Mr. Nocera is off today. Bobo has a question in “Convener in Chief:” What sort of leader can get things done in an age of austerity? A comparison of three management styles sheds some light. Well, the sort of dim bulb light that Bobo sheds… Mr. Cohen, in “America, Awaken,” says the U.S. economic crisis is not a temporary blip. An energy and an industrial policy are urgently needed. Here’s Bobo:
This is a column about management styles. What sort of leader can get things done in an age of austerity?
Our first case study is what you might call the Straight Up the Middle Approach. When Chris Christie ran for governor of New Jersey, he campaigned bluntly on the need to reduce the state’s debt. After he was elected, he held 30 contentious town meetings with charts to explain how the debt would crush homeowners in each municipality.
Christie makes himself the center of the action and is always in the room. He sat down with Democratic leaders at meeting after meeting and hammered out compromises, detail after detail. The bipartisan pension reform bill Christie signed this month is controversial, but it is a huge step toward avoiding fiscal catastrophe. Christie, needless to say, quotes Springsteen to describe his approach: “No retreat. No surrender.”
Our second case study exemplifies the Insurgent Approach. While campaigning to be mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel also spoke bluntly about the tough steps he would take to reduce the city’s $650 million deficit.
But, in office, he hasn’t led a single frontal assault. Instead, Emanuel has introduced a flurry of initiatives in all directions. He took away credit cards from many city officials. He’s moved to lengthen the school day. He redeployed 650 cops from offices to the streets. He cut $75 million from the 2011 budget. He induced United Airlines to bring 1,300 jobs.
At any given moment there seems to be six Mayor Emanuels announcing six different initiatives. The measures to reduce spending are submerged in a frenetic reinvigoration agenda.
The key for Emanuel is to know which fights to pick (making it harder for teachers to strike, for example), and sequencing those fights within broader narratives about city growth.
It’s almost physical. Christie relies on power and mass. Emanuel relies on dexterity and speed. Both have begun their administrations in spectacular fashion.
The third case study is the most unexpected: President Obama’s Convening Approach. First, some context: In 1961, John F. Kennedy gave an Inaugural Address that did enormous damage to the country. It defined the modern president as an elevated, heroic leader who issues clarion calls in the manner of Henry V at Agincourt. Ever since that speech, presidents have felt compelled to live up to that grandiose image, and they have done enormous damage to themselves and the nation. That speech gave a generation an unrealistic, immature vision of the power of the presidency.
President Obama has renounced that approach. Far from being a heroic quasi Napoleon who runs the country from the Oval Office, Obama has been a delegator and a convener. He sets the agenda, sketches broad policy outlines and then summons some Congressional chairmen to dominate the substance. This has been the approach with the stimulus package, the health care law, the Waxman-Markey energy bill, the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and, so far, the Biden commission on the budget.
As president, Obama has proved to be a very good Senate majority leader — convening committees to do the work and intervening at the end.
All his life, Obama has worked in nonhierarchical institutions — community groups, universities, legislatures — so maybe it is natural that he has a nonhierarchical style. He tends to see issues from several vantage points at once, so maybe it is natural that he favors a process that involves negotiating and fudging between different points of view.
Still, I would never have predicted he would be this sort of leader. I thought he would get into trouble via excessive self-confidence. Obama’s actual governing style emphasizes delegation and occasional passivity. Being led by Barack Obama is like being trumpeted into battle by Miles Davis. He makes you want to sit down and discern.
But this is who Obama is, and he’s not going to change, no matter how many liberals plead for him to start acting like Howard Dean.
The Obama style has advantages, but it has served his party poorly in the current budget fight. He has not educated the country about the debt challenge. He has not laid out a plan, aside from one vague, hyperpoliticized speech. He has ceded the initiative to the Republicans, who have dominated the debate by establishing facts on the ground.
Now Obama is compelled to engage. If ever there was an issue that called for his complex, balancing approach, this is it. But, to reach an agreement, he will have to resolve the contradiction in his management style. He values negotiation but radiates disdain for large swathes of official Washington. If he can overcome his aloofness and work intimately with Republicans, he may be able to avert a catastrophe and establish a model for a more realistic, collegial presidency.
The former messiah will have to become a manager.
