[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 1]
[Senate]
[Pages 452-458]
[From the U.S. 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:

       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

[[Page 453]]

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 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.

[[Page 454]]

       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.
       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

[[Page 455]]

     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 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,

[[Page 456]]

     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.

[[Page 457]]

      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

[[Page 458]]

     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 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.

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