[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 7 (Thursday, January 21, 2010)]
[Senate]
[Pages S62-S68]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
HEALTH CARE
Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, during our recent health care debate
I heard a number of times from our friends on the other side of the
aisle this question: What are Republicans for?
Well, they will wait a long time if they are waiting for the
Republican leader, Senator McConnell, to roll into the Senate a
wheelbarrow filled with a 2,700-page Republican comprehensive health
care bill or, for that matter, a 1,200-page climate change bill or a
900-page immigration bill.
If you have been listening carefully to the Senate debate, you will
know that on health care, as well as on clean energy, debt reduction,
and immigration, for example, Republicans have been offering the
following alternative to 1,000-page bills: going step by step in the
right direction to solve problems in a way that re-earns the trust of
the American people.
Comprehensive immigration, comprehensive climate change, and
comprehensive health care bills have been well intended, but the first
two fell of their own weight, and health care, if enacted, would be a
historic mistake for our country and a political kamikaze mission for
Democrats.
What has united most Republicans against these three bills has not
only been ideology but also that they were comprehensive. As George
Will might write: ``The Congress. Does. Not. Do. Comprehensive. Well.''
Two recent articles help explain the difference between the
Democratic comprehensive approach and the Republican step-by-step
approach.
The first, which appeared in the new journal, National Affairs, and
was written by William Schambra of the Hudson Institute, explains the
``sheer ambition'' of President Obama's legislative agenda as the
approach of what Mr. Schambra calls a ``policy President.''
Mr. Schambra says the President and most of his advisers have been
trained at elite universities to govern by launching ``a host of
enormous initiatives all at once . . . formulating comprehensive
policies aimed at giving large social systems--and indeed society
itself--more rational and coherent forms of functions.''
This is governing by taking big bites of several big apples and
trying to swallow them all at once. In addition, according to Mr.
Schambra, the most prominent organizational feature of the Obama
administration is its reliance on ``czars''--more than the Romanovs,
said one blogger--to manage broad areas of policy. In this view,
systemic problems of health care, of energy, of education, and of the
environment simply can't be solved in pieces.
Analyzing the article, David Broder of the Washington Post wrote
this:
Historically, that approach has not worked. The
progressives failed to gain more than a brief ascendency and
the Carter and Clinton presidencies were marked by striking
policy failures.
The reason for these failures, as Broder paraphrased Schambra, is
that ``this highly rational comprehensive approach fits uncomfortably
with the Constitution, which apportions power among so many different
players.'' Broder then adds this:
Democracy and representative government are a lot messier
than the progressives and their heirs, including Obama, want
to admit.
James Q. Wilson, a scholar, writing in a memorial essay honoring
Irving Kristol in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago, says the
law of unintended consequences is what causes the failure of such
comprehensive legislative schemes. Explains Wilson:
[[Page S63]]
Launch a big project and you will almost surely discover
that you have created many things you did not intend to
create.
Wilson also writes that neoconservatism, as Kristol originally
conceived of it in the 1960s, was not an organized ideology or even
necessarily conservative, but ``a way of thinking about politics rather
than a set of principles and rules. . . . It would have been better if
we had been called policy skeptics.''
The skepticism of Schambra, Wilson, and Kristol toward grand
legislative policy schemes helps to explain how the law of unintended
consequences has made being a member of the so-called ``party of no'' a
more responsible choice than being a member of the so-called party of
``yes, we can''--if these three recent comprehensive bills on health
care, climate change, and immigration are the only choices.
Madam President, it is arrogant to imagine that 100 Senators are wise
enough to reform comprehensively a health care system that constitutes
17 percent of the world's largest economy and affects 300 million
Americans of disparate backgrounds and circumstances.
How can we be sure, for example, that one unintended consequence of
spending $2.5 trillion more for health care over 10 years will not be
higher costs and more debt? Won't new taxes be passed along to
consumers, raising health insurance premiums and discouraging job
growth? Won't charging insolvent States $25 billion over 3 years for a
Medicaid expansion raise State taxes and college tuitions? Ask any
Governor. And how can a Senator be so sure that some provision stuck in
a 2,700-page partisan bill in secret meetings and voted on during a
snowstorm at 1 a.m. will not come back around and slap him or her in
the face, such as trying to explain why Nebraska got a cornhusker
kickback to pay for its Medicaid expansion and my State did not?
James Q. Wilson also wrote in his essay that respect for the law of
unintended consequences ``is not an argument for doing nothing, but it
is one, in my view, for doing things experimentally. Try your idea out
in one place and see what happens before you inflict it on the whole
country,'' he suggests.
If you will examine the Congressional Record, you will find that
Republican Senators have been following Mr. Wilson's advice, proposing
a step-by-step approach to confronting our Nation's challenges 173
different times during 2009. May I say that again? During 2009,
Republican Senators, 173 different times on the floor of the Senate,
have proposed a step-by-step approach toward health care and other of
our Nation's challenges.
On health care, for example, we first suggested setting a clear goal;
that is, reducing costs. Then we proposed the first six steps toward
achieving that goal: No. 1, allowing small businesses to pool their
resources to purchase health plans; No. 2, reducing junk lawsuits
against doctors; No. 3, allowing the purchase of insurance across State
lines; No. 4, expanding health savings accounts; No. 5, promoting
wellness and prevention; and No. 6, taking steps to reduce waste,
fraud, and abuse. We offered these six proposals in complete
legislative text. It totaled 182 pages, all 6. The Democratic majority
rejected all six of our proposals and ridiculed the approach, in part
because our approach was not comprehensive.
Take another example. In July, all 40 Republican Senators announced
agreement on 4 steps to produce low-cost, clean energy and create jobs:
No. 1, create 100 new nuclear powerplants or at least the environment
in which they could be built; No. 2, electrify half our cars and
trucks; No. 3, explore offshore for natural gas and oil; and No. 4,
double energy research and development for new forms of energy. This
step-by-step Republican clean energy plan is an alternative to the
Kerry-Boxer national energy tax which would impose an economy-wide cap-
and-trade scheme, driving jobs overseas looking for cheap energy and
collecting hundreds of billions of dollars each year for a slush fund
with which Congress can play.
Here is another example. In 2005, a bipartisan group of us in
Congress asked the National Academies to identify the first 10 steps
Congress should take to preserve America's competitive advantage in the
world so we could keep growing jobs. The academies appointed a
distinguished panel, including now-Secretary Chu, that recommended 20
such steps. Congress enacted two-thirds of them. The America COMPETES
Act of 2007, as we call it, was far-reaching legislation, but it was
fashioned step by step.
