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.

A Good Week for the Short Term

Presidencies have a way of defining themselves in singular, dramatic, unexpected moments.  For Reagan, it was at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the last great rhetorical charge by the winner of the Cold War, challenging Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Iron Curtain even as (to the West, unseen) economic and political forces were tearing away at the fabric of the entire Soviet Union.  For the first President Bush, it was a declaration that Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait “will not stand”; for the second, it was being given a megaphone at Ground Zero and summoning the nation’s sympathy, anger, and determination.  Bill Clinton’s, unavoidably, will be these words:  “I did not have sex with that woman.”  These moments might be prepared for but they’re not scripted, and that spontaneity — that collision of event and self — makes them so powerful.

For Barack Obama, that moment will be the picture in the White House situation room, watching the mission to take down Osama bin Laden.  It was a risky mission on multiple levels, and consequences of failure would have been severe.  Only he could sign off on it, and despite the potential pitfalls, he did, reasoning that the opportunity outweighed the risk.  He owns the success, just as he would have owned the failure, and for that boldness and decisiveness he has to be given due credit.

So there he is, at the side of a small conference table, eyes glued to the monitor in front of him, almost impervious to anyone around him.  He’s not demonstrative, like Hillary Clinton, or formal, like William Daley.  He’s simply watching events unfurl, roughly and concretely.  We don’t know exactly what he saw (Clinton’s gasp indicates it was something dramatic), and whether in fact he saw bin Laden’s last living moments.  As much as anything, he is watching a decision — several decisions, actually, given how deeply involved he was in the planning — play out in real time, something Presidents and policy makers rarely get to do, and with his own and the nation’s prestige on the line.

That this seems such a fitting portrait of his leadership isn’t necessarily a good thing.  Obama, it tells us, likes to decide.  He likes specific, clearly delineated problems with timelines, options and checklists; he likes hearing a variety of opinions, likes challenging them, and trusts his ability to line up the data toward a well-reasoned and calculated plan of action.  He likes the short term.

Contrast that with House Speaker John Boehner.  Boehner’s strength is the long term — the ability to think through variables and uncertainties, set a goal, and march through a strategy for achieving it.  This is a strength suited for legislation, which is all about variables and uncertainties and has none of the tidiness of checklists and maps.  This isn’t just a defining element of Boehner’s style or personality.  It’s why he has almost routinely beaten Obama wherever the two have faced off.

On Monday Boehner gave a speech on the messiest and most important long term challenge the country faces — our looming fiscal crisis.  It’s pretty clear from the speech that Boehner has a plan.  He’ll continue to link (correctly) our short-term jobs problem to the longer-term fiscal threat, he’ll use the pressure of a necessary debt limit bill to force concrete spending cuts, and he’ll leave as an alternative to a big spending cut package the possibility of multiple incremental debt limit increases, knowing that each one puts Obama and Democrats in a tougher and tougher political bind going into an election year.

It’s just as clear from the White House that Obama doesn’t have a plan.  He  has a proposal, but there’s no sense of strategy surrounding it just as there’s no sense that he really embraces it.  It’s just a proposal, a package of ideas sifted through experts and advisors, just like the mission to take out bin Laden.  Except that legislation is not a military mission.  It’s much, much harder.

Obama had a great week, but it was one that played to his strength in short-term decision making.  That’s not ultimately what Presidencies are judged by, and suggests that more of the good weeks to come will be Boehner’s, not his.

Patriot Way

How would your professional decisions — the ones you make for your organization — be different if you were free to make the best decisions, free of internal politics, competing agendas, or external expectations?  If all you had to worry about was the result, not the politics?

Answering that question is why I love watching the NFL draft, particularly the decisions made by New England’s vaunted head coach/ major domo, Bill Belichick.  Every year, the draft is like three dozen case studies in decisionmaking.  Some teams are driven by desperation.  This year, teams were desperate for quarterbacks, so four teams used their first-round picks on a QB class that impressed no one.  Other teams are driven by hope — that they’re just one or two players away from the Super Bowl, so they trade away lots of down-the-road picks so they can get the superstars who’ll put them over the hump.  Others still are driven by short-term business reasons; the Redskins for years routinely traded away vast quantities of picks so they could snatch up high-profile college stars who would prop up fan interest long enough to sell season tickets packages.  And some still are driven by love:  the NFL lifer, hoping to find the next Montana, Rice, or Ray Lewis, convincing himself that a player he likes is the genuine article.

