Garrow shared some of his reasons for what he called his “huge disappointment” with the Obama presidency at a Zócalo/KCRW “Critical Thinking with Warren Olney” event, “How Did Barack Obama Create Himself?”.

Hosted by Olney, the longtime KCRW radio personality and dean of Los Angeles news broadcasters, the evening echoed many of the thematic lines—and withering criticisms—that surface in Garrow’s 1,400-page biography Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. “It’s worth reading,” Olney quipped, “but it takes a long time.” (Most reviewers agreed: The New York Times appraised Rising Star as “impressive if gratuitously snarly,” while Politico judged it to be “a masterwork of historical and journalistic research.”)

Published last spring, the book charts his subject’s transformation from a highly intelligent, rather aimless young man into a calculatingly ambitious politician who, according to Garrow, wore various masks at various life stages, walled off his emotions when it served his career goals, and remained an enigma even to friends and lovers.

“It has to be said that from at least 2001, 2002, Barack Obama has been first and foremost, fundamentally, a politician,” said Garrow, the author of well-regarded books on the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case, the Civil Rights Movement, and the FBI. “There’s a very absolute compartmentalization that Barack imposes on his life, even as a 25-year-old.”

Garrow sketched out an abbreviated version of his book’s sometimes unflattering portrait of Obama, drawing applause and nodding assents, as well as occasional gasps and murmured objections, from the overflow audience.

Following Olney’s line of questioning, Garrow started out by discussing Obama’s high school and college career, his stint as a Chicago community organizer, and his youthful romantic life. Garrow faulted the future president for dumping Sheila Jager, the half-Dutch, half-Japanese woman with whom he lived for two years in the late 1980s, because Obama had made a determination that having a white wife would have been “a political non-starter” for a black politician in the Chicago of that time.

He said that Obama, born in Hawaii and raised with a “friendship network” of international students, only really began living among African Americans once he moved to Chicago and set his sights on a political career.

In Garrow’s view, Exhibit A in the saga of how Obama selectively re-invented himself is his 1995 best-selling memoir, Dreams From My Father, a reflection on his upbringing and his absentee Kenyan father. In Rising Star, Garrow describes Obama’s book as “a work of historical fiction.”

Garrow said that, in Dreams of My Father, Obama was “making a very conscious effort to reconstruct his life as dramatically more African American than it really was.” He also was attempting to re-cast himself as a rebellious tough guy, rather than the academically gifted nerd he really was, according to Garrow.

At one point, Olney quoted from the Rising Star epilogue that Obama had “willed himself into being” and that “the crucible of self-creation had produced an iron will,” but “the vessel was hollow at the core.”

“That’s pretty rough,” Olney said.

Garrow—who late in the evening described himself as “a Bernie Sanders Democrat” and “a great fan of Edward Snowden”—conceded that it was. But the author’s strongest criticisms centered on what Garrow regards as three key ways in which Obama walked back key campaign promises: by accepting large amounts of private campaign financing; by presiding over the growth of the federal government’s surveillance and anti-terrorist apparatus; and by retreating from support for same-sex marriage until Vice-President Joe Biden “got out there first.”

In response to Garrow’s comments, Olney asked whether Obama was really so different from other politicians who realized, once they got elected, that their campaign promises had to yield to more pragmatic considerations. Had Abraham Lincoln been “absolutely consistent in the things he said and the things that he did?” Olney asked, drawing one of the night’s biggest applause lines.

“I probably frankly have never read an Abraham Lincoln biography because I am almost entirely a post-1945 person,” Garrow replied.

Noting that Obama had read the first 10 chapters of Garrow’s book, Olney wanted to know what the former president thought of its less-than-glowing appraisal.

“The impression I came away with,” Garrow responded, “is that when someone has written up a version of their life story, at that point 20 years earlier, they remember better and remain attached to the version of their life which they wrote than the version which they lived.”

But if Garrow was unsparing in his remarks on Obama, he saved perhaps his harshest rebukes for Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, and the current U.S. Senate candidate from Alabama, Roy Moore—and for the American people themselves.

“The last 13 months again highlight, to me as a political historian, how American public opinion, oftentimes, lots of times, at a mass level gets huge numbers of things fundamentally wrong,” Garrow said. “I think there is a deep weakness in the American people, in American public opinion. I think there is a deep vulnerability to ignorance in American culture and American opinion that we continue to see, and that I fear we will see again next Tuesday, Dec. 12 in Alabama.”

The post Barack Obama Had an ‘Iron Will’ to Succeed—but What Was at His Core? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I recently learned that, in the second grade, I was part of presidential history.

Every morning during the 1980-1981 school year, I walked the five blocks between my family’s home in southwest Pasadena and Allendale Elementary School, where I was in Beverly Thomas’ class. Sometimes I went back in the evening to play in the Little League at Allendale Park, adjacent to school.

The round trip seemed unremarkable then, as I passed homes and dumpy apartment buildings. But just last month, my hometown of Pasadena announced that my path had crossed with greatness. The city installed a plaque on the sidewalk outside one of those dumpy apartment buildings I used to pass—an ugly place at 253 Glenarm Street. The plaque explains that an Occidental College sophomore occupied one of the apartments in 1980 and 1981.

The occupant’s name was Barack Obama.

This revelation—that the president of the United States was once my neighbor—might seem trivial. But it has had a powerful impact, making the California news and drawing a crowd of more than 200 people for the plaque’s December dedication. Seizing on this public relations momentum, my own state senator, Anthony Portantino, has proposed renaming a portion of the 134 Freeway, connecting Pasadena with Glendale, the “President Barack H. Obama Freeway.”

A plaque is seen in front of the Pasadena residence where Barack Obama lived during his sophomore year at Occidental College. Photo by John Antczak/Associated Press.

