed about.  Romer’s landscape is much broader and deeper.  He focuses on how ideas and innovation drive economic growth.  Previous economic models had simply assumed that innovation happens, on its own,  and that growth depended on factors like labor supply, investment, and consumer spending.  Romer’s theory — called New Economic Growth — argues that technological innovation (broadly defined) is very much a part of the picture of how an economy grows, and that innovation is driven by factors like rules and institutions.  David Warsh’s Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations does a great job capturing the development of Romer’s ideas as well as their slow, grudging acceptance by the economic community.

In a few talks over the last few years (Long Now Foundation and TED), Romer has been talking about how to accelerate growth by innovating the rules which influence how ideas are created and then brought to market.  Over time, he argues, the creation of new countries, able to start a legal and regulatory structure from scratch, has had a lot to do with economic growth.  Bankruptcy law which allowed risktakers to start fresh after failures and  corporate law which let investors limit personal losses, for example, helped America leapfrog the rest of the world in the last half of the 19th century.  Today’s international framework makes creating new countries highly unlikely, but technology is making it possible to create entirely new cities, and it’s in the new megacity that Romer sees opportunity for policy innovation and growth.  If given the necessary freedom from their host countries, these city-states could bring enormous growth by starting with modern rules friendly to innovation and idea creation.

London may yet wind up an example, given David Cameron’s decision to part ways with the rest of the eurozone countries over a new pact which would tighten centralized control over member country budgets and regulatory structures.  Reportedly the final straw was the continent’s insistence on centralized oversight of London’s dominant financial markets — the hub of the UK’s economy.  Cameron pushed back, France and Germany held the line, and finally Cameron left the talks.

Cameron is being criticized for marginalizing and isolating the UK, but most of this criticism is based on the assumption that European countries are stronger individually when they’re acting as a unit.  Diplomatically and militarily, this makes perfect sense.  And economically, in an economy based on production and manufacture, I think it it holds up.  In an economy of things, the EU nations are going to be each others’ biggest trading partners, simply because of geography.  A common regulatory structure means something made in Germany doesn’t have to go through an entirely different regulatory checklist when crossing the border to Denmark or France, which both makes markets more efficient within Europe and gives European manufactures a competitive advantage (perfectly fair) against non-EU members.

But it doesn’t work so well when your economy has more to do with innovation and intangible products, like financial services.  London’s financial markets have been so successful because they have global reach and because their rules respond to needs of investors everywhere, not because they’re close to Frankfurt and Paris.  Cutting free from Brussels might cost them business from the continent, but much more probably will help them compete for more promising demand from the rest of the world, particularly South America and the oil states.  That logic doesn’t stop with financial service firms; the country’s economy is one of the most thoroughly globalized in the world, and in industries like media, energy, pharmaceutical, and aerospace, it has worldwide leaders.  The mere fact that English is recognized as the international language of business gives the UK a huge advantage in an increasingly global marketplace.

So by passing on the demands of the continent’s big powers, Cameron might actually be setting the UK up to compete much more successfully in a new economy, one marked by information, innovation, and growth in the developing world.  He might be turning England’s back to its traditional partners in Europe, but also facing much more directly new opportunities in much more promising parts of the world.  And by retaining domestic control over regulation and policy, England might be setting itself up as the kind of entrepreneurial role in regulation that Paul Romer talks about in reference to newer, less developed nations and city-states.  Again, he’s being roundly criticized, but I can’t help but think that this is the smart move.  If you were running England, where would you make your bet:  on being a good neighbor within the EU, with its bureaucratic culture and desperate demographics, or on tending to and servicing the rest of the world?  I think I know my answer.

Old School, New School

My favorite single quote about how schools should treat their students (and our kids) came from Eleanor Acheson, mother of Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson.  In the early part of the last century, the younger Acheson was a student — barely — at the Groton School, whose Headmaster was the legendary Endicott Peabody.  Peabody, frustrated at Acheson’s independence and resistance to authority, told Acheson’s mother that he doubted “we can make a Groton boy out of him” and perhaps she should find another school for him.  Mrs. Acheson replied, “I am not asking you to make a Groton boy of him.  I am asking you to educate him.”

