Who Will Time Pick?

You have to hand it to Time magazine for managing to drum up interest in their Person of the Year choice. There was a time, I suppose up to about 15 years ago, when people really cared who Time put on the cover as Man of the Year. It meant something. But the media landscape changed, and those who care about the news can turn to a million instant outlets and portals. Time once had that marvelous voice-of-God quality of the great journalistic institutions; now it’s more obviously another voice in the choir, and a politically uniform and institutionally left-liberal choir it is.

But that’s another story. This one is about how they’ve done a good job building interest in the Person of the Year by offering a list of possible choices that contains so many losers that people couldn’t help reacting to it. Cable and broadcast news shows devoted stories and segments to it.

It was clever but also kind of nice and old-fashioned—traditional media carrying on its traditions, legacy media carrying on its legacy.

Time announces its choice tomorrow. Here a quick review of those it won’t be, and why, and who it will be.

• Bashar Assad, president of Syria. Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody likes him. There’s no way to balance the pros with the cons, no way to suggest he represents the future and not the past. It looks like he’s defeated his foes, but what does that signal long0term? He won’t do as a cover: His head looks like it was squeezed from a tube.

• Sen. Ted Cruz. Of course not. He is a living encapsulation of everything Time hates. Once they did an encapsulation of everything they hated when they put Newt Gingrich on the cover, 19 years ago. They had an awful, glowering portrait. He looked pale and creviced as the moon, and the copy as I remember it suggested he was small, cold and spooky to look at on stormy nights. But Time had to choose him: He was the biggest political story of the year, having led the Republican takeover of the House in 1994, and on his way to the speakership. They can avoid Cruz, so they will. His name was put on the list only to agitate the left, and get them popping on cable.

• Jeff Bezos. He had a big year in that he promised drone deliveries and bought the Washington Post—an investment that heartened fogies by suggesting old media has a place in the new world. If the drones happen and the Post begins to rise again toward its ancestral levels of journalistic indispensability, Bezos will be person of the year in a few years.

• Miley Cyrus. Oh dear. Why? I guess for looking like one of Satan’s pigtailed imps. Her choice would cause some controversy but too little to sell magazines. She offends only the sensitive, and they’re a diminishing demographic. To put her on the cover Time would have to laud her specific genius, which she doesn’t have, or deplore her as a signifier of unfortunate trends, which Time wouldn’t do because they don’t want to be caught on the wrong side of that argument.

• Barack Obama. Why? Because his face on the cover will depress sales? Because it will look just like last week’s cover? Because he’s hopelessly overexposed? Because he’s had his worst year? Because his poll numbers are down? Because he’s becoming boring even to his supporters? Because the Democratic Party is 12 months away from beginning to cut ties with him in order not to be dragged down? Because his signature achievement is revealed every day as a disingenuous flop? He is on the list because presidents are always on the list.

• Hassan Rouhani, president of Iran. Nah. What would that even mean? What he is as a leader remains to be seen. What is happening in the political life of his country remains to be seen. Maybe he represents an opening, maybe not. Maybe the nuclear deal is good, maybe not. Even the cover would be problematic. If Time used a photo of his normally expressionless and arguably rather smug face, no one would buy the magazine. If they commission a warm, friendly or interesting portrait it will open them to charges of being useful idiots for an evil regime. Anyway, this is America: no one knows what he looks like or who he is.

• Kathleen Sebelius. More boob bait for cable. Why would they pick her? Because she is one of the public faces of the biggest domestic-policy disaster in 100 years? Because she’s gormless, formless and deliberately obscure in all her public remarks? Because she stands for something people don’t like? Because she proved herself historically incompetent? Because not only is it true that no one knows anything about her but no one wants to know anything about her? She is a functionary, an administrator. She is a cabinet secretary.

• Edith Windsor. She would be a sentimental choice—her personal story is touching, she can arguably be called a harbinger of things to come, and Time is in line with her essential agenda. But no one beyond news sophisticates knows who she is. She’s a runner-up.

• Edward Snowden. This would be interesting. What he did this year was not only important but arguably world-changing. He has managed, like him or not, support him or not, to put front and center the issue America and the West had for a decade successfully ignored, and that is the depth, breadth and implications of government surveillance of the citizenry. That issue has now caused and will continue to cause huge discomfort and debate, and will one way or another bring legislative responses. A fresh look at Snowden’s motives and actions would require deep and original reporting, as would the question of what, exactly, he has given America’s foes and potential foes. Is he a traitor, a patriot, a whistleblower, a scoundrel? Did he put everything on the line for his beliefs, or for something smaller than belief, such as ego? What he has done will have real implications for our future. But he won’t sell magazines. Or rather he won’t sell the Person of the Year issue. People already think they have a position on him. They won’t want to get another headache, not during the holidays.

• Finally, Pope Francis. Who is the person I say will be chosen. Reasons, not in order of importance:

Because he has captured the imagination of the world. Because the Person of the Year issue comes out at Christmastime, and the choice of the pope will have seasonal synergy. Because he is coming up on one year on the throne of Peter; he is ripe for but has not yet received a major mainstream journalistic summing-up. Time will enjoy getting the jump. Because it’s clear his papacy is going to be an important one. Because Francis is different from his recent predecessors in ways Time’s editors and reporters would find congenial. Because pretty much everybody likes him. Because while many on the left and right feel they understand his economic populism, the exact form it will take—its precise nature, and what he’ll do and say down the road—is not fully clear, which gives the story a little mystery. Because the pope is a Jesuit, and Jesuits interest journalists because journalists think they’re smart. Because as a personality he is irresistable. Because he is a good man, not a bad one, and therefore makes the heart feel hopeful and not more anxious. And because he is, to a degree greater than any other leader you can name, exactly right for his time.

