Letter to the Next President

Don Kettl is a highly respected scholar of government and public management, and he has penned a very thoughtful article–I would say a “must read” article– for a recent issue of Washington Monthly.  In it, he pretends that the 2016 election is over and he’s advising the winner.

Titled “Ten Secret Truths About Government Incompetence,” he begins with the “secret truth” that government actually does a great many things with admirable competence, and works far better than most people think, sharing a long list of areas in which good government performance is taken for granted.

Kettl uses the list to warn the new President that good management will go unremarked, but screw-ups will be magnified.

He also points out that media and citizens alike fail to distinguish between embarrassing, but essentially minor, mistakes, and truly consequential ones:

You’ve benefited from the “Obama is incompetent” narrative. It increased the public’s appetite for getting you—and some fresh air—into Washington. But let’s be honest: you lucked out because of the media’s inability or unwillingness to notice, care about, or explain the difference between hugely consequential management screw-ups and only modestly consequential ones.

Failing to plan for the occupation of Iraq? Disbanding the Iraqi military? Putting inexperienced political cronies in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and downsizing the agency prior to Hurricane Katrina? Now those were screw-ups—big, far-reaching, world-historic blunders that led directly to the deaths of thousands.

As Kettl says, compare that to the inept Obamacare website roll-out , where no one died, and the problems were soon fixed.

Of course, these were big stories—but they were mostly big political stories. The stumbles embarrassed the Obama administration, hinted at an underlying management problem in the administration (more on that shortly), and helped the Republicans weave a powerful campaign narrative. But the stories weren’t about big failures with huge consequences. They were about putting torpedoes below the political waterline.

Kettl also addressed one of my pet peeves: the notion that government should be “run like a business.” Addressing his mythical new President, he writes

You made the case in your campaign that government needs to learn from the best-run private companies. That’s an irresistible line that Republicans invented and Democrats—especially Obama—have come to champion. But, of course, you know that the private sector isn’t always a model of good management. Remember New Coke, Windows 8, the collapse of Chi-Chi’s restaurants, and shrapnel-filled airbags? That’s even before we get to the wholesale financial miscalculations and fraud that led to global economic collapse.

The private market has a big advantage over government: it can bury its bodies in balance sheets and deal with its failures by quietly turning out the lights and locking the doors.

The entire article is well worth reading, especially the section on outsourcing–the fact that most government work is no longer done by government, and how that fact complicates management and accountability. His reminder that so many of the problems we attribute to a President are really problems created by Congress is especially timely.

All in all, the article is an important corrective to the rampant, uninformed anti-government rhetoric meant to appeal to people who don’t have the foggiest notion what government is or does or how it functions.

It’s also reminder that We the People not only need government,  we need the civic skills to make it work properly.

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First World Problems…

Many of the issues I write about are important–at least, I think they are. Others should be filed under  First World annoyances.

This is one of those.

Many years ago, a biologist at Eastern Connecticut State University, proved a long-suspected correlation between grandparent deaths and exams.

After collecting data for 20 years, Adams concluded that a student’s grandmother was far more likely to die before midterms than at any other time of the year. More specifically, his research showed that grandmothers are 10 times more likely to die before a midterm, and 19 times more likely to die before a final exam. Grannies of students who weren’t doing well in their classes were at even higher risk of meeting their maker: Students who were failing a class were 50 times as likely as others to lose a grandmother.

Like many professors, I’ve encountered this phenomenon, and I can tell you that it’s really difficult to address. No one wants to demand that a genuinely grieving grandchild produce a death certificate, but no one wants to be “played,” either. It calls for finesse.

Recently, this coincidence of grandparental death and exam times was the subject of an article that included a survey of several instructors, who were asked how they coped with this particular dilemma. Here is my favorite–one I fully intend to adopt.

Dear Student: I’m very sorry to hear of the loss in your family. Please know you are all in my thoughts in this difficult time. I understand the importance of family in times of grief, and I hope you can be a source of support for your parents in what is one of the most difficult life transitions we all must face as we get older.

I would very much like to send your [Mom or Dad] a card and a short note to let them know they are in my thoughts and to single you out for praise in being so proactive and forthright in speaking to me. Would you be kind enough to send along [his or her] snail mail address so I can get this in the mail in the next day or so?

[H/T to Jim Brown, who posted this article on Facebook!]

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Truth or Consequences

A University of Wisconsin website describes the Wisconsin Idea as “the principle that the university should improve people’s lives beyond the classroom.” The University’s mission statement has long included the following language: “basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.”

