Sure, I'm still hoping for the best from the Obama administration, but the hiring of Cass Sunstein and the banishment of Howard Dean aren't good signs

Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine is introduced by President-elect Obama as the new chairman of the DNC. But wait, isn't there somebody missing?

by Ken

For all my apprehensions about what we're gleaning about policies of the Obama administration and what's suggested by the people being brought in to staff the administration, let me be clear: I still want like heck for this thing to work.

So I was pleased to see the Washington Post's E. J. Dionne Jr., in the column that Howie noted earlier today, putting a positive spin on some adroit politics to date in the crafting of the Obama economic recovery package, about which I was just fretting. Dionne has credibility in my book, and while he too registers concern about the proposed business tax cuts, overall he seems encouraged:

Obama's Big-Tent Stimulus

One Capitol Hill Democrat familiar with the president-elect's recent meeting with congressional leaders said that Obama told Republicans that while he could probably get his program through with mostly Democratic votes, he preferred to win GOP support so that his program could pass quickly and be sustainable over time.

The price may be worth paying, but only if the business tax cuts would actually promote a quick recovery. Wasting part of the economic package on ancient business wish lists would violate Obama's own call for political leaders to "put the urgent needs of our nation above our own narrow interests."

Nonetheless, the most striking aspect of Obama's approach is how attuned he has been to his task as politician in chief. He has, so far, managed to maneuver around potential roadblocks rather than blast through them, even as he proposes a reorientation of our politics.

I think it's fair to say that, however we may disagree about how to attack them, the president-elect has a genuine understanding of the full range of problems facing him, something it hasn't been possible to say of any high-ranking official of the U.S. executive branch for a bunch of years.

And Rachel Maddow made a related point on last night's show: For the first time in that same bunch of years, we're going to have people manning the executive branch who actually believe in government as a necessary and positive force for solving problems. Not only did most Bush regimistas not believe in this; many of them were actually out to prove that government can't do anything, as Paul Krugman and others pointed out frequently over that same bunch of years. When you have people who through some combination of ideology, dishonesty, and (yes!) incompetence are determined to make government not work, their likely success rate soars up around the 100 percent mark.

That said, two things are gnawing at me at the moment, or rather two people. It alarms me that one seems to have so much of the president-elect's ear, and that the other is apparently being treated like a leper, and I mean the unenlightened way we used to treat lepers.


(1) HOWARD DEAN! HOWARD DEAN!
PAGING HOWARD DEAN!

"I didn't do this for the spoils. I did this for the country. I'm very happy that Barack Obama is president, and I think he's picked a great cabinet. And I'm pretty happy. I wouldn't trade my position for any other position right now. I'm going to go into the private sector, make a living making speeches, and do a lot of stuff on health care policy.”

-- outgoing DNC Chairman Howard Dean, to Chris Matthews
on Hardball, quoted by Jonathan Martin on Politico (see below)

I complained recently about the creepy invisibility of outgoing Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean as the Democrats prepare to retake control of the executive branch.

At yesterday's joint appearance where President-elect Obama introduced not very popular conservative Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine (a disturbingly serious contender, you'll recall, for Obama's VP slot) as Dean's successor, both paid appropriate lip service to Dean and his once-controversial 50-state strategy. Strangely, Dean himself wasn't present. He was traveling to American Samoa on DNC business, completing his self-appointed task of visiting every domain under his jurisdiction. His brother Jim, who succeeded him as head of the progressive advocacy group Democracy for America, has made it clear, as have other Dean associates, that Howard Dean could have rescheduled the trip if his presence had been desired.

It clearly wasn't, just as Governor Dean has been conspicuously absent from every aspect of the planning for the new administration. Not only is there no job for him in that administration -- which is too bad, because he apparently was interested in being secretary of health and human services, a job for which he is spectacularly well equipped -- but his presence doesn't seem to be desired even for ceremonial appearances, from the transition through the inauguration.

The Nation's Ari Berman has blogged about this ("Obama Anoints Kaine, Praises (And Snubs?) Dean"), and Politico's Jonathan Martin wrote a long piece yesterday ("Lei-off: Obama snubs Dean"). There's some question as to whether this is actually a snub, but really now, the party chairman during this election becomes totally invisible -- in what universe is that an accident?

