The next best thing is terrible

I say much that is critical of Obama in this column, as I have in other recent columns. I should make clear, however, that I consider him light-years better than George W. Bush or indeed than any Republican candidate on the horizon. Similarly, on the whole, I find a Democratic majority in Congress infinitely preferable to a Republican one. And so are Democratic majorities in state legislatures, the importance of which cannot be overestimated. Next year, these legislatures will be doing the redistricting of congressional districts based on the 2010 census. It’s fair to predict that the more seats are made safely Republican, the more Tea Party members we will have in Congress. The Tea Partiers are not all bad people, but they do seem totally disconnected from the real world of responsible problem solving.

To be sure, Illinois would understand

The headline reads “Lincoln Voters Alive, Prosecutor Says.” No, it is not a story about surviving members from the 1860 or 1864 electorate. It is a recent article from the Charleston Gazette, describing voters of Lincoln County, West Virginia, whose eligibility had been questioned. My home state is unique. Only in West Virginia could it be news that voters are alive.

The Beginning is not the End

Perhaps my most ancient complaint against the Washington press corps is that it has regarded the passage of a bill as the end of the story, with a resulting failure to follow the bill’s implementation and to determine how it is being carried out. At long last there seems to be at least some sign of an awakening—first on the health bill, and most recently on Wall Street reform legislation. Stories about the passage of the new laws have made the point that the reforms cannot be fairly judged until the Fed, the SEC, and other agencies actually implement them.

Another heartening sign is the follow-up stories on the health bill that have already appeared. For example, the New York Times has reported that where states have failed to establish coverage for the hard to insure, the federal government is stepping in to do the job. And the Washington Post has reported that health insurers are already hard at work pressing regulators to interpret the new law in their favor. You will recall that the health care bill requires that at least 80 percent of premium dollars go to medical and not administrative expenses. Among the items that insurers are contending should be treated as medical expenses, writes the Post’s David S. Hilzenrath, are the cost of “pre-certification” departments that “determine whether the insurer should cover treatment that doctors have proposed” and the conducting of “reviews when patients appeal an insurance company’s decision to deny coverage.”

These expenses are so obviously administrative that Hilzenrath’s story should act as an early warning to the media to keep an eye peeled on attempts by the insurance industry to have its way with the health bill. We have already a similar warning about Wall Street reform from Eric Dash and Nelson D. Schwartz of the New York Times, whose piece is subtitled “Its Fight Ended, Wall St. Is Already Working Around New Regulations” and a Times lead article by Binyamin Appelbaum, “On Finance Bill, Lobbying Shifts to Regulations.”

News you can lose

Unfortunately, even as the case for better coverage of federal agencies becomes more obvious—consider not only the health care and Wall Street examples, but the recent tragedies caused in considerable part by ineptitude at the Mine Safety and Health Administration and the Minerals Management Service—Jodi Enda of American Journalism Review reports that coverage of federal agencies is at “an alarming low,” because of cutbacks in print journalism and because of the inattention of the networks and cable television news outlets to anything other than “the story of the day out of the White House, the Capitol and the most visible departments, such as Defense, State, Justice and Homeland Security.”

Enda notes that the immense Department of Agriculture is not covered at all except by trade publications, which usually have the most modest circulation and equally little concern for the overall public interest, as opposed to the special interests to which they cater.

While we’re at it, how much of a salary
cut would work for you?

I have frequently expressed concern that the White House has been as deficient as the media in its lack of curiosity about what’s going in the bureaucracies that it oversees. Further confirmation of my fear comes from a recent headline in the Washington Post: “White House Orders Agencies to Identify Trimmable Programs.” It seems to me that the White House should know by now what these programs are—or at least have acquired enough sophistication about the ways of Washington to know that the agencies themselves are the least likely to concede that any of their functions is less than absolutely essential.

Our strained first (second, and third) line of defense

There are compelling arguments for maintaining a substantial combat force in Afghanistan. But there is one overwhelming reason why we can’t continue: our military has been pushed beyond the breaking point. “Army suicides hit a monthly high in June,” reports the Washington Post. “The number of soldiers forced to leave the Army solely because of a mental disorder has increased by 64% from 2005 to 2009,” reports USA Today. Army Lt. Col. Rebecca Porter, an Army behavioral health official, tells USA Today that research shows “a clear relationship between multiple deployments and increased symptoms of anxiety, depression and PTSD.” During World War II, the surgeon general concluded that 200 to 240 days of combat pushed soldiers to the breaking point. Iraq and Afghanistan have already pushed many well beyond that limit.