Another example. When I was Governor of Tennessee in the 1980s, my
goal was to raise family incomes for what was then the third poorest
State. As I went along, I found that the best way to move toward that
goal was step by step--some steps smaller, some steps larger--such as
changing banking laws, defending right-to-work policies, keeping debt
and taxes low, recruiting Japanese industry, and then the auto
industry, building four-lane highways so suppliers could get to the
auto plants, and then a 10-step better schools program, 1 step of which
made Tennessee the first State to pay teachers more for teaching well.
I did not try to turn our whole State upside down all at once, but
working with leaders in both parties, I did help it change and grow
step by step. Within a few years, we were the fastest growing State in
family incomes.
According to a recent survey by On Message Inc., 61 percent of
Independents, 60 percent of ticket splitters, and 77 percent of
Republicans answered yes to the following question: I would rather see
Congress take a more thoughtful step-by-step approach focusing on
commonsense reforms.
Human experience has always taught that enough small steps in the
right direction is one good way to get you where you want to go and
also a good way along the way to avoid many unexpected and unpleasant
consequences.
Tuesday's election in Massachusetts is the latest reminder that the
American people are tired of risky, comprehensive schemes featuring
taxes, debt, and Washington takeovers, as well as lots of hidden and
unexpected surprises. It is time to declare that the era of the 1,000-
page bill is over or the era of the 2,000-page bill is over or the era
of the 2,700-page bill is over. A wise approach would be to set a clear
goal, such as reducing health care costs, take a few steps in that
direction and then a few more so that we can start solving the
country's problems in a way that reearns the trust of the American
people.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the
Record an article from the Wall Street Journal of Monday, September 21,
written by James Q. Wilson, an article by David Broder from the
Washington Post of September 24, and an article from the magazine
National Affairs written by William Schambra.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Wall Street Journal, Sept. 21, 2009]
A Life in the Public Interest
(By James Q. Wilson)
Irving Kristol not only helped change the country, he
changed lives. He certainly changed mine.
When I was a young faculty member at Harvard, I learned
that he, along with Daniel Bell, had just created The Public
Interest. I wrote him to say how enthused I was to find a
magazine that published serious but jargon-free essays in
which scholars analyzed public policy. Irving called back to
invite me to join him and his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, for
dinner when I was next in New York City.
I was overwhelmed. The founding editor of an important
magazine was inviting an unknown young writer to have dinner
with him. I went as soon as I could. It was a nice meal, and
Irving asked me to ``write something'' for the journal.
``Write what?'' I replied. ``I will send you a government
report you should discuss,'' he suggested. He did, and I
wrote about it for the magazine's second issue. My piece was,
at best, pedestrian, but I was hooked.
Reading the magazine became the center of my nonteaching
life. I learned what Pat Moynihan, Robert Nisbet, Jacques
Barzun, Martin Diamond, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, James
Coleman, Peter Drucker and countless others thought about
public policy. It was a new world: Thoughtful people with
real knowledge were discussing public policy at a time, the
mid-1960s, when the federal government was acting as if
anything were possible.
These writers were discussants, not pundits. They wrote
long essays (happily, free of footnotes) analyzing which
policies might work and which would not. They did not utter
slogans, they assumed there were intelligent readers out
there, and for the most part did not embrace a party line. A
magazine that later was said to be the founding
[[Page S64]]
document of the neoconservative movement published work by
Robert Solow, James Tobin, Christopher Jencks, Charles Reich,
Charles Lindblom and many other conspicuous nonconservatives.
It was the right moment. President Lyndon Johnson was
trying to create a new political era by asking the government
to do things that not even Franklin Roosevelt had endorsed,
and to do it in a period of prosperity. The large majorities
his party had in Congress as a result of Johnson's decisive
defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964 made it possible to create
Medicare and Medicaid and to adopt major federal funding for
local school systems. He created the Department of
Transportation and the Department of Housing and Urban
Development. Johnson himself called what he was doing the
creation of a ``Great Society.''
I was a small part of that world. I chaired a White House
task force on crime for the president. It was a distinguished
panel but after much effort we made very few useful
recommendations. It slowly dawned on me that, important as
the rising crime rate was, nobody knew how to make it a lot
smaller. We assumed, of course, that the right policy was to
eliminate the ``root causes'' of crime, but scholars
disagreed about what many of those causes were and where they
did agree they pointed to things, such as abusive families,
about which a democratic government can do very little.
The view that we know less than we thought we knew about
how to change the human condition came, in time, to be called
neoconservatism. Many of the writers, myself included,
disliked the term because we did not think we were
conservative, neo or paleo. (I voted for John Kennedy, Lyndon
Johnson and Hubert Humphrey and worked in the latter's
presidential campaign.) It would have been better if we had
been called policy skeptics; that is, people who thought it
was hard, though not impossible, to make useful and important
changes in public policy.
Whatever the authors were called, their best essays
reflected one general view: Let us use social science to
analyze an existing policy to see if it works at a reasonable
cost. This meant that these writings were backward looking in
a world when liberals were relentlessly forward looking. If
you look carefully at what has been done rather than announce
boldly what ought to be done, you will be called, I suppose,
a conservative. We were lucky, I imagine, not to be called
reactionaries.
Irving Kristol smiled through all of this. He did not care
what we were called and he gave to one of his published
collections of essays the title, ``Neoconservativism: the
Autobiography of an Idea.'' He explained why that tendency
differs from traditional conservatism: Neoconservatism is not
an ideology, but a ``persuasion.'' That is, it is a way of
thinking about politics rather than a set of principles and
rules. If neoconservatism does have any principle, it is this
one: the law of unintended consequences. Launch a big project
and you will almost surely discover that you have created
many things you did not intend to create.
This is not an argument for doing nothing, but it is one,
in my view, for doing things experimentally. Try your idea
out in one place and see what happens before you inflict it
on the whole country.
I recall when Nathan Glazer and I spoke at a conference on
neoconservatism organized by The Partisan Review. Nat and I
made all of these points about caution, experimentation and
unintended consequences only to be told by one of the
Review's editors that this was not enough: To be serious
about politics, one had to have an organized ideology.
Well, the Review certainly did.