There's also disagreement about what role if any is being played by incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. Master Rahm is a known bitter enemy of Chairman Dean, probably because Dean knows him for the sleazy, unprincipled, party-be-damned opportunist he is. Have we already forgotten that Master Rahm fought the 50-state strategy with every fiber of his putrid being? (For all the lip service paid yesterday to the 50-state strategy, has Chairman Kaine committed to rebuilding the network of ground-level workers -- the people who in effect were the 50-state strategy -- who I understand were mostly fired after the election?)

While we're remembering, have we forgotten that one reason President-elect Obama has so many right-wing Democrats to try to win over is that Master Rahm did everything he could to stuff as many barely converted Republicans as he could into the House of Representatives, not only anti-progressives but people who would be totally loyal to him -- though I wouldn't expect to see the Master cashing any of those chips in support of progressive legislation.


(2) "LIBERTARIAN PATERNALISM": THE NEW
U.S. PHILOSOPHY OF GOV'T REGULATION?

Also this week it was announced that Cass Sunstein is to be President Obama's head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sunstein is a celebrated legal scholar who taught for years at the University of Chicago, where Obama was a colleague of his, before being lured to Harvard by Elana Kagan, who will be stepping down as dean of its law school to become solicitor general in the new administration.

For some reason Sunstein is generally thought to be a "liberal" legal scholar, though it's not clear why. Maybe what's meant is by University of Chicago standards? The university is, after all, at least within the reputable academic world, the center of the conservative micro-world.

Everyone seems agreed that Sunstein is really, really smart. (But so are a lot of the worst and most dangerous people in the political universe. Considering the dangerous ways in which smartness can be put to use, I can't even say that being smart is automatically better than being dumb.) People who have encountered Sunstein as a teacher seem to have high regard for him as someone who cares about and engages his students. I'm prepared to give him full credit for that.

Which still leaves the question of what he actually believes. This is where progressive admirers familiar with his thinking and work start to hem and haw. Like they'll offer an area or two in which he's acknowledged to have, um, his own take on things. But of course he's a brilliant man, and a great teacher, and blah-blah-blah.

Part of the "blah-blah-blah" is that Sunstein isn't just deeply admired by Obama, he's anywhere from a good bet to a dead certainty to be named to the Supreme Court. Naturally, this has made some political people that much more curious about his beliefs, a curiosity that is only increased by the announcement that he will be joining the administration. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs actually exists already but apparently is to be majorly upgraded in importance. After all, the most immediate and glaring lesson of the Bush economic meltdown is the disastrousness of the Right's hard-fought dismantling -- with a lot of collaboration from other parts of the political spectrum, it should be noted -- of the federal government's regulatory apparatus.

It would appear that Sunstein has been brought on board as de facto architect of the administration's regulatory reconstruction. In which regard, there is more than casual interest in a book that Yale University published last spring called Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard H. Thaler (who is "Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and Behavioral Science at the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago") and, yes, Cass R. Sunstein.

"REPLYING WE SPEAK AS ONE INDIVIDUAL"

As a side note, at the above Amazon link for Nudge there's an interview with Professors Thaler and Sunstein in which all of the (frequently quite extended) replies are labeled Thaler and Sunstein. For a Gilbert and Sullivan enthusiast, this inevitably conjures up the image of the jolly gondoliers Marco and Giuseppe Palmieri, who have just found out (in, of course, The Gondoliers) that they're not brothers, that one of them -- we don't yet know which -- is in fact the heir to the throne of the island kingdom of Barataria, and they are therefore forced to issue this invitation to all the other gondoliers and the Venetian flower maidens to join them at court in a most curious fashion, switching off at the heavily accented start of each musical bar, like so:

Replying we / speak as / one indi/vidual.
As I / find I'm a / king, to my / kingdom I / bid you all.
(and so on)

Looking at all those Thaler and Sunstein replies, I wonder if this is perhaps the way they were delivered, or were they perhaps all intoned in unison -- or together but in pleasing harmony (awfully tough to improvise over these extended answers, you would think)?

Now, Professor Thaler is reputed to be one of the founders of something called "behavioral economics," and the thrust of the book appears to be that people left to their own devices tend to make dopey choices but can be subtly nudged into making better ones. In the Amazon.com interview, Thaler and Sunstein offer this example, by way of explaining the term "choice architecture." (I do hope that if they actually sang the answers together, one of them at least had a guitar.)

