I'm thinking again about Cheney's cryptic remarks about Paul O'Neill and about the Bush administration policymaking contained in the USA Today/LA Times interview to which Dan Froomkin points. Cheney praises O'Neill:
I'd worked with him... during the Ford administration... he was superb... we'd kept up.... He had a great career at Alcoa, in the corporate world.... [W]e were looking for somebody... [with] a blend of governmental... as well as private sector experience... in the economic arena. And Paul fit the bill... highly recommended by a number of other people that we consulted as we put the Cabinet together. Why it failed? I don't know. I don't want to get into that. Paul has had his say. I disagree with his analysis obviously. But he's had his day. I feel badly for him, to some extent, that he has ended his career on this note. That's his choice.
O'Neill's belief is that he failed because he called for backup from Cheney--for help in reforming the White House's broken economic policymaking process--and did not get it. O'Neill told Cheney that Larry Lindsey was the wrong man to run the White House economic policy shop--disorganized and unwilling to let alternative points of view through the gates he guarded. And Cheney did nothing to help.
It is ironic that when Lindsey was fired--at the same moment as O'Neill, and with the same extraordinary lack of grace--it was because he was disorganized, and unwilling to let alternative points of view through the gates he guarded (and because he had spoken out of turn and given an estimate for the cost of the war in Iraq).
Cheney's unwillingness to help Paul O'Neill straighten out and rationalize White House economic policymaking is very strange, given Cheney's willingness during the Ford administration to put his career on the line in the interest of maintaining the kind of honest, straight policy development process that O'Neill wanted to set up. As Cheney reminisced a decade and a half ago:
... vice-president [Nelson Rockefeller] would come in with a new policy proposal.... He'd lay it on the president.... [T]he president would hand it to you and say, "What the hell do we do with this?" Your responsibility... was to say, "Well, we'll staff it out".... The answer would always come back... "This new policy proposal is totally inconsistent with the basic policy of the Ford administration".... From the standpoint of the vice-president, you are a bad guy... great personal hostility between... myself and the vice-president.... If you ask President Ford today... [h]is relationship with the vice-president was excellent. But the problem... was created by the president. We had to deal with it... be that cushion, that rubber.... It made their relationship sound, kept us from doing anything stupid... but made you the brunt of great hostility...
Somebody who understood the importance of making sure an honest staff process filtered the views of high officials with strong (and possibly unfounded) views should have been eager to help Paul O'Neill in his struggle to make White House economic policymaking less irrational.
Note that this is not a single example: this is part of a pattern of mistakes. Cheney's active intervention to purge planning for post-liberation Iraq of State Department influence, and to leave it in the hands of a Pentagon which has little clue what it is doing, is the biggest other example I can think of. But you can also cite to Cheney's key role in getting the steel tariff through the administration, in spite of the fact that it ws not only bad economics but bad mercantilism--likely to greatly annoy off well-organized steel-using industries, and to lead to a net loss of manufacturing-sector jobs.
I see three possibilities:
The third possibility seems to be ruled out. Cheney seems to be enjoying his role in the administration vastly:
But I make the judgments, and we make the judgments, the staff, on those kinds of considerations in terms of what will advance the program and move us farther down the road towards our goals and objectives, than I do in terms of worried about, sort of, my image, or how people perceive me. Am I brown cloud? Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole? It's a nice way to operate, actually...
Note how he says "I make the judgments" and then catches himself...
Posted by DeLong at January 20, 2004 04:48 PM | TrackBack
I think that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush, and a few others are policy entrepreneurs or adventurists. Maybe they learned it from Ariel "facts on the ground" Sharon. If you present the world with a fait accompli with no turning back, often the world just accepts it -- and how and why you got there becomes a moot point.
Especially if all your adversaries find the new situation unbearable and are intimidated by the impossibility of improving it much according to their principles, whereas the situation is fine according to your principles.
Early in his career Cheney was learning the ropes and establishing himself. Now he's angling for his place in history, and he's chosen to gamgle big.
But I would say that.
Posted by: zizka / John Emerson on January 20, 2004 06:18 PMWell, somebody has to have their hand in the sock puppet. Cheney, cabal or committee?