It will be Francis.

Low-Information Leadership

The president’s problem right now is that people think he’s smart. They think he’s in command, aware of pitfalls and complexities. That’s his reputation: He’s risen far on his brains. They think he is sophisticated.

That is his problem in the health insurance debacle.

People have seen their prices go up, their choices narrow. They have lost coverage. They have lost the comfort of keeping the doctor who knows them and knows they tend to downplay problems and not complain of pain, and so doing more tests might be in order, or tend to be hypochondriacal and probably don’t need an echocardiogram, or at least not a third one this year.

At the very least people have been inconvenienced; at the most they’ve been made more anxious in an already anxious world. In a month, at the worst they may be on a gurney in an ER not knowing the answer to the question “Do you have insurance?” and hoping they can get into an exam room before somebody runs the number on the little green plastic card they keep in the back of their wallet.

Everyone understands in their own rough way that ObamaCare is a big mess. And that it’s not the website, it’s the law itself. They have seen systems crash. In the past 20 years they’ve seen their own computers crash. They know systems and computers get fixed.

But they understand a conceptual botch when they see one. They understand this new program was so big and complex and had so many moving parts and was built on so many assumptions that may or may not hold true, and that deals with so many people with so many policies—and they know they themselves have not read their own policies, for who would when the policies, like the law that now controls the policies, are written in a way that is deliberately obscure so as to give maximum flexibility to administrators in offices far away. And that’s just your policy. What about 200 million other policies? The government can’t handle that. The government can barely put up road signs.

The new law seems like just another part of the ongoing shakedown operation that is the relationship of the individual and the federal government, circa 2013.

But back to the president, and his problem with being known as intelligent—Columbia, Harvard Law, lecturer on constitutional issues at the University of Chicago Law School.

The program he created in 2009-10, ran on in 2012, and whose implantation he delayed until one year after that election—in retrospect, that delay seems meaningful, doesn’t it?—has turned out to be wildly misleading as to its basic facts.

Millions are finding you can’t keep your plan, your premium, your deductible, your doctor. And millions more will discover this when the business mandate kicks in.

All of this—the fraudulent nature of the program—came as a rolling shock to people the past two months.

It’s a shock for most people that it’s a shambles. A fellow very friendly to the administration, a longtime supporter, cornered me at a holiday party recently to ask, with true perplexity: “How could any president put his entire reputation on the line with a program and not be on the phone every day pushing people and making sure it will work? Do you know of any president who wouldn’t do that?” I couldn’t think of one, and it’s the same question I’d been asking myself. The questioner had been the manager of a great institution, a high stakes 24/7 operation with a lot of moving parts. He knew Murphy’s law—if it can go wrong, it will. Managers—presidents—have to obsess, have to put the fear of God, as Mr. Obama says, into those below them in the line of authority. They don’t have to get down in the weeds every day but they have to know there are weeds, and that things get caught in them.

It’s a leader’s job to be skeptical of grand schemes. Sorry, that’s a conservative leader’s job. It is a liberal leader’s job to be skeptical that grand schemes will work as intended. You have to guide and goad and be careful.

And this president wasn’t. I think part of the reason he wasn’t careful is because he sort of lives in words. That’s been his whole professional life—books, speeches. Say something and it magically exists as something said, and if it’s been said and publicized it must be real. He never had to push a lever, see the machine not respond, puzzle it out and fix it. It’s all been pretty abstract for him, not concrete. He never had to stock a store, run a sale and see lots of people come but the expenses turn out to be larger than you’d expected and the profits smaller, and you have to figure out what went wrong and do better next time.

People say Mr. Obama never had to run anything, but it may be more important that he never worked for the guy who had to run something, and things got fouled up along the way and he had to turn it around. He never had to meet a payroll, never knew that stress. He probably never had to buy insurance! And you know, his policies were probably gold-plated—at the law firm, through his wife’s considerable hospital job, in the Illinois Legislature, in the U.S. Senate. Those guys know how to take care of themselves! Maybe he felt guilty. Maybe that’s to his credit, knowing he was lucky. Too bad he didn’t know what he didn’t know, like how every part has to work for a complicated machine to work.

Here I will say something harsh, and it’s connected to the thing about words but also images.

From what I have seen the administration is full of young people who’ve seen the movie but not read the book. They act bright, they know the reference, they’re credentialed. But they’ve only seen the movie about, say, the Cuban missile crisis, and then they get into a foreign-policy question and they’re seeing movies in their heads. They haven’t read the histories, the texts, which carry more information, more texture, data and subtlety, and different points of view. They’ve only seen the movie—the Cubans had the missiles and Jack said “Not another war” and Bobby said “Pearl Harbor in reverse” and dreadful old Curtis LeMay chomped his cigar…

Final Thoughts on JFK

I’m off this week but wanted to join in on some last JFK thoughts. I write just a few minutes before the 50th anniversary of that moment the shots rang out.

The television coverage has been excessive, and some have found it grating. Fair enough, but we’ll never do it like this again. There won’t be any such attention paid to the 60th and 70th; those who were there will be gone, as will be many of those who were not there but remember.