I still live less than two miles from the sidewalk plaque, and coach my kids in the same Little League where I played. And so, while I’m not a big fan of the president, I’ve found myself stopping at least a half dozen times to see the plaque over the holidays. The draw is some combination of childhood nostalgia and the deliciously incongruous 21st century updating of the president-from-a-log-cabin story. Plus, I’m never alone—there always seem to be other curious locals in front of the otherwise forgettable apartment building.

But I must confess I also find the plaque—and my own interest in it— embarrassing, in an “Aren’t we behaving like small-town hicks?” sort of way. And, for the record, I felt that embarrassment even before my in-laws, visiting from Chicago, a city somewhat familiar with the president, made fun of the plaque when I took them to see it.

Obama, after all, left us as fast as he could, transferring from Occidental to Columbia University in New York City after that sophomore year. And the plaque is the product of a conversation between Obama and a city councilman in which the president said he’d loved Pasadena—but could only remember that the street he’d lived on started with a G. (A search of phone directories and utility records identified the address, according to the Pasadena Star-News).

So why is my hometown holding so tightly to such a thin connection to a president? There’s our strong commitment to celebrating African-American history in a city with one of California’s oldest African-American communities (Jackie Robinson grew up in Pasadena). It’s also understandable that Californians are clinging to a president for whom we voted twice, particularly at a time when we’re confronting a president-elect that most of us see as a threat to the republic.

But that doesn’t justify our state’s lack of caution in celebrating Obama so robustly and so quickly, even before he leaves office. There are already two schools named for Obama in Los Angeles, and another in Oakland; more are likely on the way. The town of Seaside, near Monterey, gave its Broadway Avenue a second name—Obama Way—six years ago. And scientific researchers even named a lichen they discovered in the Channel Islands after the president. (The fungus is officially called Caloplaca obamae).

Such celebrations seem excessive because the president hasn’t exactly reciprocated them. The president didn’t dote on California with half the passion Bill Clinton once did. Obama came to our state mostly to raise money and play golf. And he didn’t always have our best interests at heart. He attacked Silicon Valley for not collaborating with his administration on mass surveillance of questionable legality. He turned down our recession-era requests for financial assistance that would have prevented the worst of the state budget cuts. And he deported an awful lot of our undocumented neighbors.

A woman takes a picture of the plaque in front of the Pasadena residence where Barack Obama lived during his sophomore year at Occidental College. Photo by John Antczak/Associated Press.

At the very least, high honors for this president should be seen as premature. It’s always dangerous to name things after living people, and he is just 55 years old, with—potentially—decades to screw up his reputation here. Depending on what his successor does, Obama’s legacy may soon seem rather ephemeral.

So why not hold off on renaming more schools or roads for him?

Yes, the stretch of the 134 Freeway in question is near Obama’s alma mater. But that’s too big an honor for a guy who spent such little time here in his youth—and was here only long enough to tie up traffic as an adult. It’d be more appropriate to name that bit of freeway for Mildred Pierce, the title character of the novel and 1945 film noir, whose daughter, a bratty social climber, dreams of leaving drab Glendale for higher social status in Pasadena. (Perhaps the president, who loves film and literature, might prefer that as well).

In spite of that note of caution, I must confess that I feel differently about the sidewalk plaque in my old neighborhood. Yes, the plaque—or, as some of us locals prefer to call it, the Obama Monument—is hokey. And yes, if you have friends from Pasadena, you may have to get used to us bragging that Obama was once our homie.

But I say we swallow our pride and keep the plaque (and maybe even have T-shirts made). It’s a sweet little reminder that sometimes history is hiding just around the corner, and living in a really shabby apartment.

The post My Hometown’s Rush to Honor Obama Says More About Us Than Him appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s a shame, because the Obama-era efforts hold important lessons about what’s possible in addressing inequality and how we must do better in the future.

As Obama entered office, public consciousness of inequality of income and wealth was on the rise and the Great Recession brought disastrous economic consequences for tens of millions of Americans. In the past 40 years, inequality of income rose faster in the U.S. than in any other nation and the inequality of wealth exceeded that found in any other advanced economy.

Obama tackled the problem of inequality from the beginning. The first bill he signed as president was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act—an equal pay legislation. Ledbetter had worked for Goodyear for 20 years before learning she was paid less than men for the same job. The law removed the requirement that a petition regarding discriminatory pay be filed within 180 days of the discrimination; it also made any discriminatory paycheck actionable.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the administration’s 2009 stimulus bill, has not received enough credit for assisting poor families and for preventing more people from falling into poverty. The act added $20 billion for food stamps and food banks, support for poor neighborhoods, an increase in unemployment insurance, and $3.5 billion for job training. With an unprecedented 45 million Americans in poverty today, one enduring criticism is that Obama should have focused on a second stimulus rather than his health care bill.

Yet the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act also helped reduce inequality to a degree. The law’s redistributive features are not generally recognized by the public, but they help explain the unrelenting opposition from its reactionary opponents. Obamacare contains higher Medicare payroll taxes on individuals with incomes above $200,000 and families with incomes above $250,000 and it levies fees on the healthcare industry (which has gained millions of new customers from the ACA) and on drug and medical device manufacturers.

