Tilting at windmills.

• Author: Peters, Charles

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President, dictator, whatever

In the long parade of books on the topic of what Obama could or should have done, which began with Ron Suskind's Confidence Men, the silliest of all has to be Bob Woodward's The Price of Politics. The problem with all of these books is that their authors are beholden to unreal expectations, and have little or no idea of the difficulty of getting sixty votes in Mitch McConnell's Senate, or of the near impossibility of dealing with the right-wing Republican majority that has ruled the House since 2010.

Woodward expected Obama to "bend Congress to his will." Think about those words. Their hint of macho bombast becomes more obvious when you change the object of "bend" from a group to an individual. Say, a woman. Would Woodward say "he should bend her to his will"?

So, in the end, he got what he wanted

By the way, the issue posed at the beginning of the Washington Post excerpt of Woodward's book is whether Obama could avoid a two-step solution to the debt crisis, meaning that Congress would authorize a one-time increase of the debt ceiling in the summer of 2011 but the country would have to address the issue again this year during the heat of the fall campaign. The remainder of the excerpt sounds like the effort was a total failure. Only in the penultimate paragraph do we learn that a few days before the deadline "House Republicans dropped their insistence on the two-step plan."

Mediconfusion

In a recent article in the New York Times, "Despite Democrats' Warnings, Private Medicare Plans Find Success," Robert Pear wrote that "private plans have helped hold down costs and have satisfied most beneficiaries." Just how these private insurance plans have cut costs remains a mystery, however. And the mystery deepens seven paragraphs later when Pear at last discloses that Medicare has actually "paid private plans more than it would cost to care for the same patients in the traditional gov ernment-run Medicare program." In other words, private plans have cost the government more, not less.

The wrong reward

Last month, I praised Michael Grunwald's The New New Deal, for telling the positive story about the stimulus program. I noted that he also told what was wrong with it. The story of the Department of Energy's Claire Johnson illustrates both the good and bad, and in telling it, Grunwald displayed knowledge about how government works that is rare among Washington journalists, whose high sophistication about politics is often accompanied by abysmal ignorance of bureaucratic culture.

The Obama stimulus program gave the Department of Energy's Office of Weatherization $11.3 billion for the weatherization of low-income homes and related efficiency efforts. The trouble is that the George W. Bush administration had little interest in the office's work and had therefore used it as a dumping ground--what insiders call a turkey farm--for marginal or incompetent but hard-to-fire employees, hoping to get rid of them by budget cuts or program elimination, the only efficient way of removing unwanted civil servants.

The office, thus ill-equipped to carry out its new mission as part of the stimulus program, was limping along weatherizing homes at the rate of 30,000 a year when Claire Johnson took over. She managed to inspire the remaining good employees as well as enough of the marginal ones to raise the rate to 30,000 a month. In the process, however, she annoyed the timeservers who refused to be inspired. They leaked emails to the department's inspector general, showing that Johnson

had cut corners in hiring her deputy. The hiring process, Johnson explained, was "just too slow." Of course she was telling the truth; it is far too slow and is one of the major problems of government. Nonetheless, she was fired.

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