From Foreign Policy: The Syria Dissent Channel Message Means The System Is Working The State Department Syria memo isn't some dangerous sign of insurrection. It's an essential instrument for sparking essential debate.

For out look at the media's relationship with government officials. The State Department has a process in place to allow administrative policy to be challenged by its rank and file. They don't always get leaked, but one did last week, and it points out conflict within the administration regarding Syria.

Here's an inside look at how this is done.

- Click here for the article.

The New York Times details the leak here:

More than 50 State Department diplomats have signed an internal memo sharply critical of the Obama administration’s policy in Syria, urging the United States to carry out military strikes against the government of President Bashar al-Assad to stop its persistent violations of a cease-fire in the country’s five-year-old civil war.

The memo, a draft of which was provided to The New York Times by a State Department official, says American policy has been “overwhelmed” by the unrelenting violence in Syria. It calls for “a judicious use of stand-off and air weapons, which would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic process.”

Such a step would represent a radical shift in the administration’s approach to the civil war in Syria, and there is little evidence thatPresident Obama has plans to change course. Mr. Obama has emphasized the military campaign against the Islamic State over efforts to dislodge Mr. Assad. Diplomatic efforts to end the conflict, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, have all but collapsed.

But the memo, filed in the State Department’s “dissent channel,” underscores the deep rifts and lingering frustration within the administration over how to deal with a war that has killed more than 400,000 people.

The State Department set up the channel during the Vietnam War as a way for employees who had disagreements with policies to register their protest with the secretary of state and other top officials, without fear of reprisal. While dissent cables are not that unusual, the number of signatures on this document, 51, is extremely large, if not unprecedented.

For more:

- AFSA: The Dissent Channel.
- Cato Institute: The Dissent Channel Goes Public.

Where did the proposal to increase overtime pay come from?

According to the New York Times, it came from an economist - Jared Bernstein - who had worked in the White House as the Chief Economist and Economic Adviser to Vice President Joseph Biden.

Upon leaving wrote a report describing the benefits of increasing the number of people who qualify for overtime pay. His idea was to set the level to where it as in 1975 and inflation-adjust it to today, and keep it set at the level of inflation. They also allow white collar workers - executives - to be eligible for overtime.

- Click here for the report.

Increasing overtime pay fits within the overall goals of increasing middle class incomes.

Liberal interest groups have been pushing this proposal for some time. Their arguments can be sumarized here:

- fixoverime.org.
- What the New Proposed Overtime Rules Mean for Workers.

For more:

- Obama's new overtime rules: How they'd work and who they'd affect.
- One Industry That Will Hate Obama’s New Overtime Rules: The Media.
- Republicans will hate Obama’s new overtime rule, but they can’t do anything about it.

Presidential advice prior to 9/11

An ongoing question since 9/11 has been why wasn't information about the attacks available? A commentator in the NYT argues that the CIA and the Defense Department had different positions on whether Bin Laden was an imminent threat. The CIA said yes, the Defense Department said no. The question became, who had the president's ear?

The President's Cabinet is irrelevant

This is a point made repeatedly when we discuss presidential advising - they are far more likely to look to members of the White House staff when seeking advice. Obama is no different in this regard.

The larger truth is that modern presidents, with a few exceptions, don’t need, and don’t use, Cabinet members as privy councillors on the most important questions. They have other people for that. Presidents do need competent, even if anonymous, executives to run the vast machinery of the federal government, but most Cabinet secretaries don’t really do that either—at least not in the classic C.E.O. sense—leaving such work to their deputies and the professional civil-service staffs. In fact, experience has shown, it is hard for modern presidents to attract private-sector C.E.O.’s to serve in the Cabinet because of the financial and personal sacrifices required. Hank Paulson, George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary, once told me that if he’d known how arduous the confirmation would be for his own non-controversial appointment to the post he would never have left Goldman Sachs. The Cabinet these days amounts to a kind of demographically balanced assembly of team mascots, with increasingly ill-defined roles. The Constitution stipulates only that the president “may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices.” Maybe Obama should ask for an occasional postcard and leave it at that.

The Justice Department argues the Obama's recess appointments are constitutional

From the Washington Post:

President Obama’s decision to issue recent recess appointments is constitutional, because recent pro forma sessions of the U.S. Senate — some lasting just a few seconds — didn’t constitute legitimate sessions that could block such appointments, the Justice Department said in a memo released Thursday.

Congressional Republicans have assailed Obama’s decision to issue recess appointments last week of Richard Cordray to lead the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and of three nominees to serve on the National Labor Relations Board. Several GOP lawmakers criticized the move as disregarding the history and legality of Senate procedure.