So the younger Dean stayed and, despite Peabody’s inability to shape him to Groton specs, managed to lead a fairly successful life as Secretary of State, architect of a post-World War II diplomatic and defense structure that ultimately (and bloodlessly) brought down the Soviet Union, and eminent Wise Man to many Presidents.  No doubt this shocked many a Groton Don, more aware of how the teenage Acheson missed Groton’s mark than what was so special and unique to the boy who would become the most brilliant of all American diplomats.

In its concern with what a “Groton boy” (the school became co-ed in 1975) should be like, Peabody’s philosophy is consistent with most prep schools today, each of which has its own distinct personality within an admittedly narrow range of the educational spectrum.  Most see this as a competitive advantage, which is increasingly necessary in the prep school market because they’re competing not just against other secondary schools but against college and even future grad school for finite educational dollars.  If you’re a parent, you want to know what you’re getting, and you want a sense that your child will fit, so — when boarding tuition can top $30,000 a year — a certain clarity and consistency within each school isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

But it’s not enough, nor is the promise that each child will have a better shot at getting into a good college (in part because college admissions officers are veering away from prep schools).  The current trend among private schools is more.  More exotic programs (more study abroad, more immersive language courses, more intense science curricula), more glitzy resources (high tech infrastructure, athletic facilities), more high-profile outreach.  But the focus is still the institution and the history and tradition which support its prestige.  There might be varying degrees of freedom for each student to pick and choose from the various goodies available, but at the end, it’s still about the institution — about making Groton/ Andover/ Exeter/ St. Pauls/ Hotchkiss boys and girls.

Which is pretty much counter to current innovation trends of education, which are all about individualizing education.  In New York City, for example, former Education Commissioner Joel Klein established a pilot program called The School of One to use technology to develop individualized curricula for students and to assess how well they responded to different modes of instruction; if one particular method worked especially well one day, they’d be able to make changes in how the student was taught the very next.  Taken to its logical conclusion, that means students wouldn’t ultimately be assessed in terms of how they respond to specific methods of instruction, but more broadly on how well they’re learning and how well they’re becoming the students they’re capable of being.

I went to one of the aforementioned prep schools (Andover), and it has a new Headmaster who, presumably, has his own vision of how the school needs to evolve.  What I’d love — LOVE — to hear him say is this:  We believe every child we admit is special and unique.  We need to act on that belief — in fact, we need to make it the lodestar of everything we do.  Our goal, starting today, is to find what’s most special about each of our students — their strengths, their passions, how they think and learn.  And we’ll build on those special qualities, we’ll serve them.  We’re going to stop caring so much about whether our kids meet our standards and start obsessing about how we can meet and exceed theirs.

This is important because schools like Andover have the resources to lead this wave of educational innovation and the prestige to make new ideas stick. Innovation happens this way:  leaders spend money, try, fail and learn, and what they ultimately come up with can then be disseminated broadly and affordably.  It’s important for this kind of individualization to continue, because right now a lot of public schools — faced with the need to maintain political support in harsh budgetary times — have gone the other way, toward mass teaching methods and mass standardized testing.  Given an economy which increasingly values the distinct, the special, and the creative, that’s a terrible way to educate kids, but it’s what lots of school districts are doing.

So somebody has to lead, to show not just how to evaluate and educate kids in terms of their differences and strengths, but to make it viable, important, accepted, and even prestigious.    I’d love to see my old school try.

Newt

Early on, you could see the fall of the Perry and Cain candidacies even as they rose.  Both were new, both were fresh, both were saying and doing interesting things in — respectively — their states and the debates, and (maybe most important) both seemed to represent a viable alternative to Mitt Romney.

But at the same time, both were untested, and this is ultimately why they receded and why Romney is still strong.  The national press hadn’t put the kind of pressure on Cain’s world that can reveal baggage which can normally stay secret; it hadn’t put the kind of pressure on Perry’s record and ability as a campaigner that would ultimately show him to be a relative lightweight.  When the press and the pressure showed up, they crumbled.  Romney has already been through it all; there’s no shoe about to drop, no damaging story threatening to derail his credibility or viability.  He is — unlike Cain and Perry — who we think he is.  There are downsides to this — there’s no sense of drama or discovery as we get to know more and more about him as a person as the campaign unfolds.  But there’s something to be said for stability as well, particularly when the party is as desperate to win the White House as it is.

So normally, even though the base distrusts him, Romney would be a shoo-in for the nomination, the steady tortoise to everyone else’s mercurial hares.  The only reason he’s not is that his most visible rival is perhaps the most distinct and special Republican politician since Ronald Reagan.  And understanding why he’s so special (not necessarily good, but special) is key to understanding why he’s such a potent candidate.