People keep doing “Where I was when I heard.” It is obnoxious, but it’s an understandably human impulse to want to locate yourself in time and space and tell someone where you were when you heard big news. Our parents did it with Dec. 7, 1941. “I was at a football game and the announcer came on and asked all military personnel to return to their bases . . .”

I was in seventh grade at John P. McKenna junior high school in Massapequa Park, Long Island. We were in the halls on our way to seventh period. My friend Karen Strazzeri walked up to me wide-eyed. “Did you hear? The president was shot.” That was too strange to be true. I told her it was probably a rumor but if it was true we’d find out soon. A few minutes later, in what I remember as social studies class, the teacher said the president had been shot. Then the principal came on the public address system and said the president was dead. We were all very quiet. Thn one boy, out of nervousness or idiocy, laughed. The teacher yelled at him, harshly: How could you so insensitive? That poor boy is probably still in therapy.

I remember that night or the next sitting on the lawn and looking up and thinking, “Isn’t it funny JFK is dead and the moon is still there and everything looks the same?”

I watched it all on TV, like everyone else. Later I worked in the CBS Newsroom on West 57th Street in Manhattan, and wound up working with the men and women who’d covered the assassination 15 years before. One of them, Marion Glick, told me what it was like. They all worked double shifts. The writers and producers and technicians, the secretaries and on-air talent, all of them felt they were performing a public service. They had a heightened sense of responsibility, like soldiers. Others felt this too. The second day, local restaurants and diners started sending over full dinners and lunches for the CBS staff, all on the house.

People debate whether JFK was a liberal or a conservative. He was a politician operating within a party that was starting to go left. He wasn’t that interested in ideology. He was propelled by a belief that of all the available leaders around, he’d be as good as any and better than most. He wanted to win, triumph and rise, and these are not bad things, and he thought that he, along with the best and the brightest he brought into the White House, could handle, with practicality and pragmatism, what came over the transom.

He was curiously passive about his legislative agenda. You always get a sense when you read the histories that he thought he’d always have trouble with those old Neanderthals in the Senate. It took Lyndon Johnson, the least appreciated president of modern times, who had the bad luck to follow Jack Kennedy’s act, to bully JFK’s agenda through. He knew those senators, knew what they needed, as opposed to desired and liked to pose about. He made deals, bent them to his will. Thus came the civil rights laws and Medicare. It is amazing that he gets so little public credit for these things. But he didn’t have dash and he wasn’t a glamorous or romantic figure.

You can’t ignore the sheer glamour in the Kennedy story. Yes it was the first fully televised White House, and yes his friends in the press splashed pictures of the family all over their magazines, but people wanted to look at them—there was a market for them—because they were beautiful and young and sun-splashed. They were like movie stars. The Nixons were not, Hubert Humphrey was not. They were at a disadvantage.

Anyway it’s foolish not to remember that glamour was part of the story.

Two small points. It is interesting that JFK was celebrated as the first modern president, the first truly hip president, and yet the parts of him we celebrate most are actually the old virtues. He lied to get into the military, not to get out of it. He was sick, claimed to be well, and served as a naval officer in the war. In the postwar years he was in fairly constant physical pain, but he got up every day and did his demanding jobs. He played hurt. He was from a big, seemingly close family and seemed very much the family man himself. What we liked most about him wasn’t hip.

And he was contained. He operated within his own physical space and was not florid or mawkish or creepily domineering in his physical aspect.

For generations after him politicians imitated him—his mannerisms, his look, his hair. Before JFK hair was not a political virtue. After him it was. I remember a candidate for the U.S. Senate in New York who was the first candidate to blow-dry his hair. He had a big swoop of it. That guy ran on his hair. It was his platform. I remember a local New York City political figure who wore a kind of JFK wig, a big strange shock of hair that looked twice as big as his head. And he went pretty far.

If they had to imitate anything I wish it was how distanced, ironic and modest JFK was in the physical sphere. He didn’t hug the other pols on the platform, he didn’t give a big man-hug to the others on the dais, he didn’t kiss everyone and point at the audience and give them a thumbs-up. He didn’t act, he just was. Like a grownup. Like a person with dignity. Like a person with public boundaries who is an actor but not a phony.

Why We Still Talk About JFK

I am on my way from Los Angeles to Dallas, where tomorrow I will appear on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” which will come live out of the Texas Schoolbook Depository. I can’t believe I’ll be inside that place, from which, 50 years ago next week, at a corner window on the sixth floor, Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots that killed John F. Kennedy.

One of the questions we’ll discuss: Why do we still talk about JFK?

From my show notes:

1. We talk still about JFK and his death because the biggest generation in all U.S. history, that part of the population known as the baby boomers, watched it all, live, on that new thing called TV, and it entered our heads and never left. It was the first central historical fact of our lives, so we still read about it, think about it, and watch anything having to do with it.

2. Our parents experienced it as a different kind of trauma. They had lost one of their own. He had fought in World War II, like them. He was still young, like them, and now he was brutally cut down. What a lot of them felt was captured in the famous conversation of the newspaper columnist Mary McGrory and her friend Pat Moynihan. McGrory said: Oh Pat, can you believe we’re at Jack Kennedy’s funeral? “I feel like we’ll never laugh again.” He replied: “We’ll laugh again, but we’ll never be young again.”

