A hero is a man who does what he can.
Roman Rollard
Sunday Talk Soup
I've taken Meet the Press to task the last couple of weeks, but in particular I do want to comment on some of today's roundtable discussions about Romney and next year's Presidential race.
David Gregory basically quotes a number of sources, even GOP ones, including Karl Rove, implying (with a billion-dollar war chest) that Obama has to be considered the favorite, how weak the GOP field is, etc.
Then David Brooks has this to say:
Well, first of all, the president--people--independents vote on the basis of who they essentially think is competent. They look at the guy, and they just have an overall image, "Is he competent?" And Obama still has that image, and that has not been dented even all, all the policy disagreement. So he has that advantage. Then the second thing, they take a look at their own field and they see weakness up and down the line. I think the conventional view among Republicans is that there are a lot of flawed candidates.What the HELL are you talking about, David Brooks? Tell me, what about Obama suggests he is "competent"? The way he kept throwing federal money at the auto companies, saying no one would buy a car from a bankrupt company, and then decided to put the companies through bankruptcies, putting his crony union interests ahead of bondholders? The debacle of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill handling? The inept way he handled the Egyptian crisis? The way he passed major legislation, including health care, without a single Republican vote (including an unconstitutional mandate that he himself opposed during his own race to the White House)? The way he allowed the 111st Congress to go by without passing a FY2011 budget and now he finds himself bartering with the GOP House for 2 or 3-week extensions? The way he unilaterally and unconstitutionally declared an offshore drilling moratorium and we are now, once again, facing $100/barrel oil which could result in a double-dip recession? His passive leadership on things like the stimulus, health care, and financial reform, his contradiction on no earmarks allowed?
You give me a conservative majority like Obama had a progressive super-majority, and I will change America in ways progressives would never dream possible. I will cut deals when I have to, and I have the persistence to see things through. More importantly, unlike Barack Obama, I am acutely aware of my limitations. I would not subcontract my mandate to Leader McConnell or Speaker Boehner.
Okay, reality check here. Barack Obama is in over his head. He had no prior executive experience. Almost every potential challenger is or has been a governor (or Speaker of the House). Twenty months into a recovery, Obama holds a 47-45 approval rating; he was only the second Democratic nominee to win a clear majority of popular votes since 1964 (Carter won 50.1%), and he won 53% in an election where McCain had a fraction of Obama's funds and represented a party whose incumbent hovered nearly a 30% approval rating. A billion dollars may put lipstick on a pig (Obama's record), but it's still a pig. Almost any candidate Obama will face will have the advantage of running against Washington: Obama IS Washington. People's minds are already made up over Obama, and the fact is by election time, he will have added more to the national debt than George Bush did in 8 years, including 2 recessions, 9/11, and the corporate scandals. This is NOT the same as the mid-term recoveries of Reagan and Clinton.
With all due respect, Karl Rove is saying the predictable: I could have phoned in his column. Of course, it is difficult to beat an incumbent. The fact is that in 1980 most polls leading into the election showed the contest between Reagan and Carter to be a tossup--in fact, Carter had a 54% approval rating 8 months before the election. In contrast, between Reagan and Clinton, each had consistent 50-plus% approval ratings every month (except 1, for Clinton) in the year preceding the election. Yet even with the lame-duck boost and his handling of the Giffords' assassination tragedy, Obama hasn't been able to break 51%. It's very easy to see how Obama drops from here--e.g., an inflation crisis, a double-dip recession, a homeland security incident, unemployment over 8% on election day, etc. I do not think the people who gave Obama the benefit of the doubt are ever going to go back to him, unless the GOP was stupid enough to do something like nominate a clearly inferior candidate like Sarah "I Quit" Palin. (I don't deny Palin's appeal to a certain base, but she has zero chance of winning a swing state--and that's why almost every poll shows her stuck at a 14-18% support range, despite massive publicity advantages over all alternative candidates.)
An Obama campaign strategy will focus almost surely on two basic elements: (1) Obama will argue he needs to be able to keep the GOP from undoing the gains of the 111th Congress (i.e., health care et al.); (2) he will run a heavily negative campaign against his opponent (not unlike how an unpopular Blagojevich won reelection in 2006).
I've written several commentaries on how a conservative should approach the 2012 election. Without going into undue detail at this point, I think that the successful GOP candidate will not rerun the same old same old Reagan election for a fourth consecutive decade, will present an optimistic, inclusive campaign--not mere lip service like Obama but proven results, stress administrative competence and living within means, make the US a good place to do business in (and a streamlined tax burden, with more balance between consumption and savings/investment), and argue the need to resolve unsustainable, unfunded liabilities. No polarizing litmus test issues (social, immigration, etc.) The indisputable facts are that Obama has not shown bold leadership and failed miserably by risking the future of our economy for his political crony interests.
