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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Competing to provide the answer were two bitterly opposed titans of American engineering. James Buchanan Eads had so mastered the currents and swells of the Mississippi that riverboat pilots called him “Captain Eads,” and the bridge he built in St. Louis in 1874 stands to this day; Eads called for a network of channels which would bleed away rising river tides. His rival, Andrew Atkinson Humphreys, was the commander of the Army Corps of Engineers; his proposal emphasized building high levees which would contain the river and prevent floods. Neither advocated a levee-only policy, but their acrimony was so great that the commission in charge of the project wound up recommending just such an approach — even though Eads and Buchanan subsequently opposed it.

Then, in 1927, disaster struck. Heavy rains throughout the Midwest in the fall of 1926 were followed by record snow storms. More rain and melting snow came in April, overcoming the levies first just north of Greenville, Mississippi and then southward, toward New Orleans. To protect the city, the New Orleans grandees who dominated Louisiana ordered the levees blown, saving New Orleans but releasing enough water — rushing out at three million cubic feet a second, three times the 1993 flood’s pace — to wipe out an area the size of New England. Nearly a million people were forced out of their homes, and the Red Cross provided food and shelter to almost 700,000 people for months. Herbert Hoover led the relief effort, giving him a national exposure that propelled him into the White House a year later.

But the flood wiped out more than that. Southern oligarchs, particularly the Percy family of Mississippi, had been fighting a winning war against the Ku Klux Klan, and in trying to recruit African-Americans to farm the rich Delta fields, established universal schooling for their children and racially tolerant communities. There seemed a vague but legitimate social contract which — if not perfect justice — kept the peace and offered chances for self-improvement. All of that collapsed when New Orleans gave the order to blow the levies upstream, saving the French Quarter but dooming millions. In a stroke, the oligarchy lost its legitimacy. In came Huey Long, promising to humble the grandees; in came a resurgent KKK, in came a Southern Populist political movement that owed less to a philosophically coherent set of views than an inherent distrust of political, economic, and cultural elites. On April 10, 1927 the South faced one kind of future, and in the days following the flood, that future changed; it’s hard to say for the better or for the worse, but its new course was profoundly different and profoundly more chaotic and unpredictable. And all because in the 1870s, planners decided that the best way to control a mighty force like a great river was to contain, to build the levees high. (For an absolutely superb recounting of the Flood and its causes and consequences, see John Barry’s Rising Tide.)

Which, seamlessly, leads us to Occupy Wall Street and the financial community. The trends driving the broad-based dissatisfaction that OWS represents have been in the works for years — a widening income gap, volatile job market, a churning, accelerating economic complexity that makes it difficult to connect merit and reward, and a broadening exposure to the whims of the financial markets. If you made a lot of money (like big Wall Street financial firms) in an incredibly abstract industry (like the financial services industry) whose excesses and miscalculations led to a global financial meltdown (like the big Wall Street investment banks) and were then absorbed by federal taxpayers (like… ok, you get the picture), you might have thought about what might happen when all these forces converged. And you might have taken steps to channel those pressures, much as Eads proposed channeling Mississippi floodwaters.

But that’s not how the financial community has worked. For decades, it has sought to contain social and economic volatility within a political levee system. Few industries spend as much on lobbying, few foster such close relationships with their regulators, and few have business models which are so closely entwined with the nuances of the industry’s highly complex, often contradictory regulatory and legal structure. I can’t think of a single industry where so many top executives have at least a significant stint in government. My point here isn’t that any of these are bad, and I think the whole concept of influence-buying is drastically overdone. My point is that Wall Street tends to view Washington and its political institutions as bulwarks against broader volatility which it can generally rely on to prevent major changes to their business models; based on this, the financial community is then free to pursue its own interests without regard to the consequences.

What kind of channels could have relieved some of this pressure? Any industry as abstract and lucrative as financial services is going to have a hard time getting public sympathy, but a sense of trustworthiness is a realistic goal. That means restraint and resolve: not pushing risky and complex products to consumers who don’t understand them, taking systemic risk seriously, and being willing to call out bad behavior. What would have happened in 2006 if a highly regarded leader in the banking world had said, publicly, that Lehman’s or Bear Stearns’ derivatives didn’t pass the smell test and were off limits to his bank’s traders? What would have happened in 1996 — when Glass-Steagal repeal was on the table — if a big bank or investment firm CEO said that a diversified financial services company should only be able to trade for itself using executives’ own money, like a partnership? What would happen right now, if someone with money on the table publicly acknowledged that the current vogue in high volume, high-speed (as in ridiculously high-speed) algorhythm-based trading is, well, just plain crazy? (And when trading platforms are built in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, simply to shorten trading times by milliseconds, just plain crazy is exactly how to describe it).  Would money have been left on the table?  Sure.  On the other hand, the movement of people of nearly every conceivable philosophical, educational, and income level who want Wall Street taken down a peg (or several) — the more painfully the better — might never have gotten off the ground.

