President Pragmatist

Obama is passionate about being a pragmatist and he refuses to get drawn into the trap of focusing on tactics over strategy. He has a goal of what direction he wants to move the country in, and he is willing to start small and to build piece by piece because knows that throughout history many of America's greatest achievements started small and built bit by bit till they became core pillars of our system. Andrew Sullivan has it right in his assessment of Obama's tax cut deal

Obama has secured - with Republican backing - a big new stimulus that will almost certainly goose growth and lower unemployment as he moves toward re-election. If growth accelerates, none of the current political jockeying and Halperin-style hyper-ventilation will matter. Obama will benefit - thanks, in part, to Republican dogma. So here's something the liberal base can chew on if they need some grist: how cool is it that Mitch McConnell just made Barack Obama's re-election more likely? Bet you didn't see that one coming, did you?

The mix of policies is also shrewd from a strategic point of view.

At some point, I suspect, the Congress will have to decide between extending the payroll tax holiday or keeping the Bush tax cuts for millionaires - the double-track of the current Keynesian deal. I think Obama wins on that one, and has set up the kind of future choice the GOP really doesn't want to make. What he has done, in other words, is avoid an all-out fight over short-term taxes and spending now in the wake of a big GOP victory in order to set up the real debate about long-term taxes and spending over the next two years, leading into a pivotal 2012 election that could set the fiscal and political direction of this country for decades, an election in which he may well have much more of an advantage than he does now.

This is the difference between tactics and strategy. The GOP has won again on tactics, but keeps losing on strategy. More broadly, as this sinks in, Obama's ownership of this deal will help restore the sense that he is in command of events, and has shifted to the center (even though he is steadily advancing center-left goals). It's already being touted as "triangulation" by some on the right even as it contains major liberal faves - unemployment insurance for another 13 months, EITC expansion, college tax credits, and a pay-roll tax cut.

My view is that if this deal is a harbinger for the negotiation Obama will continue with the GOP for the next two years, he will come into his own.

What you realize if you pay attention is that Obama is not looking at things the same way as everyone else. He is looking at where he wants to lead the country, what he is able to do in the present to get the country closer to realizing his vision for it, and lastly, what does history tell him about the nature of change in America, and how does that inform his decisions in the present and his vision for the future. You can call it whatever you want, but before he's out of office he'll have run circles around most everyone in Washington, and I think the country will be better for it.

Some Empire

Today William C. Rhoden published in the New York Times one of those incredibly asinine sports columns that makes a big splashy claim in the headline that the facts it presents in the body of the article cannot even begin to support because reality is not of the writer's creation. Under the title "The Day the Patriots Empire Began to Crumble" Rhoden uses the "spy gate" incident from a few years ago when the Patriot's head coach Bill Belichick was caught in a long-term pattern of cheating by taping other teams' practices to foretell the demise of the three time Super Bowl Champion Patriots.

Normally unrestrained in heaping praise on his team, Ryan was careful with his remarks about Belichick and the Patriots. It was as if he wanted to play down the perception that a shift in power was taking place.

Too late. The shift has occurred: the Jets are in ascendancy and New England is in retrograde

One might think that the link under the highlighted phrase "a shift in power was taking place" would provide some evidence of this supposed "shift in power," but it doesn't. It just links to an article about "spy gate." And of course what is this "shift in power anyways?" Going into the game the Jets and Patriots had identical 9-2 records, so it certainly isn't a power shift that was yet evident on the field, the teams appeared equal going into the game. And of course Rhoden admits as much, arguing that the power shift "was set in motion...by a moral misstep" and "has nothing to do with one game, one season, injuries, or upheaval," which is another way of saying that Rhoden made it up, but let's let him try and make his argument.

The scandal, which came to be called Spygate, put New England and Belichick under a cloud, although by 2007, several teams had begun to suspect the Patriots were taping opposing coaches.

The Green Bay Packers caught New England in the act in 2006 but never took the complaint further. Belichick was thought to be taping opponents when Mangini was a member of the Patriots’ defensive staff under Belichick from 2000 to 2005.

