The burden of omniscience

We expect our presidents to be know-it-alls. That personality type seems drawn to the job. This malady is usually moderated in the aftermath of elections. Faced with a skeptical opposition, surrounded by loyal, but practical supporters and a dispassionate, inquiring press, the president is constrained. The message is always the same. You are a leader, not a king.

Until now. The "thrill down my leg" and "Obama, above it all, like God" moments could undermine any man's humility and seem to have scrambled President Obama's. We saw early evidence at the convention when he spoke the words "This is the moment when the rise of the oceans slowed and the planet started to heal.”

Unfortunately, the only lasting remedy for the omniscience phenomenon is voter sanity. Control of both houses and a filibuster-proof majority in the hands of a sitting president, any president, is a bad idea. It reinforces the delusion, rather than disarming it. Worse, it fuels the impulse to act without caution rather than suppressing it.

The press, having campaigned for this president, is caught in a trap of their own making. They defend his initiatives today, more in their own defense than the policy's. The principled opposition is toothless because they campaigned and governed as nanny-state lite for the past twenty years. The only plausible opposition comes from conservative Democrats, but they want to get elected too. Opposing the stimulus and health-care reform probably doesn't help many of them.

The country has survived the omniscience phenomenon in the past because it was a politician's disease. It is potentially more problematic this time because the president's delusion is shared by many voters and the press. If the country believes this president to be omniscient, we had better hope that he really is.

Black, white and grey in Boston

here is a certain preordained futility in writing about race in America. If you hope to persuade, you are usually just wasting computer memory.

That said, the sergeant’s account of the events rings true. He didn’t know if Dr. Gates was the victim of a home invasion or just a homeowner who had lost his keys. Might an intruder be in the house unbeknown to Dr. Gates or perhaps threatening him? The police officer is there to ascertain the facts. I’m sure that this officer has been confronted with race-tinged hostility on other occasions. What happened here? We don’t know.

While I suspect that Professor Gates jumped to the wrong conclusion concerning this event, his response was drawn from a lifetime of experience, not a moment’s. Gate’s journey started in West Virginia in the fifties and encompasses twenty years in Boston. When the definitive history of race relations in America is finally written, Boston will not be one of the happy chapters. It would be naive to think that either man can or should leave their baggage (personal experience) at home.

Dr. Gates isn’t a professional race baiter. His views, while hardly conservative, are characterized by thoughtfulness and he has publicly taken positions that conservatives have wholeheartedly endorsed.

Sergeant Conway defended himself (against all advice I’m sure) and I have to admire that. Back during the Reagan era, Iran-Contra hearings, George Schultz alone testified without counsel at his side, monitoring every word. I was pretty sure that I was detecting honesty then and I think it is probably true here. If the facts support you, no lawyer’s advice should silence you.

Dr. Gates probably misread some of the interaction and then Sgt. Conway personalized it. I find both reactions regrettable and understandable. Sometimes we just get it wrong. There are events that truly have larger implications. This is not one of them.

"In the weeds" on health reform

In the restaurant business, waitresses, bartenders and line cooks sometimes get hopelessly behind. We are doing our best but we are irretrievably lost, "in the weeds". Extra effort just makes it worse and only tomorrow's coming will set things right again.

President Obama made some brief remarks in the Rose garden yesterday promoting the health care package that is currently being debated in Congress. He is trying really hard, but it is slipping away. He is 'in the weeds' and only a new day saves him.

The president said “They (opponents) would maintain a system that works for the insurance and drug companies while becoming increasingly unaffordable for families and businesses.” How is it working for them, if, as the president acknowledges, their customers are less able to afford their products?

The president later said “Let me repeat that. If you like your plan, you will be able to keep it.” It would have been more accurate to say….If your plan survives the coming reform, you will be allowed to keep it.

Mr. Obama further assured the public that “Each bill provides a public option that will keep insurance companies honest, ensuring the competition necessary to make coverage affordable.” Read that statement carefully. It is breathtaking in its arrogance. The government’s remedy, aka the public option, will prevent companies from following their dishonest predilections. This government-generated honesty will then produce the competition that evidently is lacking now

Health care or more accurately, medical care could use some attention. The White House plan gets less focused every time someone speaks about it. It is hard to make a coherent argument for it because no one knows what is in it. The president is reduced to saying that it is comprehensive, fair and urgently needed but it doesn't ring true. The public wants to know why it is necessary, why right now, what it entails and how it is going to work.

The public option is not new. The government has provided us with three public options to date, Medicaid, Medicare and VA health care. Are we confident that the strategies and bureaucratic structures that have made these three a model of service delivery and financial viability will work for the rest of the health care market?

The president is very focused on leadership. He needs to lead this to a halt and wait for tomorrow to come.

Line item veto for Catholics

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend observed in a Newsweek editorial on July 9, 2009 that President Obama’s agenda better represented the views of American Catholics than the Pope’s. The political analysis may be correct and if the Pope were the chief lobbyist for the America Catholic laity, relevant. But in the context of religious belief, her observations are more an indictment of Catholics than the Pope.

People, in and outside the Catholic church, debate the right or wrongfulness of war, euthanasia, stem-cell research, abortion and capital punishment. The conclusions drawn are influenced by reason, ethics, politics and yes, faith. Only in recent years, would it be considered acceptable to co-opt the mantle of one’s faith to deride it.

The faith she references is an ocean wide and an inch deep. Faith has political currency today and both the left and the right are in the market for a prominent Catholic to carry their water. Kennedy Townsend fits the bill for the left. Townsend notes that “polls bear out the fact that Catholics do not want the Vatican to tell them what to think.”

She thinks that the Pontiff “could learn from Obama’s style of respectful disagreement,” yet she wants more. She sees the Pope’s respectful disagreements less charitably. Rather than being the voice of Church teaching, she envisions the Pope’s proper role as a celebrity endorser for progressive Catholicism.

The modern faithful worship a more “user friendly” God than the one introduced to us in the Baltimore catechism. This God isn’t pushy, knows his/her place and doesn’t much interfere. A God more “invented” than revealed, endorsing our decisions but not influencing them. He appears all over the political map. The Almighty has strong pro-gun and anti-immigration leanings in the South and holds an equally passionate (and divine) position in support of assisted suicide farther west.

We could successfully transform the Pope into a mere conduit for the current leanings of the faithful. In so doing, we make the Pope into the Press Secretary for Catholicism. There is no going back from that point. The credibility of the Papacy derives largely from its willingness to be pro-actively tone deaf to the politics.

An American Catholic politician who proposes that the shepherd should follow the flock is akin to an anti-civil rights Democrat or pro tax increase Republican.

Townsend can legitimately borrow the Kennedy aura to wax on things political and frankly, she should be commended for her passion. If she correctly portrays the state of Catholic political thought, it should be so acknowledged. As a political citizen, she is on solid ground. As a person of faith, she is way out on a limb.