Obama’s critics, and the president himself, have said he hasn’t done enough to tell the story of this battle against inequality. But it’s not for lack of trying. In December 2011, Obama confronted the unfairness of our economic system in a speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, where ex-President Theodore Roosevelt in 1910 made his historic “New Nationalism” speech calling for a “Square Deal” for the American people. The next month, Obama’s State of the Union focused on restoring America’s promise of opportunity. Always cautious during his first term, Obama waited until after his re-election to talk directly about “income inequality.” Instead, he emphasized fairness and everyone “playing by the same rules.” At the time, billionaire Warren Buffett pointedly disclosed that he was taxed at a lower rate than his secretary (who Obama invited to sit with the First Lady Michelle Obama in the House gallery for the State of the Union), and Obama called attention to the unfairness of hedge fund earnings being taxed at 15 percent; anyone earning over $1 million, he said, should pay an effective tax rate of at least 30 percent. The Republican-controlled House predictably ignored his suggestion.

In his campaign for re-election, Obama hammered away at the same themes, while successfully painting his opponent Mitt Romney as an out-of-touch rich guy, with help from Romney’s own mistakes. Once re-elected, in his 2013 State of the Union, Obama spoke directly about income inequality, calling it “the defining challenge of our time.” He promised then, and at other times throughout the year, to devote the rest of his presidency to attacking inequality. The Congress he addressed had reached a milestone: more than half its members were millionaires and the body’s total worth was approaching $5 billion.

Obama’s second term is often portrayed as an exercise in futility: the president proposes and the Republican Congress opposes. But that’s not the whole story. In 2013, the president’s give-and-take with Republicans on budget priorities succeeded in increasing tax rates on the highest earners.

This happened in two ways: Money in tax shelters got treated like other income and limits were imposed on the deductions high earners can claim. While the “Bush tax cuts” were extended for most Americans, the cuts for those making over $500,000 expired. The so-called 1 percent are now taxed at pre-Ronald Reagan levels. Although most capital gains are still taxed at only 15 percent, more affluent taxpayers in the 39.6 percent income-tax bracket now face a 20 percent rate on their capital gains. The result—the 400 highest earners among American taxpayers are now paying an effective tax rate of 22.9 percent, up from 16.7 percent in 2012, but still down from 26.4 percent in the late 1990s.

Obama has also made effective use of his office and executive powers to address inequality. Unable to persuade Republicans in Congress to raise the federal minimum wage, (stuck at $7.25 an hour, and worth far less in real terms than the minimum wage in 1968), Obama has used the “bully pulpit” to advocate higher wages and encouraged a growing movement among states and cities to raise their minimums on their own.

In 2014, the president issued an executive order raising the minimum for workers hired by federal contractors to $10.10 an hour. The president also required federal contractors to report wage data to the Labor Department, to prevent abuses and serve as fuel for future action.

In early 2015 Obama again resorted to an executive order to give federal workers up to six weeks of paid maternity leave, and asked Congress to extend this to private workers. The president also advocated a Healthy Families Act giving workers in the private sector up to seven days paid sick leave; some 44 million, or 40 percent of the workforce, do not have paid sick leave. Just four states and the District of Columbia, along with 18 cities, have passed laws requiring employers—usually with 15 or more employees—to give such paid leave.

Obama’s Labor Department also issued guidelines to help states establish savings plans for private-sector employees whose employers don’t offer them. And Obama has sought to reverse regulations that burden unions. While organized labor was disappointed that the president and Senate Democrats failed to enact legislation making it easier to unionize workplaces, Obama delivered a huge gain for low-wage service workers in his appointments to the National Labor Relations Board.

In August 2015, the board delivered a series of decisions by a 3-2 partisan vote making it easier for unions to represent workers in fast food restaurants and retail giants like Wal-Mart. And this May, the Department of Labor announced sweeping new overtime rules that could affect as many as 12.5 million workers. The regulatory action will make it almost impossible for employers, even smaller firms, to avoid paying overtime to workers who put in more than an eight-hour workday.

Meanwhile, even as the more progressive wing within Obama’s party would have liked to see more energetic action taken against Wall Street, there is evidence that the complicated financial reform known as the Dodd-Frank is having some effect in reining in the financial sector. Bank earnings are down, and the biggest banks are lending more while preserving healthier balance sheets under tighter regulation.

All told, the administration’s higher income tax rates on the affluent, subsidies for health insurance, expanded tax breaks for poor families with children, and other measures, amount to an impressive government counterattack on advancing inequality. Nevertheless, the administration faces two problems in selling its narrative: the fact that public opinion is a lagging indicator to economic reality (things can turn better before the benefits are widely appreciated), and the more daunting reality that there are limits to what government can do in the face of structural forces (such as technological change) creating deeper income and wealth inequality in our society.

As Obama prepares to leave office, Americans are only now beginning to consider his overall legacy, and may soon come to appreciate his efforts to combat economic inequality and restore a sense of fairness and opportunity to American life. Whether his successor will try to build on Obama’s effort, or be able to do so, remains to be seen.

The post Obama’s Unsung Legacy in the War on Income Inequality appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Not long ago, the idea that two landmark U.S.-centered trade deals could be the pillars of President Obama’s foreign policy legacy would have seemed laughable. As a presidential candidate in 2008, Obama was a trade skeptic, painting deals like NAFTA as job-killers, which played well with unions weary of import surges from China. Once in office, however, Obama warmed to trade expansion as presidents tend to do, given the dependence of the American economy and jobs on exports and global supply chains. In 2010, Obama issued a call to double U.S. exports, with trade deals forming part of the package–only now they were described as “partnerships” that would open new markets to American businesses big and small, rather than “free trade agreements” associated, even if falsely, in the public’s mind with offshoring and job losses.

As an economist who has for years worked to advance free trade in both the public and private sector, I could not be more elated by the prospect that these major deals now look achievable. For more than a decade, ambitious global efforts to liberalize cross-border trade and investment had stalled. The promise of the Uruguay Round of negotiations, which in 1994 produced the crown jewel of the global trading system, the World Trade Organization, appeared to have been lost. The Doha Round–the multilateral talks that were supposed to expand on the Uruguay Round’s gains–have been going on for 13 years, with few tangible results because of disagreements between emerging markets such as Brazil and India (who resist opening their markets to foreign manufactured products and services) and the U.S. and Europe, which are reluctant to free their agricultural markets.