As we are, alas, almost alone in pointing out, this country has fewer than 100,000 combat soldiers and marines. The total number of service members is of course much higher, but by far the greater number perform support functions, so we deploy the same fellows over and over again to get shot at and have their brains rattled by IEDs. We have read a lot recently about the danger of concussions to football players. What about the dangers to soldiers? Army Sgt. Chad Joiner tells USA Today’s Gregg Zoroya that he has been “near seven blasts during three tours of combat.”

Still not convinced?

For me, the condition of our troops is reason enough to radically reduce our combat exposure in Afghanistan, but for those who need more convincing, I offer the hopeless corruption of the Karzai government. Just consider two recent headlines: “Karzai Officials Seen Impeding Bribery Probes” (Washington Post); “Corruption Suspected in Airlift of Billions in Cash From Kabul” (Wall Street Journal). And did you see the walking tour of Kabul that NBC’s Richard Engel conducted for MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow? Incredibly large mansions for the elite stand along unpaved streets and open sewers and the squalor in which most Afghans live. Engel explains that some of the billions we have given to the Afghan government have gone to build these structures, but most of it is deposited in the banks of Dubai and other safe havens for the funds ripped off by Karzai’s cronies.

Sound familiar?

By the way, you’ve read a lot recently about the Pakistan intelligence agency’s ties to the Taliban. You read it here eight years ago.

The Vietnam Parallel, Part 1

The reason we finally had to give up in Vietnam is that there, too, we were allied with a government that was corrupt, inefficient, and unable to inspire the loyalty of its people or its soldiers, even though many of them had no desire to live under the North Vietnamese Communists.

When Obama was deciding to escalate in Afghanistan, Joe Biden urged that he consider the consequences of the corruption of the Karzai government. Similarly, when the Johnson administration took the decision to make the major escalation in Vietnam in July of 1965, several participants in the deliberations mentioned the weakness of the South Vietnamese government. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge concluded, “I don’t think we ought to take this government seriously.” Yet Johnson, supported by all but one of his national security team, made the decision to commit most of the American troops who were to serve and die in Vietnam.

The Vietnam Parallel, Part 2

At the time, the case for escalation in Vietnam seemed just as compelling as has the case for escalation in Afghanistan. Back then, the Communists seemed an even more potent threat than the Taliban or al-Qaeda are today. The fear now is that our enemies might get control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Then, the Communists already had their own nukes and seemed just as implacable in their hatred of democracy and of the United States. In 1961, they had built the Berlin Wall, and in 1968 they would cruelly crush the democratic awakening in Czechoslovakia. Surrendering South Vietnam to them seemed just as unthinkable as conceding any ground to the Taliban does today.

So my point is not that our choices are easy. It is only that the course we choose must face the facts that our troops are worn out and that the Karzai government is too corrupt and incompetent to win the loyalty of the Afghan people.

The real nuclear buildup

Speaking of matters nuclear, the expansion of the nuclear power industry that many are advocating today seems to make sense—that is, except for one little problem, and that is how to dispose of radioactive waste. It is crystal clear that the state of Nevada doesn’t want it. So it’s held in places like Wiscasset, Maine, where the now-closed Maine Yankee nuclear plant left behind fifty-four concrete silos, each seventeen feet tall, and each holding 150 tons of radioactive waste. As the Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Smith explains, “quite simply, the government hasn’t found a permanent place to put it.”

“Breaking point” isn’t just a figure of speech

To put a human face on those suicides by our soldiers, the Washington Post’s Greg Jaffe, whose reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan has been consistently first-rate, recently told the story of Staff Sgt. Thaddeus S. Montgomery Jr., who endured three years of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan as a Humvee gunner, a sniper, and an infantry squad leader. For much of that period, Montgomery struck his comrades as a fearless and upbeat leader. One of his men described him this way: “Monty was someone I could talk to when things got tough. He brought laughter to the squad and a bright outlook on life.”

But those years of combat took their toll. They included “five complex enemy ambushes, three roadside bomb attacks, and a handful of sniper and mortar assaults.” Finally, on January 16, 2010, his company came back from a “harrowing patrol in which his fighting position collapsed on him.” After this, “Montgomery withdrew from his friends and said he could no longer fight.” A few days later, he killed himself.

I sure wonder where I’ll work after I leave my SEC job of monitoring wealthy businesses like yours

I am delighted to see that Senator Charles Grassley has asked the SEC’s inspector general to review that agency’s “revolving door” to make sure that “officials are more focused on regulation and enforcement than on getting their next job in the industry they are supposed to oversee.” I hope the senator and his colleagues will show similar concern about themselves and their staffs. It is true that legislators are at least somewhat inhibited from selling out by their need to get reelected. The safer their seat, however, the less that inhibition applies. And there is nothing to keep a staff member from giving priority to securing his next job, which is precisely what more and more of them appear to be doing. This corruption of staff is among the greatest scandals to emerge in Washington since I first came here fifty years ago.

