I promise to get back to my post-mortem on the Rasiej for Public Advocate campaign, but just came across this far more important post-mortem on the whole Katrina disaster. "Hurricane exposes government's shortcomings," is the understated title of David Wood and Chuck McCutcheon's article for Newhouse News Service, which is posted on the Times-Picayune's Nola.com blog. "How could this happen?" they ask, and their answers ought to taught in civics instead of the crap they force our kids to memorize.
-- Power and authority, as the founding fathers intended, are scattered across Congress, the White House, executive agencies and on through state and local governments. That complicates coherent planning, allocation of money and accountability.
-- Two- or four-year election cycles keep attention spans short and focused on the next campaign. Money is appropriated year to year, with results demanded immediately.
-- The executive and congressional bureaucracies stifle initiative and smother creativity, a problem some say has grown worse with the proliferation of congressional committees and subcommittees and the consolidation of independent agencies into the vast Department of Homeland Security.
-- The rising demands of bitterly fought election campaigns tend to stifle political courage and spur partisan squabbling.
Here's what some veteran DC watchdogs told them:
"If it's beyond the next election cycle, we'll worry about it next year after we get ourselves elected," said Winslow Wheeler, recently retired chief defense analyst for the Senate Budget Committee.
Work within the executive branch is similarly compressed, first by a four-year clock of presidential elections, then by the sheer number of crises.
[Gordon] Adams, senior budget director for national security in the Clinton administration, described his White House work this way: "I am standing with a paddle in the middle of a big room. All around the edge of the room, people are throwing balls at me. My job is deciding which balls to hit back. In the White House, that's long-range planning."
In that kind of pressure cooker, "you become risk-averse," said Wheeler, author of "The Wastrels of Defense: How Congress Sabotages U.S. Security."
"If you are outside the conventional wisdom, you are vulnerable," he said. "Both parties have purged themselves of big thinkers and a diversity of views."
...."No one in government is making hard choices," said David Williams, vice president of Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonprofit reform group in Washington. "It's about handing money out. There's very little of somebody saying, 'No.'"
...."What is required here," [Richard] Ben-Veniste [a member of the 9-11 Commission] said, "is a level of outrage from the citizenry to require that those in positions of leadership lead the country in a way that transcends those retail political concerns."
Not so fast, Adams said: "We are the nation of quick fix. Americans as a culture are into the short-term mentality: Fix me now.
"The difficulty with an outraged citizenry is impatience, and it's very hard for an outraged, impatient citizenry to focus on the long term," he said.
"But that's what we've got to do now."
Let's start a new party and call it the "Long-termist" party.
Posted by msifry at September 19, 2005 01:43 PM