With any one of the WTO’s 160 member nations able to scuttle any global agreement, countries have turned to regional trade agreements or country-to-country pacts as alternatives. Since the United States, Canada, and Mexico launched the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) two decades ago, no fewer than 400 trade deals have been concluded or are under negotiation, coupling such players as Chile and China, Japan and Mexico, and the United States and Singapore, to name a few. Such deals are easier to get done than a universal WTO deal. They also tend to go deeper than WTO efforts, pioneering in the regulation of such matters as e-commerce, intellectual property, and state-owned enterprises. But for globalizing companies, they also create tremendous new complexity–a patchwork of rules and standards that differ from one market to the next.

The two trans-oceanic pacts that would link us to Asia and Europe, though, would resurrect the momentum for a more comprehensive global agreement. They would also deliver considerable economic benefits. The Trans-Pacific deal (TPP) will boost U.S. annual gains by $77 billion, and Japan’s by $104 billion. The TTIP deal, by integrating markets in the U.S. and the EU, would generate $130 billion annually in economic gains for the United States, and $162 billion for Europe. As such, it is estimated that TTIP will boost U.S. household incomes by $865 annually and create 750,000 new U.S. jobs, while TPP would generate about $1,230 per household by 2025–a great boost without a dime of deficit spending, and a strong bonus on top of the $10,000 annual income gains American households have already scored due to post-war trade opening.

These trade deals, by locking in deeper access for American interests in overseas markets, could give U.S. companies the confidence needed to unlock their considerable cash holdings and invest in the production of more export goods and the hiring of more U.S. workers. While big business spearheads the trade lobby, “Main Street” small businesses stand to gain from greater access to foreign markets and the harmonizing of product standards and regulations across borders.

These new trans-oceanic deals, if achieved, would also make it costlier for nations who have opposed lowering barriers to stay their obstructionist course. The most cantankerous player in the global trading system, India, risks being left out. Ever pragmatic, China has become interested in joining TPP, in part as a means of counteracting the country’s economic slowdown and driving reforms of inefficient state-owned enterprises.

In our hemisphere, Brazil has not been interested in joining trade agreements, seeking leadership instead of its own dysfunctional Mercosur alternative. Its strategy stands in stark contrast to that of Mexico, which has forged free trade deals with partners covering some 90 percent of its trade, such as North America, the EU, and Japan. As a result, Mexico has emerged as a global manufacturing hub and anchor of Latin America’s Pacific Alliance bloc, which includes the more market-oriented nations of Colombia, Peru, and Chile. Brazil’s industrial lobbies, once champions of protectionist policies, now worry about the effect of high tariffs and about being left out of global supply chains, and have broken with the government to call for a reset of the nation’s trade policy

With the Ukraine crisis, the Israeli-Palestine imbroglio, and our messy departure from Iraq and Afghanistan all stunting Obama’s foreign policy achievements, the once stalemated issue of trade expansion now looks far more doable and desirable on the Obama administration’s menu of possible legacy options. To be sure, the White House is facing complicated talks with Congress over the trade promotion authority (TPA) needed to successfully negotiate a trade deal and get it through Congress. Such a legislative license to jumpstart globalization will likely be opposed, much like the recent budget agreement was in Washington, by both the left wing of the Democratic Party and the Tea Party right within the Republican Party. This may be yet another reason that a trade legacy looks appealing to President Obama: It will take a purple coalition to do the right thing.

The post Will Globalization Be Obama’s Greatest Foreign Policy Legacy? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The question comes to mind as we watch Barack Obama abandon cooperation in favor of strategies that bypass Republican obstruction on Capitol Hill. Obama’s approach is understandable, but turning to executive orders and other paths to one-party action will only aggravate the problem of political dysfunction. In the short run, Obama may be able to ram his preferences through, but he invites similar action by future Republican presidents. Instead of defusing partisan conflict, Obama will fuel its expansion.

For a solution to our high levels of partisan conflict, we would do well to learn from the legacy of Nelson Mandela. The late South African president understood a key principle for effective governance—if you want everyone to work together on behalf of the common good, you have to give everyone a meaningful voice in government. Mandela rejected one-party control and instead chose a politics of inclusion. As former President Bill Clinton observed about Mandela, that’s the only politics “that works.” Indeed, said Clinton, “it’s the only thing that’s working in American communities today.”

But we currently have a politics of exclusion in Washington, and that explains much of the dysfunction that prevents Congress and the president from solving the country’s pressing problems. Democrats and Republicans both are well represented on Capitol Hill, but only one party is represented in the White House.

It was not always a problem to have a one-party presidency, but over the past 75 years, the Oval Office has amassed an exceptional amount of power. Presidents control policy for air quality, energy exploration, education, healthcare, consumer protection, and many other matters through agency regulations, executive orders, and other unilateral actions. Presidents dominate foreign policy even more. They decide when we go to war, which foreign governments we recognize, and which undocumented immigrants we deport. As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote, we now have an imperial presidency.

When a single person exercises the immense power of the modern presidency, people fight tooth and nail to secure that power. They spend billions to win the election, and they spend the ensuing four years positioning their party for the next election. One side of the aisle in Congress backs the president; the other side devotes itself to obstruction. Instead of responsible governance, we get the permanent campaign. It is no surprise that the sharp increase in partisan conflict has paralleled the huge expansion of presidential power.

The United States would do well to replace its one-person, one-party imperial presidency with a two-person, two-party presidency. Instead of electing the candidate with the most votes, we would send the top two finishers to the Oval Office. Presidential partners usually would come from the Democratic and Republican Parties, but they also could emerge from third parties.

