Tilting at windmills

Washington Monthly, April, 2008 by Charles Peters

My pastor problem

When I last attended church regularly, my pastor, like Reverend Jeremiah Wright, was a good man in many ways but had a few truly bizarre ideas. For one thing, he was obsessed with the cause of the Chinese Nationalists who had retreated to Taiwan after being defeated by the Communists. He even seemed willing to risk World War III by having the U.S. help the Nationalists retake China. During such sermons, I usually tuned him out and used the time for the kind of contemplation and reflection not possible during a busy workweek--with, I must admit, a passing thought or two about sex or my favorite sports. If I had run for president, would I have been accused of advocating World War III because I had gone to that church?

Iraq's budget surplus

It was dismaying to read recently in the Washington Post that the Iraqi army still needs more training and better equipment. Part of the fault lies with the U.S. military, including with General Petraeus, who was responsible for training Iraqi forces in 2004.

But part of the responsibility for equipping troops lies with the Iraqi government. Now we learn, from a Government Accountability Office report summarized by the Associated Press, that the Iraqi government is not "spending much of its own money, despite soaring oil revenues that are pushing the country toward a massive budget surplus." All this as we are on the road to spending $2-3 trillion and running massive budget deficits, because of Iraq!

What goes on must go up

The recent passport scandal has been treated by the media as simply a State Department story, without any suggestion that it is symptomatic of a government-wide problem of people at the top not knowing what is going on down below and making far too little effort to find out. Good news travels up the bureaucratic ladder with lightning speed. But bad news tends to be buried, since no one wants to tell the next fellow up the ladder, for fear that the bearer of the bad news will be blamed, and his or her career will suffer. And sometimes the people at the top don't reach down for the truth because they fear it will conflict with their policies, or simply because they hope the bad news can be buried until their successors can be blamed for it.

Giving a fence

This failure of the bureaucratic top to communicate with the bureaucratic bottom has recently been illustrated in the case of the twenty-eight-mile "virtual fence" built along the Arizona-Mexico border at a cost of $20 million. It seems that the fence, complete with its high-tech sensors and cameras, has been built, according to Jerry Seper of the Washington Times, without any consultation with the field agents who will use it. Needless to say, the goal of the fence, to detect 95 percent of illegal crossings, has not been met.

You can park there, but we'd have to kill you

And speaking of bureaucracy, the local baseball team is trying to find enough parking space for fans coming to the new stadium. It looked into the possibility of using an empty federal garage nearby. The team's owners got the city to pay for the stadium; now they want to get the government to provide parking. So it is difficult to have any sympathy for their problem. Still, here is the list of agencies that, according to the Washington Post's Marc Fisher, must grant permission for use of the garage: the Federal Protectors Service; the Department of Justice; the General Services Administration; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; and five different offices of the Department of Transportation.

And since part of the document that Fisher relied on for this story was redacted "to protect national security," it seems likely that intelligence agencies are also involved.

Obama, another Dewey?

There are some signs that the Obama campaign plans to sit on its lead, running out the clock in the hope that Hillary Clinton will not be able to overtake Obama in pledged delegates and the popular vote. I urge them to attend to the fate of Thomas E. Dewey in the 1940 Republican convention, which he entered with 400 of the 501 votes needed to secure the nomination.

Dewey not only had 80 percent of the votes he needed, but he had won by large margins in every primary he contested and enjoyed a wide lead in the public opinion polls. But in the final three months of the campaign, an unknown candidate named Wendell Willkie emerged from literally nowhere--o percent in the polls on April 1--to command the media's attention and in effect control the story, as Hillary did for much of March. Willkie was favored by media moguls like Henry Luce and most reporters because of his opposition to Hitler. His candidacy was gaining momentum that accelerated as the convention opened on June 23. Three days later, when the balloting actually began, a Gallup poll showed Willkie had moved well ahead of Dewey. On the first ballot, Dewey's 400 votes shrank to 370 and Willkie got 105. But Willkie gained on each succeeding ballot. Dewey eventually withdrew, and Willkie won the nomination late that long and exciting night on the sixth ballot.