An American Lion

What good are think tanks, anyway? They seem like a welfare system for a bunch of Poindexters who can’t get real jobs because their ideas are too weird.

Very little thinking actually happens in groups that are formed based on an ideological position. Many of the think tanks on the right are responsible for the mess we’re in now. The think tanks on the left are rife with zany ideas like raising taxes and given Americans health care coverage that is affordable. I react against wooly-headed thinking and decry a world where phony ideas are used to justify the spending of tax dollars. I don’t need a think tank to tell me what’s what. I have the Internet for that.

The last remaining avowed liberal at the Washington Post, save all the other avowed unhinged liberals, tells us about a recent experience he had with a think tank:

Late last week, I was summoned to a windowed meeting room overlooking the White House to sit with members of one of Washington’s nimbler, smarter think tanks. The assembled thinkers tried to convince me that Barack Obama was missing a historic opportunity: The legislation that was traveling under his name was increasingly unlikely to bind the middle class to his presidency or party. Cap-and-trade was a mess. Health reform was going to fail on cost control. And what of jobs? Obama, they said, had to take a firmer hand with the Congress. His hands-off approach was a fiasco. Leadership matters. It’s important. It’s needed.

Of course, as David Brooks points out, a firm hand with Congress is remembered as the defining mistake of the Bill Clinton’s first-term. As you can read in detail here, there was no mistake more consequential than the president’s decision to dictate every jot and tittle of his health reform plan to the legislature. Obama’s congressionalist approach is an effort to avoid the mistakes of the Clinton years. Predictably enough, that’s led to a growing chorus flaying him for making the opposite mistakes.

And maybe that chorus is right. But the implicit assumption of these arguments about strategy is that there is, somewhere out there, a workable strategy. That there is some way to navigate our political system such that you enact wise legislation solving pressing problems. But that’s an increasingly uncertain assumption, I think.

Ezra Klein is a bit passive here, frightened of being canned like Dan Froomkin and likely concerned about the effects of upsetting his corporate masters. I can’t get past the idea that he was “summoned” as if he were reporting for a useless round of waiting to be called for jury duty. Shouldn’t a blogger be a bit more enthusiastic about being exposed to the opinions of a think tank? Or did Klein realize up front that it was a sham? Not a people person? Afraid of being exposed to new things? I’ve always been outgoing. Perhaps, one day, it will be my undoing. But, for now, I will be a gladhander and a frisky boy.

Where does it say that a President has to lead? The Congress has to create the legislation that will be acceptable for passage. The Congress has to answer to the masters who lobby it and feed it money. The President doesn’t write the laws, he sets a clear agenda by sending an oft-ignored message to Congress about what he wants. That’s it.

It’s clear and simple to me—the Congress has its own agenda. Good government is not on that agenda.

What people who want the President to “lead” are clamoring for is cover from being held accountable, nothing more. The Congress wants to avoid having to answer for the fact that it can’t get anything out of committee without being laden with pork and with the corrupt double-dealing that is endemic to the system. You have members of Congress from the same party coming to blows over earmarks for pet projects. You have members of the President’s own party already bailing on him because they do not fear the repercussion.

Klein misses the most obvious point of all—discipline in the caucus. I’m not talking about rhetoric in front of the cameras. I’m not talking about tea parties and rides on Air Force One. I’m talking about fear. Fear of being forced to deal with the sight of the President of the United States in your home state, in your home district, embracing your sworn enemies on local television, dropping millions into the coffers of the candidate who wants to defeat you in the primaries next fall, telling the editorial board of the biggest newspaper in said region that you are a child-beating, tax-cheating, corrupt son of a bitch with a penchant for lost weekends and rolling around in your own sick after a booze cruise.

George W. Bush instilled the fear of God almighty in the Republican Party. Up until the end, they did his every bidding. President Obama does not instill fear in them yet. He needs to make threats that he intends to carry out to get wayward Democrats back in line. Then he needs to double-cross a few of them, ruin their political careers, and make examples out of them. Only then can anyone expect his agenda to move forward. In short, he must command through fear, not lead by being their pal.