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In a 23-page memo dated Jan. 6, Virginia A. Seitz, the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, wrote that although the Senate held pro forma sessions from Jan. 3 to Jan. 23, “those sessions do not interrupt the intrasession recess in a manner that would preclude the President from determining that the Senate remains unavailable throughout to ‘receive communications from the President or participate as a body in making appointments.’ ”

It all depends on what the word "session" means. This could make for a good written assignment.

Narcissistic Autocrats

Here's something for both 2301 and 2302 to chew on as we review basic terms and observe the pros and cons of different governing systems. Autocracy tends to be efficient - it can get things done - but is also arbitrary - there are no rules which guide its actions. The autocrat is unpredictable.

Add to that the tendency of autocrats to be narcissistic:

There is a school of thought in politics and international relations which holds that all the bluster from dictators under pressure is propaganda, in the sense that the leaders themselves realize it’s untrue. They are just trying to demoralize their opponents and rally their friends by intentionally overstating how well things are going. In their hearts, autocrats know the jig is up and that means a window for a negotiated settlement with them has opened.

That school of thought is usually wrong.

If you take a human being — particularly a male one — and for most or all of his life give him every material comfort while others are starving, encourage him to believe that other people are his inferior, and nurture a sense of entitlement in him through word and deed (e.g., letting him watch or participate in torture sessions), you will often produce what we shrinks call a malignant narcissist (or “A classic Cleckley psychopath” for those of my colleagues who may be scoring at home). I don’t mean “narcissist” in the colloquial sense of someone who worries too much about his looks and is a bit self-involved, I mean someone who literally believes that other human beings are merely objects for his self-gratification, and, that the usual constraints of human existence (e.g., everyone dies, no one gets everything he wants) do not apply to him.
A nice analysis of human nature and a great compliment to some of the material we will dig through during the first couple of weeks of class.

Counseling the President on the War Powers Resolution

The NYT reports on the conflict between various executive agencies regarding the scope of the War Powers Resolution and whether it applies to our activities in Libya:

President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.

Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.
But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team — including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh — who argued that the United States military’s activities fell short of “hostilities.” Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged.

Just in Case

From the story below, a copy of the text Nixon would have read had the crew of Apollo 11 not returned safely from the moon. H.R. Halderman was Nixon's chief of staff, Bill Safire was a speechwriter.

Group Think in the Kremlin

This is a truly tragic story that illustrates a key problem of presidential advising (though it involves decision making in the Soviet Union). Leonid Breznev, the Soviet leader, wanted to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Communist Revolution with an ambitious space flight, but the technicians involved in the flight - including the cosmonaut that would eventually die in it - were aware of literally hundreds of problems with the spacecraft. But no one in the leadership wanted to hear it, so the flight went on as scheduled, with the predicted result.

The plan was to launch a capsule, the Soyuz 1, with Komarov inside. The next day, a second vehicle would take off, with two additional cosmonauts; the two vehicles would meet, dock, Komarov would crawl from one vehicle to the other, exchanging places with a colleague, and come home in the second ship. It would be, Brezhnev hoped, a Soviet triumph on the 50th anniversary of the Communist revolution. Brezhnev made it very clear he wanted this to happen.

The problem was Gagarin. Already a Soviet hero, the first man ever in space, he and some senior technicians had inspected the Soyuz 1 and had found 203 structural problems — serious problems that would make this machine dangerous to navigate in space. The mission, Gagarin suggested, should be postponed.

The question was: Who would tell Brezhnev? Gagarin wrote a 10-page memo and gave it to his best friend in the KGB, Venyamin Russayev, but nobody dared send it up the chain of command. Everyone who saw that memo, including Russayev, was demoted, fired or sent to diplomatic Siberia. With less than a month to go before the launch, Komarov realized postponement was not an option. He met with Russayev, the now-demoted KGB agent, and said, "I'm not going to make it back from this flight."
This is not that unusual a story when it comes to presidential decision making. Sometimes they just make up their minds and shut themselves off from contrary opinions.

Richard Wirthlin

Richard Wirthlin, a pollster who worked with Ronald Reagan died recently. Both 2301s and 2302s ought to read up on him as he is credited (if that's the proper word) with developing the field of campaign polling.

From the Huffington Post:

He first polled for Ronald Reagan when the future president was seeking reelection as California's governor in 1970. As recounted to author David Moore for his book, The Super Pollsters, Wirthlin had not previously been "a strong Reagan supporter," at least not "until I met him." Although he initially thought of Reagan as "a two-bit, B-grade actor, four degrees to the right of Atilla the Hun," Wirthlin's view changed after he spend two hours alone with Reagan explaining the results of a poll on policy issues.