The N.F.L. fined Belichick $500,000 and the team $250,000 and took away a first-round pick in the 2008 draft.

But the Patriots and Belichick lost more than money. New England lost some of its luster as a first-class organization. No one doubts Belichick’s coaching genius, but he lost a measure of respect for violating the sanctity of sportsmanship and the integrity of competition.

Is losing people's respect the same thing as losing a sports empire especially since that supposed sporting empire hasn't stopped winning and shows no signs of stopping now? It's an asinine argument. If you wanted to make the argument that people's perception of Bill Belichick has been forever diminished (I've never particularly liked him), that would be supported by the evidence, but sports empires are build on winning. In fact, that's Rhoden's ultimate conclusion

New England will not be defined by the spying fiasco. The Patriots don’t need to win another championship to validate themselves, nor does Belichick. He has three Super Bowl rings as validation.

But Spygate left a stain that will not be washed away by victories and even championships.

So instead of what Rhoden promised, the decline of a entire sporting empire, we only have the sullied reputation of the coach of that empire. And so as if to prove the idiocy of Rhoden's claimed power shift from the Patriots to the Jets, the Patriots in the words of Mike Tirico, the man who called the game and who grew up a Jets fan, "demolished and embarrassed the Jets" 45 - 3 tonight. The "same old Jets" lamented Tirico "got to the big game and didn't convert." One might also call these the same old Patriots. They are right where they've been every year since 2001, right in the thick of the playoff race. Some empire.

Lord of All Hopefulness

I can vividly remember wondering about 10 years ago when I was still in high school whether my generation would have any big challenges to face. It was a naive thought, but perhaps an understandable one for a young, white American growing up in the suburbs and living at the tail-end of the dot-com boom. The Cold War was over, we were at peace, we were making millions of dollars investing in all these incredibly exciting and innovative companies that were doing all of these really cool things, or so it seemed from watching the newsmedia. We had come a long way on Civil Rights, not far enough, but far enough that it didn't seem as potent a force for social change as it once was. From my vantage point, limited as it was, it seemed the long periods of tumult and conflict and fear and the death of thousands of young men in battles far overseas and social upheaval and economic collapse and privation that had so epically defined the generations of my parents and their parents were not likely to similarly define my future.

But then in my last quarter of college at Ohio State I took a graduate-level seminar on the history of modern American political economy and my eyes were opened. I was given a preview of what is happening now in America with our economic malaise, with the slow-motion destruction of the middle-class, with the disintegration of the rust-belt and the once vital now crumbling manufacturing communities that defined it. All these acute problems now before us are the results of decades of decisions that have eroded the social compact that the political and economic elites once had with the American middle class.

Both Black and White working class Americans used to be able to leave high school and go work hard in a factory and still be able to own a home, a car, and provide for a family. Things were that way for a short amount of time, but it became in Post World Way II America a powerful symbol of the success of the American system. The knowledge in the security afforded by hard work was the backbone of American confidence and sense of self-worth. In America you could be anything if you worked hard for it, or at least that was the myth.

But already even then, even when factory jobs provided entry into the middle class for millions of Americans forces were already at work that would break that compact and its been broken ever since. Now we're just paying the full price for it.

When we helped set up the World Bank, when we helped rebuild Europe under the Marshall Plan, when we began to re-knit the world's economy back together after World War II we were doing it because it would benefit us enormously, but of course one of the unintended consequences of that was that the world got a lot richer too, and we lost our relative economic position. A lot of people act like it's some kind of recent phenomenon that American workers have to compete with the rest of the world's workers. But this has been true for a long time now. American workers have been losing going on 60 years now, and they're not going to make it back up anytime soon. We've failed to ensure for a long time now that our education system was providing for young Americans the skills they need to succeed in the world we helped to make so much more competitive. As a result of that and the decline of unions and the explosion in corporate compensation we've seen real wages stagnate since the Johnson administration for almost everyone except the very rich. We had been using debt for a long time to make up that difference and now we 300,000,000 Americans owe something like $13 trillion in private debt, more by the way than we owe in public debt.