3. We talk about JFK’s death because for the 18 years leading up to that point—between the end of the war, as we used to say, and 1963—America knew placidity. Many problems were growing and quietly brewing, but on the surface America was placid, growing more affluent, and politically calm. And then this rupture, this shock, this violence, this new sense that anything can happen, history can be ripped from its rails, that security once won cannot necessarily be maintained. That our luck won’t necessarily hold.

4. And what followed—growing political unrest, cultural spasms, riots at political conventions, more assassinations and assassination attempts—was so different from the years preceding that we couldn’t help look back at JFK’s murder as the breakpoint, the rupture. After that, things turned difficult.

5. Why, after all the historians’ revelations and the stories of the past 30 years—the women, the drug use, the Kennedy White House’s own farfetched efforts to do away with Fidel Castro, the fantastical nature of the Bay of Pigs, the failure of JFK to anticipate and answer the crude communist clichés of Kruschev at Vienna, etc., etc.—why do we continue to hold this special place for JFK? Because in the months and years after his death we fell in love with him as he was presented to us by those who knew and cared about him. Youth, beauty, charm, high intentions, wit, a certain fatalism and, deep down, a certain modesty. “Camelot.” But Camelot isn’t JFK. Camelot is the way we remember America before JFK died. Camelot is the America that existed, for one brief shining moment, before Lee Harvey Oswald began to shoot. a placid-seeming, even predictable place that we have not seen since.

6. We live in now. We live in this world. Right now I can hardly believe it that I am in seat 6B of American Airlines flight 2442, LAX to Dallas-Fort Worth, a few hundred miles east of Los Angeles, mountains and desert stretching below—and I am typing on an iPad, and will press a button, and my editor in New York in just a few seconds will read this and post it on The Wall Street Journal website and you will read it. It still takes my breath away. This is “the age of miracles and wonders.” Some child born now will look back on these days as Camelot.

ObamaCare Is the Story

Republicans should stop taking the boob bait of the press. The story of the day is ObamaCare and the pain it is causing the Democrats. That story is not being fully explored. We are not seeing pieces on Captol Hill Democrats rethinking their four-year-long lockstep backing of a program that is failing massively and before the nation’s eyes. I’m not seeing “Pelosi Agonistes: The Speaker Who Said ‘We Have to Pass It to Find Out What’s In It’ Has Some Regrets.” We’re not seeing “Democratic House Group Meets, Anguishes, Decides on New Path.” We’re not reading “Dem Sens From Red States Bolt: ‘It Only Takes One to Start a Jailbreak.’”

The focus of political journalism now should be on what’s happening on the Democratic side, because ObamaCare is a Democratic program. They bought it, they built it, what now?

Democrats aren’t talking about that, at least on the record, and none of them colorfully. They’re in the domestic political/policy debacle of their lives and their reaction is discretion. Some of them are loyal, some of them are kind. Some of them think in terms of blind team-ism. Some of them fear reprisal from the party’s enforcers. Some are stupid and don’t understand the fix they’re in. But many of them are simply disciplined.

What are we seeing on the Republican side? Nonstop taking of the press’s boob bait. “Potential Christie Rival Says He’s Not Conservative,” “GOP Readies for 2016 Battle Reflecting Party Divisions,” “GOPer: ‘Moderation the Path,’” “GOPer: Why Do Women Hate Us?” “Establishment Hates Grass Roots,” “Grass Roots Hates Establishment,” “Libertarians Hate Everyone,” “Everyone Hates Them,” “Republican: Even I Hate Me.”

Someone should tell Republicans that the story now, next week and this winter is ObamaCare, not 2016. It is what to do about ObamaCare. 2016 is not the subject now, it is a changing of the subject.

Is the press beginning to focus on the Democrats and 2016? To a small degree. Mostly they’re fixed on Hillary Clinton. Someone said on cable this morning that there’s the Elizabeth Warren story, she’s being mentioned. Somebody else said Sen. Warren’s in the news as a possible contender because the press needs a 2016 story on the Democratic side, it’s no fun to cover a coronation. True enough. But even truer is this: Hillary needs a fight. She has to prove she can win, not glide. She needs someone to defeat. Democrats understand Mrs. Clinton’s eventual future primary win will be tarnished, even clouded, if no one serious gets in to do battle with her. She has to appear to have fought for it. So they’re in search of a few interesting contenders who can fight hard and lose well.

Back to ObamaCare.

More than four years ago, in July 2009, I wrote a column in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt offered President Obama some wisdom on health care. Obama’s newly proposed plan—the Affordable Care Act—wouldn’t work, said FDR. In fact, Obama’s proposal put him in a “lose-lose” position. “If you don’t get a bill along the lines you’ve announced, you’ll look ineffective and weak—a loser. If, on the other hand, you win, if you get what you asked for, it will all be a mess and all be on you. The system will be overwhelmed, the government won’t be able to execute properly, the costs will be huge.” FDR said the Obama plan would “thoroughly discombobulate things” and ruin the Democrats’ prospects in the 2010 election.

But FDR had an idea—a sly one, as his ideas usually were. First, he told Obama, drop your current bill. Second, take everyone aback by talking constantly about the national medical program that already exists, Medicare. Show your love for it, insistently—but also admit very freely what isn’t quite perfect about it. “Get your people in Congress to focus on making the system ‘healthier.’ It’s rife with waste, fraud and abuse, everyone knows that. And there’s the demographic time bomb. Come together in a great show of bipartisan feeling with our Republican friends and announce some serious cost-saving measures that are both legitimate and farsighted. Be ‘Dr. Save the System.’ On thorny issues like end-of-life care, put together a bipartisan commission, show you’re open to Republican suggestions.”