Not Belichick.  Belichick is incredibly unusual in the coaching world in that he has the complete support of his owner and just one charge:  to contend for a Super Bowl championship every year.  He’s also unusual in his pedigree; both a coach’s son who has coached professionally since 1975 and who majored in economics at a very academically rigorous school.

The job security and the exposure to both football and economics allows him to see the game at its most fundamental level.  Today’s NFL isn’t solely about talent or superstars; it’s about excellence at specific positions (mostly quarterback), attrition, culture, and creating and exploiting market inefficiencies.  Belichick has the quarterback — Tom Brady, possibly the team’s only superstar.  His team model puts a higher priority on skills that don’t necessarily attract a lot of attention or budget-busting contracts — consistency, hard work, leadership, the ability to learn and execute different kinds of game plans and to constantly hone individual skills.

The others he addresses through the draft.  The college game is so different from the pro game that it’s hard to project a player’s NFL success accurately, so Belichick routinely trades single high picks for multiple later-round picks, and does this so well that six of the first 96 picks in this year’s draft are his (in a 32-team league).  He’ll also trade into future years, getting higher-round selections one or two years in the future.  To keep emotion in check, the Patriots methodically assess players for value, determining how much that player will help them in relation to the tradeable value of the pick in question and how much of their fixed budget they’ll have to spend on him.  This leaves him with lots of players whom he can assess further in training camp, and with depth at each position that can survive the rigors of an NFL season.

Belichick is very smart, very analytical, and very creative.  But other NFL coaches and general managers are too.  What sets apart Belichick and others whose teams are routinely successful in the NFL is how he can tune out distractions, focus on the best interests of his team, and make good decisions.  His job is solid; his reputation in New England is bullet-proof.  Other teams can’t, and every year, he turns their desperation, their loss of objectivity, their short-term striving, into more draft picks for the Patriots, a better choice of players, and more wins.

Old Dogs, Old Tricks at Augusta

At his Monday pre-Masters press conference, Tiger Woods was trying to show he’d learned something a little more substantial than not to leave cell phones with text messages from his mistresses lying around the house. By all accounts, it was a winning display. He seemed sincere and hit all the right notes about humility, renewed appreciation for his fans, and a commitment to being a better role model on and off the golf course.

And yet…. well, by the weekend he was cursing on the course again, pouting after bad shots, and slamming the occasional club into the ground. Despite a few major blunders he shot a respectable 69 on Sunday, finishing five strokes off winner Phil Mickelson. Incidentally, Woods might have had some off-the-course emotional issues to deal with, but for the last year Mickelson’s wife and mother have been battling breast cancer (prompting him to miss a number of tournaments last year). On Saturday night his 10-year old daughter broke her wrist rollerblading and Mickelson had to track down a doctor. He still shot a 67 on Sunday, enough to win the tournament by three strokes.

So what Woods could have said after Mickelson holed his last putt was this (and if Ari Fleischer were still advising him, it’s what he would have said):

“I’m not sure I played my best golf today, but with the way Phil played and the year he and his family have had, I’m really happy for him. And the fact is I would have had to shoot 64 today just to tie for the lead, and with the difficulty of this course that would have been a tall order. Most importantly, though, I really want to express my appreciation to the tournament’s hosts for having me here and to the audiences here who were so positive and supportive. Congratulations to Phil and I’m looking forward to competing again next year.”

In other words, humble, gracious, and maybe even a little empathetic toward someone he’s not known for getting along with. Was that what he said? You be the judge:

“Well, I entered this event and I only enter events to win and I didn’t get it done. I didn’t hit the ball good enough, I made too many mistakes around the greens. Consequently, I’m not there. I finished fourth. Not what I wanted. As the week wore on, I kept hitting it worse. After Friday, it was not very good.”