According to AP and several other news outlets, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker–in addition to cutting $300 million from the University’s budget–

 had wanted to insert language in the budget stating the university’s mission was “to meet the state’s workforce needs.” He wanted to remove language saying UW’s mission is to “extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campus” and to “serve and stimulate society.” He also wanted to remove the statement “Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.”

When the proposed changes became public, the enormous blowback obviously took the Governor by surprise, and he backed off, initially suggesting the change was “a drafting error” that hadn’t been caught.

Right.

The New York Times and other media sources immediately debunked that lame excuse. As a blogger at Daily Kos wrote:

First of all, today I obtained copies of the original records from the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau’s drafting office, which show that there was a long chain of correspondence during which the Walker administration actually proposed deleting the Wisconsin Idea. The records also reveal that numerous officials within the administration proofed and approved of deleting the Wisconsin Idea.

Second, this wasn’t “somehow overlooked” by University of Wisconsin officials.  They objected on several occasions to it, but the Walker administration refused to back down.

As the Times noted in a scathing editorial, “It was as if a trade school agenda were substituted for the idea of a university.”

Scott Walker is emblematic of the anti-intellectualism that is so rampant on the American Right. He is one of the (far too many) shallow and ambitious politicians who think education and job training are synonymous, that scholarly research and the “search for truth” are elitist non-essentials, and that humans don’t need to know anything that isn’t immediately useful for obtaining gainful employment. They’d have handed Socrates that cup of hemlock without thinking twice.

After all, if people are allowed to search for truth, they’ll ask inconvenient questions. They’ll challenge the martinets. They might even see themselves as citizens rather than obedient consumers.

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Guns and Cars and FREEDOM

Over at Juanita Jean’s, the World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, I read:

Motor vehicle accidents used to be the leading cause of death in this country. But not in Missouri —

Firearms proved more deadly, and by a wide margin — 880 to 781 — according to the most recent federal data available. And Missouri appears to be a harbinger of things to come.

Some experts predict that for the first time in decades, firearms will kill more people nationwide this year than motor vehicles.

And the reason why traffic deaths have decreased dramatically?

Advocates credit seat belts, padded dashboards, airbags, highway median guard cables and road-edge rumble strips, among other things.

But God forbid that we talk about putting better safety mechanisms on guns! Because FREEDOM!

Reading this, I couldn’t help recalling a memorable interview with the late, irrepressible  Molly Ivins, during which she noted that the Texas legislature had successfully addressed a similar problem. Gun deaths in Texas had exceeded fatalities from automobile accidents. “But our lawmakers took care of that problem.” Molly reported.

“They raised the speed limit.”

We’re doomed.

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Quotes From The Founders of Our “Christian Nation”

One of the many things Thomas Jefferson was known for was creating his own version of the bible: he famously excised all of the metaphysical portions, leaving only the moral teachings. (This may be why, when he was running for President, opponents warned that  he would order the burning of all bibles if he were to be elected.) I thought about that recently, when I came across a collection of quotations about religion and religious liberty from Jefferson and America’s other founding fathers. I was familiar with most, but not all of them. Of those I hadn’t previously seen, I particularly liked this one from Jefferson, taken from a letter he wrote to one Peter Carr in 1787:

“Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”

Ben Franklin was more blunt. In Poor Richard’s Almanac, in 1758, he wrote

“The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.”

Although not technically a Founder, Thomas Paine was an enormously influential figure in Revolutionary America, and a reliable critic of religion and religious establishments; in The Rights of Man, he wrote

“Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law. Take away the law-establishment, and every religion re-assumes its original benignity.”

In 1776, in The American Crisis, he made his disdain for “faith-based” reasoning even clearer, writing

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”

(Explains the problem with several current members of Congress, the General Assembly and most of Texas….)

Madison frequently weighed in on the side of reason and the need to separate church from state. In his often-quoted letter to William Bradford, he wrote

“Christian establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects.”

There are many similar quotes from the architects of our Constitution, easily found in textbooks, history books or a cursory visit to Doctor Google. This nation’s founders tended to agree with Gallileo that “man is not obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect intends us to forgo their use.” However avid our current culture warriors may be about rewriting American history, it’s impossible to ignore the continued relevance of these sentiments. In fact, in view of the current push for explicit religious “liberty” to discriminate against LGBT folks, another Jefferson quote (from A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom) seems especially apt:

“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”

You tell ’em, Tom!

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