The sly fox was telling the young president to show good faith to Republicans by admitting problems, and reassure Democrats by showing his heart and commitment to federal solutions. “Then, at the end,” said FDR…

Obama’s Catastrophic Victory

Years ago John McPhee wrote a great book about Bill Bradley called “A Sense of Where You Are.” I keep thinking about that title. You have to know where you are in time and space, you have to know who you are and what you’re doing, you have to be able to locate the moment and reorient yourself within it.

Politically where are we right now, at this moment?

We have a huge piece of U.S. economic and social change that debuted a month ago as a program. The program dealt with something personal, even intimate: your health, the care of your body, the medicines you choose to take or procedures you get. It was hugely controversial from day one. It took all the political oxygen from the room. It failed to garner even one vote from the opposition when it was passed. It gave rise to a significant opposition movement, the town hall uprisings, which later produced the tea party. It caused unrest. In fact, it seemed not to answer a problem but cause it. I called ObamaCare, at the time of its passage, a catastrophic victory—one won at too great cost, with too much political bloodshed, and at the end what would you get? Barren terrain. A thing not worth fighting for.

So the program debuts and it’s a resounding, famous, fantastical flop. The first weeks of the news coverage are about how the websites don’t work, can you believe we paid for this, do you believe they had more than three years and produced this public joke of a program, this embarrassment?

But now it’s much more serious. No one’s thinking about the websites. They wish you were thinking about the websites! I bet America hopes the websites never work so they never have to enroll.

The problem now is not the delivery system of the program, it’s the program itself. Not the computer screen but what’s inside the program. This is something you can’t get the IT guy in to fix.

They said if you liked your insurance you could keep your insurance—but that’s not true. It was never true! They said if you liked your doctor you could keep your doctor—but that’s not true. It was never true! They said they would cover everyone who needed it, and instead people who had coverage are losing it—millions of them! They said they would make insurance less expensive—but it’s more expensive! Premium shock, deductible shock. They said don’t worry, your health information will be secure, but instead the whole setup looks like a hacker’s holiday. Bad guys are apparently already going for your private information.

Look at the simple, factual eloquence of Edie Littlefield Sundby, from Monday’s Journal. It is a story that tells you everything you need to know about ObamaCare. It is the single most persuasive and informative piece written since the whole program began.

And now there are reports the insurance companies are taking advantage of the chaos of the program, and its many dislocations, to hike premiums. Meaning the law was written in such a way that insurance companies profit on it.

And—I am limiting things to just today’s news – the New York Times reports that while millions may qualify for enough federal subsidies to pay the entire monthly cost of some health-insurance plans, the zero premiums come with some “serious trade-offs.” What serious trade-offs? Most of these plans, called the bronze policies, “require people to pay the most in out-of-pocket costs, for doctor visit and other benefits like hospital stays.” Huh? I thought the purpose of the law was to help with the cost of doctor visits and hospital stays!

Back to a sense of where we are. You know where we are? It’s as if it’s 1964 and the administration has just passed landmark civil rights legislation and the bill goes into effect, and everyone looks—only immediately it is apparent that it makes everyone’s life worse! It doesn’t help minority groups – it makes their lives harder and less free! And it does real, present and intimate damage to the majority.

It’s as if it’s 1937 and they launched Social Security, only rich coupon-clippers on Park Avenue immediately started getting small monthly checks, and 67-year-old dust bowlers in tarpaper shacks started getting monthly bills.

It’s the biggest governmental enterprise that hasn’t worked since the earliest beginnings of the U.S. rocket program, when they kept trying to send rockets into space and they kept falling, defeated and groaning, into the ground. Only the rockets were still unmanned, so those failures never hurt anybody!

ObamaCare is a practical, policy and political disaster, a parlay of poisonous P’s.

And it is unbelievable – simply unbelievable – that the administration is so proud, so childish, so ideological, so ignorant and so uncaring about the bill’s victims that they refuse to stop, delay, go back, redraw and ease the trauma.

Two closing notes. In my lifetime the good word liberal was discarded by the Democratic Party. Over the decades they’d run it into the ground and changed it from a plus to a minus. Liberal came to suggest a whole world of bad ideas—soft on crime, eager for gun confiscation, big taxing. So the past 20 years Democrats tried to change their label, and in the Obama era it was finally definitively changed. They were now progressives.

Well, the biggest piece of progressive legislation in our lifetimes—not just costly but intrusive, abusive, and marked by a command-and-control mentality—is ObamaCare.

Remember, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat”? They’re gonna need another name.

Second point: I don’t know, maybe the Republican Party could focus on where we are and help those Americans who are beside themselves with anxiety? A friend had a suggestion today. Maybe instead of having oversight hearings on the stupid website, they could be hauling in some insurance executives to see if they’re capitalizing on this bad law and trying to profit on its dislocations? You know, like they’re listening not to K Street lobbyists but the people?

Maybe they could even call in some people from the White House and Congress, the ones who helped write and interpret this famous law that you had to pass before you could know what was in it, and ask: “Did you ever meet a normal human? Did you understand what you were doing when you produced this thing?”