And yet our politics is so corrupted and so cynical at the moment that it can't produce any actions that might actually help grow the economy back out of the massive hole it's fallen into, let alone begin to start helping the middle class to crawl its way back. And so I posted the video above of my favorite hymn because no matter what you believe in, we all need hope at a time like this.

Follow Up from Gee

So in the wake of everyone (I love speaking in hyperbole) jumping all over President Gee for his "We don't play the little sisters of the poor" needling of Boise State and TCU, Gee decided to remind everyone why he was voted the best University President in America by Time Magazine, and masterfully displayed his self deprecating charm to diffuse the situation.

What do I know about college football? I look like Orville Redenbacher. I have no business talking about college football

You gotta love that quote, it's hilarious, it shows self awareness, it's self-depricating, and it diffuses the situation with his admitting that he shouldn't have been talking about the issue in the first place (I disagree but from a pr standpoint he's probably doing the right thing) and it also suggests a background question of "why was anyone paying so much attention to what I was saying about college football anyways?" But then he outdoes himself with these statements quoted from the end of the article.

Gee told the Dispatch he has since decided, "I need to keep my mouth closed."

"I'm very blessed to have the best athletic director and best football coach in the country," Gee said, the newspaper reported. "They run the athletic program and I run the university, and I should have stayed out of there. What I should do is go over to the surgical suites and get my foot extricated from my mouth."

As for the real Little Sisters of the Poor -- a Roman Catholic women's religious order serving the elderly -- Gee said he had reached out to one of the order's homes in Ohio.

"I sent a [personal] check to the Mother Superior up there and invited her to a ballgame," he said, according to the report.

I mean, that's just text book right there. He puts his full support in his staff and says he'll let them handle things from now on, they know what they're doing, and then he even sends a check to the real Little Sisters of the Poor and invites their Mother Superior to a game. Genius! Thank God Ohio State's got him. Right now the state really needs good people in charge of its institutions and Gee is one of the best.

Photo Attribution: Joebengo at en.wikipedia

Potential consequences of the private control of public spaces

So I'm on an Ethan Zuckerman kick lately, and here's Zuckerman responding to a report in the Guardian that Joe Lieberman was able to pressure Amazon into kicking Wikileaks off their servers in the wake of Wikileak's recent State Department cable dump.

It’s going to be very interesting to hear how Amazon justifies this decision. If the company was required by a court order to remove the content, that’s one thing. If they simply responded to pressure from a US Senator, or to boycott threats, it sends a very disturbing message: that Amazon will remove content under political pressure. Yes, Amazon is within its legal rights to refuse service to a customer… but as I’ve argued previously, they’re a private company responsible for a public space. That’s the nature of the internet – we use it as a space for public discourse, though the sites we use for much of our discussion are owned by private corporations and controlled by terms of service that are significantly more stringent than restrictions on public speech.

In the video I posted below, Zuckerman talks for a bit about Nicholas Negroponte's book Being Digital, and most specifically about Negroponte's idea that it is hard to build connections in the world of atoms, in the world of tangible things. But, Negroponte predicted way back in 1995, in the emerging future, in the digital world, it would be much easier to build connections because information would move very easily as tiny bits at the speed of light across the globe.

But of course as Zuckerman goes on to point out, things haven't quite turned out that way (not entirely surprising when you remember that we didn't all of a sudden become a new species devoid of clannish tendencies). Information does move very quickly indeed in the digital world, but that information tends to stay within rather closed loops; basically, we talk to people who are like us.

And so, Zuckerman argues, even though we have an amazing physical infrastructure that allows us to transport both goods as well as information all across the globe, if we only focus on that infrastructure, we won't have a very good idea of what is really going on, we won't know what kinds of connections people are building and what they are doing with those connections. And he's quite right, it isn't very useful to look just at the infrastructure, but of course as his quote above makes clear, the infrastructure is still pretty important.