But the decision — de facto, if not specific — was to protect itself behind a political system defined, most of the time, by inertia — that’s how it has managed its significant political risk.  OWS is a result of that core decision. We don’t know what it will actually lead to, but its momentum is only increasing and its breadth expanding. We should know that OWS is making politics more volatile, and that the forces of unrest that are driving it could have significant policy consequences. Could it lead to big tax increases for the wealthy, big restrictions in how Wall Street operates, big changes in how corporations make decisions? We don’t know. But the odds are greater than they were before Zuccotti Park became a staging ground for protest a month ago.

(Oh, and who nailed the whole spirit of these kinds of protests better than anyone?  Hugh Laurie, here.)

So I’m pretty impressed with the persistence and dedication of the Occupy Wall Street movement.  News coverage has been extensive, so I’ll just offer these thoughts about what they mean and what they’re likely to push us toward.

Why now?  What’s most surprising is that they’ve taken this long to go national.  Bank bailouts came in 2008 and 2009, and Wall Street pay and bonus packages returned to pre-meltdown levels in 2009, led by Goldman Sachs.  Why not then?  Or, on the other side, there hasn’t yet been any triggering episode that would catalyze frustration into action — no slashing of student loans or dramatic increase in college tuition, no significant cuts to government spending programs, no specific tipping points.

What this goes to is the power of social networking.  In the past, broad protests might have needed more specific triggers to push a sufficient critical mass into motion, as long as the latent frustration is sufficient.  I suspect that two years ago, there was enough of a hope that the Obama Administration would address these frustrations to keep that critical mass from forming.  Now, there’s not.  On the other hand, protests on this scale don’t need particular events to get enough people mad enough to leave their homes and start carrying signs.  They just need a deep level of latent frustration, a target, Facebook, and cheap smartphones.

The Extraction Economy.  Zuccotti Park, where the protests began, is about four-and-a-half miles from the Apple Store in Manhattan, where Apple enthusiasts have dropped bouquets by the dozens in memory of Steve Jobs.  Jobs died with a net worth of almost eight billion dollars; he has no public record of significant philanthropy (most probably because he was intensely private about such matters); he made products which, at least when first introduced, were only affordable to the rich.  Again:  throngs of angry protestors just south of Wall Street, bundles upon bundles of flowers on East 59th and Fifth.

Nor is anybody protesting the enormous wealth that Bill Gates, or Warren Buffett, or any of the internet billionaires, have amassed, even though they have provided relatively limited numbers of jobs (one complaint) and have contributed to the income gap as much as anyone.  Nobody outside the professional Left is even protesting the Koch brothers.

Why?

I suspect that much of the reason is the unease brought about by an economy that’s increasingly abstract and intangible.  All the above did something tangible, either by building their own company or by providing a service or good that we have some experience with.  We know Facebook, we know Google.  They’ve created something, they’ve earned something.

Then there are firms and companies who have leveraged themselves into economic sweet spots where they’re able to extract money — in some cases, a lot of money — without actually conferring a clear benefit.  Wall Street firms lead the list in this — charging and expecting huge sums of money for services that nobody understands and in many cases make life more dangerous for the rest of us.  But they’re not alone.  Utility companies, telephone and cable companies, health insurance companies, and yes, government — we know we need them, we know we can’t do without them, and yet they seem to care much more about extracting money from us than serving us.  And when some people see how much their senior executives pay themselves, the blood boils.

The point is that the more abstract the economy becomes, and the more dominated it is by old-line businesses who seek to extract higher prices and fees than by more entrepreneurial companies who still have to please their customers to survive, the more volatile will be the social and political environment for the economy.  The protests aren’t against free-market competition or innovation.  They’re against free-market manipulation and self-interest.