Posted by: jim in austin on January 20, 2004 07:25 PMI read somewhere that in the Reagan Administration Cheney advocated fomenting a violent rebellion to bring down the Soviet Union, and in Congress he voted against a resolution to release Mandela from prison. I'm running out of synonyms for "shortsighted".
Posted by: Lee A. on January 20, 2004 10:02 PM"...make White House economic policymaking less irrational...."
Less irrational from whose point of view?
I have a hunch that they, the Bush team, the core team (which does not include either Ms. Rice or Mr. Powell), know exactly what they want and go for it.
Posted by: Bulent on January 21, 2004 12:15 AM>"Am I [a] brown cloud? Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?"<
--Dick Cheney
I was with him all the way up until he jumped the rhetorical shark with "genius".
On the other hand, two out of three ain't bad. Or anyway, that's what they say. Not that that makes it "gospel" or anything...
Posted by: Mike on January 21, 2004 01:16 AMAll of your options are based on the assumption that Mr. Cheney knows/accepts a traditional economic model. Those options don't fit if Mr. Cheney is working from another model. It may seem inconceiveable to top economists that anyone would be foolhardy enough to abandon years of refined economic study. However, with the faith based, belief is rationalized and trumps inconsistencies.
It is mistaken to believe that Mr. Cheney or any of the people calling the shots in the Bush administration are working from a traditional economic model. Mr. Bush is a supply sider who believes that tax cuts are supposed to increase revenue by expanding the economy. The deficit is not supposed to be a problem because the extra economic growth from the tax cuts will make up the difference.
I agree that supply side is a crackpot model. However, it was the Reagan model and Reagan is worshipped by the southern redneck GOP plantation economists that are currently running our country. If your school board was filled with creationists, you would get creationism taught in science class rooms. If an administration is filled with true believers in crackpot supply side voodoo, then we will get voodoo policy.
We have received voodoo policy. Ergo, the supply siders (voodoo faction) are controlling the policy. It is a mistake to think that Cheney takes a more traditional academically acceptable POV. If Cheney truly believes in supply side as do most of the GOP faithful, then it was is not his job to help O'Neill introduce policy based on economic models that treat supply side as the hokem it is. It is Cheney's job to support the policy, not the alternative.
Given that the administration predictions for jobs, deficits, etc. have been way off the mark and very different from those using more standard models, it is clear the model being used by Bush Inc. must make some very different assumptions. Although they don't publish their methods, their model appears to include a stimulatory effect of the tax cuts (this is where the supply side voodoo comes in) well beyond that used by the other models.
According to Bush Inc. they are pulling all the correct economic levers, but are being frustrated by the trifecta factors beyond their control. They take the Kantian approach to economics. If their economic model is not predicitve, they don't correct the model, they blame unanticipated factors. This is the paradigm for faith based people. If Cheney assumes that economic policy operates according to the supplys model, then Cheney's behavior makes perfect sense. O'Neill was an infidel and his heathen ideas got nowhere.
Posted by: bakho on January 21, 2004 05:41 AMOn one futurist-libertarian type site I've had to fight to convince them that they really should think about economics some. They're Lomborg-type cornucopians who reject any idea of limits.
This is odd, for me, because in 95% of my interactions with non-liberals I'm dealing with people who take Econ 101 as gospel. For me economics is an essential tool but an incomplete description of reality, and I usually end up as the nay-sayer or devil's advocate.
Come to think of it -- in many respects Bush's economic policy is pretty analogous to Left Utopianism (e.g. Mao's Great Leap forward), isn't it?
Posted by: zizka / John Emerson on January 21, 2004 07:29 AMIs there enough transparency in the business of this Administration, including the process of economic policy making?
Posted by: bulent on January 21, 2004 09:57 AMPeople change. They evolve intellectually, reacting to the people and events around them; not always drawing the right lessons.
Cheney could have been a closet fanatic for all I know (he was obviously a social conservative all his life), but it is also possible that he moved much further to the fringe in the intervening years.
I have this document (Rumsfeld rules) that Rumsfeld wrote earlier when he was leading the transition team for an earlier administration. I am stuck by the wisdom and humility in the advises that he offered to potential presidential aides. You have to make a really enormous journey to reach where he seems to have reached from where he was a decade back. of course it is always possible that it was all an elaborate front ....
Posted by: Kaushik on January 21, 2004 01:43 PM