Advising Obama

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If you've ever wanted to offer advice to the President of the United States, this is the place to go and have at it.

Lincoln: The Great Partisan

February 12, 2009

Dear President Obama,

Today being the 200th anniversary of the birth of our greatest president, what better time to talk about partisanship?

It would be hard to imagine a politician more partisan than Lincoln, in his time or our own. He fought tirelessly and relentlessly for the success of his party. But that side of his personality has become almost a footnote to history as successive generations have canonized him as a man who transcended party.

To reconcile the man and the myth we need to understand that partisanship for Lincoln was a means to an end rather than an end in itself. He was far too wise to think that it mattered in any absolute sense whether his party was successful or not. What did matter was whether he was able to accomplish his policy objectives. In so far as being partisan helped him to do so, he devoted himself to his party. But when his party became an obstacle to the success of his policies, he wasn't afraid to trade his party for a new one that better represented his politics. He did so twice, once when he left the dying Whig Party, in which he had been a lifetime member, and then again when he stood for reelection for president as the candidate of the National Union Party, instead of as the candidate of the Republican Party under whose banner he was elected to his first term.

Lincoln used partisanship to achieve his political agenda rather than using his political agenda to achieve partisanship. Therein lies a lesson of inestimable value for us.

Mr. President, it seems to me that your noble pursuit of bipartisanship has become an end rather than a means. Lincoln, I think, would not have understood this. If you actually needed Republican votes to get your programs passed, then you would have no choice but to go after them. But you don't need their votes, not with this Congress. (You'll get a few Republican votes when you need them regardless of what you do, not because of your charm but because they need to vote that way for their political survival.)

What you do need are the votes of Democrats. But by devoting so much time and energy to reaching across the aisle you have empowered some conservative members of your own party to ignore your leadership. In this time of crisis, that doesn't serve your party or the country. To paraphrase one of your metaphors, when your house is burning down, you need everyone working together to save it, rather than working at cross purposes that put the whole neighborhood at risk.

The point here, as Lincoln so brilliantly showed us, is that what matters in the long run is the success of your policies rather than the success of your party. By being less of a party man, you have actually made it more difficult to succeed with your policies. As Lincoln understood so well, your political opponents, even in times of great crises, have no choice but to oppose you. That's what they do. So let them.

Meanwhile, look to your own troops. You can't garner the support of the opposition party by abdicating the leadership of your own. In fact, the harder you reach out to your opponents, the harder you make it for them to embrace you. National politics is a public medium, played out on a stage in front of the entire country. Under those circumstances, only by reaching out less to your opponents will you give them the opportunity to reach out more to you. The harder you try to sell bipartisanship, the harder you make it for Republicans to join you. Despite your good intentions, it begins to come across as sounding holier than thou. Nobody responds well to that. So ignore your opponents--until they reach out to you. Then embrace their overtures as you would have liked them to embrace yours.

When you allow your opponents to reach out to you, you give them the chance to be perceived as statesmen. You give them an opening to support your policies--for the good of the country--without being seen to have come under the Obama spell. The bottom line is this: If you really want Republican votes, focus more attention on your party than on theirs.

In a two-party system, the only way you can get anything done is to have one of those parties solidly behind you. Lincoln was profoundly aware of this. Only by gathering your own party behind you can you tap the political capital you need to lead during a time of national emergency. Then, paradoxically, that's when you'll have the best chance of getting support from Republicans.

You know all this, of course. Giving you political advice is like telling Michael Jordan how to shoot a fadeaway. And lately, compared to the first few weeks of your administration, you've begun to sound more like the leader of a political party rather than a leader without a political party. That's a good thing, not because the success or failure of your party matters in the long run, but because the success or failure of your policy matters in the long run.

Fortunately, as Lincoln knew so well, there is a form of party leadership that allows you to put your country first.