He soon became a trusted adviser, chief strategist of Reagan's successful 1980 presidential campaign and the pollster who reportedly met with Reagan in the White House every month to brief him on his latest surveys. Reagan later described Wirthlin as "the best in the business ... when he speaks, I listen."

Former colleagues interviewed by The Huffington Post spoke of Wirthlin as a trailblazer in the then-emerging field of campaign polling. "When we started in this business," recalled former Wirthlin Worldwide Executive Vice President Vince Breglio, "there really only were three firms operating in the political realm."

. . .

Wirthlin's former employees and colleagues credit him with a series of innovations that continue to influence the practice of campaign polling today. These include:

The right direction/wrong track question. Colleagues credit Wirthlin with being the original author of the question that asks whether things in the country are "generally going in the right direction" or have gotten "pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track." Most national media polls now track that question as a leading indicator of support for incumbent officeholders. As Wirthlin explained in a 2004 op-ed, the question helped inspire Reagan's now famous rhetorical question, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"

Nightly tracking polls. David Moore credits Wirthlin with the first systematic use of the nightly tracking poll, in which a relatively small number of respondents are polled every day and their results are averaged in "rolling samples" of those interviewed on the day before.

Dial group tests. Newhouse says Wirthlin was the first campaign pollster to do what is now called "dial testing," the process of wiring up focus group respondents to mechanical dials that they use to constantly rate a presidential speech or debate.

Other innovations may have been less about invention than application within the realm of campaign-sponsored polling. Breglio credits Wirthlin with the first extensive application of advanced statistical techniques such as multiple regression and factor analysis. Republican pollster Steve Lombardo never worked for Wirthlin, but nonetheless sees his most "powerful and lasting" contribution as his pioneering measurement of political values. "He forced us to go beyond surface attitudes and to find the key 'value' that was driving that attitude. His feeling was that core values like beliefs in fairness or freedom were often at the core of public opinion, and that only by peeling back that onion could we begin to understand how to change attitudes."

Executive Officials Comment on the Economy

Ezra Klein highlights actions by three separate executive officials involved in implementing economic policy. or providing advise about it:

The Secretary of the Treasury: Tim Geithner urged the IMF to push China on its currency, reports Howard Schneider: "In seeking to muster a broader coalition, Geithner issued an ultimatum to the International Monetary Fund: take a more aggressive stand on China's currency or potentially lose U.S. backing for a series of efforts pending at the agency. The IMF is debating changes in how it is governed to give greater influence to developing nations in Asia and elsewhere, but Geithner said these steps should be tied to these countries, in particular China, allowing their currencies to more closely adhere to free-market levels."
The Chair of the Federal Reserve: The Fed may target an interest rate rather than buy a set amount of bonds, reports Neil Irwin: "Instead of just announcing that it will create, say, $500 billion out of thin air and buy bonds with the money, the Fed could instead announce it will target a certain interest rate and then buy Treasury bonds so that rates in the marketplace reach that level. For example, the Fed could announce that it aims for three-year Treasury debt that now carries an interest rate of 0.56 percent to instead be 0.25 percent. It would then buy Treasury notes in whatever amounts were needed to get rates to the target level. That would help the economy by lowering rates for a broad range of borrowers, including Americans looking to take out a mortgage and companies looking to use debt to finance expansion."

The Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers: Austan Goolsbee says we'll need to grow, not tax or cut, our way to fiscal sustainability: "What little countries did to deal with their imbalances are frequently not available for giant economies like the U.S. or Japan. More intense research shows that the primary way countries get out of fiscal holes is by increasing their growth rate. To posit that you have to either substantially cut spending or raise taxes belies the fact that what really matters is debt-to-GDP. In the U.S., we’ve often reduced that ratio without running surpluses by getting the growth rate up."

Some Bits for Today: 7/5/10

- Maryland is one of several states that must periodically decide whether to rewrite it's constitution.

- Debate continues over unemployment benefit extension. See unemployment data from the BLS for background.

- Teachers' union upset with Obama.

- The perks of seniority.

- Conflict between Obama's economic and political advisers.

- Commerce Clause in the news.

- From "subjects" to "citizens."

- Video of the Kagan hearings.

OMB Director May Resign

From the Washington Post.

Tension in Obama Administration

General McChrystal had tart words about members of the Obama Administration in a recent interview. He's since backed down, but his comments illustrate the tension common within presidential administrations and among advisers.

Fall Guys

The post below makes me wonder if anyone has ever written a history of fall guys in American history.

It would make a good read.