In time I think The Public Interest began to speak more in
one voice and the number of liberals who wrote for it
declined. Every magazine acquires a character just as every
human has a personality. That character was sharpened and
reinforced by the cultural revolution of the late 1960s,
which required of liberal skeptics that they become not
merely critics of ill-advised policies but defenders of the
nation to which those policies might apply.
Irving Kristol's talents were remarkable: He did for The
Public Interest what he had earlier done for Commentary, the
Reporter and Encounter--find good people and induce them to
say important things even when it did not improve the
revenues of the magazine. The Public Interest always relied
on financial support from a few friends and rarely sold more
than 12,000 copies. That didn't bother Irving at all: What
counts is who reads it, not how many read it. And for 40
years a lot of important people did read it.
I was upset when the magazine ceased being published in the
spring of 2005. With others I struggled to find a new home.
There were some good possibilities for a new venture, but in
time Irving said no, ``Forty years is enough.'' And now for
Irving, 89 years is enough--he died Friday of lung cancer.
Losing him is like losing your favorite uncle: A wise and
cheerful man who knew so much about so many things and would
always help you out.
____
[From the Washington Post, Sept. 24, 2009]
Mr. Policy Hits a Wall
(By David S. Broder)
A new publication came across my desk this week containing
an essay that offers as good an insight into President
Obama's approach to government as anything I have read--and
is particularly useful in understanding the struggle over
health-care reform.
The publication is called National Affairs, and its
advisory board is made up of noted conservative academics
from James W. Ceaser to James Q. Wilson. The article that
caught my eye, ``Obama and the Policy Approach,'' was written
by William Schambra, director of the Hudson Institute's
Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal.
Schambra, like many others, was struck by the ``sheer
ambition'' of Obama's legislative agenda and by his penchant
for centralizing authority under a strong White House staff
replete with many issue ``czars.''
Schambra sees this as evidence that ``Obama is emphatically
a `policy approach' president. For him, governing means not
just addressing discrete challenges as they arise, but
formulating comprehensive policies aimed at giving large
social systems--and indeed society itself--more rational and
coherent forms and functions. In this view, the long-term,
systemic problems of health care, education, and the
environment cannot be solved in small pieces. They must be
taken on in whole.''
He traces the roots of this approach to the progressive
movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when
rapid social and economic change created a politics dominated
by interest-group struggles. The progressives believed that
the cure lay in applying the new wisdom of the social
sciences to the art of government, an approach in which facts
would heal the clash of ideologies and narrow constituencies.
Obama--a highly intelligent product of elite universities--
is far from the first Democratic president to subscribe to
this approach. Jimmy Carter, and especially Bill Clinton,
attempted to govern this way. But Obama has made it even more
explicit, regularly proclaiming his determination to rely on
rational analysis, rather than narrow decisions, on
everything from missile defense to Afghanistan--and all the
big issues at home.
``In one policy area after another,'' Schambra writes,
``from transportation to science, urban policy to auto
policy, Obama's formulation is virtually identical:
Selfishness or ideological rigidity has led us to look at the
problem in isolated pieces . . . we must put aside
parochialism to take the long systemic view; and when we
finally formulate a uniform national policy supported by
empirical and objective data rather than shallow, insular
opinion, we will arrive at solutions that are not only more
effective but less costly as well. This is the mantra of the
policy presidency.''
____
[From National Affairs]
Obama and the Policy Approach
(By William Schambra)
Nine months into his tenure, the patterns of President
Barack Obama's style of governing are becoming clear. Obama
had no executive experience when he took the presidential
oath last winter--but he did come in with a particular idea
of what politics and government are for, and how they ought
to work. It is a view grounded in Progressive politics, and
shared by a number of Democratic chief executives in recent
decades. But Obama has articulated it, and his administration
has embodied it, more fully than most.
Perhaps the most distinctive political characteristic of
the Obama administration thus far is the sheer ambition of
its early legislative agenda, which seeks to move a host of
enormous initiatives all at once. The administration's most
prominent organizational feature, meanwhile, is its reliance
on issue ``czars'' to manage broad areas of policy. By the
end of his first summer in office, Obama had named some 35
such policy superintendents--``more czars than the
Romanovs,'' as one blogger quipped--overseeing matters
ranging from health-care reform, energy, and regulation to
stimulus accountability, corporate executive compensation,
cyber security, and the Great Lakes.
Both his ambition and his unique style of issue management
show that Obama is emphatically a ``policy approach''
president. For him, governing means not just addressing
discrete challenges as they arise, but formulating
comprehensive policies aimed at giving large social systems--
and indeed society itself--more rational and coherent forms
and functions. In this view, the long-term, systemic problems
of health care, education, and the environment cannot be
solved in small pieces. They must be taken on in whole, lest
the unattended elements react against and undo the carefully
orchestrated policy measures.
The ``policy approach'' Obama seems to be embracing was
best articulated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his classic
essay ``Policy vs. Program in the 1970s,'' published in the
Summer 1970 issue of The Public Interest. ``A policy approach
to government,'' Moynihan wrote, begins ``by seeking to
encompass the largest possible range of phenomena and
concerns.'' This means, to begin with, that ``everything
relates to everything,'' and therefore that ``there are no
social interests about which the national government does not
have some policy or other.'' But these policies cannot simply
consist of discrete interventions meant to address particular
concerns. Public problems, arising in intricate social
systems, are just too complex for that. Instead, policy
should aim to give the system as a whole the proper shape,
and then the elaborate array of programs, rules, incentives,
pressures, and intentions will better fall into place.
[[Page S65]]
Writ large, this approach suggests that government exists
not to attend to the various problems in the life of a
society, but to take up society itself as a problem--and
improve it. The consequent expansion of the reach of
government, proponents of this view contend, is not driven by
anything as crude as presidential ambition or ``socialist''
ideology. It is simply a realistic and pragmatic response to
the inexorable demands of the web of social reality.
To address social problems this way, the policymaker must
put himself outside the circle of those whom he governs, and,
informed especially by social science, see beyond their
narrow clashing interests. This presents a problem in the
politics of a democracy, of course, since most citizens (and
the self-interested politicians they elect) either are
baffled by or deliberately ignore social complexity and
interrelatedness. The resulting truncated policies,
reflecting unenlightened popular prejudices or arbitrary
ideologies, tend to make a hash of the underlying network of
causes and effects. The practitioner of the policy approach
must gently chide these citizens and politicians for their
short-sightedness. He must insist that they put away their
childish things, and get down to the hard and serious work of
attending to the complicated causes of society's problems.