Even when Lincoln was most partisan, his inherent decency meant that he played the deadly-serious game of politics with a sense of equanimity toward his opponents that put him in a class by himself. They weren't evil, he knew, they were simply coming from a different place. He didn't demonize his opponents as much as he simply beat them fair and square in the marketplace of ideas. But he did beat them. He played with class but he played to win. To extend his hand in friendship toward his political opponents, as he was inclined to do, to treat them the way he would want to be treated were he in their place even after he had soundly defeated them, that wasn't bipartisanship as much as it was good sportsmanship. Sheer, uncommon decency. Or better yet, let's call it civility. Lincoln played hard but he played fair. Far from preventing him from being partisan, his qualities of humanity and fairness--his innate civility--made him all that much more effective as a competitor in partisan politics. People followed Lincoln because they could sense that he was the kind of man they wanted to be, even when they didn't agree with him. The same, I think, is true of you.

Mr. President, I'm speaking here not as a Democrat or a Republican but as a reader of history. We need the kind of leader who can rise above partisanship when necessary and also rise above bipartisanship when that is necessary. We need someone who can get things done, without trashing those who stand in his way, but get things done he must. That's what a political party does best, to focus the efforts of a large number of people on achieving a small number of goals. The better you lead your own party, the better you will lead the country.

I'm not suggesting a return to the rabid partisanship of the previous eight years. Just the opposite. We don't need another president who puts his party first. What we do need is a president who uses his party as a tool to get those things done that will most benefit the national interest. I urge you to return to the pragmatic, principled party-leadership that allowed Lincoln to wield great power in the service of great ends. On his bicentennial, what better tribute can there be to such a man?

The President-Electric

Dear Mr. President,

While it may be true that I know as much about economics as a Wall Street executive knows about ethics, it seems to me that we need to do more than stimulate our economy, we need to trade it in for a shiny, new 21st Century model. Whatever amount you intend to spend for an immediate stimulus, I urge you to match that money, dollar for dollar, with investments in the key infrastructure and technologies that will position us as the most powerful economy on the planet for years to come.

Start with energy independence. It's the triple-double of economic stimulus. We can create jobs from day one, we can make ourselves more secure, we can make ourselves more competitive, and we can do our part to help stop global warming. Wait a minute—that's a quadruple double! There is no other investment we can make that has as much bang for the buck.

Instead of investing in 20th Century infrastructure like roads and bridges, let's invest in the infrastructure that will make us more competitive and more secure in this century. Sure, we need to repair the roads and bridges we have, that's already in your stimulus plan, but instead of expanding the same old infrastructure for the same old automobiles, let's rethink both. Before we spend another dollar on yet another new highway, let's create a mass-transportation infrastructure that will be the envy of the world the way our superhighway system was in the 1950s.

I happen to live next to an interstate that the government wants to expand because there are too many cars traveling on it during rush hour. That's sooo 20th Century. What we should be doing is investing in transportation systems that free our commuters from having to rely on automobiles. Mass transportation is easier on the environment and ultimately easier on the pocketbook. Building subways and commuter rail service where they don't exist would create jobs, reduce traffic, and reduce pollution. Building high-speed transit in our most heavily traveled corridors would do the same thing. These are massive construction projects that will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs and will yield positive dividends for decades.

And while we're on transportation, what about electric cars? We've been talking about them for years. We know how to build them but we never seem to get the job done. There's this chicken and egg thing, where no one will buy electric cars until there’s an electric grid that can support them, but no one will build that grid until people start buying electric cars. So let's start with the grid right now, today, and solve both problems at once.

If we’re ever going to move to a model of electric cars and sustainable energy, we're going to have to solve the problem of moving electricity from what will of necessity be remote, power-generating facilities, like wind farms in the Great Plains and massive solar farms in the deserts, to wherever that energy is needed. But the problem with electricity is that it can't be stored in large quantities so it has to be used the instant it is generated and it has to be generated the instant it needs to be used. A smart electric grid—nationwide—would make all that possible by making it economically viable to move electricity from one part of the country to any other part of the country that needs it. Such a grid would also spread the load so that during hours of peak demand on the East Coast, for example, energy generated elsewhere can help meet that demand. Later in the day, as peak demand shifts to the Midwest and then the West Coast, electricity can follow that demand.