By giving both sides of the political spectrum a voice in the executive branch, we would temper partisan conflict. Currently, half the public is shut out of the White House and turns readily to partisan opposition. A coalition presidency would represent the views of nearly all Americans. Hence, a much higher percentage of the public would be comfortable with executive branch initiatives. Even if legislators wanted to play partisan ball, they would not find a receptive electorate. There no longer would be a mass of disaffected voters to mobilize against the Oval Office.

Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle would have other reasons to cooperate with a bipartisan White House. For example, they could share in the credit for presidential achievements. During President Obama’s first term, Republicans recognized that even if they voted for the economic stimulus or healthcare reform, Democrats would receive all of the credit for the programs. GOP members of Congress could benefit politically only by opposing legislative initiatives from the White House and hoping the initiatives would be defeated or would fail after enactment. With bipartisan presidential proposals, both parties could share in the credit for success.

All members of Congress also would be in a better position to get help from the executive branch for their constituents. As I found during my service in the Indiana House of Representatives, legislators often do more for their districts by cutting through governmental red tape than by passing bills. But I also found that I could help my constituents with the executive branch only when it was headed by a governor of my own party. With a two-party executive, every member of Congress could find a receptive ear in the White House

Shared power would promote better presidential decision-making. The Constitution envisions an executive who primarily implements policy decisions made by Congress. But the modern president has assumed much of the legislative branch’s policymaking authority. While it makes sense to have a single person who can act decisively and with dispatch when the person is an executor of policy made by others, the founding fathers correctly reserved policy making for multiple-person bodies. As Woodrow Wilson observed, “the whole purpose of democracy is that we may hold counsel with one another, so as not to depend upon the understanding of one man.”

Has shared governance ever worked? Experience with multiple executives is not very different from that with single executives. One-person presidential governments have fared well in some countries but poorly in others (e.g., in Eastern European, African and South American nations). Similarly, coalition executives have performed well in some countries, such as Switzerland and Austria, but not in others.

The key question is not whether to have shared governance but how the sharing should be structured. Game theory supplies a sound answer. If we gave two presidents equal power, we would give them the right incentives to cooperate. Elected officials may be highly partisan, but they are partisan for a purpose. In typical power-sharing settings, one person can hope to establish a dominant position by outmaneuvering the other person. In a properly designed coalition presidency, neither president could hope to prevail over the other president. During their terms, they would share power equally, and reelection also would come with half of the executive power.

Two presidents would have a potent incentive to cooperate. If they spent their terms locking horns, they would not be able to implement key policy goals. And having reached the pinnacle of political life, presidents care most about their legacies of achievement. Accordingly, they likely would come to accommodations that would allow them to implement meaningful policy changes. Presidential self-interest would prevent stalemate.

A two-person presidency also would be fairer to voters than a one-person presidency. Barack Obama exercises 100 percent of the executive power after winning only 51 percent of the popular vote. It makes much more sense to give Mitt Romney 50 percent rather than 0 percent of the executive power for his 47 percent support in November 2012.

While the founding fathers preferred a single executive in 1787, they likely would approve of a bipartisan executive today. They wanted the presidency to speak for everyone, not just residents of a particular interest group or political party. The founding fathers also believed in radical reform. When their political system failed, they understood the need for major structural change. To restore the Constitution’s vision of a truly representative government, two presidents really would be better than one.

The post Are Two Presidents Better Than One? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It was in that last role that President Obama bear-hugged Nina Pham in the Oval Office. The hug came at the end of last week, on Oct. 24, the day the 26-year-old nurse was released from her Atlanta hospital isolation room after overcoming Ebola.

As a crisis communications consultant and former television producer, it seemed to me that the President’s reassuring gesture was designed to convey these ideas to the public:

– Ebola can be beaten.
– The American healthcare system can cure Ebola.
– Ebola cannot be transmitted from a former patient.
– Do not be afraid of Ebola.
– I am a caring and concerned leader.

Such gestures work far more effectively than saying all those things out loud.

Public officials have held press conferences and cited facts about how the Ebola virus does not travel through air, water, food, or casual contact. These officials taken some well-publicized actions—from airport screenings to quarantines—to show they’re serious about preventing the disease from getting into our country. But panic over Ebola still has not abated. Instead, I think these theatrical actions have only reinforced the idea that we should be afraid.

Obama’s hug made a lasting impression because it was a demonstration of calm in action. The expressions, “Actions speak louder than words” and “A picture is worth a thousand words” are clichés because they are true. There is no better way to demonstrate care and concern than by hugging and no better way to demonstrate anger than by a slightly raised, but controlled, voice.

Let me tell you a story about a different virus and the same gesture: In 1987, I produced the pilot for Geraldo Rivera’s talk show. One segment concerned AIDS and HIV, then a mysterious and misunderstood plague. Our guest was an HIV-positive woman. The crew panicked and refused to get behind their cameras, although there was no way a woman sitting six feet away could infect them. The audience, too, was very jumpy. So Geraldo brought the woman on stage and gave her a big hug. It worked. The cameramen took their positions; the audience stayed put.

I took a cue from Geraldo in 1997, while I was working with NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn, which was due to launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Electricity for Cassini’s instruments comes from the natural heat emanating from non-weapons-grade plutonium, 72 pounds of which were on the spacecraft. That plutonium became the focus of strenuous protests in cities around the launch site because of fears that Cassini would explode on launch, releasing a dangerous cloud of radioactive dust.

Technically, this scenario was nearly impossible, yet critics promoted it extensively. Even 60 Minutes weighed in with a sensationalized, scientifically specious segment. I determined that NASA spokespersons could cite statistics and safety data until the cows came home, but dry numbers were no match for the highly-emotional claim, “You’re all gonna die.”

