Roger’s Rules

July 15th, 2009 6:24 am

Now We Know: “Ultimately, this is not about a process, it’s about results”

Thus David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s senior political strategist when asked about the administration’s plans to impose socialized medicine upon the American people (my description, not the questioner’s). “If we’re going to get this thing done,” he explained, “obviously time is a-wasting.”

But let’s pause over his first, revealing, statement: “Ultimately, this is not about a process, it’s about results,”

Wrong, Dave! Ultimately, politics in a democracy is very much about process — note that I said “in a democracy.”

Yesterday, in a column about semi-disgraced former Car Czar Steven Rattner, I quoted Geroge Will about the “tincture of lawlessness” that imbued the actions of the Obama administration. I speculated that neither the President nor many of his key advisers — to say nothing of his nominee to the Supreme Court — really understood what the rule of law was all about. David Axelrod’s offhand comment illustrates what I meant. For him, for Rahm Emmanuel, for Barack Obama, politics is all about instituting a virtuous society. For chaps like the Founding Fathers, politics is about that process of deliberation that makes free society possible. This is something that the 19th-century English commentator Walter Bagehot understood with unusual perspicacity. Civilization, he noted in his book Physics and Politics, is measured by increasing deliberateness. Government — the institutional distillate of progress in civilization — is valuable not only because it facilitates action but also, and increasingly, because it retards it:

If you want to stop instant and immediate action, always make it a condition that the action shall not begin till a considerable number of persons have talked over it, and have agreed on it. If those persons be people of different temperaments, different ideas, and different educations, you have an almost infallible security that nothing, or almost nothing, will be done with excessive rapidity.

Ultimately, to use David Axelrod’s word, it is “the age of discussion” — the age of “slow government” and political liberty — that Bagehot ultimately extols in Physics and Politics. But Bagehot is ever at pains to remind his readers of the harsh prerequisites of civilization, which include war, slavery, and gross inequity. Government by discussion, Bagehot is quick to acknowledge, is “a principal organ for improving mankind.” At the same time, he insists that “it is a plant of singular delicacy.” The question of how best to nurture this delicate plant is Bagehot’s final problem. Part of the answer is in facing up to the unpalatable realities about power that make civilization possible. The other part lies in embracing what Bagehot calls “animated moderation,” that “union of life with measure, of spirit with reasonableness,” which assures that discussion will continue without descending into violence or anarchy. It seems like a small thing. But then achieved order always does — until it is lost.

Ultimately, to revert once more to David Axelrod’s word, that is what is at stake in the Obama administration’s efforts to dispense with the political process for the sake of obtaining its cherished “results.”

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8 Comments

1. steve macdonald:

This is the government that has mismanaged medicaid, medicare, VA, health care on Indian reservations, the post office, Amtrak, passed a $1,000,000,000,000 stimulus bill that no one had time to read which has failed to date and will continue to fail in the future, passed a second half fiscal year bill with over 8,000 earmarks and an 8% ncrease in discretionary spending after promising to eliminarte earmarks and spend wisely. The government has passed energy legislation that created no energy but spent billions, continued farm subsidies that were do to expire while lowering food output, took a $4 Billion water works request from the Army Core of Engineers and converted it to a $24 billion pork fest. The government has nationalized large chunks of the finance and automotive industries with zero likelihood of being able to efficiently manage them.
Given the above, very abbreviated record of accomplishments, bypassing the proccess of informed debate in the interest of getting an unachievable end result does stike one as being “slightly bizzarre.”
Worse, there are actually people who buy into all of this.

Jul 15, 2009 - 8:28 am 2. bibio44:

“Ultimately, to revert once more to David Axelrod’s word….”

And a very apt word it is in this case. “Ultimately” it IS about the results, just as it was for other measures passed during other administrations: Social Security, Medicare, the Voting Rights Act (or whatever the official title was), etc. Saying that Axelrod wants to “dispense with the political process” is a false interpretation of his statement. (BTW, as recent revelations attest, Bush/Cheney were masters at dispensing with the political process — but I don’t suppose you’ll have an indignant post about that.)

Jul 15, 2009 - 8:47 am 3. JG:

Tax Rates – US States vs. European Nations

Jul 15, 2009 - 3:54 pm 4. JG:

Here is link:

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Taxes/images/wm2544_table1.gif

Jul 15, 2009 - 4:05 pm 5. Scott:

Bibio44,

Look, here’s the problem: we have too many Gletkins’ running around telling us Rubashovs’ how we’re supposed to be serving the State.

Jul 15, 2009 - 4:47 pm 6. Polemicscat:

Roger has a very good insight into the method of the Obama administration. Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” is their textbook.

Jul 15, 2009 - 5:08 pm 7. Gaffe Prices:

“Wrong, Dave! Ultimately, politics in a democracy is very much about process — note that I said “in a democracy.””

Which, if logic and reason are your guides, proves that government is designed to be conservative. It is designed to slow things down so that the frivolous and the fashionable is subjected to rigorous scrutiny in the hope that idiocy and usurpation[s] are driven out of policy.

So once Reid, Peloski, and 0bama have expropriated and looted the business and the personal, the gummit won’t do anything constructive on anyone’s account, except to preserve the political class through the institution of nepotism and a Gestapo that is necessary to enforce the socialist state.

So Churchill was right when he said that “a socialist state cannot be constructed without a gestapo to enforce it.”

And a socialist state enforced by a gestapo will be very “conservative” [as dhimmicrats like to think of it, their standard] by design and will not be interested in change in the least, too busy as it will be with enforcing docile compliance to its iron fisted rule.

Jul 15, 2009 - 5:48 pm 8. Gaffe Prices:

#2 bibio44, BTW, Social Security and Medicare are both growing in an inverse ratio as to payees (that’s payers to you) to recipients. Less and less of the former and exponentially growing numbers of the latter.

So if the administration and congress cannot reform these programs that are headed for one pressure cooker of a train wreck, can’t manage those, what makes them competent to administer any new ones?

Again they trot out the boilerplate of “there is a crisis”, ” we’ve got to do it NOW!”, “don’t bother to read it, much less debate the merits of this Bill”, “We’ve got to do this thing NOW!”, “Don’t you know there is a crisis?”, If we don’t do it NOW!, there will be a Great Depression!!”, “We’ve got A CRISIS™!!”

Did I mention there’s a crisis?”

And so on round and round it goes, leaving it to weasels to parse David Axelrods use of the word “ultimately” or his directive that debate, much less “reading” these Bills be suspended.

Just speak to us of the state of Social Security and Medicare, and why no one should worry, because there is all these cool green jobs gonna come, and free health care for all, and what else? Oh, I’m sure there is something.

The Dems in congress are losing their will to sign on for this stuff. The Cap & Trade bill that was to be pushed through Senate just after July 4th holiday has been postponed (plunging approval #s in inverse proportion to soaring disapproval #’s perhaps?) until september.

They are getting skittish, so look for this stuff to start dragging on, like its supposed to.

Jul 15, 2009 - 6:26 pm