Maybe they could even ask the president: “In your entire life, from community organizer to lawyer to politician, did you ever buy an insurance policy? Were you always on your wife’s plan, or immediately put on a plush government plan? Did you ever have to do anything like what you’re telling the people of your country to do?”

Questions for Secretary Sebelius

Former White House press secretary Dana Perino has good, commonsensical advice for Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee who’ll be questioning Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on ObamaCare tomorrow.

Boiled down: Can the theatrics, know your stuff, we don’t need re-enactments of constituent rage, be serious and sober. If members take this advice—Speaker John Boehner and Chairman Frd Upton should be sending it out—they’ll better their chances of meeting the moment and providing a service to their country.

Dana’s advice made me think of what I’d add.

1. Members should communicate beforehand and not go forward, as they usually do, like colliding atoms. They should logically coordinate their inquiry. There’s a lot of ground to cover and they don’t need repetitions, redundancies and free-associative journeys down tributaries that lead nowhere.

2. “It will be good for you to remember it’s not about you.” A health-care disaster has been visited on a significant number of Americans, who have been left understandably anxious, resentful and confused. If you use your time to pound the podium and get in the clips of the local news station back home, many of your constituents, seeing your theatrics, will recognize you to be an unhelpful blowhard out to gain from their pain. The national press will recognize you to be a grandstanding fool. Do you want that?

3. Do not take the bait when Democrats on the panel, who know they have been forced into defending the indefensible or joining a pile-on, try to change the subject. They’ll offer long, meandering (or accusatory and sarcastic) speeches on how Republicans have never wanted to help anyone in trouble and that’s why they’ve always opposed ObamaCare. Don’t engage, don’t start wrestling around with how many supported Social Security and who didn’t. Smile and let it go. You have limited time. Use it to find out what happened, what’s true and where we are.

4. Do not be defeated by Sebelius’s media coaches. Do not let the secretary’s slightly dazed unflappability get under your skin. All representatives of government are surrounded by communications advisers. Sebelius’s are no doubt advising her right now to do what they always tell officials in trouble to do: Come forth with long, meaningless yet on some level data-filled sentences that will steer clear of speaking plain truth and yet on some level imply the effort to be candid. (Yes, the irony: it is the taxpayers who pay for the media advisers who help the agency head mislead the taxpayers.) Sebelius will attempt to talk in a way that is arguably responsive and deliberately incomprehensible. She will not be trying to produce a colorful soundbite but to avoid one. She does not want to be on the evening news, she wants to get out of the hearing room with her career intact.

When government officials have been trained in this strategy, there is a tell. The tell is that they begin many of their sentences with the word, “So.”

As in:

Q: Madame Secretary, did you know or have reason to know the ObamaCare website would crash on opening day? If you did, did you tell the White House? Who in the White House? If you did not know, how did it happen that you, the person in charge of the program, did not understand the depth of its problems?

A: So, we know through historical experience that a vast, multitiered, horizontally integrated program will always yield or produce certain unanticipated challenges of a technological or other nature, which is inevitably and also predictably the pattern, and it’s increased by the scale and size of the endeavor . . .

Q: Let me ask: Did you know that as soon as the program debuted, millions of Americans would see their own health insurance policies canceled or terminated? And that they would often find that newer policies would be more expensive with less coverage? When did you come to understand this—during the writing of the law, after its passage, in the ensuing years? If you did not know that millions would lose their coverage, how did it happen that you did not know?

A: So, in the intervening days and months following the passage of the ACA, a focused task force composed of peer-reviewed stakeholders throughout the government and the private sector, in addition to appropriate designated agency officials, along with contractors and subcontractors . . .

This is what media advisers have gotten us to. If they had been advising clients in 1945-46 at the Nuremberg Trials the court transcripts would have looked like this: “So, part of the context within which directives were perceived is that there is a task announced and enforced by the government and its appropriate directors and agencies, and our topographical and rail line information, as provided on numerous occasions by the interior ministry, but also a number of people in the department had their own copies, suggested the most reliable train lines did in fact go through a town called Auschwitz. So considering that, and our responsibility to afford maximum efficiencies in accordance with the needs and directives, it was decided to . . .”

How to get around the obfuscation, indirection, passive voice, deliberately fractured grammar, and refusal to speak directly, clearly and pertinently?

Be courteous, cool, stay focused and press. “Madam Secretary, I know it’s hard under the lights, but I am going to ask for simple, direct answers. Please, at what point did you see a catastrophe coming? Who did you tell? And what did they say?”

“I must ask again, and I ask you to be clear and direct: Did you know, in the years that you and the president were saying ‘If you want to keep your current coverage you can keep it’—did you know that was not true?”

“You have heard the charge that that promise was a lie meant to aid in the selling of the Affordable Care Act to the American people. Was it a lie?”

“How did you expect the American people to react when they found out it wasn’t true?”

Keep to the question. Don’t make speeches. Find out the answer.

Update: Early reports say Sebelius will be apologetic in her testimony regarding the failed rollout. Meaning she does want a soundbite after all, and that’s it. An apology is fine, it’s appreciated, but an apology is not accountability. When a guy causes a fatal car crash it’s good if he says he’s sorry, but it doesn’t exonerate him. Was he driving under the influence? Was he texting? Was he asleep? Who’s going to pay for the damage, what will ease the suffering of the victims?