Let’s take as a given his deep and broad imagination.  Yes, he’s got a lot of ideas.  Some of them are good, some are batty.  Assume as well his tremendous gifts as a debater — maybe the best five-minute debater in the history of the House of Representatives — and deep connection with the Republican base, built over decades of campaigning for local candidates.

What makes Newt so special is that these particular attributes — which would be enough for most politicians operating at a national level — are just the tip of the iceberg.  He is a brilliant political strategist and tactician, who not only identified what Republicans would have to do to win back the House in the mid-1990s, but devised the Contract with America as a way to convert what could have been a freak anti-incumbent election into a long-term governing majority.  He also understood before nearly anyone the degree to which consultant-driven negative campaigning had turned off voters (“the only thing we learned from the 2004 election,” he said at the American Enterprise Institute, “is that slightly more people hated John Kerry than George Bush.”), and much of his current strength comes from the sense he’s broken past this and into new, positive ideas.  He’s also a fantastic planner.  In 1995, I was one of hundreds of young House Republican staffers whom Gingrich personally briefed on a thoughtful, shrewd strategic plan for Medicare reform, which he knew as the one single issue which could lose the majority in the 1996 elections (he was right – it almost did).  He understands organizational leadership, he understands how to communicate an issue as well as anyone in national politics (most politicians do well communicating their own identities but lousy on ideas), and he understands how to build and manage a staff, which seems easy and not terribly important until you actually have to do it, when you find out it’s very hard and vital.  And nobody — nobody — understands the Republican base better.  He’s so good, so self-sufficient as a political unit that when a number of campaign staff quit on him this summer because they doubted his commitment (he was taking a cruise of the Aegean Sea with his wife instead of fundraising), you got a sense all it did was lower his overhead.

But as good as Good Newt is, there’s a Bad Newt — largely drawn from his four years as Speaker and his own marital (and extramarital) history.  Basically, as well as Good Newt understood what and how to do things, Bad Newt couldn’t execute them.  As orchestrator of the 1994 elections and the Contract with America, Gingrich had no peer, but as Speaker he managed to alienate… well, nearly everybody: his leadership team, the freshman class he’d helped elect, and rank-and-file who stuck with him through a failed coup because Republicans Don’t Like Coups.  Bad Newt changed his mind frequently, threw temper tantrums in public, wouldn’t listen to bad news, made huge decisions without consulting others, and rushed into major change initiatives without a backup plan or strategy.  (He also had an extramarital affair with a staffer at the same time he was pushing the House to impeach Bill Clinton for having an affair with an intern, maybe not the best judgment).  Bad Newt can be very, very bad, which might explain why few of his former top House staffers (among the very best on Capitol Hill) are working for his presidential campaign; the painful memories linger.

So the big question right now is whether Bad Newt is still lurking in the shadows, and whether Good Newt can overcome Bad Newt’s potentially fatal flaws; eleven years is a long time.

The more precise questions are, in no specific order:

Short-term judgment.    Again, will he put his foot in it?  His confrontational, no-holds-barred style serves him well in that his overstatements tend to be most offensive to the constituencies that the Republican base loathes — the mainstream media, the Washington elites, anybody who has ever watched MSNBC on purpose; to the base, they’re mother’s milk.  But he has shown a tendency to do things totally at odds with the values he talks about with the greatest conviction, and not wanting to hear bad news is a common politician’s disease.  Most worrying here is his lack of a strong, discreet advisor who can be brutally candid with him about mistakes he needs to correct or avoid — that’s a sign that although he might understand the problem, he hasn’t actually done anything concrete about it.

Clarifying the Vision.  Newt’s strategy thus far has been to use the relatively narrow bandwidth available in the debates to articulate better than anyone else Republican skepticism and hostility towards commonly accepted foes, whether in office (Obama, Pelosi, Barney Frank) or not (the mainstream press, the bureaucracy, “Warshington,” cultural elites).  Then, secondarily, he’ll discuss his own ideas.  His actual policy instincts are probably overrated; he’s given credit for the party-defining Contract with America, but in fact all of those ideas had been Reagan Administration initiatives which polled extremely well but had been pushed aside by the Democratic Congress.  As the primaries turn into a two-person race against Romney, he will have to better articulate his positive vision and  prioritize his policy agenda, and this will require a level of discipline and rigor he has yet to show.