And he must recruit to his administration a cadre of experts
who can detect those causes--experts professionally trained
in the natural or social sciences, which alone enable us to
fully grasp social complexity and to design appropriate
interventions.
Hence policy czars, mandated to follow the causal threads
wherever they may lead, passing freely across the
anachronistic and arbitrary boundaries of executive
departments without undue concern for political turf. Hence
Obama's ill-concealed frustration with what he so often calls
the ``tired old arguments'' that compose our day-to-day
politics. Hence also the immense ambition of his first-year
agenda--and the immense obstacles and complications he will
no doubt face as he moves forward.
the science of government
The ideal of the policy presidency is deeply rooted in the
enduring American Progressive movement, and particularly in
its understanding of the social sciences. In the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, new economic and technological
developments--factory production, mass markets, railroads,
the telegraph and telephone--shattered the old boundaries of
what historian Robert Wiebe aptly called our ``island
communities.'' Instead, we seemed to be increasingly
intertwined, our existence affected by distant developments
whose ramifications arrived unbidden in our lives through
steel rail and copper wire.
That growing interdependence, writes Thomas Haskell in The
Emergence of Professional Social Science, meant that the
``effective cause of any event or condition . . . became more
contingent and more difficult to trace.'' Everyday common
sense now failed to explain the world, which seemed to be
shaped instead by ``long chains of causation that stretched
off into a murky distance.'' Human behavior was no longer
directed by autonomous moral choice, but rather by ``a host
of determinants external to the conscious mind.'' For the
early Progressives, this brought into question the ideal of
the free, self-governing, and personally responsible human
being and citizen. And it led to the elevation of those
equipped with sciences of society that promised to trace the
chains of causation into the murk--those who appreciated, as
sociologist Lester Frank Ward put it, that ``every fact and
every phenomenon is indissolubly linked to every other.''
The professional social scientist--the economist,
sociologist, psychologist, and political scientist--now had a
critical role to play in society because, as Haskell points
out, ``it was largely through his explanatory prowess that
men might learn to understand their complex situation, and
largely through his predictive ability that men might
cooperatively control society's future.'' As the prominent
Progressive (and founder of the New Republic) Herbert
Croly put it, ``in the more complex, the more fluid, and
the more highly energized, equipped, and differentiated
society of today,'' the ``cohesive element'' would be
``the completest social record,'' which could be assembled
only by social-science experts ``using social knowledge in
the interest of valid social purposes.''
This conviction became the basis for the Progressive
political movement in early 20th-century America. The
politics of that era seemed dangerously corrupt and
tumultuous, with politicians either despoiling the public for
personal and constituent enrichment or roiling public opinion
with radically divisive new ideologies like socialism. In
tones resembling Obama's rhetoric today, the Progressives
condemned such behavior as short-sighted, parochial, and
irresponsible. These reckless political practices, they
argued, ignored growing social interdependencies that
demanded empirically grounded, objective, far-sighted
decisions focused on the larger national interest.
Progressivism's solution was to shift the administration of
public affairs out of the hands of citizens and politicians
still in the thrall of fragmented (and therefore
dysfunctional) views of social reality, and into the hands of
a new professional class steeped in the social sciences. They
alone could formulate coherent intellectual maps of an
interrelated world, and interventions sophisticated enough to
bend the causal chains in the desired direction. In Croly's
words, Progressivism believed that a ``better future would
derive from the beneficent activities of expert social
engineers who would bring to the service of social ideals all
the technical resources which research could discover and
ingenuity could devise.''
Progressive doctrine--particularly as extended and
elaborated in President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and
President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society--thus demanded the
centralization of political power in the American presidency
and its bureaucratic apparatus, organized according to the
rational and orderly doctrines of scientific management and
public administration. Progressive reformers throughout the
20th century came to denigrate the wisdom and relevance of
the American Constitution, which frustrated centralization
and coordination by dispersing governing power across the
states and over the branches of government. Once thought
essential to American freedom, these institutions now came to
be seen as impediments to coherent national governance.
The apogee of social science's influence in American public
life came with Johnson's Great Society and its vast
proliferation of professionally designed programs to address
housing, poverty, education, urban affairs, and other public
problems. ``There was a prevailing faith that social science
could diagnose the causes of human problems and develop sound
and effective public policy cures,'' note Calvin Mackenzie
and Robert Weisbrot in their history of the 1960s.
This brought on what Moynihan (in the first issue of The
Public Interest, in 1965) called ``the professionalization of
reform.'' The expert class had become persuaded that our
supply of social-science knowledge had accreted to the point
that we now had reasonable assurance of bending society and
economy to our will, he argued. And the project of reform was
attracting larger segments of the middle class--who,
benefiting from expanding higher education, were introduced
to the allure of the ``independence of judgment, esoteric
knowledge, and immunity to outside criticism that
characterize professionals.'' Public policy now tended to
respond not to social movements, but rather to the concerns
of the professionals--not only because of their superior
expertise, but also because they were reaching a critical
mass within the institutions of government and the economy.
Political scientist Samuel Beer summarized the increasingly
autonomous role played by experts in the Great Society and
subsequent administrations as ``the technocratic takeover.''
As he put it, with all major contemporary policy problems,
``it has been, in very great measure, people in government
service, or closely associated with it, acting on the basis
of their specialized and technical knowledge, who first
perceived the problem, conceived the program, initially urged
it on the president and Congress, went on to help lobby it
through to enactment, and then saw to its administration.''
The professionalization of reform and technocratic takeover
went beyond government boundaries, however. As Hugh Heclo,
Lester Salamon, and other scholars have observed, much of the
expansion of federal programs in the Great Society and beyond
involved not adding more federal bureaucrats, but rather
subsidizing third-party providers at lower levels of
government and throughout the non-profit sector. These
institutions, too, took on a professional cast, as they
recruited experts to design, execute, evaluate, and report on
the federal programs for which they were responsible. They
also inevitably became advocates for sustained government
support for their services. Private charitable foundations,
which had previously been mainstays of support for non-profit
service providers, now chose instead to join them in pushing
for increased government funding of services. Philanthropy
was then left free to fund experimental projects that would
blaze trails for yet more government programs.