I think that there are a number of very capable sleeper candidates, including Mitch Daniels, Haley Barbour, and Tim Pawlenty. I do think Romney has a challenge with RomneyCare; I understand he sees this as a Tenth Amendment issue; but there's a world of difference between the 70-page Massachusetts bill and the 2000-page national bill. (The bill was motivated by a federal government threat to cut off Medicaid funding because of the number of uninsured health care recipients in Massachusetts.) Romney won equal protection tax deductibility and fought for proof of financial responsibility in lieu of coverage and against an employer mandate (although the Democratic-controlled legislature rejected the latter two; in all, the legislature overrode 8 of Romney's vetoes); some of it simply involved shifting existing subsidies for free care from hospitals to individual subsidies. (I still think we would be better off providing catastrophic coverage through a low universally applied consumption tax and get the government out of the business of covering ordinary expenses and special interest-driven gold-plated costly coverages.)
My political intuition tells me that Romney has already decided how he'll respond to his GOP competition and, more importantly, to President Obama. And, unlike any other competitor (except for possibly Trump or Bloomberg) he can point out (through Bain Capital) significant business experience, having graduated from both Harvard Business School (MBA) and Harvard Law School (JD). He has led turnarounds (including Bain & Company, facing bankruptcy), has a nose for rooting out waste and efficiency, and the mental acuity to deal with arcane financial statements. If anyone can reengineer the moribund federal bureaucracy, Romney can--and he can more than hold his own in debates with Obama. With all due respect to Obama, Romney is easily the smartest serious candidate to emerge as a national candidate in decades. I do think Romney made a number of mistakes in the 2008 campaign, but McCain should have picked him as VP. Once the economy started tanking, the choice of Romney was a no-brainer. I publicly pleaded for McCain to dump Palin for Romney in this blog by late September.
Interesting Read: Jerome Corsi's Red Alert: Thumbs UP!
Let me say first of all, I am not taking a stand a number of controversial positions taken by Dr. Corsi, including his bestselling criticisms of the last two Democrats to head the Presidential ticket (there are substantive reasons to reject the typical progressive Democratic Presidential candidates without engaging in polemical rhetoric), not to mention promoting certain fringe conspiracy theories and the like. To be honest, I've caught the website/weekly newsletter in one minor typo, misidentifying the given name and gender of an Obama Cabinet member. I forwarded a gentle correction, got a response back they would correct the error--and a week or two later got a second email with the same error. Note I am not a fact checker for the website, and we differ on a number of issues (for instance, I'm a strong proponent of NAFTA and legal immigration reform). But this is one of the best-written, most interesting weekly emails I get. You can go to the website (link above) and sign up for the newsletter.
I'll briefly comment on a couple of stories Corsi is covering this week: small-scale neighborhood (10,000 homes) nuclear reactors, being explored by a couple of vendors, including one backed by Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates, and Obama is pushing for Mexican trucker access to the US, a long-delayed part of the NAFTA agreement. I'm not even going to comment about the green energy policy implications of nuclear energy, which I have strongly supported; I have also been concerned about the vulnerability of the US national electric grid. Thumbs UP!
The debate over restrictions on Mexican truckers makes me feel we are re-fighting the same economic efficiency argue the 1980 trucking deregulation bill, only on a wider scale. The arbitrary restrictions on Mexican truckers constitute little more than trade protectionism--which serves only to impoverish consumers and protect inefficient providers, union truckers, etc. Thumbs DOWN!
A Personal Aside: The Wisconsin Union Kerfuffle
I discussed in a past post that during the time I as a junior professor ran into some glaring due process issues at UWM, somehow a union representative had gotten wind of the situation, and we discussed the problems; at the end of the conversation, he basically ended the discussion with a sales pitch, saying this was just the sort of thing why the faculty should be unionized, but there was nothing he could do for me. What I honestly thought at the time was: "You are barking up the wrong tree." The reason I am mentioning this was that I was unaware when I wrote that post that, in fact, the University of Wisconsin system personnel (including UWM) had been extended collective bargaining rights by the predecessor union crony Democratic Governor Jim Doyle during the previous biennial budget (the same one Governor Walker is attempting to shore up).
The truth is that I had made up my mind to leave UWM my first semester when the senior professor who had recruited me threatened me over critical comments I had made privately on a doctoral student's dissertation proposal. I had befriended the student; I remember even meeting his kids one day, happily eating their McDonald's sundaes. But he had refused to let me see his proposal, on orders from the senior professor. This immediately set a red flag; proposals have to be frozen and made available to the faculty before a defense. What I read alarmed me; in essence, the student wanted to use the senior professor's connections at Wisconsin Bell to do a field test (highly unlikely). As a backup, he wanted to conduct the study using student subjects. These ideas really weren't fleshed out in terms of study materials, operationalized variables, numbers of subjects, reliability and validity of measures, statistical analyses, etc. I told the student that he should withdraw his proposal, work on filling in the details, and resubmit the proposal at a later date.
As I may have mentioned elsewhere, there was a dog-and-pony show at Wisconsin Bell; one of the MIS instructors, a CPA admitted to the doctoral program, had given me a ride to the facility. For whatever reason, they split the visitors into multiple groups. I got separated from my ride back, and when I finished my tour, my ride had already left. It was, of course, just a coincidence that my senior colleague, the dissertation committee chair, just happened to be heading home in my direction, and we were the only ones in the car.