There are reports she will blame one or more of the outside contractors. This is weak—the government oversees and directs the contractors. It’s like the captain of the Titanic saying the problem is the company that made the rivets in the water tight compartments. Maybe, but it was his ship and he let it sail full steam into an icefield.

The Deep State

President Obama says he didn’t know the U.S. government was tapping Angela Merkel, and you know, maybe he didn’t. I have come to wonder if we don’t have what amounts to a deep state within the outer state in the U.S.—a deep state consisting of our intelligence and security agencies, which are so vast and far-flung in their efforts that they themselves don’t fully know who’s in charge and what everyone else is doing. Maybe they’re bugging so many people it’s hardly news to them when they bug the chancellor of Germany. Maybe they mentioned it to the president, maybe not. Maybe they don’t know.

Mr Obama has gone from seeming like someone who doesn’t quite know what’s going on in his government to someone who doesn’t really want to. He has perfected a sense of surprise. He’s always finding out at just the moment you are, and feeling your indignation.

So maybe he didn’t know. Maybe our intelligence and security apparatus—so huge and full of money since 9/11, so self-encased and self-perpetuating—didn’t tell him.

Before we think about that, should we be tapping Merkel’s phone?

No, for a simple reason: Because it is wrong. She is our friend. She is our ally. She leads a great nation. As such—friend, ally, greatness—she deserves respect. It is not respectful or friendly to invade her privacy and spy on her in this way.

It also seems sort of nuts. Does the National Security Agency think Angela Merkel is planning to blow up Times Square? That would be just like her, wouldn’t it? Does the NSA want to get the mood of her government before the trade talks commence? Then they can do it the old-fashioned way, through old-fashioned human measures: “Hey, source in the foreign ministry, what are you hearing?”

America has been embarrassed by this. A president with more than adequate political smarts would never OK it. But our intelligence and security agencies? That vast edifice that always wants whatever new technologies are available and whatever new targets are around? Sure, they would do it. After all, it’s not their job to look after America’s reputation in the world, it’s just their job to get the goods and say they got them. Maybe they don’t get into sources and methods even with presidents.

Particularly obnoxious on this question are the American policy thinkers and journalists who, when asked about the Merkel taps, put on their world-weary professional wise-guy face, looking like tragic suburbanites who once read a John le Carré novel and can’t forget the shiver of existential dread, and say that everyone does it, governments spy, get with the program, this is the way the world works.

Sorry, but tapping the private telephone line of one of your most important friends in the West is not how the world works, it’s how, once she finds out and the world finds out, it falls apart.

A president would, naturally and out of sheer diplomatic courtesy, tell his intelligence community to cut it out. What I’m wondering is: Do they cut it out? Who would know if they didn’t? Maybe they will choose to be courteous to the president, stop the tap and present Germany with evidence the tap has stopped. But maybe the deep state will think it doesn’t have to be pushed around by some joker who’ll be gone in a few years, to be replaced by another joker.

Yesterday on “Face the Nation,” I was on a panel that included Tom Johnson, Philip Shenon and Bob Woodward. We talked about the tendency of government agencies to cover up their mistakes, hide their internal agendas and lie. We’d been discussing Shenon’s impressive book on the JFK assassination and the making of the Warren Report. He documents the extent to which agencies and actors in those days withheld and even destroyed information that should have gone to the Warren Commission.

Anchor Bob Schieffer noted that the first things agencies under duress tend to do is “try to make sure they can’t be blamed for something. And, clearly, that is why the FBI and the CIA did not come clean with the Warren Commission.”

Woodward referred briefly to Watergate, and added: “I think there’s a theme here in all of this . . . that connects somewhat to what’s going on now.” He spoke of “the power of this secret world—CIA, FBI,” in the past, to know of or be involved in activities such as assassination plots against Fidel Castro, and not divulge those activities to a commission that was ostensibly searching for potential motives behind the Kennedy assassination.

Woodward brought it to the present. “We look now at what’s going on with all the NSA wiretapping and people saying, ‘Well, they didn’t know, or they did know.’ It clearly is much more extensive than people expected. You connect this with the drone strikes in Pakistan, and Yemen, which is our government conducting regular assassinations by air. You know, what’s—what’s going on here? Who is in control of it? And who can find out? You know, I think—it’s in the New York Times this morning that there is a review that Susan Rice, the National Security Adviser for Obama, has done on Mideast policy. They need to review this secret world and its power in their government because you run into this rat’s nest of concealment and lies time and time again, then and now.”

I agreed with Woodward. His stated concerns are very much my growing ones. And the pertinent questions are, as he says, “What’s going on here?” and “Who’s in control?”

What Woodward calls “this secret world” I have come increasingly to think of as the deep state…

Answering Paul Krugman

In a blog post this morning for the New York Times, Paul Krugman attempts, mischievously in my view, to score some ideological points.

Yesterday he and I were on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” and when the show had ended but the panelists were still seated together I said I’d just had one of those shows where you forget to make the two points you were most eager to make. Everyone smiled—that can happen. Then someone asked what the points were.

We had talked on the show about the shutdown and debt ceiling crisis, and I’d stated that the Republicans who’d pushed the shutdown had made a mistake, going forward without a serious strategy, endgame or plan. But, I said, the larger point I’d meant to make is that what’s going on now in the GOP is not only a continuation of old fights but a big brawl between old-style, experienced or “establishment” Republicans, who put an emphasis on realistic strategy in order to win, and their rising challengers on websites, in talk radio and in some think tanks, who take a different approach, who are more slash-and-burn, or purist. And this fight, or split, while not new, is becoming more consequential to the party’s future.