Over time, ``issue networks'' (to use Heclo's term) began
to develop, linking government bureaucrats, congressional
staff, non-profit administrators, foundation program
officers, and policy advocates around a shared interest in
specific policy areas. Though they didn't always agree on
policy particulars, Heclo maintains, they shared a ``common
language for discussing the issues, a shared grammar for
identifying the major points of contention, a mutually
familiar rhetoric of argumentation.'' These networks would
provide quiet but self-sustaining momentum for federal
programs, even in the face of hostile presidents.
Frank Baumgartner and Christine Mahoney have argued that as
new government initiatives were established, ``the programs
and spending associated with them generated new interests
themselves, as affected constituencies, service providers,
and others entered into long-term relations with the
government officials responsible for these new programs.'' As
Michael Greve explains, even the Reagan administration
eventually gave up trying to make a dent in federal support
for liberal advocacy groups, concluding that ``defending was
a fight it could not win without mounting an extraordinary
effort,'' and that ``government funding of advocacy groups
had become too deeply engrained in the structure of American
government.''
Thus, the policy approach to governing, and especially to
the executive branch, came
[[Page S66]]
to take hold on the left and in Washington policy circles. It
has played a role in the work of every recent
administration--whether as implicit modus operandi or as
exasperating foil--but not until President Obama has it had a
genuine, life-long true believer in the Oval Office.
THE POLICY PRESIDENT
Obama's early life primed him for this way of thinking
about politics. The circumstances of his family and his
globally peripatetic youth acquainted him with a variety of
strong traditional cultures--Kenyan, Kansan, Indonesian--that
had not yet been entirely pulverized by modern
cosmopolitanism. Obama's first book, Dreams from My Father,
is in part his account of trying on several of the tightly
woven cultural garments that his background made accessible
to him. As he often puts it himself, this experience endowed
him with a remarkable capacity to appreciate the most diverse
moral and cultural beliefs, coolly and objectively assessing
their strengths and weaknesses. Because he was in but never
entirely of several cultures, he was left with a wistful
sense that he would always somehow be on the outside looking
in.
But his cosmopolitan childhood ensured that Obama would not
be burdened by a crippling illusion so common in the
traditional community: that its way is the right way, and
that it can autonomously shape its common life accordingly,
free of the sprawling chains of social causality. From his
earliest days--helped by the guidance and example of his
mother, who held a Ph.D. in anthropology--Obama understood
and easily glided through the network of interdependency
that, as the Progressives had predicted, was eroding
traditional communities and pulling us all together in vast
systems of relationship.
When a Chicago non-profit accepted his application for a
job as a community organizer, Obama put on the garment of a
Chicagoan. That he was not born and reared in one of the
strong and often insular ethnic neighborhoods of the city of
broad shoulders was not particularly relevant. He was not
there to help a local neighborhood rebuild a coherent sense
of community that would enable it to solve its own problems
according to its own values. Rather, he was there to help
local residents understand the larger networks of power and
influence that determined their lives, and which alone could
provide the resources and knowledge to alleviate their
poverty. What the South Side of Chicago needed was not an
illusory sense of community efficacy, but rather the clout to
force the importation of professional expertise--in the form
of city-paid employment specialists at a new job center, and
hazardous waste-removal workers to clean up asbestos at the
Altgeld Gardens housing complex.
After his legal education, Obama found his way into the
``issue networks'' that had come to dominate Chicago
politics--the non-profits, advocacy coalitions, and
foundations committed to ever more extensive and
sophisticated interventions by trained professionals into the
lives of Chicago's distressed neighborhoods. In all major
American cities today, as the Manhattan Institute's Steven
Malanga observes, this constellation of forces--along with
the municipal and educational unions--has replaced the
traditional urban political machine; it is the new engine
driving the perpetual expansion of municipal services and
budgets. In addition to ongoing work with local advocacy
groups, Obama served on the boards of two major foundations
that are leading national proponents for the development and
expansion of government services.
The mode of thought inculcated by this sort of work is
reflected in the final report of the Chicago Annenberg
Challenge--a massive local school-reform project (co-founded
by the former Weather Underground radical William Ayers) that
Obama chaired. The report suggests that the effort fell well
short of expectations precisely because it left too much
discretion to the untutored leaders of local schools. It
would have been better to ``provide guidance for local
initiatives in the form of well-researched and well-thought-
out maps for change,'' the report maintained, which would
``present sound theories and principles that might enhance
the effectiveness of local thinking and action.'' It was too
much to expect everyday citizens to understand the complex
forces affecting their schools without substantial,
theoretically informed intervention by the professionals.
Obama's chief complaint as a new U.S. senator was that
Washington's discourse seemed to be dominated by the bitter,
tired, ideologically driven politics that had characterized
the pre-Progressive era. Most Americans, he insisted in his
second book, The Audacity of Hope, exhibited a ``pragmatic,
nonideological attitude'' and were ``weary of the dead zone
that politics has become, in which narrow interests vie for
advantage and ideological minorities seek to impose their own
versions of absolute truth.''
Obama preferred an approach to public policy that would
make greater use of objective evidence, scientific facts, and
expert counsel. For example, he suggests in the book, we
could take on the health-care problem by ``having a
nonpartisan group like the National Academy of Science's
Institute of Medicine determine what a basic, high-quality
health-care plan should look like and how much it should
cost,'' examining ``which existing health-care programs
deliver the best care in the most cost-effective manner.'' In
other words, the beginning of reform lies in the formulations
of professional expertise.
During Obama's presidential campaign, journalists were
clearly impressed by his willingness to consult and rely on
the policy professionals. But the candidate's adamancy about
seeking out proven experts came as no surprise to Obama
advisor Cass Sunstein, who observed that ``in his empiricism,
his curiosity, his insistence on nuance, and his lack of
dogmatism, Obama is indeed a sort of anti-Bush'' from whom we
will see ``a rigorously evidence-based government.''
In January, the Boston Globe reported with hometown pride
that the newly elected president had turned particularly to
Harvard University for key administration officials. It
seemed only natural, since Obama was ``a preternaturally
self-confident product of the meritocracy'' and had a
``reputation as a seeker of the expertise and intellect that
Harvard prides itself on attracting.''
