Not like us --why distrust of D.C. causes bipartisan pain -- July 11, 2013

By MARSHA MERCER

What’s the difference between Washington and everywhere else? Here’s a quick take from a corporate executive who knows from experience.   

“Growing up in New Hampshire and being a CEO, I always felt like what I thought, what I said and what I did had to be the same thing,” says David M. Cote, chairman and chief executive of Honeywell International. 

“In government, that’s three separate decisions.”

In Washington, “what they say isn’t necessarily what they think, and what they do isn’t necessarily what they say or think,” says Cote, who noted that Washington operates at a level of “complexity” beyond any he has dealt with in the business world. He sat for an interview last month at a Wall Street Journal breakfast.

I would argue that not doing what one says is duplicity, not complexity, but let’s not quibble. Cote hit on a truth so obvious it made me want to slap my forehead. He learned as a member of the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles fiscal responsibility commission how to translate Washington-speak and understand how politicians triangulate their thoughts, words and deeds.

Cote, the lifelong Republican, said he once walked out of a meeting with a pol who had said, “I’m with you, Dave.” Cote turned to his staff guy and said, “What a great meeting!”  

“He’s not with us,” his guy replied and explained why what the pol said wasn’t really what he meant. Cote had a lot to learn.

Some corporate suits named to presidential commissions just make one appearance or so – they’re busy, after all, with their day jobs. But Cote arranged his schedule so he could show up every time the commission met, an accomplishment that only he, Simpson and Bowles managed. He learned not to take what pols say at face value – certainly not until there’s a deal they can start talking about. Why, he says, would a savvy pol go out on a limb and upset constituents prematurely?

When the Simpson-Bowles commission considered raising the age of eligibility for Social Security by one year 75 years in the future, left-leaning groups rose in mighty opposition, ludicrously claiming that the commission was robbing the old. Eventually, Congress must deal with the long-term future of boomer-burdened Social Security and Medicare. The longer we wait, the more likely we hurt current beneficiaries.   

Even though Congress should deal with the future of Medicare and Medicaid now, the more likely scenario is that Congress will lurch forward, crisis to crisis, Cote says.

There are “some really smart, well-meaning people” in Washington, Cote says, and, yes, there are also dolts. “I’ve had times when I’ve looked at someone and said, ‘You can’t possibly believe what you just said.’”Haven’t we all?

Cote’s trenchant remarks help explain why it’s so hard for voters to trust anyone in Washington. President Barack Obama shocked many on his side when he delayed parts of the Affordable Care Act, and that was merely the latest in a series of disappointments for liberal supporters.

House Majority Whip Eric Cantor, R-Va., promises that the House will take up a package of bills before the end of the month aimed at addressing the trust deficit in Washington. Among these is a bizarre  measure allowing people to record their conversations with some federal officials – although not with members of Congress.

If the House and Senate can’t agree on substantive legislation, like the Farm Bill and how to avoid doubling the interest rates on new student loans, political grandstanding hardly will shore up the people’s trust.

If Dave Cote is right, the problem for the next presidential candidate -- Republican and Democratic –is deeper than something a jazzy PR campaign can fix. Voters need to believe we can rely on what politicians say as a guide to what they’ll do. That’s not too much to ask. Anything less adds to the already significant distrust of Washington and that will keep voters home on Election Day.

 © 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

A boomlet of Bush popularity -- April 25, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Americans are notoriously fickle. Three separate times while he was president, George W. Bush’s approval rating plummeted to 25 percent. This, of course, was the same president whose approval rating soared to 90 percent after the 9/11 attacks.

As Bush’s helicopter lifted off the U.S. Capitol grounds for his return to Texas after Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration in January 2009, the jubilant crowd sang-sneered:  “Nah, nah, nah, nah, hey, hey, goodbye!” At that point, only about one in three Americans approved of his performance as president.

Bush claims he never worries about polls or the judgment of history. When journalist Bob Woodward asked him in 2003 how history would judge the Iraq war, Bush declined to take the bait. “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead,” he said.

As they often do with polarizing politicians, people have mellowed toward Bush. Nearly half of adults now approve of the way he handled his job as president. While about three in four Democrats still disapprove, that’s down from the nine in 10 Democrats who disapproved in 2008 of the way he did his job.

Bush’s approval rating overall equals Obama’s, the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll reported Tuesday.  Such are the power of silence and absence.

   

In our ego-driven world, the idea of someone stepping off the national stage more or less voluntarily has definite appeal. Even his critics admired the way Bush picked up his paint brushes and went about his new life in Dallas, refusing to be drawn into the political fray.

He didn’t respond when Barack Obama and other Democrats blamed him for the mess he left. He skipped the 2008 Republican National Convention to stay in Washington after Hurricane Gustav, showing he did learn something from the disastrously slow response to Katrina. He declined an invitation to join Obama at Ground Zero after Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011. Bush also stayed away from the Republican National Convention last year.

The 43^rd president, in interviews surrounding the dedication Thursday of his presidential library, began to give his side of his eight White House years. For example, he vigorously defended the Medicare prescription drug benefit he expanded, despite Republican criticism that it was too big and costly.