What did work was a response composed by Cassini’s project manager, Richard Spehalski:
1. NASA has been safely launching some form of that non-weapons-grade plutonium for 40 years–all the way back to the Apollo astronauts who flew with it to the moon.
2. No member of the public has ever been injured in a NASA launch.
3. I am so convinced it will be safe that I will be there, and so will the most precious person in the world to me–my 3-year-old granddaughter.

This was a shock-and-awe answer; Mr. Spehalski overwhelmed the negative (you’re all gonna die) with three positives. And while his first two points were factual, the third was emotional. Not quite as effective as a hug–but the verbal equivalent, I think.

You cannot overwhelm emotion with facts and reason alone. Why is that? Blame it on the amygdala, the so-called lizard brain. The deeply buried amygdala–the fight or flight center–is the part of our brain that responds when our hot buttons are pressed. We know this from research conducted by Vincent Covello of Columbia University and the Center for Risk Control. Dr. Covello also found that it was best to overwhelm a negative assertion with three positives. Two, four, five? None of them as effective as three. No one knows for sure why that is; it’s just the way our brains work.

Today, the media and the political worlds have discovered that pressing those hot buttons and firing up the pesky amygdala over a fantasy domestic Ebola epidemic is good business. Over the decades I’ve observed closely a number of public health emergencies–real ones, like annual polio epidemics that left thousands paralyzed, the last U.S. smallpox outbreak, AIDS, SARS, and swine flu. But I’ve never seen one politicized like this. I call it the Ebolafright Industry. The political motive is obvious: elections are coming up. And for the media it’s cheaper and easier to fret about a two-person “epidemic” at home than to cover one in Africa that has afflicted 10,000. Fear draws viewers and readers; fear gets you elected; fear overwhelms reason.

It appears as if reassurer-in-chief Obama is going to have to do a lot more bear hugging in the days ahead. But with a little luck, he’ll soon run out of patients to hug. After all, of the nine people treated for Ebola in this country, six have recovered, two remain in treatment, and just one–the grievously mishandled Liberian gentleman, Thomas Eric Duncan–has died. Moreover, only two–both nurses who treated Duncan–have contracted the virus in this country.

A note of hope for the media and politicians looking for another frightfest: There’s always Entrovirus D68. That disease already has infected nearly 1,000 people in 47 states and has killed twice as many as Ebola in this country (i.e. two). Or they can obsess about this fall and winter’s flu epidemic which, if the past is a prologue, will kill thousands of us.

The post Do Hugs Work Better than Quarantines? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Mr. President, I realize such a statement may seem jarring to you and your strongest supporters. After all, our state (and this columnist) voted for you twice, and you and California are a near-perfect match on the issues. Heck, when you were first running for president, Maria Shriver said, “If Barack Obama were a state, he’d be California.”

A presidential visit to the biggest and most important state in the nation–3,000 miles away from the capital–ought to be an occasion to be anticipated, a moment of connection. But these days, I bet I could rally a majority of my fellow Californians for a proposition asking that you never visit again. And I wouldn’t have to talk about your recent political troubles or your record-low job approval ratings among Californians.

No, our fundamental problem with you is more personal than political. You, sir, have developed a reputation as a very poor houseguest.

We Californians pride ourselves on our hospitality to people from all over the world, not to mention family and friends who like to visit from weather-challenged places back east. But Mr. President, after more than 20 visits, you’re trying our patience.

You often show up with little warning about your itinerary or schedule. (Your excuse? That the Secret Service can’t disclose your movements for security reasons.) You and your massive security cordon proceed to cause hours-long traffic jams in a state that already has too many of them. And you put your basic needs over those of the rest of us; I was once two hours late picking up a child from daycare because you just had to stop at Roscoe’s, the fabled chicken and waffle place on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, during the evening rush hour.

So you’ll understand why I felt nothing but dread upon reading multiple news reports that you’re headed to Southern California next week to raise campaign money at the home of actress-turned-insufferable-lifestyle-guru Gwyneth Paltrow, she of the “conscious uncoupling.”

It isn’t just the traffic-related inconvenience that’s tiresome: It’s that your visits are about you taking, not giving. Almost all of your trips have been driven by political fundraising. You’re disrupting our lives so that the millions of dollars rich people might otherwise spend here will instead pay for mindless TV ads that bludgeon voters in Alaska and North Carolina. You rarely bother to engage Californians in conversation about the very serious problems we’re facing.

Is it personal? The one time you lived in California, you left early, transferring from Occidental College, on a blissful L.A. hillside, for Columbia University in pre-Giuliani New York. The nicest thing you’ve said about us in six years is that our attorney general is hot. And then you apologized for saying it.

While you might be our president, these days other leaders seem to do more presiding than you, engaging with Californians about California (as opposed to engaging only with rich Californians about political battles in more purplish states). Mexico’s Enrique Peña Nieto addressed a joint session of the legislature on his recent visit. Even the governor of Texas, Rick Perry, is much more of a presence in the civic conversation about California than you are.

Why has the relationship between you and California grown cold? I suspect part of the problem is that you and California are too similar. The fact that we don’t disagree on much can make small differences seem bigger.

We both want to take action against climate change, but your meager policy proposals seem like a drag while we forge ahead with cap-and-trade and carbon reduction. We both care a lot about adapting to new technologies, but you’re squabbling with Silicon Valley over government surveillance (the Facebook and Google guys like to be doing the surveillance, not getting surveilled) and privacy.

Frankly, it feels like you’ve taken California for granted. Even the biggest things you’ve done for us–Obamacare, the stimulus package when the Great Recession hit–can feel like disappointments.