Small wonder, then, that as president, Obama's explanation
for today's economic crisis reflects a distinctively
Progressive tone, with a call to renounce short-term and
selfish private indulgence in the name of empirically based,
objective analysis of the long-term, system-wide view. There
has ``been a tendency to score political points instead of
rolling up sleeves to solve real problems,'' he suggested in
his ``New Foundation'' speech at Georgetown University in
April. The problems we face, he continued, ``are all working
off each other to feed a vicious economic downturn,'' so
``we've had no choice but to attack on all fronts of our
economic crisis at once.''
To address these challenges, Obama insists, we must come up
with comprehensive policies that account for the entire sweep
of interconnected social and economic factors contributing to
the problem, and whose coordination will contribute to its
solution. Echoing Moynihan's understanding of the
implications of the policy approach, Obama suggests that
tackling only isolated pieces of the problem, or trying to
solve only one problem at a time, will merely introduce
further distortions into what should be treated as a
unified and coordinated system. A comprehensive policy
approach will enable us to take maximum advantage of
natural- and social-science expertise, displacing
expensive or ineffective local practices by spreading
system-wide those programs that have proven to be more
effective and less expensive, as documented by thorough
research and experimentation.
Approaching the problems of the health-care system
individually and incrementally, Obama insisted in a speech in
July, ``is precisely [the] kind of small thinking that has
led us into the current predicament.'' The inefficiencies and
shortcomings of health-care financing will be done away with
only if an extensive system is built that assigns and
regulates roles for all the players, including federal and
state health programs, medical personnel, hospitals,
insurance companies, and all American citizens. Once this new
universal network of relationships is established, science
and technology--comparative effectiveness research,
electronic medical records--can make their contributions. And
once all Americans receive the treatments judged most
effective according to rigorously empirical measurement, the
nation's health care will be delivered everywhere as it is
today at the Mayo Clinic.
Likewise, Obama and his allies insist that our national
approach to energy and the environment must be based on the
recognition that we are embedded in an intricate system of
ecological linkages. In Obama's view, we have recklessly
spewed carbon into the atmosphere because of poor decisions
about housing, transportation, and electricity use--ignoring
the web that ties them all together. Here, too, the answer is
a system of energy supply that brings to bear the latest
scientific research: A proposed ``cap-and-trade'' program
will establish standards for measuring and regulating the
emission of carbon; and a nationally interlinked web for
energy transmission will carry renewable energy from wherever
it is produced to wherever it is needed, no matter the
distance.
Our education system, too, is chaotic and disorganized,
according to Obama. Too many states and localities are going
in too many different directions, and Washington ``has been
trapped in the same stale debates that have paralyzed
progress and perpetuated our educational decline,'' as he put
it to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Again, the president
argues, the solution is a more uniform application of expert
guidance and direction. ``It's time to give all Americans a
complete and competitive education from the cradle up through
a career,'' he said in March. And that trajectory should be
enabled by one overarching system, because ``it's time to
move beyond the idea that we need several different programs
to address several different problems--we need one
comprehensive policy that addresses our comprehensive
challenges.''
In one policy area after another--from transportation to
science, urban policy to auto policy--Obama's formulation is
virtually identical: selfishness or ideological rigidity has
led us to look at the problem in isolated pieces rather than
as an all-encompassing system; we must put aside parochialism
to take the long systemic view; and when we finally formulate
a uniform national policy supported by empirical and
objective data rather than shallow, insular opinion, we will
arrive at solutions that are not only more effective but less
costly as well. This is the mantra of the policy presidency.
And overseeing each of these policy areas will be a
``czar,'' attuned to the big picture.
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This key presidential aide--almost invariably a policy expert
rather than a political figure--will coordinate the
activities of the various departments through which the
intricate policy web is woven, and focus the latest expert
advice and counsel on his particular segment of the problem
of the whole.
POLITICS AND POLICY
How will the Obama policy-approach presidency fare? We can
find a clue in the unrest stirred by his growing list of
``czars.'' Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Obama's
fellow Democrat, objects to this new structure, complaining
that the czars ``rarely testify before congressional
committees and often shield the information and decision-
making process behind the assertion of executive privilege.''
Indeed, he argues, ``the rapid and easy accumulation of power
by the White House staff can threaten the constitutional
system of checks and balances.'' Liberal law professor Bruce
Ackerman suggests that ``we need to seriously consider
requiring Senate approval of senior White House staff
positions.''
These cavils are unlikely to prompt serious action, but
they do remind us of the persistence of our constitutional
system of checks and balances and of a Senate jealous of its
prerogatives. And that points to a central vulnerability of
the policy-approach presidency. To be successful by its own
definition, each of its policies must necessarily be
rational, coherent, and all-encompassing, whether the issue
is health care, energy, or education. And yet, as the early
Progressives knew all too well, critical elements of the
constitutional system--the executive cabinet, federal
decentralization, the separation of powers, and the extended
commercial republic--serve to shred and fragment policy
proposals as they make their way from the minds of their
expert designers through departmental bureaucracy and
legislative committees (not to mention their hearings in the
court of public opinion). Once enacted, the execution of
policy is similarly trammeled by our political system's
fragmented dispersal of administrative authority. The result
is often policy that is irrational, incoherent, and partial.
Policies not designed to take account of that reality usually
turn to mush in practice.
This failure to heed the realities of our politics often
first presents itself in the form of an overly ambitious
agenda that ignores the nature of the legislative process.
Pressed to take on too much at once in pursuit of holistic
reform, the system overheats quickly and easily. President
Jimmy Carter discovered the risks of this approach when, as
political scientist James Ceaser reminds us, he pursued his
own version of a policy presidency. ``Imbued with a
technocratic perspective toward problem solving,'' Ceaser
writes, ``Carter seemed to view the task of governing in
terms of the management of complex and interrelated
policies.'' Or, as Carter speechwriter James Fallows noted
toward the end of Carter's administration, he ``thinks he
`leads' by choosing the correct policy,'' and so he came to
hold ``explicit, thorough positions on every issue under the
sun.''
The Carter administration therefore generated a flood of
elaborate and complex proposals covering energy, housing,
welfare reform, income policy, families, neighborhoods, and
urban affairs, among other issues. To take urban affairs as
an example, Carter's call for ``A New Partnership'' insisted
that we ``must carefully plan the total range of Federal,
State, and local actions'' in urban areas. To accomplish
this, the partnership laid out, as urban planner Charles
Orlebeke put it, an ``elaborate edifice'' of seven
governing principles, four goals, ten policies, and 38
strategies for implementation. Carter promised to ``work
with, encourage, support and stimulate every other level
of government plus the private sector and neighborhood
groups--all at the same time with equal fervor.'' This is
precisely the sort of expansive and encompassing
programming demanded by a genuinely comprehensive policy
approach.