And for that, you have to start with why Jobs was so successful.  He was the master minimalist.  For all the imagination Apple brought to its business, what’s most striking is how small was the canvas it worked on.  Apple did four things:  it designed hardware, it created software, it ran retail and online stores, and — most important — integrated all these operations flawlessly.  Its core culture was based on absolute commitment to the actual experience of using its products and to refusal to be hemmed in by past accomplishments, no matter how successful, but all within the principle of discipline and simplicity.   The black mock-t shirt, Levi 501′s and New Balance shoes?  They weren’t just an outfit; they were a message to everyone connected with Apple:  Less is more.

That’s it.  Unlike a huge multinational like GE, Apple’s product line was like a long, slowly unfolding road, each turn revealing moments of surprise but, in retrospect, seemingly predictable.  It didn’t actually make anything:  that fell to a tightly controlled network of contract suppliers.  It didn’t actually create most of what people experienced and paid money for: that fell to software writers who created Mac, iPhone, and iPad applications or artists who created the music, movies, television shows and podcasts for iTunes.  What it did do, better than anyone perhaps in the history of the marketplace, was anticipate how to engage our imagination in the vast new possibilities of information technology in a way that inspired absolute delight.  But it could do this only because Jobs and his company were able to focus their singular skills on such a narrow arc of the spectrum.

Compare that with government.  The most narrowly drawn cabinet department is expected to be nearly all things to the constituencies it serves.  The Department of Veterans Affairs offers home loans, financial education, and pensions besides its main job managing the largest network of hospitals in the country.  The Department of Labor regulates pension investment as well as enforce labor law, oversee workplace safety, provide job training, and invest billions of dollars.  This kind of incredibly expansive range is the norm more often than the exception.

Some things government does very well.  By and large, when the task is clearly defined and resources adequate, government meets and even exceeds expectations.  We landed a man on the moon; that’s something that even Steve Jobs would have been amazed by.  More recently, we’ve prevented any post-9/11 terrorist attacks on our soil; we’ve sifted through millions of bales of hay and found the needle of Osama Bin Laden, and held him accountable for his deeds; we’ve made stunning progress on a variety of diseases, from AIDS to cancer.

But there’s so much else government hasn’t done well, and won’t — not because the people who work for government are inept (the vast majority are not), but because we ask it to do so much for so many.  Put someone with Steve Jobs’s gifts in the middle of any cabinet department and he’d quit — ideally before having melted down in frustration.  It’s simply impossible.  And until we acknowledge that — until a political leader starts leading a candid national conversation about what government can actually do well, what it can’t, and how to satisfy all our other legitimate societal needs that government realistically can’t — we’re going to continue to wallow in distrust and cynicism about government.  The Left will continue to insist that government is the default solution to any national problem, despite decades of history and mountains of evidence to the contrary; without an intellectually honest or rigorous adversary, the Right will continue to argue that government needs to be cut back wholesale.  And the vast bulk of the population will continue to jump from one to the other, frustrated rather than persuaded.

 When, before Jobs, can you remember the word “delight” being used to describe your relationship with a mass-produced consumer good?  Think about that — the word’s sense of surprise, of joy, of fleetingness.  We think of individual experiences as delights — the first taste of an extraordinarily good dessert, our first encounter with a stunningly moving piece of art or entertainment, moments when children do something unexpected and amazing.  But a thing?  Yet that’s what Apple produced under Jobs — things you can hold in your hand which evoke little bursts of delight not just when you first use it, but all the time.  Disney reaches for this standard but, let’s face it, the Magic Kingdom would only be fully magical if there were no lines; carmakers might try as well, but they’re limited by the fact that the experience of driving a car gets stale no matter how great the car is.  Herman Miller — particularly with its Aeron chair — might come close.  But think of what life would be like if others took up the charge as well:  schools that delight; banks that delight; a public transportation system that delights; how about a tax form that delights, at least in its ease and simplicity?  It’s worth trying.

Nice can be overrated.  I’m not talking here about Jobs’s occasional brutal treatment of employees, but about his public face.  Most public personalities outside of sports, politics and rock music are careful to be seen as inoffensive, benign, compassionate, nice.  Not Jobs.  He trashed Adobe Flash not because it was a rival, but because he thought it was a crash-prone battery hog.  He trashed Michael Dell because, when Jobs returned to a near-death Apple in 1997, Dell said Jobs should liquidate the company and return the money to the shareholders (Jobs reminded Apple employees of this on the day Apple’s market value topped Dell’s).  He trashed other computer companies because their products were boring, because they failed to innovate, because, essentially, they hadn’t lived up to Jobs’s own, exacting standards.  (He also told a college student looking for a comment from Apple’s PR department to “please leave us alone.”)