About that earlier-in-the-week desire to be a bit less of a visible jerk when his game wasn’t all sweetness and light? That was then. “People are making way too much of a big deal of this…I was not feeling good. I hit a big snipe off the first tee and I don’t know how people think I should be happy about that. I hit a wedge from 45 yards and basically bladed it over the third green. These are not things I normally do. So I’m not going to be smiling and happy. And I hit one of the worst, low quack-hooks on No. 5. So I’m not going to be walking around with a lot of pep in my step because I hadn’t hit a good shot yet.” Me, me, me, blah, blah, blah.

Here are Tiger’s bigger problems. First, he’s no longer the most exciting player on the tour. Mickelson’s go-for-broke style echoes the King himself, Arnold Palmer. From a younger generation, Anthony Kim can get so hot that he’s practically incendiary. You’re just as likely to see their ooh-and-ahh shots on a highlight reel as Tiger’s, and you’re just as likely to see Tiger’s miscues (which can be epic) as his miracles.

Second, he and his story are getting old. The child prodigy, shaped by his drill sergeant dad… we know all this. It gave Tiger a certain, very American gravitas — golf wasn’t just a hobby but a calling that had found him, through his father, at an early age and expected from him a greatness which only epic amounts of hard work could reveal — and in that greatness, unite all the ethnic strains that he represents. But whatever virtue the story wrapped around Woods washed away with the first few mistress jokes, and now it’s just stale and a bit forced.

What holds it all together — what has always held it together, through the swearing and the thuggish behavior of his caddy and the cold remoteness towards even those who cheered him the most — is winning. When Woods wins, all is forgiven, and he is smiling Tiger, fist-pumping Tiger, pitching-wedge-as-magic-wand Tiger. And here’s the biggest problem. Woods hasn’t been winning the major tournaments that define real champions — nothing since the U.S. Open in 2008, when on literally one leg he willed himself to a playoff victory. That injury forced him to miss the remaining major championships for the year as well as the Ryder Cup (which, despite his absence, the U.S. won for the first time since 2009 — a lesson in chemistry making a difference). He won a bushel of tournaments in 2009, but no majors. And then on Sunday at the Masters, where he’s always seemed either stoutly defending a lead or in hot pursuit, he was simply one of a crowd trying to catch up with Mickelson.

Woods has already shown that professional imagemakers will only be able to help him so much, because at the end of the day the person that people see is the Tiger of Sunday’s press comments. His standing will only recover when he starts winning the big tournaments again. If he doesn’t start doing this soon, he might find that golf will develop a new crop of heroes just as appealing and just as exciting as he once was.

Health Care, Polling, and the Aeron Chair. Not in That Order.

If you want to understand why the Obama health care agenda has come so completely unglued, think about the Aeron chair.  Seriously.

In the early 1990s, two designers at office design maven Herman Miller struck on a soup-to-nuts reinvention of the office chair.  To maintain back support, it would be ergonomic; to keep things airy, it would replace leather and vinyl with mesh, draped over a lightweight skeleton; to provide comfort, would allow unprecedented control over height, pitch, and rigidity.  And it would look singularly, unbelievably cool, unlike any office chair that had ever been made.

And — as Malcolm Gladwell tells the story in Blink — when Herman Miller did its usual market research on the Aeron, it bombed.  It was too new, too much of a shock for people who were used to thinking of office chairs as totems — big, deep, leather chairs for the senior execs, narrow cloth seats with a small back for the steno pool.  They simply weren’t used to thinking of office chairs as statements of hip design or steady comfort.

The company persisted, of course, and within a few months of the Aeron hitting the market it became not just the hottest chair in the industry but the biggest-selling piece of office furniture of all time.  Going forward required a certain amount of skepticism about HM’s own research methods, and the Aeron’s success has to stand as kind of a warning:  being captive of your existing research tools puts you at enormous risk.

