Here’s an oddity: Jamie Love and I doing an op-ed together.

I have always respected Jamie, who now heads Knowledge Ecology International, but, in many policy battles over the years, we have been on opposite sides. I remember, for example, a debate at the Cato Institute on whether the feds should be going after Microsoft on anti-trust grounds. Jamie and Ralph Nader took the affirmative; I was on the other side, along with Robert Levy of Cato. Jamie and I have also sparred on matters of patents and copyrights.

But we are united in opposition to the attempt by a House and Senate committee to put a measure into the healthcare reform bill that would effectively kill any generic competition for biologics — medicines derived from living organisms.

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Commentary has posted as its lead website item, my article “The Hazard of Moral Hazard,” which appears in the September issue of the magazine, just out. In the long piece, I argue that many of the steps taken to avoid a financial meltdown may have had beneficial short-term effects but run the risk of setting us up for a worse disaster next time through the forces of moral hazard. Here is how the piece begins:

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On Tuesday, ForeignPolicy.com published my piece, “It’s Not About Us,” which tries to lay out a strategic direction for public diplomacy that is sharper and more goal-oriented than the policy that the Obama Administration seems to following but that fits in with the President’s important formulation, “mutual interests and mutual respect.”

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Obama, public diplomacy | 1 Comment »

A few days ago, I began an exciting new job. I am the founding executive director of the George W. Bush Institute. The Institute is a think tank that is part of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, which will also include a library and museum in a gorgeous building designed by Robert A.M. Stern on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

My job is to work with President and Mrs. Bush to decide on a limited number of areas of focus, to hire about two dozen scholars and fellows, and to develop partnerships. Those partnerships — with NGOs, universities, foundations, businesses, and governments — are critical because we are conceiving the Bush Institute as an “action-oriented think tank.” That is, our main task will be to conduct objective, world-class research that can then be put to practical use in making a better world.

This dedicated action orientation is, as far as I know, unique among think tanks. Also unique is the concept of an academically serious, independent presidential think tank itself. 

If you would like to read more, here is an article from the Dallas Morning News, a piece by Peter Baker of the New York Times, and the press release posted on the presidential center’s website on Thursday.

Posted in education | 1 Comment »

So why do fewer and fewer people find newspapers compelling? Call me old-fashioned, but I think that content counts.

A major strategy for publishers has been to cope with falling circulation and advertising by cutting back on the editorial product — both space and talent. The result, quite naturally, is a newspaper of declining quality, which, also quite naturally, attracts few readers. Thus, what we see is a death spiral. It is only a matter of time — and not much time — before all but a handful of newspapers are gone.

Despite what you hear lately from politicians and aging journalists, there is no moral case to be made for news and opinion delivered with ink on paper. But it is still infuriating to watch quality fall so dramatically at institutions that should know better. A case in point….

Five months ago, the Washington Post eliminated its stand-alone daily Business section and folded it into the front of the paper. The Business section, all by itself, survives only on Sundays. The coverage, is scantier and the subject matter frothier. Today’s Business front (page G1) carries three stories. At top on the right hand side (traditionally, the lead story) is a column by Michelle Singletary on why you should not have typos on your resume. The big headline across the fold is about collectibles — concentrating on the market for 1960s guitars. The third piece, an electronic gaming column by Mike Musgrove, focuses on new Nintendo software called “Personal Trainer: Walking.”

You might think that we weren’t enmeshed in the worst economic crisis in at least a quarter-century or that the administration had not proposed a trillion-dollar-plus plan to revise the healthcare system or that the Fed not is about to face an excruciating decision on interest rates or that investors were not still deeply troubled about what to do about their 401(k) plans….

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Early this morning (Hong Kong time), I was interviewed on CNN International (here’s the video) about the consequences of recent rescues of American citizens sentenced to long prison terms in some of the world’s worst countries — specificially, former President Bill Clinton’s mission to North Korea on Aug. 5 to bring out journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee and Sen. Jim Webb’s trip to Burma over the weekend to extract John William Yettaw.