The second point I’d wanted to make, I said, is that for all the Republican Party’s troubles, for all the fighting and fisticuffs, there is one great thing, and it is that the party is alive with idea and argument and debate. This is good, it speaks of a liveliness and vitality appropriate to a great party. And if I were a Democrat, I said, teasingly but also seriously, I would wish my party were engaged in such spirited debate, and be anxious that it is not.

Someone said there should be a new segment on the show called “What I Meant to Say,” and we laughed, talked a little more, went our ways.

When I referred to what is happening among Republicans in the area of ideas, I had in mind a number of things – disagreements about tax policy that include subarguments about questions like the treatment of carried interest. There are real disagreements about the impact of an immigration bill on unemployed and underemployed U.S. citizens. There is a continuing and rising Republican debate about foreign policy, about what America’s role in the world should be, of which the NSA spying debate is, in a way, a subset. There are both present and coming debates about spending. Must we be the party of cutting entitlements because they can bankrupt us, or are there other, more winning and in the end more constructive and realistic approaches that promote growth while taking into account the number of Americans who right now depend on government because of forces—globalization, for one—beyond their control? All these debates involve ideas about what is just, desirable, possible.

These are just a few issue areas. But there’s a lot going on! And these debates are playing out in a lot of places, if least satisfyingly on Capitol Hill.

While Paul, in his post this morning, concedes it’s possible to argue that “the GOP is full of ferment, with passionate arguments that are very different from the relative placidity of Democrats these days,” he reminds us the truly sophisticated would understand “the much-ballyhooed rift between Wall Street and the Tea Party is entirely about tactics, not policies.”

That is simply not true.

Some quick examples. Wall Street is pro-immigration and wants a bill; the tea party is not and does not. Wall Street would fight to the death for the favorable tax treatment of carried interest; the Tea Party would do away with it in a great populist roar. If there were another financial crisis and the banks wanted bailouts, Wall Street would argue passionately for it, and the tea party would fiercely oppose it. Even as we speak the tea party is calling repeal of the medical device tax in the Affordable Care Act another example of crony capitalism, while Wall Street, if you will, argues it’s a matter of higher costs and jobs.

These are not tactical issues, they are or bear on serious policy questions.

Paul, in his work, often seems so immersed in an ideological world—in who is right and must be momentarily held high (they’ll be wrong tomorrow) and, more frequently, who is wrong and must be denounced (Paul Ryan’s ideas are not just “terrible”, they’re old)—that he doesn’t even notice what is going on among those he disagrees with, or doesn’t find it worthy of inquiry because whatever they’re doing it couldn’t possibly be in good faith. (My friend James Taranto summed up Krugman’s blog post as, “Oh yeah? Well, the jerkstore called, and they’re running outta you!”)

A small point connected to this. Paul writes that he “really wanted to ask” me about what I meant, but “time was up.” Actually time wasn’t up. The show wasn’t ending, it had ended. He could have asked me my thoughts right there, or afterwards, as we strolled, the two of us, from the studio to the street. There was plenty of time, if he was really interested.

Scott Carpenter, RIP

Oh what it was like. “Mission Control, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed.” “America on the moon.” “Godspeed, John Glenn.” “Come on and light this candle.” “A-OK.” “Four 3, 2, 1, and liftoff, we have liftoff.”

Oh, we did. Those are words and phrases of America’s space program, especially the Mercury program, one of whose astronauts died this week, 88-year-old Scott Carpenter. In 1962 he became the second American to orbit the Earth. He was the one they couldn’t find for a while, when he missed his splashdown point by about 250 miles. It’s tempting to write that all of America was on the edge of their seats while Navy planes searched for him and his capsule, but we weren’t. We knew it would be fine.

But what an era of dynamism, of breaking through, of pushing out, of daring. The space program gave us a forward-looking attitude, a sense we could do anything in any area. Especially if you were a kid, as I was, age 11, when Carpenter flew. What a gift it was to be young then—America blasting off, the Yankees or the Dodgers always winning. No one cared about government—what bliss—but to the extent we had one it seemed to work. Respectable people like Dwight Eisenhower were in charge, and then, in ’61, the glamour of the Kennedys. People were getting TVs. A whole new way to waste time! But also something else, our culture showing itself to itself, and it didn’t look so bad, especially, again, if you were young.

But the point is the era. It was big, expansive, it was pushing against limits, even against gravity. Now we have shutdowns, ceilings, chained CPIs—it’s all limits. The head of NASA talks about greenhouse gases.

Our children aren’t told by our culture that we can do anything, they’re taught to be afraid by people who are afraid—the future can harm you, hunker down, shelter in place. Really, that phrase captures the mood of our time: “Shelter in place.” Don’t go anywhere interesting, like a planet.

We don’t talk greatness now, we talk problems; and we don’t solve them, we set up processes to address them down the road.

I don’t know who the next American president is, but I know who the next great American president is—someone who remembers and can marshal and bring forth the mood of the old America: “Liftoff, we have liftoff.” “We will do it.” “Endless horizons.” “Home of the brave.” Great nations run on spirit. The next great one will know that. Scott Carpenter, steely-eyed rocket man, rest in peace.