In other words, he put his mouth where his heart was.  He tied himself, body and soul, to a nearly transcendent vision of excellence and imagination, and made himself a huge target whenever Apple’s own products failed to meet it.  Simply making products that people would buy seemed to him a profound moral failing, and he was willing to call people on it.  That’s how progress happens.

No Excuses.  Beyond the idea of delight, if there’s any accumulated societal residue of Jobs’s career at Apple, it’s this:  We have no more excuses for not fulfilling ourselves.  For a few hundred dollars — pennies, in the scheme of things — we can reach pretty much the full compass of human knowledge, make our own sense of it, and present anything new, anything interesting, that we might have to do or say in bright, compelling, elegant form, for the world to see and maybe, just maybe, pay for.  For services or information, that previous generations might only have had access to after travelling hundreds of miles, slogging through endless bureaucracies, working for powerful organizations or paying thousands and thousands of dollars, Apple’s response is:  there’s an app for that.  Want to buy a house, book (and research) a vacation, participate in a distant meeting without leaving your home, or publish a book?  It’s all there.  No excuses.

Finally, since Jobs’s death the internet’s been awash with statements from the high, mighty and famous, mostly to this effect:  “Steve Jobs was an amazing and visionary leader who, more than anyone else, recognized how incredibly awesome I could be and, in fact, am.  The world is poorer for his departure, but I’m still here, and I’m still awesome.”

Here’s what might be a more fitting, though privately expressed tribute:

[CEO walks into New York boardroom for meeting of his/her top leadership team, called just 15 minutes ago].

“Folks, I don’t know what you saw on your way into work this morning, but I saw two things.  First, I saw hundreds of protestors telling the world what massive jerks we are.  It’s tempting to write them off, it is.  But if you look at them closely, they’re not freaks.  They look like our kids — at least my kids.  They look pretty much what you’d expect young people to look like if they were pissed off and hadn’t showered in a few days.  And they really, really hate us.

“Second, I saw wreaths of flowers in front of the freaking Apple stores — one in my home, one in the city.  Flowers!  And cards, and big, hand-decorated signs thanking Steve Jobs for everything he did for them.  For Steve Jobs!  Who never went out of his way to look nice, or generous, or statesmanlike, or anything like that.  At least Oprah gave away some cars.  Steve Jobs never gave away anything.  Nor did he kiss babies, or comfort the weak and the sick, or go globetrotting with Bono.  

“So why is he getting flowers and we’re getting the one-finger salute?  Let’s be honest about this.  Apple has constantly made amazing products.  Constantly.  One damned thing after the other.  They didn’t establish a beachhead and then try to leverage that into a competitive advantage.  They had great ideas, built on them, blew them up, and then had new great ideas.  You know how they had to completely redo their supply chain just going from the iPhone 3 to the 4?  They could have milked the 3 for years before the 4, much less the iPad — and then the iPad 2.  The iPad 2!  Even my 8-year old has an iPad 2.  Take it away from her and all hell breaks loose.

“And let’s face it:  that’s what we would have done.  We would have — maybe — done the iPod, and we would have absolutely milked that sucker for everything that it was worth.  And instead of thinking of the next product that would blow people’s socks off, we’d be hiring consultants to tell us how to use it to maximize its long-term competitive advantage, so we could milk it even longer.  Like what Microsoft has done with its operating system; like what Google does with its search engine and gmail.  Instead of innovating and innovating, we would have innovated and leveraged, and congratulated ourselves for our shrewdness.

“Oh, by the way, if you’re about to say that if we don’t make competitive advantage our priority that our stock price will suffer, just shut up.  Apple’s went up 9000 percent since 1997.  9-0-0-0.  OK?  

“So here’s what we’re going to do.  We’re going to start thinking first, second, and third about how we make our customers’ lives better, about making them smile when they think of us.  Not as part of a marketing brochure, but as how we approach our business.  We’re going to think about what we aren’t doing that we should, and what we are that we shouldn’t.  Then we’ll think about how to make money at it — and there will be money to be made.  We’re going to stop settling.  We’re going to stop worrying about looking occasionally ridiculous.   We’re going to dare to be exceptional.

That’s the new mission, and we’re retooling everything to accomplish it — compensation structures, personnel policies, recruitment, budget policy, everything.  

“And if any of you don’t feel that way, I expect your letters of resignation on my desk by noon.  

Don’t you think this is something Jobs would have appreciated more than all the kind words and fanfare?