Building and Maintaining an Organization.  He’s put together a number of enterprises since leaving the Capitol, but none have required the kind of agility and resilience that a Presidential campaign requires.  So far, the campaign has been all about the debates, and he’s been able to be both candidate and campaign manager.  Soon that will change; he will have to focus almost entirely on his public performance, and delegate the rest to others.  (Consider how important James Carville, Paul Begala, and George Stephanopoulos were for Bill Clinton, arguably the most skilled and knowledgeable Democratic politician and strategist since FDR).  The concerns, based on his history as Speaker, are huge — epically so — and unresolved.  In 1984, Gary Hart — also relatively organization-free — was able to ride a wave of short-term buzz and lack of excitement about frontrunner Walter Mondale to the brink of knocking him off in the early primaries because so many of them came so quickly after his dramatic win in New Hampshire.  Today, it’s possible to think that social media could also make such a surge possible, but more likely that he’s peaked too early to ride that kind of spontaneous crest.

Other Candidates.  The sweet spot of the Republican primary ballot is to be the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney, and now that Gingrich has it, others like Rick Perry and Ron Paul will start focusing their rhetoric on him.  Can he survive this?  In 2004, Howard Dean looked as though he’d wrap up the Democratic nomination even before getting to the southern primaries, but Dick Gephardt — worried that a Dean nomination would be death for House Democrats and reconciled with his own likely loss — took it upon himself to wound Dean’s candidacy in Iowa, and Dean’s third-place finish crippled his chances.  Could Gingrich face a similar barrage of not-entirely-accidental-friendly fire, either from a rival candidate (like Ron Paul) or conservative group (like the Club for Growth).  Could he survive it?

The point about Gingrich is that by any conventional measure, his campaign should be on a death watch by now.  That it’s not means he has a chance, and if can survive through the southern primaries, it will show he’s been able to answer the biggest concerns about his candidacy.  In which case — watch out.

Noonan, Brands and Sacred Cows.

Peggy Noonan writes astutely (as she always does) in today’s Wall Street Journal about the continued inability of Republicans to earn broader support than their Democratic rivals, even when Democrats in Congress are on their heels and their President at his nadir.  What she gets absolutely right in particular is the importance of branding, of reputation, in this.  Democrats still benefit from their perceived history of the broadminded rich joining with the blue collar masses for the betterment of the entire society, with a bit of fun thrown in to lighten things up (think JFK and FDR sharing a beer with Andy Stern, though this is my image, not hers).  Republicans, on the other hand, are saddled with their aura of the stern grandfather (this is her image) who paid his bills on time and made sure his grandkids did their chores.  That’s not the sort of image that will win hearts (though it can win minds), and it’s even worse when you don’t do it very well, which was the case for Republicans during the Bush-Hastert years.  To sum her article up any further is both dangerous (she’s too good) and unnecessary (her piece is less than a 1000 words); read it here.

At one point, Republicans had a winning brand which coupled skepticism about government’s ability to improve people’s lives with a robust faith in private institutions — neighborhoods, associations, churches, the free market — to do the same.  That brand, of course, was Reaganism.  It was effective enough to win three presidential elections by landslides; in the 1980, 1984, and 1988 Presidential elections, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush won a grand total of 1440 electoral votes to 173 for Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis (this is not a typo).  It propelled congressional Republicans in 1994 to their first House majority in 40 years, and it pushed George W. Bush (much more Reagan’s ideological progeny than his own father’s) to a victory in 2000 that a strong economy and world at peace should have made impossible.

Optimism carries with it a responsibility to be prudent, and Republicans lost their way in the last decade because they gave prudence a back seat.  But I don’t think that’s the biggest thorn in the Republican brand’s side right now.  Much more important was the slow freeze of the middle class economy over the same years, as homeowners and homebuyers substituted debt and leverage for income, finally cracking up entirely in 2008.  The free market economy, which Republicans deeply and sincerely trusted to create a rising tide for the entire country, failed.  And if trust in a free market economy is a lynchpin of your entire philosophy and brand, that’s a big problem.