Ling and Lee had begun 12-year terms at hard labor (though the labor had not started yet when Clinton arrived) for crossing into North Korea, and Yettaw, a strange person, had begun a seven-year term for swimming out to the residence of Aung San Suu Kyi, whose party won the elections of 1990, which would, under normal circumstances, have made her prime minister. Instead, the junta nullified the vote, and she has been under house arrest for 14 of the past 20 years. She won the Nobel Prize in 1991.

The moderator wanted to know the effects of these “ad hoc” rescue activities — her phrase, not mine.

Certainly, it’s a proper function of government to protect Americans being abused, held hostage, or wrongly incarcerated in foreign countries. But we should also beware of the risks of such actions — one of which is to put our citizens abroad in greater peril in the future from irresponsible governments that want to take hostages and gain advantages themselves. The main reason the U.S. government does not pay ransom to spring hostages is that such payments encourage more hostage-taking.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Obama, public diplomacy | 1 Comment »

In a post just now for the New York Times, David Stout, covering President Obama’s Town Hall appearance in Montana, writes:

“’I hate government programs, but keep your hands off my Medicare.’” The president says he has heard just those words, “’and there’s a little bit of a contradiction there.’”

Actually, there is not a contradiction at all, and it irks me that President Obama and others say that there is. Two simple points:

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Posted in Obama, health | 4 Comments »

While we disagree about a lot, I am a longtime fan of Camille Paglia, described in her Wikipedia entry as “an intellectual of many seeming contradictions.” We’ve met a few times and are even Facebook friends. Practically whatever she writes, I find challenging and pleasurable. I really enjoyed Sexual Personae (now 18 years old!) and Vamps and Tramps.

Camille writes for Salon.com, and her latest post is a ramble over various hills and dales called “Obama’s Healthcare Horror.” It clearly struck a nerve and so far has generated more than 600 responses. Camille focuses on the Obamaites’ political fumbles (she herself favors a single-payer plan and is miffed that Democrats are dropping the ball). There are lots of nice apercus here — as well as some juvenalia like her attacks on George W. Bush. Overall, however, I find the piece unsatisying and say so in my own response on Salon.

I argue that Camille is wrong to blame the difficulties that Obama is encountering on bad political strategy. In fact, he had a good strategy — trying to rush a massive change in healthcare through before the public discovered its contents (the way he did with the stimulus bill) and before constituents had a chance to voice their opinions during summer recess. He missed by a whisker. Now, the more people know about the package, the less they like.

In addition — something I did not say in the Salon response — the President’s healthcare reform has become the target of enormous anger and frustration that has bubbled up, not merely because of healthcare but because of general unhappiness at the way the government has conducted itself in the economic crisis. Mainly, the problem is concern about a) government intervention all over the place, and b) government spending. To Obama’s detriment, ealthcare reform has become a symbolic target in a way that Citigroup, AIG, and Bernie Madoff have not.

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“Town halls have become town hells,” says Mark McKinnon, a former adviser to President Bush who supported Barack Obama in the November election. He was referring, of course, to contentious meetings between members of Congress and constituents on the subject of changes to America’s healthcare system. McKinnon, who used to serve with me on the Broadcasting Board of Governors, knows how to turn a phrase. But deep concern about the government’s healthcare activity is nothing new, and politicians who believe that the opposition to the Democrats’ plan is a put-up job are deceiving themselves and imperiling their own careers.

Such self-deception abounds. Paul Krugman, a cheerleader for the House healthcare reform package, recently wrote in the New York Times: “I can’t find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds.” The responses, he wrote, are “something new and ugly.”

Actually, they aren’t new at all, and, in ugliness, it is hard to match an incident that occurred almost precisely 20 years ago.

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No doubt you have noted the deep concern with which Democrat bloggers and the media at large have viewed contentious congressional get-togethers with constituents around the country. In a typical report, Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle, writes that “those traditionally sleepy town hall meetings have become rowdy shout-fests across the nation.”

In a wonderful post on the Enterprise Blog, Andrew Biggs puts the town hall imbroglio into perfect perspective. Biggs, formerly chief deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration and now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, also happens to be a terrific writer:

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