The administration's ``complex and ambitious program seemed
to confuse the public and ultimately to paralyze the
operation of government,'' Ceaser notes, leaving it little to
show for all its technocratic bustle. By contrast, Carter's
successor Ronald Reagan deliberately limited his proposals to
Congress to one or two top priority items at a time, having
learned precisely this lesson from Carter's failures.
Obama has taken his stand with the comprehensive approach,
noting repeatedly that while there are ``some who believe we
can only handle one challenge at a time,'' in fact ``we don't
have the luxury of choosing between getting our economy
moving now and rebuilding it over the long term.'' Outdoing
Carter, Obama doesn't just view each separate area of public
concern as a realm for the development of a comprehensive
policy. He insists that, following the intractable
interconnectedness of the pieces of his recovery plan, all
the areas of concern must be covered immediately,
simultaneously, and in a coordinated fashion. The
comprehensive policies themselves must all fit into a larger
comprehensive policy. Only thereby will they cohere into a
uniform and truly comprehensive ``new foundation'' for the
revival of the economy.
But as Obama's proposals begin their journeys through the
requisite institutional hoops, they will inevitably begin to
lose their coherence and uniformity. A policy czar may
entertain a single, overarching vision, but the various and
often conflicting cabinet secretaries under his supervision,
along with their vast attendant bureaucracies, may have very
different interpretations of that vision and of how it is to
be implemented. And congressional bargaining is never kind to
fragile policy gems containing numerous carefully
interconnected parts that must all be preserved intact in
order to work.
The Obama agenda is particularly vulnerable to
congressional distortions of executive intentions, owing to
what might be an over-corrective reaction to the lessons of
President Bill Clinton's health-care reform proposal--which
died without a congressional vote in 1994. The Clinton
administration, too, embraced a version of the policy
approach, believing that health-care reform could be
accomplished only by addressing all the pieces within a
coherent and unified system. Clinton, too, argued that the
nation's economic recovery from the recession of the early
1990s depended on it. His Task Force on Health Care Reform
brought together more than 500 experts from all relevant
federal departments, legislative staffs, governors' offices,
and universities to produce a massive, 1,000-page proposal.
It covered every conceivable aspect of health care--down to
establishing limits on the number of specialists that medical
schools could produce.
In Boomerang, her account of the Clinton reform plan,
Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol suggests that since the
task force ``made such a gargantuan effort to come up with a
truly comprehensive plan for reform--a plan thought at the
time to be both technically and politically workable--there
was a natural tendency for administration planners to see
their proposal as a logical achievement to be `explained.' ''
That is, the planners could not bring themselves to dicker
with Congress over the specifics, because they were convinced
that all the pieces had to fit together in order for the
policy to succeed. Yet as the New York Times's Matt Bai has
observed, ``Ever jealous of its prerogative, Congress took a
long look, yawned and kicked the whole plan to the gutter,
where it soon washed away for good--along with much of
Clinton's ambition for his presidency.''
On the surface, Obama seems to have absorbed the moral of
that failure. He has begun the process of revamping health
care and environmental policy by proclaiming general
principles that any plan must feature, while leaving the
specifics of the programs to Congress. But it remains to be
seen whether a Congress reflecting a vast array of contending
geographic and economic interests can produce the sort of
internally consistent and comprehensive proposal that the
policy approach considers essential for success. Obama has
articulated criteria for measuring the value of a plan that
are out of line with his decision to leave the plan's
construction to Congress.
In reality, the Clinton and Obama models are not all that
different. Sooner or later, one way or another, the exquisite
workings of policy experts must be subjected to the brute
judgment of elected officials, who have not lost their quaint
(if inefficient) attachments to the varied desires, needs,
and interests of their constituents. The sheer intellectual
coherence of a plan does not protect it from the need to
justify itself to the American constitutional system. The
policy approach has not overcome democratic politics, and so
remains a profoundly problematic way to try to govern our
democracy.
THE PERSISTENCE OF THE POLITICAL
Progressivism was initially attracted to social science
precisely because it would permit us to avoid or transcend
political conflict grounded in irresolvable economic and
moral differences. Meticulous empirical research that
assembled all available data about a given problem would,
Progressives believed, provide a solid, indisputable, shared
ground for subsequent deliberation. Indeed, social-science
data would be so compelling that the solution to the problem
would likely emerge from its own scientifically rigorous
description. It's not just that facts would be more important
than values: Facts would suggest the most plausible values.
Or, as the American pragmatists believed, what works best to
help us grasp and shape reality becomes the moral good.
We find traces of this thinking in The Audacity of Hope.
``I understand that facts alone can't always settle our
political disputes,'' Obama concedes, but ``the absence of
even rough agreement on the facts puts every opinion on equal
footing and therefore eliminates the basis for thoughtful
compromise.'' He insists, however, that ``sometimes there are
more accurate and less accurate answers; sometimes there are
facts that cannot be spun, just as an argument about whether
it's raining can usually be settled by stepping outside.''
Clearly, Obama's heavy reliance on policy expertise is
designed not just to produce more accurate answers, though
that is surely a critical goal. It also aims to quell the
shrill exchange of equal (because equally baseless) opinions
that, in his view, has come to characterize American
politics. Where available--and Obama intends to multiply the
situations where they are available--pure non-political facts
will provide the grounds for the resolution of policy
questions, fulfilling Progressivism's faith in the natural
and social sciences.
But what then to say about the increasing use of social-
science data by conservative scholars, who seem to use it to
provoke and
[[Page S68]]
sustain, rather than to ameliorate, partisan conflict with
Progressive reformers? Some liberals simply insist that what
conservative scholars produce is inferior or false social
science, because it is produced in service of ideology rather
than objective truth. Eric Wanner, former president of the
liberal Russell Sage Foundation, insists that ``the AEIs and
the Heritages of the world represent the inversion of the
Progressive faith that social science should shape social
policy.'' In his Paradox of American Democracy, John Judis
complains that conservative think-tank scholars ``did not
seek to be above class, party, and ideology'' like earlier,
disinterested social scientists, but rather ``were openly
pro-business and conservative.'' They thereby ``rejected the
very idea of a dispassionate and disinterested elite that
could focus on the national interest.''