In politics there are two dominant forms of voter research — the poll and the focus group.  In the first, carefully prepared statements are read to participants, whose reactions are quantified in terms of agreement and depth of interest.  Focus groups are more qualitative, with pollsters teasing out voter views on statements, issues and trends.  What’s important about both is they ask their participants to respond to something the pollsters offer.  And this depends on people to be able to clearly say what they want and what they care about.

Such reliance, marketers are finding, is often misplaced. Increasingly, market research for product development is emphasizing more anthropological perspectives, studying how people really behave and what kinds of needs and preferences this suggests.  Instead of asking 1000 people to tell them what they’d like in a new kind of ready-made dinner, for example, they might spend time inside the houses of 15 or 20 families, studying their evening schedules, how and where they actually eat, who does the cooking, and how they cook.  Out of this can emerge something tied not to what consumers say they want, because in fact consumers are really bad at saying what they want, but to the full and honest complexity of feeding a family every night.

And that is where I suspect the Democrats have missed out.  They did the customary polling and got the customary answers, which included (1) the desire for guaranteed and affordable health care, and (2) support for the government to be the last-resort health insurance provider.  And they’ve built their entire policy and communications strategies on those answers.  What they neglected are all the other complex insights that come from studying the same voters more broadly and deeply.  If you’re really concerned about losing your health care, the recession has probably also made you worry about debt, and news that the Obama plan would cost nearly a trillion dollars (which you or your kids will at some point have to pay for) might give you second thoughts.  At the same time, the governmental failures at the heart of the current recession might make you question whether you can rely on government-run health care.  Finally, you’re probably not hearing anything about the Democrats plan that’s actually relevant to your own health care experience.  All told, that’s a recipe for failure.

Polling can be useful, but it shouldn’t be the last word.  By its very nature, it’s reactive and limited, and no good at all if you’re trying to think more than a few months ahead.   (In fact, as I think the Obama team is finding, they can be dangerously misleading).  If you want to be able to anticipate political pressures early enough to be able to do anything about them, you need to go well past polling toward the trends and long-term pressures that are concretely affecting the environment in which we live.

Health Care Morass

When I worked on Capitol Hill, my chief job was strategy.  Any new idea tends to invite opposition, and in the bigger projects whose strategy I helped manage, I always liked having a shrewd and experienced opposition.  If they were smart and experienced, I could anticipate their actions, figure out what was driving their decision process, read into their actions and comments, and ultimately sniff out what kind of concessions would be necessary and how to structure the process accordingly.  I knew they would plan as well as we planned; that they would identify their goals, their weak spots, and their strengths; and that they would be realistic in their own actions (if not rhetoric).  This made them predictable, and ultimately made it easier to reach as much of an agreement as we needed without undercutting key goals.

I mention skill and predictability in the context of Barack Obama and health care because neither seem to apply.  Obama entered the year with enormous political momentum, the opportunity to convert that momentum into leverage with both Republicans and Democrats, and an actual health care proposal from the campaign.  All of that is gone, and if a health care bill is passed this fall it will be one which substitutes spending for reform, complexity for decisiveness, and easy answers now for hard choices tomorrow — that is, it’ll be significant health care reform in press release only.

How did it get to be this bad, and what can we learn from it?

First, bad planning.  It’s stunning how many of the problems the White House is facing right now should have been easily anticipated when they first started down this road.  The cost estimates from the Congressional Budget Office are killing them every day. Organized labor is holding onto subsidies for employer-provided insurance as hard as they can, and other key Democratic constituencies — like trial lawyers — are just as stubbornly holding onto advantages the current system gives them.  House-Senate tensions are getting worse, and instead of being forced to the bargaining table by Obama’s huge popularity in the suburbs, Republicans have found an effective rallying point in the huge costs associated with any of the current proposals.