“We were modernizing an antiquated system” already in place, he told the Dallas Morning News.

He regrets being unable to get an immigration bill through Congress, and he called for a “benevolent spirit” in the debate.

His brand of “compassionate conservatism” may yet get a second look from his party. After losing the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, the Republican National Committee finally conceded that the perception that the GOP doesn’t care hurts Republican candidates. Imagine that. 

It’s worth remembering how Bush cast his compassionate conservatism. “Big government is not the answer. But the alternative to bureaucracy is not indifference,” he said in 2000. “We will give low-income Americans tax credits to buy the private health insurance they need and deserve,” he said.

Democrats typically denounced Bush’s compassion as phony, and conservatives saw his conservatism as squishy. Interestingly, tax credits are what the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – will give low-income people in January to buy health insurance through exchanges.

   

House Republicans have voted repeatedly to repeal Obamacare. This week House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., tried a different approach. The felicitously titled “Helping Sick Americans Now Act” would redirect $300 million from the health law’s Prevention and Public Health Fund to a temporary health insurance fund for people with pre-existing medical conditions.

   

The idea was to show that while they hate Obamacare, Republicans do care about the sick. Not so fast.

Democrats opposed the measure for draining the public health fund, and the White House threatened a veto. But it was the ire of GOP conservatives that forced Cantor to pull the bill before a floor vote. Tea party Republicans and other conservatives refused to vote for anything short of repealing Obamacare.

Cantor says he isn’t giving up. Can he win the compassion argument among Republicans that Bush could not? Stay tuned.

   

 © 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Skimping on brain food -- April 5, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

President Barack Obama says “the next great American project” will be mapping human brain activity.

The budget he will send Congress Wednesday calls for $110 million for his brain initiative in fiscal 2014, which begins Oct. 1.

Even Newt Gingrich and Eric Cantor support brain research. Former Republican House Speaker Gingrich said Obama “deserved credit for taking an important step in the right direction.”  And House Majority Leader Cantor said in a statement it’s “exactly the type of research we should be funding…it’s great science.”

Before we go all gooey about gridlock thawing in Washington, a new space race or our 21^st Century Camelot, let’s take a deep breath. The president proposes, Congress disposes. And $110 million -- bold?

Don’t get me wrong. You’d have to be living in a cave not to support the effort to unlock the mysteries of the brain. We need this research, and we need it now. But it’s hardly a done deal. There’s plenty of time for Republican mischief making. And about that federal effort of $110 million a year – that doesn’t say bold or audacious.  It says modest. Piddling.

I get the rationale for starting small. Maybe it’s the best the president can hope for in the Honey- I-Shrank-Uncle-Sam era. But in modern America, $110 million is small potatoes.

It’s Justin Bieber’s net worth. He’s 19.

It’s the listing price of a penthouse apartment in New York City last year. OK, the apartment was near Carnegie Hall, but still.

It’s even just three-tenths of 1 percent of the National Institutes of Health’s annual budget, according to Francis Collins, the director.  

He said in a live chat via Twitter that NIH is in a “pickle” after budget cuts over 10 years that lopped 20 percent of purchasing power for research. Sequestration is draining $1.5 billion from NIH this year, he said.

So don’t let cold-eyed budget hawks tell you $110 million is a large sum. The Human Genome Project got about $300 million a year from Uncle Sam. Total federal investment was $3.8 billion. The project to map the human genome took 13 years.

Obama likes to tell audiences that every dollar spent on the genome project generated $140 in economic output.  Not bad.

Republican Cantor suggested “reprioritizing the $250 million we currently spend on political and social science research” for the brain initiative. It almost sounded as if Cantor was doubling the president’s bid on brain research. Wouldn’t that be fun? More likely, Cantor was trying to show he’s for the brain, conservatively speaking.

Obama envisions his initiative as “giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action and better understand how we think and how we learn and how we remember. And that knowledge could be – will be – transformative.”

After a decade of war, no politician will, or should, ever say we’re doing all we can to help our wounded warriors with traumatic brain injury and post traumatic stress disorder. No one can tell families struggling to help loved ones that we should wait to look for ways to treat, cure or even prevent Alzheimer’s, autism, epilepsy, Parkinson’s and strokes.

And yet, such practical applications of the BRAIN project -- Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies – are far off. Obama didn’t mention a timeline or even a definite goal.

Three federal agencies will contribute money to the research in the year that begins Oct. 1: National Institutes of Health, $40 million;   Defense Advanced Research Projects, $50 million; and the National Science Foundation, $20 million.

Some say this isn’t the right time begin a new project because of budget woes, but Collins says research has progressed to the point where putting it on hold is wrong.

The federal government will work with four foundations on brain research. The Allen Institute for Brain Science has agreed to spend $60 million annually on projects related to the initiative; Howard Hughes Medical Institute, $30 million annually; the Kavli Foundation, $4 million a year over 10 years; and  Salk Institute for Biological Studies, $28 million.

It’s a good start, but it’s not enough.

“I wish we could go faster,” Collins said on the live Twitter chat. “Maybe we’ll be able to ramp it up.”

© 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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