The Bhopal Lesson

A caution about BP: it is essential that we not forget, that we hold their feet to the fire on the cleanup, and that we do not let up until those responsible for the disaster are brought to justice. Consider what Union Carbide and the company that later acquired it, Dow Chemical, got away with after the 1984 chemical leak in Bhopal, India, which killed over 3,000 people immediately, and several thousand later.

It has taken more than twenty-five years to bring even a few of the culpable executives to justice. Only this summer, eight were found guilty in a Bhopal court, but they were sentenced to just two years in jail and fined the equivalent of $2,300. Although both Union Carbide and Dow are American companies, with their policies determined by American executives, not one American has been convicted. In civil damages Carbide gave the average victim the grand sum of $550.

By the way, as Lydia Polgreen and Hari Kumar of the New York Times point out, 425 tons of hazardous waste remains at the site, still uncleaned by Carbide or Dow.

Bob Herbert: Not boring

I have to confess that I used to dismiss Bob Herbert as a predictable liberal, but his recent columns about jobs and Afghanistan have struck me as outstanding, both for their passion and their humanity.

Overworked today, overpaid tomorrow

Ever since I suffered at the hands of an exhausted emergency room resident, I have worried about the problem of overworked young doctors. In the years that followed, there have been many proposals for reform. The resulting rules, however, have seemed abysmally weak. In New York, for instance, residents are “limited” to serving eighty-five hours per week. The latest proposal from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education is to limit the shifts worked by first-year doctors to sixteen hours. That’s still too much. Not only are these physicians likely to commit medical errors because they are too tired to think straight; I’m also convinced that overworking young physicians breeds a self-pity that convinces them that, later in their careers, they deserve to drive Jaguars, enjoy incomes of several hundred thousand dollars a year, and unwind with a round of golf at their country clubs while the young residents are slaving back at the hospital.

What this headline won’t tell you

“Avandia Gets Equivocal Vote from FDA Panel. Fewer Than Half Want Diabetes Drug Pulled over Safety Concerns.” If this subhead from the Washington Post leads you to assume that more than half the panel approved of Avandia, it was significantly misleading. Here’s what you would have found if you had stuck it out through the story’s fifth paragraph: of the thirty-two members of the FDA panel who voted, only three favored allowing Avandia to continue its present sales practices unaltered. What is more, “10 voted that it should remain available, with serious label revisions and possible restrictions on its sale,” seven “voted to add further warnings to the drug’s label,” and twelve voted to prohibit the drug completely. A lot of us read three or four stories carefully in our daily newspapers but scan the rest of the contents. This means that the writers of headlines have an obligation to take care, especially when a threat to health, like a potentially dangerous drug, is concerned.

Don’t look over your shoulder

Looking back to the lessons I learned while doing my book on Lyndon Johnson, one stands out: Democratic presidents can make major mistakes out of fear of Republican criticism. My point is not that the fear was unrealistic—indeed, in each of the examples I cite below, I’m quite sure most Republicans would have acted predictably—but what I want to do is remind Obama and future presidents of the danger of yielding to it.

After John Kennedy saved us from nuclear war in the Cuban missile crisis, he concealed the most dovish action—Bobby’s secret offer to Dobryin to remove our missiles from Turkey—from the public and from Lyndon Johnson. His fear of Republican criticism led him to compound this sin, in an interview with Charlie Bartlett and Stewart Alsop, by demeaning Adlai Stevenson for his spinelessness in urging the precise action Kennedy had taken. Both Johnson and the public assumed that we had made the other fellow blink, when in fact both sides blinked.

When the Tonkin Gulf episode occurred, Johnson’s first reaction was to dismiss the attack as an understandable North Vietnamese response to South Vietnamese provocation. When, however, he was told he had to appear tough to avoid criticism from Barry Goldwater—the time was early August, during the 1964 presidential campaign—Johnson proceeded to blame the North and get Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.

Throughout the war Johnson was haunted by the fear that the GOP would accuse him of losing China again. Similarly his sending of troops to the Dominican Republic was motivated by a fear that he would be accused of losing Cuba again.

In Obama’s case fear of Republican criticism appears to have been one factor in what history may view as four serious errors: the size of the stimulus; the strategy of health care reform and its impact on the content of the bill; the escalation in Afghanistan; and the failure to take immediate control of the response to the oil spill. The most recent and most absurd example of the impact of the fear of Republican criticism was the hasty reaction of the administration, if not of Obama himself, to the apparent misdeeds of Shirley Sherrod. And I must say that I do suspect White House involvement. Lamentably, the one kind of case where a White House is sure to concern itself with what the bureaucracies are doing is when there is a high potential for publicity, positive or negative.