Choice architecture is the context in which you make your choice. Suppose you go into a cafeteria. What do you see first, the salad bar or the burger and fries stand? Where's the chocolate cake? Where's the fruit? These features influence what you will choose to eat, so the person who decides how to display the food is the choice architect of the cafeteria. All of our choices are similarly influenced by choice architects. The architecture includes rules deciding what happens if you do nothing; what's said and what isn't said; what you see and what you don't. Doctors, employers, credit card companies, banks, and even parents are choice architects.

We show that by carefully designing the choice architecture, we can make dramatic improvements in the decisions people make, without forcing anyone to do anything. For example, we can help people save more and invest better in their retirement plans, make better choices when picking a mortgage, save on their utility bills, and improve the environment simultaneously. Good choice architecture can even improve the process of getting a divorce -- or (a happier thought) getting married in the first place!

Thaler and Sunstein also explain that they would never want to tell people what to do. Oh no, heaven forbid!

Those who are in position to shape our decisions can overreach or make mistakes, and freedom of choice is a safeguard to that. One of our goals in writing this book is to show that it is possible to help people make better choices and retain or even expand freedom. If people have their own ideas about what to eat and drink, and how to invest their money, they should be allowed to do so.

Last July our friend Matt Stoller took a look at Nudge, and if you have any interest at all in the role of government as a regulator, or in the role of government generally, I urge you to look at his Open Left report. Like this conclusion:

The real point of this book is not to teach anyone about behavioral economics, but to enforce a Beltway orthodoxy that is anti-government to the core.

Here's how Thaler and Sunstein describe how appealing this idea is to politicians.

Libertarian paternalism with respect to savings, discussed in chapter 6, has received enthusiastic and widespread bipartisan support in Congress, including from current and former conservative Republican Senators such as Robert Bennett (Utah) and Rick Santorum (Pa.) and liberal Democrats such as Rahm Emanuel.

Rahm Emanuel a liberal? On what planet? He's a war supporter, a supporter of retroactive immunity for telecom companies, and wants to maintain the hedge fund loophole allowing hedge fund managers to retain more of their earnings than ordinary citizens. For Sunstein and Thaler, Emanuel is a liberal because it's useful for Emanuel to be a liberal in the kabuki world that is the Beltway, where government is just too darn big.

I know we're supposed to be bowled over by this brilliant law professor's familiarity with trendy stuff like "behavioral economics." I found Matt's report mostly chilling.

Bad Karma Dept.: I find it scary that there are people who think something called "libertarian paternalism" could be a good thing. Wouldn't you think that with their marketing savvy they would come up with a prettier-sounding name?

Even scarier is the reasonable assumption, based on the president-elect's established esteem for Sunstein, that far from Sunstein imposing these views on the administration, they'll already be built in.

I'm grateful to Rick Perlstein for calling Matt Stoller's report to our attention. Rick has also called my attention to a post by blogger Kathy G. (who, in the interest of proper disclosure, happens to be his wife), who was a student of Sunstein's at U. of Chicago, and thinks he was a good teacher but isn't a big fan:

Above all, though, what has really chapped my hide are Sunstein's recent comments defending the FISA bill, opposing impeachment, and pretty much just shrugging his shoulders at the contempt for democracy and the rule of the law that the Bush administration has repeatedly shown. . . . To see a distinguished expert on the constitution bend over backwards to avoid saying anything worse than mildly critical about the Bush regime's desecration of the constitution is an incredibly depressing spectacle to witness.

The thing I find most disturbing about Sunstein is how he always seems to go out of his way to make nice to the right. It may have something to do with the fact that he taught for so long at the University of Chicago Law School, which has one of the most conservative faculties in the country (Antonin Scalia used to teach there, and its current dean recently admitted that he's never once voted for a Democrat). But I believe it goes far beyond that. I think Sunstein is an extremely ambitious man who basically would run over his own grandmother for a seat on the Supreme Court (well, he'd think seriously about doing so, anyway).

Cass Sunstein on the inside, and presumably on a fast track to the Supreme Court; Howard Dean on the outside, and presumably on his way back home to Vermont. Sounds backwards to me.

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