But wait, there's more. We've already seen that one of the great challenges of generating massive amounts of electricity is that we can't store it. But guess what? If we convert our fleet of automobiles from gas to electric, we will have tens of millions of cars with high capacity, high efficiency batteries that can store an enormous amount of energy. If we build an electric grid that is smart enough, when those cars aren't being driven they can actually transfer their energy back to the grid to be sent, in an emergency, to wherever it is needed. And if we take this model one step further, with a smart enough grid, efficient enough batteries, and tax policies that make it attractive enough, we can encourage homeowners to install battery-backup systems for their homes (instead of gas generators). Such systems could power those homes during power outages lasting from a few hours to weeks at a time. And again, during times of emergency or special need, the energy stored in those home-sized battery-backup systems, or some portion of that stored power, could be fed back to the smart grid and transferred to wherever that energy is needed.

Where would such miracle batteries come from? They’re already here. The latest batteries for electric cars are easier on the environment, last longer, weigh less, charge more quickly, and provide more miles per charge. That’s the good news. The bad news is that these batteries are not yet quite cheap enough for mass production. So let's make them cheaper. Let's invest, and invent, and legislate our way to solve that problem the way we’ve solved so many others. Let's make those batteries a top priority so that the electric cars we produce will be even better than the gas cars we've been used to.

With a smart grid in place, we can generate power virtually anywhere—on a wind-farm the size of a small state or a solar panel on top of a hen-house—and then move that power to wherever it is needed. We can put electric cars on the road that can be charged wherever we choose to drive them. And then their next-generation batteries—along with such batteries in our homes—can store the kind of emergency power that we’ve never had access to before. And that power can be transferred on demand to wherever it is needed. All because we invested in the grid, the cars, and the batteries that together provide benefits that far outweigh the cost of the parts.

But where will all that electricity come from? Again, that’s a solvable problem. What we need is massive investment in the kind of infrastructure that will produce sustainable energy. Not a few billion bucks here and there, but a determined effort to supply at least 50% of our energy from renewable sources within the next eight years.

We can do it if we want to. We have enormous stretches of land in the United States that are ideal for wind farms and similar areas elsewhere that are ideal for solar farms. We're not talking a few acres of solar panels or wind turbines, we're talking about square miles, in some cases dozens of square miles for a single facility. Likewise, there are plenty of locations where geothermal energy makes economic sense. Best of all, these technologies are here today. To the extent they are not economically competitive with fossil-burning energy sources, that is only because we have refused as a society to consider the true costs of continuing to burn fossil fuels.

What are those costs? Think of the burden on our health care system from treating lung disease and other pollution-related illnesses. Think of how many hours of productivity are lost because of those same illnesses. Think of how many of us die younger than we need to because the air we breathe and the water we drink are unhealthy for us. And what about the hundreds of billions of dollars we spend to defend our lifeline to oil in the Middle East? Why not invest a fraction of those dollars—while sacrificing none of our soldiers’ lives—to solve the problem right here at home? And who knows how much we will save if we can slow or even reverse global warming? Trillions? Gazillions? I doubt if we can even count that high.

Mr. President, I know you know all this. You even mentioned most of it in your Inaugural Address. I know that you intend to make energy independence a high priority of your administration. But why not make it the highest priority? Why not help to solve almost all of our most pressing problems by focusing on this one first?

The economy of the 20th Century, the economy that made us such an economic powerhouse, was based on atoms. We learned to make things and move things with such efficiency and on such a large scale that we became the richest nation on earth. But the economy of the 21st Century will belong to whomever becomes the best at making and moving electrons. Whichever country makes the smartest investments in that new economy will reap the greatest rewards, in terms of economic stimulus, job creation, reduction in the costs of health care, reduction in carbon footprint, enhanced national security, and increases in productivity and competitiveness that will lead the world for decades to come. That's one competition we can't afford to lose.

The scale of the commitment we're talking about here staggers the imagination. But the payoff is even larger. As enormous as such a task might be, I can't think of anything more worthy of a great nation. Or a great leader.

©Copyright 2009 by Keith Ellis; All Rights Reserved