Still with the messiah shit, eh, Bobo? And of COURSE it’s all Obama’s fault that Republicans walk out of meetings designed to avert that catastrophe. What a horse’s ass you are, Bobo. Here’s Mr. Cohen:
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once remarked that the United States was “aesthetically inferior but morally superior” to Europe.
On the aesthetics, there’s not much doubt. Savoir vivre is a French expression that English finds it needs. Style is many things but one reason Italy elevates it is because it is a fine disguise for lost power. When you’re running the world you don’t have much time for Windsor knots.
The aesthetics of European cities offer the consolation of the past’s grandeur but seldom the adrenalin of future possibility. It’s wonderful to be lost in Bruges or Amsterdam, Venice or Vienna. The palaces bear no relation to current obligations. They have become outsized repositories of beauty.
Sleepwalk through them and feel content. The only problem is awakening. One of the things you awaken to is that it’s now almost a century since Europe ripped itself to shreds at Verdun. Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently calculated in The New York Review of Books that British losses on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, given respective populations, were the equivalent of “280,000 GI’s killed between dawn and dusk.”
The Great War had its midcentury European sequel. And so power passed to America. It was of a United States ascendant that Berlin wrote, a confident nation assuming responsibility for the world.
He found it “morally superior” to Europe. I think he meant above all the can-do vigor of a young nation still able to dream big and gather its collective resources to realize great projects. Not for America the moral relativism of tired European powers that, ambition exhausted or crushed, settled for comfort and compromise.
I was talking about puritanism the other day with an American friend who observed: “Don’t knock it — that’s what got us this country in the first place!” There’s something to that: America has been inseparable from a city-on-the-hill idealism but also from a strong work ethic. When I became an American citizen and had to do an English test the second sentence of my dictation was: “I plan to work very hard every day.”
But of course you can’t work if you don’t have a job and today that’s the situation of 9.1 percent of Americans and 24 percent of U.S. youth. These are shocking numbers that aren’t temporary blips. They reflect shifts in the global economy. Every year developing economies are producing tens of millions of middle class people who can do American jobs.
What’s most worrying is that the U.S. response to this crisis seems to be one of a country in middle age, a nation that has lost its can-do moral edge, the ability to come together and overcome. In this critical regard President Obama has failed to deliver.
Berlin observed that Americans were a “2×2=4 sort of people who want yes or no for an answer.” They’ve gotten neither of late, only muddle.
Bill Clinton recently took Obama to task in Newsweek, proposing 14 measures to create employment. Given that the Clinton presidency saw the creation of 23 million jobs his advice is probably worth a glance even if it grates. I was struck by two underlying themes: the need for an energy policy and for an industrial policy.
Here’s why: It’s absurd that “climate change” has become an unpronounceable phrase under Obama and that green technology initiatives have been stymied by sterile ideological dispute. Intelligent use of resources makes strategic sense for America whatever your hang-up on global warming. It’s equally absurd that private U.S. corporations, having made $1.68 trillion in profits in the last quarter of 2010 and sitting on piles of cash, are doing fine while job numbers languish and more Americans struggle.
None of this makes moral or any other sense. America needs an energy policy and an industrial policy. It has to lead in green technology and — purist capitalist reflexes notwithstanding — it must find ways to get corporate America involved in a national revival.
In these regards it might look to Europe: Copenhagen now heats itself in winter by burning its own garbage; Germany has 6 percent unemployment in part because the government and corporations have cooperated to keep jobs.
One of Clinton’s energy ideas related to the cash incentive Obama had offered for start-up green companies. America moved in the past few years, the former president noted, from having less than 2 percent of the world market in manufacturing high-powered batteries for hybrid or all-electric cars to 20 percent, with 30 new battery plants built or under construction. Then — wait for it — Republicans in Congress wouldn’t extend the plan because they viewed it as a “spending program” rather than a tax cut.
This is madness, the ne plus ultra of American politicians betraying the American people. As Clinton noted, “We could get lots of manufacturing jobs in the same way” — that is, combining green energy and industrial policy.
It’s past time for Obama to lead in these areas. Americans, Berlin also suggested, are the “largest assemblage of fundamentally benevolent human beings ever gathered together.” But their representatives have lost their moral compass. History tells us where that leads.
