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Since it is the NY Times, you will be surprised at the criticism.
… Successful modern presidents share an experience that Barack Obama does not have: before becoming president, each played an executive or leadership role that provided insight as to how to run an effective government.
The management troubles that have dogged the Obama administration are not unique to Mr. Obama or his team. One of the biggest problems facing America today is that in Washington, the ability to effectively run complex organizations is among the skill sets that is least valued in our leaders.
Often people with no management experience — academics, writers or politicians who have never run an office with more than a handful of people — are put in charge of giant, complicated government agencies or processes. In part this is because so many people in government mistakenly believe that being able to articulate ideas is the same as being able to put ideas into action.
This administration provides an object lesson in how, when too many staffers have excessive influence, political calculations often trump good policy choices. When an inner circle maintains too tight a stranglehold over the president’s time and attention, too few views come into play. If isolated by an inner circle, the president will have a harder time fostering cooperation in his administration. During his first term, Mr. Obama’s inner circle included Michelle Obama, Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, David Plouffe and Pete Rouse. Even top administration officials believe these gatekeepers held power too closely. Staff casualties resulted.
When Obama campaign insiders on the National Security Council staff were thought to have more access to the president than their boss, Gen. James L. Jones, the general reportedly felt undermined and left the administration. Ms. Jarrett is said to be seen as so powerful that hardly anyone dares to cross her.
Despite constant behind-the-scenes grumbling from top officials, few appear to have successfully challenged her. Acknowledging how much the president values her opinion, staffers complain about her involvement in matters outside her competence. Battles with Ms. Jarrett reportedly played a role in at least one top official’s decision to leave the administration.
Mr. Obama’s top advisers say they often feel alienated from the president. There is a sense in the White House that “Barack Obama’s theory of government is he is the government.”
Mr. Obama’s perceived aloofness didn’t help his relations with Congress. Many Hill Democrats resent the fact that the president essentially did not consult with them during the last campaign, regularly keeping them away from him during his campaign appearances.
CHIEF executives who have visited the White House for much publicized consultations with the president and senior staff report that Mr. Obama appears to be more interested in delivering his message than in listening to others. This, too, speaks to Mr. Obama’s management weakness. Selecting a diverse team, creating a system in which ideas surface, listening to those ideas and then empowering others to put them into action are the cornerstones of good management — and of effective leadership. …
Joel Kotkin revisits his look at the “clerisy.”
… The clerisy shares a kind of mission which Bell described as the rational “ordering of mass society.” Like the bishops and parish priests of the feudal past, or the public intellectuals, university dons and Anglican worthies of early 19th century Britain, today’s clerisy attempts to impart on the masses today’s distinctly secular “truths,” on issues ranging from the nature of justice, race and gender to the environment. Academics, for example, increasingly regulate speech along politically correct lines, and indoctrinate the young while the media shape their perceptions of reality.
Most distinctive about the clerisy is their unanimity of views. On campus today, there is broad agreement on a host of issues from gay marriage, affirmative action and what are perceived as “women’s” issues to an almost religious environmentalism that is contemptuous toward traditional industry and anything that smacks of traditional middle class suburban values. These views have shaped many of the perceptions of the current millennial generation, whose conversion to the clerical orthodoxy has caught most traditional conservatives utterly flat-footed.
As befits a technological age, the new clerisy also enjoys the sanction of what Bell defined as the “creative elite of scientists.” Prominent examples include the Secretary of Energy, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist David Chu; science advisor John Holdren; NASA’s James Hansen; and the board of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In the words of New York Times hyper-partisan Charles Blow, Republicans have devolved into the “creationist party.” In contrast Obama reigns gloriously hailed as “the sun king” of official science.
Let’s be clear — this new ascendant class is no threat to either the “one percent,” or even the much smaller decimal groups. Historically, the already rich and large economic interests often profit in a hyper-regulated state; the clerisy’s actions can often stifle competition by increasing the cost of entry for unwelcome new players. Like Cardinal Richelieu or Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, our modern-day dirigistes favor state-directed capital that has benefited, among others, “green” capitalists, Wall Street “too big to fail” firms and, of course, General Motors.
More disturbing still may be the clerisy’s regal disregard for democratic give and take. Both traditional hierarchies, or new ones like the Bolsheviks after the 1917 revolution, disdain popular will as intrinsically lacking in scientific judgment and societal wisdom. Some leading figures in the clerisy, such as former Obama budget advisor Peter Orszag, openly argue for shifting power from naturally contentious elected bodies to credentialed “experts” operating in places Washington, Brussels or the United Nations.
Such experts, of course, see little need for give and take with their intellectual inferiors, in Congress or elsewhere. This attitude is expressed in the administration’s increasing use of executive orders to promote policy goals such as better gun control, reduced greenhouse emissions or reform of immigration. Whatever one’s views on these issues, that they are increasingly settled outside Congress represents a troublesome notion.
Like empowered bureaucrats everywhere, the clerisy also sometimes reserves a nice “taste” for themselves, much as the old bishops and upper clergy indulged in luxury and even prohibited pleasures of the flesh. Just look at the lavish payouts accorded to Orszag and Treasury Secretary-designate Jacob Lew, who, after serving in the bureaucracy, make millions off the same Wall Street firms that have so benefited from administration policies.