People are certainly aware of the change, but I sometimes wonder whether they appreciate the magnitude of the shift toward private control of our primary places of public discourse. With facebook and twitter you have incredibly important spaces for both public discourse and the private discourse that sustains it being policed by private entities. That simply wasn't the case 20 years ago. Even with the early advent of the internet, information was not as easily policed or controlled or circumscribed as it is today. It is more difficult to limit the content of a phone call, or an email message, or a short wave radio broadcast, or a snail-mail letter without reducing the desirability of the communication in a free and open society. But a post on facebook, or twitter, or this blog post for instance, it's much easier to limit the bounds of that content without materially reducing the desire to communicate through that interface because you can filter out or block just certain messages, or certain audiences from seeing certain messages.

Now, I'm not saying that facebook or twitter or amazon or google are doing anything terribly nefarious (yet), but they and the political-economic power-structure that controls the U.S. are acting in a formative period in our new media environment. Our republic has succeeded in large part thanks to the fact that our government has protected and subsidized the free press throughout our history. As communication moves increasingly through private networks instead of through public or publicly-regulated networks, will we still be able to have the free and open discourse that is so necessary to the success of a governance structure that takes its driving force from the will of the people?

One of my favorite parts of Tocqueville's Democracy in America is when he describes traveling out to the hinterlands of Tennessee or some such frontier place and coming upon a cabin deep in the woods and being dumbfounded that the resident there could speak intelligently on all the major subjects of the day because he received a newspaper. Such a thing would have been unheard of in monarchical France among the "peasants." But newspaper's in the early republic's period were subsidized by the postal service, and that allowed information to flow freely.

Will we be able to say the same about our information 20 years from now? To answer that question we will have to pay close attention to both changes in our communication patterns and in our communication infrastructure.

Ethan Zuckerman on Rewiring Our World

There's a lot to think about here. I will say that I think this works at many different levels in one's life, not just globally. We need people to knock us out of our orbit. We humans love regularity, love pattern, and that can be ok; but too much of a good thing...well, you know. New pathways, new ways of seeing the world, new information, all of these things are healthy and necessary. Whether you're talking about family, work, friends, whatever, it's never good to be locked into the same way of doing things time after time. When you get out of your pattern, and are willing to accept the value of that change, you are often able to learn valuable things about yourself and the world around you that you would never have known before.

The Late Great Leslie Nielsen Shares a Policy Thought

Mayor: Now Drebin, I don't want any trouble like you had on the South Side last year, that's my policy.

Frank Drebin: Well, when I see five weirdos, dressed in togas, stabbing a man in the middle of the park in full view of a hundred people, I shoot the bastards, that's my policy!

Mayor: That was a Shakespeare-In-The-Park production of "Julius Caesar," you moron! You killed five actors! Good ones!

RIP Leslie Nielsen

Bottom-up Innovation and the Survival of Organizations

Timothy B. Lee has some wise words to ponder:

So far I’ve described top-down thinking as the tendency to underestimate the effectiveness of bottom-up processes like evolution or Wikipedia, based on the assumption that decentralized systems can’t work well without someone “in charge.” The Innovator’s Dilemma critiques the flip-side of this fallacy: the tendency to believe that when an organization does have someone in charge of it, that that person has a lot of control over the organization’s behavior. In reality, hierarchical organizations have an internal logic that severely constrains the options of the people in charge of them. Bottom-up thinkers in both cases focus on the complexity of the underlying systems, and resist the urge to over-simplify the situation by focusing too much on the people in charge (or lack thereof).