But the notion that there is true and false social science
relies on our ability to locate a fixed and universally
accepted standard according to which we can say that some
conclusions are beyond dispute because they are empirically
true. Certainly that was the initial Progressive vision for
social science. Yet the policy and social sciences have come
nowhere close to such a standard in assessing society. In
1979, Edward Banfield wrote that the ``persistent efforts of
reformers to do away with politics and to put social science
and other expertise in its place are not to be accounted for
by the existence of a body of knowledge about how to solve
social problems,'' because no such body exists. Indeed, he
continued, ``there are few social science theories or
findings that could be of much help to a policy maker.''
Ten years later, Ronald Brunner noted in Policy Sciences
that it was difficult to assess the usefulness of the policy
movement, because its ``various parts tend to differ in their
judgments of the relevant standards, data, and inferences to
be drawn from them, whenever their judgments are made
explicit''; nonetheless, the policy approach's ``results
typically have fallen short of the aspirations for rational,
objective analysis.'' Positivist social science had ``assumed
that if the behavioral equivalents of Newton's laws could be
discovered, they would provide a basis for rational and
objective policy. Rationality would be served because the
consequences of policy alternatives could be predicted with
precision and accuracy,'' while the ``valid system of
generalizations would reduce controversy in the policy
arena.'' But still, according to Brunner, ``after roughly
four decades of behavioral research, positivists have not yet
discovered universal covering laws that predict human
behavior with accuracy and precision.''
In short, policy science cannot be depended upon to dampen
or eliminate conflicting points of view because it is itself
riven by deep divisions over how best to develop, analyze,
implement, and evaluate public policy. And these divisions
cannot be explained away by a conservative conspiracy to
dilute genuine, objective social science with a spurious,
ideologically driven imitation. Social science begins from
one place or another in society, and can do great good that
way. But it cannot step outside the circle of our social
life; no human activity can.
The Obama administration will of course insist that its
policy plans are rooted in unassailably objective research.
But there may well be equally compelling research supporting
contrary conclusions, and the debate between them cannot be
resolved by insisting that true science supports only one
kind of conclusion. Often the origins of the dispute have to
do with people's sense of the most important questions to
ask, the most critical goals to set, or the highest ends of
society. These are generally determined by those outmoded,
yet stubborn, values--not social science.
President Obama knows, however, that whatever the state of
the policy approach's epistemological foundations, it is
vital to making the case for his political project. For
example, he can insist that he is undertaking only
reluctantly, and certainly without selfish ambition or
ulterior motive, a massive and ambitious expansion of
government into major segments of the American economy
because it has been shown necessary. ``I don't want to run
GM,'' Obama told reporters as he initiated a government
takeover of the company. The decision was not driven by
personal choice, he seemed to suggest. It was simply what a
thoroughgoing and effective policy approach demands. As
Ceaser points out, ``to speak of a policy for any given area
of activity already implies that that area is a matter for
legitimate superintendence by government.'' Only an
unsophisticated rube would mistake the pristinely objective
dictates of the policy approach for ``socialism.''
But the mention of unsophisticated rubes points to a final
possible problem for President Obama's policy approach, this
one related to America's commitment to democratic self-
government. Obama's technocratic rhetoric is meant to be
soothing and reassuring to an American public fed up with
intractable ideological division: Many of our problems will
resolve themselves once we have collected the facts about
them, because facts can ground and shape our political
discussions, deflating ideological claims and leaving behind
rational and objective answers in place of tired old debates.
But in spite of several decades of data production by social
science, American politics has proven itself to be remarkably
resistant to the pacifying effects of facts. It has continued
to be driven, as James Madison predicted, by the
proliferation and clash of diverse ``opinions, passions and
interests.''
Indeed, as Madison put it, ``as long as the reason of man
continues to be fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise
it, different opinions will be formed.'' It may be that, in
the end, the proponents of the policy approach disagree with
Madison's premise that reason is fallible. But if that is
their view, they can hardly claim much empirical evidence for
it.
Though Madison believed the most common source of different
opinions to be property, he also understood that Americans
were likely as well to divide along religious and moral
lines, reflecting convictions about ultimate questions of
good and evil that cannot be resolved through scientific
reason. This does not mean they take in only part of the
picture, but that they disagree about what is best for the
whole, for reasons that run deep. These disagreements,
although they do not always lend themselves to scientific
analysis and technical solution, speak to genuine human
yearnings and concerns. They are often rooted in many
centuries of experience and wisdom, and can hardly be
dismissed as irrelevant to the life of a liberal society--let
alone as illegitimate subjects for political debate.
This leads to the most troublesome implication of Obama's
policy approach, which revealed itself in what might have
been the chief blunder of his presidential campaign: his
offhand remark that some Americans continue to ``cling'' to
guns and religion in the face of adversity. The comment
betrayed Obama's debt to the Progressive view that such
parochial values are poor substitutes for a sophisticated
understanding of the larger networks of causality that
determine the lives of everyday Americans. In light of
such an understanding, the old debates that grip American
politics may well look rather ridiculous.
The policy approach begins from the assumption that those
old disagreements are fundamentally an error, or a function
of a temporary lack of information. It begins, in other
words, from the contention that democracy is an illegitimate,
or at least a highly inadequate, way to govern a society.
This is a deeply anti-political way of thinking, grounded in
a gross exaggeration of the capacity of human knowledge and
reason. American politics as we have known it appreciates the
fact that fallible men and women cannot command the whole--
and so must somehow manage the interactions and the tensions
among parts. Social science--however sophisticated it might
now be--has come nowhere near disproving that premise. Unless
it does, social science will always best serve politics by
helping to address the particular problems that bedevil
society as they arise, rather than treating society itself as
one large problem to be solved.
This is not because society is not in fact an intricate web
as the early Progressives asserted, but precisely because it
is--a web far too intricate to be reliably manipulated. We
are not capable of weaving our society anew from fresh whole
modern cloth--and so we should instead make the most of the
great social garment we have inherited, in its rich if always
unkempt splendor, mending what is torn and improving what we
can.
Our constitutional system is constructed on this
understanding of the limits of reason and of the goals of
politics. Every effort to impose the policy approach upon it
has so far ended in failure and disappointment, and done much
lasting harm. President Obama is now attempting the most
ambitious such effort in at least 40 years. He brings
considerable talent and charm to the attempt--but the
obstacles to its success remain as firm and deeply rooted as
ever.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Nebraska.
____________________