So who loses in the new order? Certainly unfashionable companies – oil firms, agribusiness concerns, suburban homebuilders — face tougher times from regulators and the mainstream media . But the biggest losers likely will be the small business-oriented middle class. Not surprisingly Main Street, far more than Wall Street, harbors the gravest pessimism about the president’s second term.
The small business owner, the suburban homeowner, the family farmer or skilled construction tradesperson are intrinsically ill-suited to playing the the insiders’ game in Washington. Played up to at election time, they find their concerns promptly abandoned thereafter, outliers more than ever in a refashioned political order.
So how does the clerisy treat today’s slaves – adjunct professors? Walter Russell Mead knows.
When the Affordable Care Act passed in early 2010, many in academia—faculty and students alike—cheered on. But now that its provisions are going into effect, some of these same people are learning firsthand that Obamacare has some nasty side effects.
A new piece in the Wall Street Journal reports that many colleges are cutting back on the number of hours worked by adjunct professors, in order to avoid new requirements that they provide healthcare to anyone working over 30 hours per week. This is terrible news for a lot of people; 70 percent of professors work as adjuncts and many will now have to cope with a major pay cut just as requirements that they buy their own health insurance go into effect:
In Ohio, instructor Robert Balla faces a new cap on the number of hours he can teach at Stark State College. In a Dec. 6 letter, the North Canton school told him that “in order to avoid penalties under the Affordable Care Act… employees with part-time or adjunct status will not be assigned more than an average of 29 hours per week.”
Mr. Balla, a 41-year-old father of two, had taught seven English composition classes last semester, split between StarkState and two other area schools. This semester, his course load at StarkState is down to one instead of two as a result of the school’s new limit on hours, cutting his salary by about a total of $2,000.
StarkState’s move came as a blow to Mr. Balla, who said he earns about $40,000 a year and cannot afford health insurance.
“I think it goes against the spirit of the [health-care] law,” Mr. Balla said. “In education, we’re working for the public good, we are public employees at a public institution; we should be the first ones to uphold the law, to set the example.”
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen serious unintended consequences from Obamacare, and it’s unlikely to be the last. It’s already become painfully obvious that the law’s creators failed to think through its full implications.
But beyond alerting us to one of the many problems that implementing Obamacare will cause, this news provides a depressing look at the underbelly of the academy. Universities are citadels of blue model thinking and most faculty members are relentlessly liberal in their politics. But the reality is that these same universities are some of the nastiest and most exploitative employers in America. The exploitation of adjuncts is an ugly feature of contemporary American academic life, and the smug complacency about it among many beneficiaries of the two tier system should remind us all that moral hypocrisy can co-exist with impressive degrees.
Partisans of the blue social model like to think of it as a utopian commonwealth; academic adjuncts know the truth, and the revolting treatment of adjuncts by colleges understandably anxious to avoid the high costs of Obamacare should remind us all that the blue social model, especially in decline, is not as benign as its supporters and beneficiaries believe.
Reason with yet another government nightmare of unintended consequences.
Jerrie Brathwaite was not in her car when Washington, D.C. police seized it in January 2012. She had lent her 2000 Nissan Maxima to a friend, and that friend was pulled over, searched, and found to be in possession of drugs. A year later, Braithwaite—who has never been charged with a crime—still doesn’t have her car back, and no one from the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) will return her calls.
Brathwaite, 33, is knee-deep in the murky world of civil asset forfeiture, where confiscated cars, cash, and other property disappear into police coffers, and where legal recourse for owners is confusing, slow, and expensive. Under civil forfeiture, police can seize property from people who are never convicted—much less charged with—a crime. Unlike criminal forfeiture, where the government must prove property was used in the commission of crime, civil forfeiture law presumes an owner’s guilt.
According to Brathwaite, a single mother of three living in Southeast Washington, D.C., a police investigator told her in June that the car was no longer needed as evidence in the case against her friend, and would be released. “He told me…to make sure I faxed him all the necessary paperwork…. I faxed everything and I just haven’t heard anything,” she says. “I’ve been calling. I called in the past three months I know at least 10 times and left voicemails and no one has called me back.”
Brathwaite’s situation—and the MPD’s behavior—are not uncommon. Civil forfeiture is a national problem. Law enforcement agencies seize millions of dollars worth of property each year with little or no due process for owners. In all but six states property owners are considered guilty until proven innocent. State law typically allows law enforcement to keep most or all of the proceeds from forfeiture—an enormous incentive to police for profit.
In court filings, MPD claims to have sold over 200 forfeited vehicles at auction in the last three years—and to have returned 16 to 20 vehicles a week to property owners during that time. MPD says it collected $358,000 from civil forfeiture in fiscal year 2011, according to court documents. Over the same period the department received $529,000 from federal equitable sharing, a program in which local law enforcement turns cases over to federal prosecutors. The feds process the forfeiture and then return 80 percent of the proceeds to the seizing agency. It’s a finder’s fee of sorts for local cops.
In theory, the government uses asset forfeiture to strip criminal enterprises of resources and “toys”—the cars, planes, boats, and homes that make the illicit life look glamorous. But a glance at the legal notices the department publishes periodically in The Washington Times reveals the city is hardly targeting kingpins. A notice from last September lists these cars: a 1985 Chevrolet, a 1994 BMW, a 1999 Lincoln, a 1994 Lexus, a 1991 Honda, and a 2001 Chevrolet. Most seizures are of cash—generally less than $100 and as little as $7—taken from thousands of people each year. …