But all of these should have been factored into the process early.  Peter Orszag, the current OMB director, came from CBO and has worked on health care for years; if anyone should have been able to say that CBO would be skeptical of savings and leery of costs, it should have been Orszag.  Resistance from key Democratic constituency groups should have been a given.  The importance of regional interests as well as partisan interests should have been a given.  The history, personalities, and processes that drive the House and Senate apart are apparent to anyone who’s ever read a copy of Roll Call.  And once the Presidential honeymoon drew to a close, it should have been obvious that Republican Congressmen and Senators would be more concerned about primary challenges from their right than general election challenges from their left.  These are basic assumptions any good, candid planner should have at least confronted and addressed.

Second, hard questions gave way to easy answers.  Still scarred from the Clinton healthcare debacle of 1993, the Clinton White House veterans now running the effort sought to avoid previous mistakes instead of learning from them, and this led them to cede the actual policymaking to the Hill; this almost automatically fed House-Senate rivalries and unleashed special interests who hold little sway at the White House but lots of it in key committees and with Congressional Democratic leadership.  The White House likely assumed Obama’s political capital (as misused an idea as any in Washington), vast communications skills and personal charm could paper over problems and keep the project on track, but this has simply never worked; Congress is too transactional and too driven by local events and interests to care.  The only time a leader’s personal political standing drove a major legislative proposal through Congress was when Ronald Reagan pushed for his tax package in 1981, and this was only because he was willing to campaign against southern Democrats who were less popular in their districts than he was.  Democrats knew Obama would never publicly oppose them, so he had no leverage.

This is important because any scenario-based assessment of legislative action — whether it’s successful and what impact it will have, if any — has to include the actual skill level of the key legislative players.  Conventional wisdom tends to look solely at partisan breakdowns and special interest involvement, but legislative skill is perhaps more important than either in determining how legislation will play out because the Congressional environment is so difficult and so opaque.   Expert legislators like Ted Kennedy and (my old boss) John Boehner can get a lot more done with fewer votes than less talented legislators.  And the skill level of key players, like Barney Frank and Tim Geithner, will be a big factor in any assessment of what happens to other big-ticket items like financial services regulation, another complicated, hot-button issue Congress is grappling with.

We Begin.

And so begins my blog.  My background is in public policy; I was a Republican staffer in the U.S. House of Representatives for 14 years, the last eight in senior levels at a Committee and then House leadership.  My main job was long-term planning and developing new ideas and strategy across a broad spectrum issues (which I did with varying degrees of success), but my main interest throughout was change — anticipating it, taking advantage of it, driving it.  Change will be the main topic of this blog, and in these times, that presents a pretty wide and open canvas.  Entries to this blog will be all over the map — politics and public policy but also culture, television, sports, economics, business.  Length and style will vary as well; a few lines and a photo here, a longer think piece there.   What I hope is that whether long or short, wonky or light, you’ll find something that makes you think.

As my old boss liked to say, better to be heckled than ignored.  I hope that you’ll be free with thoughtful feedback, and if something you see here sparks an idea of your own, feel free to share it.  The point is to provoke, and if you agree with everything I say in a given entry, I probably haven’t gone far enough.

I’m also starting a political risk assessment shop, NextWorks LLC, that helps clients anticipate and plan for challenges and opportunities from government over the next two-to-eight years.  When I was in Congress I was shocked at how little attention long term issues got from the press and the private sector in particular;  huge amounts of time, energy and resources went into the crisis of the hour but very little of the above went into the longer-term trends that would generate even more significant challenges and opportunities down the road.  NextWorks aims to fill that niche by helping clients understand how the political environment of the immediate near term — two years and beyond — will develop, how it will affect them, and what they can do about it.  We’re in an age of incredible uncertainty, and things aren’t likely to be any more predictable any time soon.  I’ll be writing about this business of political risk assessment as well from time to time, with varying degrees of shamelessness. 

Finally, I’m working on a book about how the Republican party might revitalize itself, using as a starting point what Reagan did to the party in the late 1970s and 1980s.  I’m thinking of putting sections of it here as I write it, again hoping for thoughtful feedback.  The party has a long, hard climb back but, if you think that freedom and progress still have some life left in their old bones, it’s an important climb to make.  As for the unthoughtful kind of feedback — don’t you think there’s enough of that without having to find it here?

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