The Affordable Care Act has covered more than 2 million Californians, which is great, but it also neglects more than 2 million of us: undocumented immigrants. Including them would have been a heavy lift politically. But you’ve been suspiciously more interested in deporting our undocumented neighbors and preserving your party’s political advantage than legalizing Californians who are deeply embedded in our communities.

As for the stimulus, that legislation, while providing billions in state aid to California, was not nearly enough to offset the huge budget cuts forced by the recession (and by, let’s be honest, our own broken budget and tax systems). The stimulus included very little money to help with our state’s massive infrastructure needs, estimated at $800 billion. You were asked to do more to prevent big budget cuts here–state officials begged your administration for loan guarantees to get us through the worst times–but your administration said no. The result: California spending on schools and health remains at low levels, even with the economy recovering.

Yes, you and your aides and people in other states might grumble: Why should California get special treatment? Because, Mr. President, we really are special. You simply can’t accomplish your biggest goals when your biggest state is in the shape it’s in.

You can’t reduce the national unemployment rate much if California’s own unemployment remains well above the national average. You can’t achieve your goal of making the U.S. number one in the world in percentage of people with college degrees when spare budgets force California’s public universities to turn away tens of thousands of students each year.

Your trips here have come to feel like those political fundraising e-mails that keep arriving this time of year. You’re spamming us, Mr. President. And if you can’t find it in yourself to–and I use this word advisedly–change, then maybe you should stop visiting for the rest of your presidency. We’ll be happy to see you again when you’re out of office, and your security and its traffic impact have been reduced. Maybe you’ll even stick around long enough to talk to us.

The post Mr. President, Please Stop Visiting California appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The 10-hour round-trip total comes in at nearly $2.3 million, and that’s just the operating cost of Air Force One. It doesn’t account for the additional planes the President might require for his armored limousines, his Secret Service protection, their lodging and meals, or the support costs for his entourage of White House staffers coming along for the ride. There are also considerable expenses in terms of both time and money that the Southland cities he visits and passes through will incur by cordoning off streets and snarling traffic. In short, taxpayers will spend millions of dollars in order to allow the President to raise thousands of dollars.

Presidential travel has been an easy political target for decades, of course, especially by the side that’s out of office. And it’s easy to dismiss these expenses as insignificant in a $3.5 trillion federal budget. But we shouldn’t. What should particularly bother taxpayers, regardless of their political persuasions, is the fact that there is virtually no transparency surrounding a president’s use of this immensely powerful perk.

Political parties and campaign teams are required to reimburse the government whenever the president travels on their behalf. It’s taxpayers, however, who almost always end up footing most of the total bill, because under existing rules (or lack thereof), it’s left up to White House officials to determine which portions of any trip are official and which are expressly political. So when a President wants to attend a fundraising dinner with A-list actors in Hollywood, the expense can be offset by making a stop at a nearby business or school to speak about issues like immigration reform, healthcare, or student loan rates. Presto! Now the trip is for “official” business.

It’s been this way for years, and the rules are so vague that not even researchers who study them full-time can describe them. In a 2012 report, the Congressional Research Service stated that it’s “unclear how the White House designates travel that is not directly related to a governmental or political function.” Basically, the president gets the benefit of the doubt.

This makes it easy for schedulers to add a sprinkling of “official” business to any trip, and it opens the door for any party to game the system. Ultimately, this is to the detriment of every American’s bank account as well as an electoral process that’s becoming increasingly expensive and time-consuming.

To be sure, security concerns surrounding presidential travel require some secrets to be kept. And in today’s hyper-partisan political environment, where just about everything that anyone in Washington does inevitably draws criticism from across the aisle, examining what constitutes political or official travel could devolve into pointless fighting or political posturing. But just because a policy has been in place for years doesn’t mean that it’s a good one.

Fortunately, there’s been a little more attention paid recently to the issue of taxpayer-subsidized fundraising. In 2009, the Federal Election Commission updated its rules to require campaigns to reimburse the government at charter flight rates, which are significantly higher than commercial flight costs. That means that President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign paid much more for Air Force One usage than, for example, President George W. Bush did in 2004, or President Bill Clinton in 1996. It’s a start at least.

Still, the rules need to be explicit, and the steps any administration takes in order to follow them need to be plainly visible and easily reviewed. This means more thorough and timely public access to travel records and costs as they are incurred (within carefully defined considerations for security). Regardless of whether it’s technically legal or “by the books,” and no matter who occupies the Oval Office, this type of activity should be less of a secret to the everyday Americans who must pay for it.

Let me be clear: the problem isn’t as simple as a $2.3 million flight to California. It isn’t that we have reason to believe the president has intentionally abused his travel privileges. It’s just that without a more transparent system, we’d never have any idea if he did.

The post The President’s Coming to Town on Your Dime appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Back when I began shopping, I predicted that I would end up purchasing a “silver” Blue Shield PPO product to cover my family of three in Sacramento for $997 per month. The actual prices when they came out were much lower. So we bought a “gold” level product for $972 per month.

As people are beginning to learn, gold is much better than silver. Lower-income people receive subsidies from the federal government that make the silver plans more generous. But families like mine, which don’t receive subsidies, have to pay the $4,000 deductible before the silver plan begins to cover the costs of non-preventive care. The gold plan, on the other hand, has no deductible. Out-of-pocket costs such as copayments are also lower in the gold plan—a primary care visit has a $30 copayment instead of a $45 copayment.

Both the silver and gold options were more affordable than our previous insurance, which had cost us $1,137 per month. Our premiums had been higher because we had to buy two policies—an individual plan for my son and me and a COBRA policy for my wife, who had a not-too-serious but nevertheless pre-existing condition that prevented her from being able to buy an affordable individual policy. Now we have one insurer, one policy, and one network of doctors and hospitals for the entire family.