No matter which way you look at or perceive the world there is something you'll be missing. That's why it's so important to view the world from as many different perspectives as possible. I think the advantage of "bottom-up" thinking is that inherently there are more people, and therefore more perspectives, at the "bottom" than there are at the top. This gives people at the bottom more chances to see things that others can't see and then take advantage of them (as long as the system allows for it). So I don't know if I fully agree with Lee on the advantages of "bottom-up-thinkers" being their focus on the complexity of underlying systems. I think that "top-down-thinkers" or the people "in-charge" also often focus on the complexity of a given situation, I just think that their particular vantage point blinds them to things more easily seen from a different position. But Lee draws us to an important point nonetheless. Organizations and the people in charge of them often do not have as many options available to them as they might need to survive and succeed. They are often to their detriment attached to their niche, and when the world changes and that niche goes away they die. The adaptable survive, and one common trait of adaptable people is the ability to look at things from many different perspectives, understand the causes and consequences of various changes in the world quickly, and alter behavior accordingly. This is harder for organizations to accomplish because it requires a lot of engagement with the outside world, and empowering employees at lower tiers within the organization to make important decisions. But it can be done.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Gobble! Gobble!

Gee's Comments about Boise and TCU in Context

Speaking about whether TCU and Boise State deserve to play for the BCS National Title, Ohio State President Gordon Gee said today

Well, I don't know enough about the X's and O's of college football...I do know, having been both a Southeastern Conference president and a Big Ten president, that it's like murderer's row every week for these schools. We do not play the Little Sisters of the Poor. We play very fine schools on any given day. So I think until a university runs through that gantlet that there's some reason to believe that they not be the best teams to [be] in the big ballgame.

In response Pat Forde, ESPN College Football writer and Boise State bandwagon member, tweeted

With all due respect to Ohio State prez Gordon Gee: his Buckeyes would be beaten by both Boise and TCU this year. Perhaps handily.

Then Adam Rittenberg, ESPN Big Ten college football blogger followed up with some non-micro blog style commentary of his own, which included these choice phrases in response to Gee

Ugh. It's just not cool for Goliath to pick on David when Goliath's forehead keeps filling up with welts.

But that's beside the point. The Big Ten is a very tough conference this season. Would Boise State or TCU make it through a Big Ten schedule unscathed? It'd be tough, but it's also possible.

The bigger issue is that Ohio State has a tough time making the strength of schedule argument in 2010. Although the Buckeyes take more scheduling risks than many of their Big Ten brethren, they still face the Eastern Michigans of the world too often.

Then

One thing several Ohio State fans pointed out on my chat is that Gee has just given Boise State or TCU some bulletin-board material if it should face the Buckeyes in a BCS bowl. Ohio State has had a hard enough time beating SEC schools in bowls. Now the Broncos, who have been brilliant in BCS games, or TCU have some extra incentive to beat the Scarlet and Gray.

It's fine for Gee to support a system that is set up to benefit his school. But singling out Boise State and TCU does nothing to help Ohio State.

I disagree with President Gee's premise (and it's a premise that pretty much everyone in the SEC has made with a lot less fanfare), which is that because TCU and Boise State haven't played as strong a schedule (especially in conference it would seem from his comments) as Big Ten and SEC teams play, that that somehow makes them undeserving of playing for the National Title. Both TCU and Boise have been dominant this season, and I don't think there is a team in all of college football that wouldn't have trouble facing them. Both TCU and Boise execute at a very high level, they always play hard and tough and smart, and they aren't afraid of anybody. I think college football is measurably improved by their emergence as legitimate title contenders, and I would love to see either one of them get the chance to play for the National Title against a power conference school so that they can put to rest this idea that they can't compete with and beat the best.

But I also think that Rittenberg is wrong to argue that Gee's words do nothing for Ohio State, and I think that's because he doesn't know Ohio State the University very well, or what Gordon Gee is trying to accomplish there. I know Ohio State pretty well. My Parents still teach there, both since the 1970s, and they've each met and interacted with President Gee on a number of occasions, and I'm an Ohio State alum, and I've also heard President Gee speak on a number of occasions. One of the first anecdotes I heard from my parents about something Gee said when he arrived back at Ohio State on his second go-round as OSU president separated by stints at Brown and Vanderbilt went something along the lines of "I've just been president of two Universities that are not as good as they think they are, and now I'm the president of a University that is better than it thinks it is."