When we were about a mile from my apartment building, he mentioned that the student had briefed him on my critique and paid lip service that the student, of course, should address the identified deficiencies. He then casually mentioned that he had recruited a prominent organizational behavior professor to be on the student's committee and made it clear that the professor would be running interference for the student if I showed up to the defense; then, as the cherry on the top of the sundae, he reminded me that I didn't have a vote in my own tenure approval (I knew that, of course, but there was only one reason he had in mentioning that). Off-the-chart violation of professional ethics; of course, in Rod Blagojevich's view of the universe, this sort of thing is little more than your typical political wheeling and dealing. Oh, and the justification for premature submittal of the dissertation: the student was planning on hitting the academic job market, and they had decided he wouldn't be a credible applicant without a defended proposal. (Nothing like having one's priorities straight...)
There were other issues I had with the senior professors (one of the more glaring ones I've mentioned was when the accountant cited above failed his second and last comprehensive exam, and the 4 senior faculty refused to abide by the decision (because they liked him personally)); they suspended execution of the decision; one of the senior professors was chair of the PhD program committee and sought/enacted a change to allow the exam committee to issue a contingent pass with qualifying remedial work; they re-opened the exam committee and gave a conditional pass. Off-the-chart unethical, an unconscionable double standard, changing the rules after the game was played: all of us advised him he wasn't ready to take the exam and he went against our advice. There were other things as well I've mentioned in past in other posts (like when the faculty and administration attacked me for busting an Asian student with acts of plagiarism under 3 different professors, including myself, claiming I was attempting to sabotage their visiting student program). I had already made the decision to leave UWM after my first year; it was only a question of the timing.
I don't mean to imply that the other two schools on my resume were any better. UTEP recruited me principally because they were looking to get AACSB accreditation for the first time and wanted my publication record in the file. (I don't think I made the difference, but at the time there was only one other published MIS professor.) That professor had recruited me; later that year I was at a conference cocktail party when one of the people there, when I mentioned my UTEP colleague by name, seemed to know him and suggested that I should ask him why he left his last institution. I didn't know the specifics, but I was told that I should read my colleague's papers and look at some other papers; the implication was plagiarism. At some point after the conference, I started off a conversation and literally said nothing more than I had heard some comments about why he left his former college, and he immediately exploded and threatened to sue me if I repeated whatever I had heard--I hadn't even discussed a specific allegation; lots of people change employers for normal reasons, e.g., a spouse's job, an expired contract, etc. I will not itemize everything that happened my first semester at UTEP except to point out that I was already window-shopping for other opportunities and went on a campus visit to Louisiana during finals week my first semester (not my choice). I ended up leaving UTEP for a 1-year contract to Illinois State, where I ended up having to file academic freedom charges against the department chairman, confirmed by the investigating subcommittee. (I started wondering why there weren't any normal schools out there like UH, and why I was only attracting the attention of the freak shows; I had never even heard of nonsense like this at other colleges.)
I don't think there is a "perfect employer" out there, and in fact, life isn't fair. I didn't write the above to bash UWM and UTEP. There are bizarre things that happen in any university, no doubt. Probably the most unusual anecdote I have also came from UWM. I was using a statistical package called LISREL for one of my research papers and befriended this attractive psychology graduate student staffing the statistics lab. We seemed to be attracted to each other (i.e., she once asked me out), although I was concerned about propriety (even though I wasn't her professor). Anyway, one day she confided in me that her psychology class professor had stopped her after lecture one day and declared that her breasts were too large. He felt that they were too distracting to other class members, so she had to do something about them. (I'm not sure what he expected her to do: detach them and store them in a locker before she came to class?) In fact, she was very well-endowed, but she probably wore an industrial-strength bra, was always fully clothed (no neckline) and didn't wear tight clothes. I told her in my opinion, the guy protested too much and probably had some ulterior motives. [For the record, I've never dated a former student.]
Political Humor
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid now wants to outlaw prostitution. Let's make politicians illegal and keep the hookers. At least they're upfront about screwing you. - Jay Leno
[You wine them and dine them, you spend a lot of money on them, you fly them on chartered flights to fancy resorts--and they STILL won't put out... It's hard to be a
"A new report found that the U.S. spends more than $5 billion on redundant government programs. Another report found that the U.S. spends more than $5 billion on redundant government programs." –Jimmy Fallon
[You see, in order to fix ineffective government, we must first clone it, so we don't affect existing defective functionality with rogue patches... (Trust me: this is an inside-IT joke; DBA's everywhere are laughing...)]
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
The Bee Gees, "He's a Liar". The Bee Gees would never again achieve the chart success and saturation they had in the late 1970's, which resulted in a backlash; they would occasionally chart with hits I've embedded in the past, e.g., "One" and "Alone". This track, their first attempt to reinvent themselves once again, features an unusual arrangement (which reminds me of the Eagles' later phase hits) and tight harmonies.