The issues with the federal website HealthCare.Gov have been well documented. Many states that chose to set up their own exchanges and websites have had much better results. Even here in California, though, I encountered a few small bumps in the process. The first day I tried to use my new insurer’s online system to pay our monthly premium by credit card, the site didn’t work. But it was fixed by the next day.

Also, my insurer automatically enrolled my son and me in the plan that most closely matched the old one that we had—but had been canceled—last year. Had we not preferred to switch to a Covered California plan, this would have made things more convenient. But in spite of how much I love writing about health insurance, I do not in fact love insurance so much that I want to have two policies. So I called the insurer, cleared the mix-up, and got a refund.

The move to a plan purchased under Covered California has had no impact on our family’s relationships with our doctors and hospitals, although I know people who are having some issues with finding providers. We had checked ahead of time and knew that our doctors were in the new PPO network.

We did notice that our new network had fewer doctors and hospitals, a winnowing of choices called narrow or tailored networks. These tailored networks have been targets for critics of Obamacare, but such networks constitute a feature, not a bug, of the reform. If every insurer has to provide access to every hospital in a certain town, there is no incentive for hospitals to lower their prices. If insurers offer only the highest value hospitals and doctors, though, it sets up competition among healthcare providers. Creating this kind of competition is the most effective way to control healthcare costs.

So my family is paying less for a single, more convenient policy in order to receive what I anticipate will be the same standard of care we were getting before the Affordable Care Act was implemented. But the fact that the new health law is working for us doesn’t mean it’s working perfectly for everyone. Issues of access to healthcare remain. More needs to be done to enroll formerly uninsured people, even in states like California, which has seen significant enrollment growth. And there’s a need to get a large number of younger, healthier folks to buy policies in order to keep premiums down in future years.

So we’re not out of the woods yet, but we can see the light through the branches.

The post Why Obamacare Is Rocking My World appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My concern for California governments in the digital age does not spring from skepticism about their interest or willingness. We are, after all, the home of Silicon Valley—the birthplace of tech start-ups. State agencies and local governments in California have been especially willing to enter the digital age. But then, so was the Obama administration. What keeps going wrong?

President Obama finds the root of the problem in government inefficiency: “Our IT systems—how we purchase technology in the federal government—is cumbersome, complicated, and outdated.”

There is nothing false in the president’s statement. In fact, it very much fits the popular narrative of the problems with governments and technology. Procurement processes are cumbersome; legal requirements (whether imposed by Republicans eager to promote accountability or by Democrats eager to appease their labor union political base) add further inflexibility to bureaucracy.

But the danger with this analysis is seeing the problem purely as a procedural one: streamline a process or two, change a few rules, and voilà! The government is now ready for the digital age. As technology writer Clay Shirky pointed out in Politico: “The biggest problem with HealthCare.gov was not its timeline or budget. The biggest problem was that the site did not work, and the administration decided to launch it anyway. This is not just a hiring problem or a procurement problem. This is a management problem and a cultural problem.” (The italics are mine.)

Technological innovation in government is hindered by a cultural fear of failure combined with the top-down management of bureaucratic administration. Such a culture is not conducive to innovation; as Shirky points out, “A culture that prefers deluding the boss over delivering bad news isn’t well equipped to try new things.” This approach all but guarantees the very failure that management wants to avoid.

HealthCare.gov is just one example of a government’s failed attempt at technological innovation. Californians have witnessed a number of tech disasters: from the DMV’s IT Modernization project and the VoteCal voter database to the expensive new payroll systems for state employees and L.A. Unified School District employees.

Must we throw up our hands and say, “Well that’s just government!”?

I’m optimistic that the culture of government can change. It has in the past. Many of the obstacles to technological innovation in government that exist today were created by a mid-century cultural shift toward a more professional and administrative government; current procedures for bidding and requisitions date to that shift. And efforts to make that bureaucracy fair, transparent, and accountable often hinder innovation, as officials tend to focus on disclosure and following the rules, rather than bending them to accommodate new ideas. California’s Brown Act, with its public reporting and meeting requirements, is an example of just the kind of inflexible reform that discourages smarter government.

To get technology right, governments need to learn to let go and allow the work of preparing a technology project—beta testing, phased rollouts, trial and error— drive timetables and decision-making. A website is only ready when the people building it, and those trying to use it, can show that it’s ready.

When it comes to learning the lessons of HealthCare.gov, my eyes are on local governments in California. In many city governments in California, there has been a cultural shift from a top-down administrative system to a more collaborative approach. Some of the biggest cultural changes have occurred in cities that experienced major failures. After its bankruptcy, the city of Vallejo launched the nation’s first citywide participatory budgeting project to allow local residents to set priorities and make decisions. After corruption and scandal were uncovered in the city of Bell, a new, reform government has engaged residents in all sorts of new ways.

Government officials fear that such reforms will cost them control and increase the risk of runaway projects. These are not baseless fears. There is real risk involved in moving away from a top-down administration to adopt new technologies or involve residents in policy-making. But there is also real risk in refusing to make that cultural shift.

That cultural shift is starting to happen. In a recent survey by the nonprofit civic organization Public Agenda, 85 percent of senior local government officials reported a shift in their views on public engagement since their careers began, with most saying that, over time, they came to value public engagement.

This new openness to input and collaboration—and the move away from command-and-control—are precisely what the digital age requires. It will be easy to identify the governments that don’t change; they’ll be the ones dealing with technological disasters that get compared to HealthCare.gov.

The post Government Bureaucracy’s Fear of Failure Doomed HealthCare.Gov appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.