My point here is that until Republicans wade deep into the fundamentals of today’s economy — driven much more by innovation, risk, and ideas than it has ever been — and how to make it work for our entire society, it will never again be able to project that confident faith in the future that made the Reagan brand so utterly compelling.  That kind of examination will be uncomfortable; new thinking always is.  Sacred cows will need to explain why they’re still sacred; blasphemies will need a chance to show they’re not so sacrilegious.  But without it, as a party they’ll always be dependent for success at the polls on Democratic ineptitude.  And that can’t last forever.

Steve Jobs, Near Death, and Lunch.

Two last thoughts on Steve Jobs and Apple, culled from Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs.

Near Death Beats Slow Decline.  The Apple we know almost didn’t happen.  If Apple’s collapse in the mid-1990s hadn’t been so dramatic — if it had been more like the slow death spiral of so many other Silicon Valley companies — then there wouldn’t have been an opening for Jobs to return in 1997.  He would have been just fine: Pixar, whose stock still comprised the lion’s share of his wealth when he died, saw to that.  But the revolutionary Apple products that still dazzle us, the incredibly fertile ecosystems in media and software that Apple spawned, the transcendent design sense reflected in nearly every facet and every crevice of every Apple product and store — we’d never have seen them.

Near-death experiences usually have two outcomes:  real death on one hand or revolution, renewal, and success on the other.  They can point toward the latter if the body is worth saving.  Apple was worth saving in 1997 because Jobs had made it so iconic in the 1980s.  But the formula works for political parties too.  Few remember how much of a joke the national Democratic party was in the 1980s; only Jimmy Carter had won a Presidential election since 1964, and only in that Watergate-shadowed year of 1976 did the party avoid a landslide loss.  Yet to many, the Democratic Party was worth saving, even if it meant turning to a moderate Southern governor who supported spending discipline, welfare reform, and free trade.  If the elections of 1980, 1984, and 1988 hadn’t been such complete blowouts, it’s hard to see how that happens.

In the same vein, one thought you occasionally hear from Republican policy wonks — usually sotto voce, when there’s no possibility of an eavesdropper who might report you to your betters — is whether the big midterm win of 2010 came too early for the party’s own good.  The party was clearly on its heels after a near-loss in 2004 to John Kerry (arguably the least appealing Presidential candidate since Nixon, but without the shrewdness), then debacles in 2006 and 2008.  If Democrats hadn’t overreached so spectacularly in 2009-10, it’s likely that Republicans would have had to make that very hard choice:  is our party worth saving, and if so, how do we again make ourselves attractive and compelling?  But without any significant rethinking or renewal, widespread disgust with the Obama White House and Pelosi-Reid Congress brought them back to center stage.  And now we’re still talking about the same ideas that defined Republicans during those catastrophes of the last decade.  Sometimes near death isn’t all that bad.

The Power of Lunch.  Books like Isaacson’s of Jobs — biographies of towering, world-changing figures — tend to cast at least a few rays of light on people who were critical to the main subject’s success but left in their shadow.  For Steve Jobs, that figure is Jonathan (Jonny) Ives, Apple’s chief designer.  Most technology companies are driven by the engineers:  they come up with the rough parameters for their products, then leave it to the designers to work within them.  Not Apple.  Under Jobs, the design came first, and engineers were challenged, bullied, and bludgeoned to make the products work within the designers’ specifications.  The Ives-Jobs relationship was as close as any within the company; the two even had lunch every day.

I suspect this was not lost on the engineers as they prepared to tell Ives they couldn’t make his design work.  “No problem,” he might say.  “Of course, I’ll have to share this with Steve.  Jobs.  Whom I have lunch with, alone.  Every day.  And he might want to talk with you about it after that.”  Of course, because he could say this, he likely never needed to.  Everyone knew who had lunch with whom, and everybody knew that Jobs did not deal gracefully with engineers who couldn’t accommodate Ives’s (and his) ideas.

The question now is whom Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO since Jobs’s resignation earlier this year, has lunch with.  Apple’s unique strength under Jobs was the consistency of its vision:  design first, then hold the engineers at gunpoint.  If Cook still sides consistently with the designers, Apple will do well.  If he gives in to the inclination to be fair, to hear both sides, to make sure the engineers get an open hearing, I suspect that what’s special about Apple will be lost.

So if I were an Apple investor, I wouldn’t care so much about earnings targets (Jobs never did), or sales projections, or difficulties in Apple’s supply pipeline.  I’d want to know who Tim Cook was having lunch with.