The thing I love about Gordon Gee, the thing that every Ohio State person loves about Gordon Gee, is that he believes Ohio State is a great university and he wants to make absolutely sure that it realizes that it's a great university, which is a much harder thing than it sounds. Ohio is a pathologically modest state, and Ohio State has often, to its detriment, been symptomatic of that pathology. So Gee is trying to give Ohio State confidence, swagger, ambition. He wants it to set its sights high, to believe that it can be the best public institution in America. It's his over-riding message whenever I've heard him talk. And so he likes to trumpet the things that are great about Ohio State, which obviously includes the football team, of which he is unabashedly proud.

Pat Forde and Rittenberg are both reacting to Gee's comments in the light of this present season. Oh no! Bulletin board material for Boise and TCU! Oh, but the Sagarin rankings show that Ohio State's strength of schedule is not much better than TCU or Boise! Oh, Ohio State might not even be able to compete with TCU and Boise! Gee doesn't care. He knows something that he wants all Ohio State fans to know and that is that Ohio State isn't competing with Boise and TCU, Ohio State has already reached the highest level of college football. Ohio State isn't looking for a signature program win, it isn't looking to be taken seriously by the establishment, it is the establishment. Gee doesn't care if Boise or TCU could beat Ohio State this year on a neutral field, he's trying to give an Ohio State program back some of the swagger it lost losing to LSU and Florida in National Title games by reminding everyone that Ohio State isn't worried about the fad schools of the moment because it knows that it's better than that.

There's a story I once heard about Larry Bird at the NBA All-Star Game three point shooting competition. Larry arrives and he's warming up and kind of studying all the other competitors but not saying anything to them, and they're a little uneasy because they don't know quite what he's doing and so they all start staring back at him. Larry smiles at this and says, "I'm just trying to see who's going to be second." Ohio State should always be wondering who's going to be second, that's Gee's point. That's not to say that Ohio State would beat TCU or Boise this year (according to Jeff Sagarin's rankings, TCU and Boise should both be classified as 5 point favorites over Ohio State, which is pretty good, but hardly the slam-dunk Forde implies), but success requires confidence, TCU and Boise know that as well as anyone. Gee is trying to make sure Ohio State has as much confidence as it needs.

Why Hate LeBron?

Michael Rosenberg at Sports Illustrated has one of the better articles I've seen about "Lebron Hatred" and the reasons behind it. The main core of his argument is summed up in this passage.

If we did not love sports, we would not hate LeBron James. He has not sinned against society. He has sinned against competition. And this sounds backward, but it's true: If he had sinned against society, we would have an easier time forgiving him. We all sin against society at some point. In sports, competition is everything.

I think this more or less nails it. LeBron, by working together with D-Wade and Chris Bosh to create a three superstar team, in most people's minds is guilty of taking a shortcut to win a championship. A championship has value because it is difficult to attain, because past champions had to give their blood, sweat, and tears to achieve it. It's cliche, we've all heard it in cheesy sports movies and on NFL Films documentaries, but champions are supposed to have gone above and beyond, are supposed to suffer, to fight back, to look defeat in the eye, to face their demons and in the end triumph in spite of all of it. LeBron though has seemingly found a way around that by simply joining two of the other best players in the game to make things easier for himself. I don't know if that's actually objectively true. As of today, the Miami Heat are 8-6, they have just lost Udonis Haslem, one of their best role players and team leaders, for at least the next four months, if not longer, D-Wade continues to play his no-holds-barred style, which makes him spectacular as well as injury prone, and the Heat seems to have trouble matching up with and defending size. But it's still far to early to tell how good the Heat will be, and they've shown at times already this year that they can be an elite team. If they become that elite team this year, or next, or the year after that, and LeBron, Bosh, and Wade hoist that championship banner, many people will look on and wonder why any of it matters. When the best have conspired to beat the rest is it really such a great achievement? And, won't it something to see if LeBron is 35 and still without a championship? How desperate for achievement will he be then?

San Francisco is beautiful

The Unseen Sea from Simon Christen on Vimeo.